Colombian hitmen reveal horror of the kill

Colombian hitmen reveal horror of the kill
October 14, 2009 -- Updated 2247 GMT (0647 HKT)

By Karl Penhaul
CNN

Editor's note: This article contains profanity and graphic images that some may find offensive. This is part two of a three part series showing different aspects of life inside Colombia's drug gangs.

MEDELLIN, Colombia (CNN) -- This city's drug underworld is littered with "poseurs" -- lowlife triggermen pretending they're the real hard cases. But a longstanding and trusted source, with intimate knowledge of Medellin's violent subculture, assured me the two men I was about to meet were the real deal.

My destination: a single-story home in the city's notorious "Commune 13" district where I had set up a meeting with two hit men, who have for years hired their lethal services out to the cocaine cartels.

Inside the house, a man called "Red" sat on a couch toying a fully loaded 9mm Ruger pistol. "This will stop somebody nicely," he said, as I glanced at it. His face and arms were covered in burn marks. He said it was a testament of the day a barrel of acid spilled onto him as he was working in a clandestine cocaine processing lab in northern Colombia.

Red explained that after the accident, the lab foreman tossed him out, half-dead, into a jungle clearing. What little strength he had left, he said he used to bat away vultures. And, against the odds, he made his way to safety and slowly recovered. When Red left the clinic months later, he said he went straight back to the drug lab and gunned down the foreman and three of his henchmen.

More:
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/10/14/colombia.hitmen/index.html?imw=Y&iref=mpstoryemail

It may well be all true, but so is the US slaughter of over one million innocent people in Iraq, and we don't see any exposes on that, do we?

My first guess: To justify and promote the $6 BILLION in US taxpayer money larded on the corrupt, murderous Colombian military and government, who have killed as many (or more!) people than the drug cartels have, and with a much more devastating goal: killing democracy. The government's targets are union leaders, human rights workers, political leftists, peasant farmers and others who dare to advocate a human rights cause or raise their heads in dissent. Further, the Pentagon now wants seven new US military bases in Colombia, allegedly for the US "war on drugs." No end in sight. The cocaine, and the US war profiteer projects, just keep on coming. Ha-ha on US taxpayer suckers.

My second guess is less obvious: I think the US wants to dump Alvaro Uribe, in favor of the actually worse former Defense Minister, Manuel Santos (the "Donald Rumsfeld" of South America), who is...ahem...running for president of Colombia. Santos is chafing at the bit to invade Venezuela and Ecuador, kill all the leftists and steal the oil. Uribe, for all his evil, seems to have an interest in maintaining some semblance of civil authority in Colombia, and some measure of collegiality (economic cooperation) with the other (mostly leftist) leaders of the continent, and also had trouble reining Santos in. Uribe got his start with the Medellin Cartel, and is just as filthily corrupt as he can be, and also has close ties to military and paramilitary death squads. He may be the roundabout target of this "expose." There have been a number of exposes on Uribe in major corpo/fascist 'news' outlets--and hardly a word about Santos, who is the coldest-eyed, nazi SOB I've ever seen in front of a US Senate committee, outside of Rumsfeld. I think Santos is the linchpin of the Rumseld war plan for South America, elements of which seem to be moving forward on their own volition.

CNN really and truly does not give a fuck about any kind of corruption. They are at the service of US war profiteers and global corporate predators. I urge "looking behind the headlines" on items like this. What they report may be true, but why are they reporting it? This may be as important as what they choose to report.

Apparently it's not noticeablly cleaner now that he's President, either. From earlier this year:

Medellín sees most violent weekend since Escobar
Sunday, 05 April 2009 17:36
Adriaan Alsema

Fifteen people were assassinated in Medellín over the weekend, local police say. According to the authorities, the wave of murders is a retaliation of the arrest of a paramilitary leader last week.

Although violence had been soaring in Medellín, it has not been since the 1990's when Pablo Escobar ruled the underworld of Colombia's second largest city, Medellín had seen so many murders over just two nights.

