Roadside bomb kills 8 police in Colombia

Source: AP

BOGOTA, Colombia — Eight police were killed Wednesday in central Colombia when a roadside bomb — apparently planted by leftist rebels — destroyed their passing truck, a police spokesman said.

The police were supporting a counter-narcotics team eradicating coca bushes, the base ingredient of cocaine, near Landazuri, 100 miles north of Bogota, Sgt. Alberto Cantillo, a police spokesman in Bogota, told The Associated Press.

Police suspect the bomb was planted by leftist rebels, who are known to operate in the area.

"Where there's coca, you'll find guerrillas," said Cantillo.



Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070509/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/colombia_ambush;_ylt=Amkdm1bnm8Aq5PkSPdypPbC3IxIF

n/t

Hezbollah builds a Western base

CIUDAD DEL ESTE, Paraguay - The Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia has taken root in South America, fostering a well-financed force of Islamist radicals boiling with hatred for the United States and ready to die to prove it, according to militia members, U.S. officials and police agencies across the continent.

From its Western base in a remote region divided by the borders of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina known as the Tri-border, or the Triple Frontier, Hezbollah has mined the frustrations of many Muslims among about 25,000 Arab residents whose families immigrated mainly from Lebanon in two waves, after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and after the 1985 Lebanese civil war.


snip

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17874369/

not saying there is a connection but the pattern of road side bombings does seem to be spreading when drug cartels identify a need

They've been pretty good at it for decades. For awhile, they specialized in lobbying propane containers into towns.

Interesting that the bombing aimed at coca eradicators. Colombia is yet another example of Latin American countries paying a very heavy price for America's war on drugs it loves to consume. There has been a lot of strife in the Peruvian coca fields this year, too, as President Garcia declares war on coca.

After all, they are rightwing religious fundamentalists.

who never do research, who never question, who never think things over, and who never develope a suspicion they may not know everything.

So they are bound to spread. It basically amounts to using a common commodity (cars) as weapons. Another pleasant consequences of this purposeful and ignoble mess.

Wish we still had a president who exemplified humanity's aspirations.

Rebel bomb kills 10 Colombian soldiers
10 May 2007 17:05:43 GMT
By Patrick Markey

BOGOTA, May 10 (Reuters) - Ten Colombian soldiers died on Thursday when leftist rebels detonated a bomb on a rural road in the second major guerrilla attack in two days, military officials said.

Local army commander Gen. Hernando Perez blamed the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the country's largest rebel group known as the FARC, for the attack in Valle del Cauca province, 143 miles (230 km) southwest of Bogota.

"We believe it was activated by remote control," Perez told local radio.

Two officers and eight soldiers were killed and 10 were slightly wounded in the attack against a military convoy, an army spokesman said.

more:http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N10434854.htm

Published on Tuesday, December 26, 2000 in the New York Times
Bush Should Start Over in Colombia
by Paul Wellstone

WASHINGTON — Earlier this month I traveled to Colombia to learn more about this war-torn country, whose military is getting nearly $2 million per day from the United States as part of an aid package that passed last June after narrow approval in the Senate.
I paid a visit to Barrancabermeja, an oil-refining port city on Colombia's Magdalena River. "Barranca," a city of 210,000, is one of the most dangerous places in one of the world's most dangerous countries. This year so far, violence in Barranca has killed at least 410 people. According to local human rights groups, most of those killed were the victims of right-wing paramilitary death squads.

These human rights groups operate in the midst of a 40-year-old civil war now in one of its most violent phases. Every year, the violence in Colombia kills nearly 4,000 people, most of them poor, powerless noncombatants. About 300,000 — more than half of them children — are forced from their homes each year. Another 3,000 people are kidnapped. Ransoms, extortion and the drug trade finance armed groups on the right and left.

In the name of the drug war, the American aid package approved this year allocates approximately 75 percent of its resources to Colombia's security forces. But Colombia's military is a deeply troubled institution, even though it has recently taken important steps to improve its overall human rights record.

The State Department recently reported that "civilian management of the armed forces is limited" in Colombia, and that in 1999 "the authorities rarely brought officers of the security forces and the police charged with human rights offenses to justice, and impunity remains a problem." Many members of the security forces continue to collaborate with the right- wing paramilitaries, who commit about three-quarters of the politically motivated murders in Colombia.

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/views/122600-104.htm

Is it to convince us that right-wing death squads are bad? This is Democratic Underground, not Free Republic, so I doubt that there are many people here who still need to be told that. I haven't seen anyone on this thread- or this website, besides the trolls- defending Uribe's paramilitary thugs. I can only guess that this was intended to prove that the rightists are killing more people than the leftists in Colombia, which is hardly surprising, but still not a justification for murder. And Senator Wellstone also said:

"The country's two main guerrilla groups, the FARC and E.L.N., meanwhile, are supported in part by skimming from the drug trade (as are the paramilitaries), and commit about a fifth of killings while terrorizing the population."