Canada Backs Colombia's Growing Embrace of US Military

Peasants sent packing to pave way for oil, gas and mining investments.

By Arno Kopecky, 6 Aug 2010, TheTyee.ca

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Canada's big resource investment in Colombia

Veran's statements echoed those of outgoing President Alvaro Uribe, the man who invented the term "narcoterrorist," as well as the man taking Uribe's place on Saturday, former defense minister Juan Manuel Santos. Both men have stressed that the agreement's wording restricts American military excursions outside Colombia to humanitarian missions like the post-earthquake Hatian relief mission launched from Palenquero in January. Besides, no more than 800 American troops will be allowed on the bases -- never mind the clause allowing American troop levels to be increased in case of emergency.

And Canada? Our government supported the agreement too. Canadian mining, oil and gas companies are Colombia's third biggest source of foreign investment, operating almost exclusively in remote zones of the country where armed protection is a precondition to profit. The question is, protection from whom? Both Plan Colombia and the new Defense Cooperation Agreement identify FARC as the enemy, a view now echoed from Ottawa: speaking in favor of the Canada-Colombia free trade deal last fall, Liberal MP Scott Brison claimed that "Enbridge (a Canadian energy company) has been recognized for human rights training that it has provided to security personnel which are required to protect its investments and its workers against FARC."

Unfortunately, the facts don't support the assumptions. Over the course of Plan Colombia, more than 2.5 million rural Colombians have been displaced; their exodus overlaps neatly with a map of the country's oil and mineral resources. Yet according to the Colombian government's own statistics, compiled from testimonies of the displaced, it wasn't the FARC who kicked most of those campesinos out -- it was the paramilitary groups employed by Colombia's army to improve the country's investment climate, encouraged by $7 billion from Plan Colombia and counting.

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The report focuses on the "false positives" scandal that broke in late 2008, when it came out that Colombian soldiers had murdered over 2,000 civilians and dressed their cadavers up as guerrillas in order to boost results in the war on drugs and terror. The report, which draws on statistics provided by the State Department and the Colombian military, shows that the Colombian army units which received the most American funding committed the most atrocities. The reverse held true as well, with the number of false positives dropping as funding was revoked. To be precise, the 16 largest single-year increases of aid to army units led to a 56 per cent increase in executions in their jurisidictions, while precisely the same reduction in killings was reported from those jurisdictions where Plan Colombia's aid was most sharply reduced.

http://thetyee.ca/News/2010/08/06/USMilitaryInColumbia/?utm_source=mondayheadlines&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=090810

Has Stephen Harper really changed Canada THAT much?

is tied up in Latin America & the Middle East, he'll be free to achieve his true goal.