Local authorities imposed strict security measures on the capital of Antioquia in February already to halt the soaring number of assassinations and to assure there were no irregularities during the summit of the Inter-American Development Bank the end of March.

Despite the rigid security measures, 'sicarios' (hitmen) this weekend took the lives of what Police say were fifteen members of the gang of 'Sebastian', a paramilitary leader formerly under the command of the extradited AUC boss Carlos Mario 'Macaco' Jiménez.

Police say the assassination was a show of force of members of the gang of Fabio Edison 'Riñon' Gómez Ruis, alleged member of paramilitary organization the Office of Envigado who, according to police, had seventy percent of the city's sicarios under his command and was arrested in Barranquilla a

The most serious of assassinations took place in a house in the central neighborhood of Tejol. Five others there were injured. In Belén Rincón the assassins followed their victims into a church and shot them there.

http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/3498-medellin-sees-most-violent-weekend-since-escobar.html

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More cops on Medellín streets after wave of assassinations
Monday, 06 April 2009 10:10 Adriaan Alsema

Medellín Police increased the number of policemen on the streets in the city center and in the poor neighborhoods after the assassination of fifteen people this weekend.

According to Medellín newspaper El Colombiano, police formed five mobile squads that will patrol the areas where the murders took place and where authorities say is a high presence of criminal gangs.

Medellín Police commander Dagoberto García Cáceres says the murders were committed by members of the Office of Envigado, a paramilitary group whose leader recently was arrested.

Colombia's second largest city has seen an increase in murders for months and already imposed rigid security measures in February to curb the violence. Rival paramilitary militias are trying to take control over certain parts of the city.

http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/3505-more-cops-on-medellin-streets-after-wave-of-assassinations.html

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New generation of criminals returns violence to Medellin
Thursday, 17 September 2009 16:34 Neda Vanovac

After a period of relative calm, violence in Medellin has intensified with the proliferation of new criminal gangs in the tradition of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, leaving more than a thousand dead since the beginning of 2009 alone.

The Antioquia department's capital experienced its worst moment in 1991 during Escobar's reign, when 6,500 homicides were reported. Between 2004 and 2007 that figure dramatically decreased thanks to mayor Sergio Fajardo's program to crack down on crime while implementing social programs.

However, between January and August of this year there have already been 1,300 murders, whose victims are members of the 380 emerging bands operating in the city.

According to city statistics, reports Colombian news source Terra, the victims all fit a profile of young men aged between 18 and 26.

City spokesman Jairo Herran said that the surge in violence is due to the "breaking of the authority of the Envigado " - a network of killers and drug traffickers born in the 1980s - "and the extradition to the United States of fourteen heads of this organization.

"When an entity like this controls its subordinates, homicides decrease and stability. However, , this manifests itself in disputes between gangs, violence in the neighborhoods and of illegal groups from other regions."

In line with this thinking, Terra reports that President Alvaro Uribe said Sunday that Medellin "is moving from having crime controlled by a few to crime dominated by many.

Luis Mosquera, head of Human Rights for agency Con-vivir, said that another element contributing to the weakening of the the great structure of the underworld was the process of demobilization and reintegration of paramilitary commanders.

Since 2003, the Uribe government has promoted the social integration of far-right paramilitaries under the umbrella of the Law of Justice and Peace which, in Mosquera's opinion, "has failed", leaving the path open to middle managers.

http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/5971-new-generation-of-criminals-returns-violence-to-medellin.html

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The paramilitary candidate
•Tom Feiling

