U.S. citizens need to know about Colombian killings

U.S. citizens need to know about Colombian killings
January 06, 2011 2:00 AM

To the Editor:

Even before being brutally murdered by the Colombian military, the three young siblings, Yenni, Yimmy and Yefferson, had lived a hard life. They'd been displaced by Colombia's brutal war and sought refuge in rural Arauca province, near the Venezuelan border. Six months ago, their mother left them. From then on, 14-year-old Yenni took car of her little brothers, who were 9 and 6. Until that terrible day, she regularly made breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the whole family.

On Oct. 14, their father, Jose Alvara Torres, left early in the morning to find work as a day laborer in the fields. His children stayed home, as they were on school vacation.

Hours later, solders from the Colombian military's 5th Mobile Brigade dragged these three defenseless children out of their homes and took them into the woods where they raped Yenni before stabbing all three to death. Their bodies were buried in a shallow grave just 300 yards from the local military base.

Their friends at school are still terrified that they will be next. Their teacher described them as in a state of panic. Parents indicate their children are afraid to walk to school, as they may encounter a solder. It should come as no surprise that for years the U.S. government poured millions of dollars in military aid into the 5th Mobile Brigade and that at least one of the Colombian military officials fired in the wake of the killing was trained in the notorious School of the Americas at Fort Benning. Lt. Col. James Edison Pineda Parra took a cadet training course at the SOA in 1989.

More:
http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20110106-OPINION-101060370

Editorials:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x580178

'Army complicit in Arauca paramilitary crimes' .
Thursday, 22 July 2010 08:19 Leo Palmer .

Former paramilitary leader Miguel Angel Mejia Munera, alias "El Mezillo," (the Twin) alleged that Colombian politicians, oil companies and the Colombian army had links with the paramilitaries in the eastern Colombian border department Arauca.

Speaking from the Colombian Court in Washington in the U.S, El Mezillo voluntarily provided testimony on Colombia's paramilitary organizations.

Mejia was extradited to the United States on drug trafficking charges in 2009 and was a leader of the "Vencedores de Arauca" paramilitary bloc

Collaboration with the Colombia Army

According to Mejia, the Colombian army was involved in the murder of Angel Chaparro, who was gunned down on January 25 in 2002 along with Mario Ruiz Gonzalez Delgado Heliberto in Tame, Arauca only four blocks from the police station.

Chaparro was the key witness in the case against the Colombian Air Force and American pilots working for Oxy oil, who were implicated in the 1998 bombing of Santo Domingo in Arauca which left 17 farmers dead. Chaparro died in the shooting but Delgado was kidnapped.

More:
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/10935-army-complicit-in-arauca-paramilitary-crimes-the-twin.html

Conditions have changed quite a bit since then. Today, the main problem is the FARC, which continues to terrorize the population. AUC is essentially disbanded.

stressing the fact they did NOT demobilize, they have created new groups, chosen new names, like the "Aguilas Negras" and are conducting business as usual.

Even all the human rights groups made their statements long ago that the situation with human rights is still the same, that it all continues just the same.

The paramilitaries are still in business. The murders of human rights workers, union workers, indigenous people, assassinations continue just as they always did. Period.

They are doing well enough to have sent some to Honduras after the coup, remember?

Colombian illegal armed groups are recruiting demobilized paramilitaries to work as mercenaries in Honduras, several Colombian media reported Monday.

According to newspaper El Tiempo, some Honduran business people are hiring Colombian former paramilitaries to strengthen their security against urban gangs.

According to the news report the drafting is taking place in ‘El Japon’, an estate seized from a drug trafficker by antinarcotics authorities in the Magdalena Medio valley. The report says some demobilized paramilitary lieutenants are engaging former paramilitary combatants of the disarmed paramilitary organization AUC to serve as security personnel in Honduras.

Colombian police say ‘Los Rastrojos’, the drug gang that inherited the drug trade from the Norte del Valle cartel, was reported recruiting demobilized paramilitaries in the vicinity of ‘El Japon’, where the alleged recruitment of mercenaries would be taking place.

"We do not rule out that ‘Los Rastrojos’ are the ones involved in the Honduran case. We will investigate," Police Colonel Ricardo Restrepo said.

http://www.colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/5900-colombia-exports-paramilitaries-to-honduras.html

"Protection?" Yeah, you bet! "Protection" for monsters who use them against the poor and helpless.

Here's a Guardian article written the next month:

Landowners in Honduras hired Colombian paramilitaries, UN saysMembers of the AUC, classified as a terrorist organisation by the US, reportedly hired to offer protection for landowners
Associated Press
guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 October 2009 14.50 BST

Honduran landowners have reportedly hired former Colombian paramilitaries as mercenaries to protect them against possible violence stemming from government tensions, a UN panel said today.

The UN working group on mercenaries said that it has received reports that some 40 former members of United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, or AUC. The US government classifies the AUC as a terrorist organisation.

They will protect properties and individuals "from further violence between supporters of the de facto government and those of the deposed President Manuel Zelaya," it said.

Separately, a 120-person group of paramilitaries from several countries in that region was reportedly created to support the coup in Honduras, the panel said.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/09/honduras-colombia-auc-landowners

What a shame our corporate media support the criminals who exploit and abuse the helpless poor. We know they're amoral, that they simply cling to the people with the power, bowing and scraping to keep in their good graces, keep their jobs. That's not "journalism," however. That's a deeply dishonest kind of prostituion.

Colombia appears to have become official headquarters for death squads on loan.

The fact Honduras gets its murdering thugs from Colombia should tell anyone all he needs to know about the fact Colombia is OF COURSE still in paramilitary bidness.

Terrorizing Colombia: Obama Continues Bush Administration’s Militarism
By: Garry Leech
Date Published: June 1, 2010

Many Colombia observers hoped that the arrival of President Barack Obama in the White House would bring about a significant shift in US policy toward that troubled South American nation. The hope was that the new president would reduce aid to the military with the worst human rights record in the hemisphere and prioritize social and economic issues. That major shift did not occur during Obama’s first year in office. And to the degree that a shift in policy did occur, it constituted an increased militarization of US intervention in Colombia.

~snip~
Less than three weeks after 9/11, Democratic Senator Bob Graham of Florida, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, launched a campaign to portray the FARC as a major international terrorist threat: “The FARC are doing the same thing as global level terrorists, that is organizing in small cells that don’t have contact with each other and depend on a central command to organize attacks, in terms of logistics and finance. It is the same style of operation as Bin Laden.”

In October 2001, the State Department’s top counter-terrorism official, Francis X. Taylor, declared that Washington’s strategy for fighting terrorism in the Western Hemisphere would include, “where appropriate, as we are doing in Afghanistan, the use of military power.” Taylor left little doubt about the “appropriate” target when he stated that the FARC “is the most dangerous international terrorist group based in this hemisphere.” Meanwhile Taylor’s boss, US Secretary of State Colin Powell, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the FARC belonged in the same category as Al-Qaeda: “There is no difficulty in identifying as a terrorist and getting everybody to rally against him. Now, there are other organizations that probably meet a similar standard. The FARC in Colombia comes to mind.”

~snip~
Oil war

What Graham failed to mention was that a huge majority of so-called terrorist attacks against the US by Colombian guerrillas consisted of bombing oil pipelines used by US companies. In other words, they were designed to hurt corporate profit margins, not US civilians. In fact, the Florida senator neglected to point out that these attacks did not kill a single US citizen in 2000, the year to which Graham was referring. Nevertheless, the propaganda campaign vilifying the FARC successfully laid the groundwork for US Ambassador Anne Patterson’s announcement at the end of October that the United States would provide counter-terrorism aid to Colombia as part of Washington’s new global war on terror.

More:
http://www.leftturn.org/terrorizing-colombia-obama-continues-bush-administration%E2%80%99s-militarism

Occidental Petroleum Corporation (Oxy) is an international oil and gas exploration and production company with operations in the United States, Middle East/North Africa and Latin America. Oxy is the fourth largest U.S. oil and gas company, based on equity market capitalization. Oxy is the largest oil producer in Texas, the largest gas producer in California, and has additional operations in Kansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico. Oxy has assets in Libya, Oman, Qatar, and Yemen and is a partner in supplying natural gas from Qatar to markets in the United Arab Emirates. Oxy has operations and assets in Colombia and Argentina.

~snip~
Corporate Accountability

Labor

Human Rights

~snip~
A Laboratory of War: Repression and Violence in Arauca
This document discusses Occidental’s human rights violations, including the XVIII Brigade which is reportedly funded by Oxy that has collided with paramilitary forces and the Santo Domingo killings. <10>

Occidental Pipeline in Colombia Strikes it Rich in Washington
The Occidental pipeline is often attacked by guerrilla groups, more than 1000 times since its 1986 construction. It has spilled more than 2.9 million barrels of crude oil (more than 11 times the amount spilled by Exxon Valdez) and has polluted more than 1,625 miles of river. <11>

Special Issues and Campaigns: World Report 1999
Human Rights Watch claims that Occidental along with Ecopetrol and Royal Dutch/Shell, took no action to address reports of extrajudicial executions and a massacre committed by the state forces assigned to protect the consortium’s facilities. The companies’ response was that human rights violations were the responsibility of governments, and they did not announce any programs to ensure that their security providers do not commit human rights violations. <12>

Human Rights Watch World Report 1998
Arauca province was the site of the Occidental Petroleum, Royal Dutch/Shell, and Ecopetrol consortium's Caño Limón-Covenas oil fields and pipeline. By putting the companies in a new relationship to the military, the contracts had raised serious questions. The direct contracts signed with the Ministry of Defense inappropriately tightened the companies' relations with an abusive military and compounded the fundamental problem: that the companies relied on that abusive military institution for security and thereby assumed a responsibility to take concrete, programmatic measures to prevent violations and to confront those that may arise. The companies have taken very little action in regarding human rights. <13>

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Occidental