Colombia's president Alvaro Uribe Velez is, by his own admission, a man of the right. Unlike most recent Colombian Presidents, Uribe is from the land-owning class. He inherited huge swathes of cattle ranching land from his father Alberto Uribe Velez, himself subject to an extradition warrant to face charges of drug trafficking in the USA, until he was killed, allegedly by leftwing FARC guerrillas, in 1983. Uribe Jnr grew up with the children of Fabio Ochoa, three of whom were to become leading lights in Pablo Escobar's Medellín cocaine cartel.
President Uribe's credentials are impeccable: educated at Harvard and Oxford, he is sharp as a tack, and a very able bureaucrat to boot. At the tender age of 26 he was elected Mayor of Medellín, the second city of Colombia.
The city's elite in the `80s was as rich as it was corrupt as it was nepotistic, and they loved the young Uribe. But he was removed from office after only three months, by a central government embarrassed by his public ties to the drugs mafia. He was then made Director of Civil Aviation, where he used his mandate to issue pilots' licences to Pablo Escobar's fleet of light aircraft flying cocaine to the US.
In 1995 Uribe became governor of the Department of Antioquia, of which Medellín is the capital. The region became the testbed for the institutionalisation of paramilitary forces that he has now made a key plank of his presidency.
Convivir were "special private security and vigilance services, designed to group the civilian population alongside the Armed Forces". Security forces and paramilitary groups enjoyed immunity from prosecution under governor Uribe, and used this immunity to launch a campaign of terror in Antioquia. Thousands of people were murdered, `disappeared', detained and driven out of the department.
In the town of Apartado for example, three of the Convivir leaders were well-known paramilitaries. All were trained by the 17th
Brigade of the Army. In 1998, representatives of more than 200 Convivir associations announced that they would unite with the paramilitary AUC under its murderous leader Carlos Castano.

Free and fair press?
Even when he announced his intention to run for President, Uribe's paramilitary connections appear to have deterred many journalists from examining the ties between drug gangs and the Uribe family. An exception was Noticias Uno, a current affairs programme on the TV station Canal Uno. In April 2002, the programme ran a series on alleged links between Uribe and the Medellín drug cartel. After the reports aired, unidentified men began calling the news station, threatening to kill the show's producer Ignacio Go'mez, director Daniel Coronell, and Coronell's three-year-old daughter, who was flown out of the country soon after the calls began. Go'mez too was later forced to flee and is currently living in exile.
Noticias Uno told the story of how, in 1997, the US Drugs Enforcement Administration (DEA) seized 50,000 kilos of potassium permanganate from a ship docked in San Francisco harbour. Permanganate is a chemical used in the production of cocaine. The cargo was heading for a company called GMP, headed by Pedro Moreno Villa, who was Uribe's campaign manager when he was running for the presidency. The chemicals seized were sufficient to produce cocaine with a street value of $15bn. The DEA confirmed that GMP was the biggest importer of the chemical to Colombia between 1994 and 1998, when Uribe was Governor of Medellín and Moreno Villa was his chief of staff.
Uribe had slipped the noose again. Two powerful business groups with ties to the political establishment own RCN and Caracol, the biggest television and radio networks in Colombia. As the presidential race gathered pace, journalists became increasingly concerned that these media bosses were threatening their editorial independence. Their concerns were heightened when Uribe picked a member of the Santos family that owns the country's most influential daily newspaper to be his vice-president.

Free and fair election?
So, despite his links to the paramilitaries and the drug cartels, Uribe won the presidency. But to call Uribe's victory a landslide - as many in and outside Colombia did - is a gross distortion of the facts. Uribe got 53% of the official vote, but only 25% of the electorate voted. Many urban and middle class Colombians, who have been largely sheltered from the civil war to date, were thoroughly disillusioned by the peace process of former President Andres Pastrana and were willing to back a hardliner like Uribe. But the election was hardly a fair one.
Mapiripan is the site of one of the worst paramilitary massacres to date, yet many of the people there voted for the "paramilitary" candidate Uribe. Father Javier Giraldo of the NGO Justicia y Paz was in Mapiripan on election day: "There was a great deal of fraud. There were paramilitaries in the voting booths. They destroyed a lot of ballots. This was denounced to the Ombudsman, but nothing happened."
Electoral fraud, widespread paramilitary threats (denounced by virtually all the other candidates during the election campaign) and the almost total decimation of the parliamentary left in the preceeding decade all contributed to Uribe's election win.

More:
http://www.peacenews.info/issues/2455/245512.html