Paramilitaries displace 700 in west Colombia
by Adriaan Alsema May 24, 2018
Almost 700 people have been displaced from their communities in western Colombia after paramilitary incursions, the United Nations said Wednesday.
According to the international organization, the inhabitants of five indigenous communities in Alto Baudo were forced to flee over the past 10 days after the paramilitaries “committed acts of sexual abuse against women” and kidnapped 12 people, including four minors.
The kidnapped community members later returned.
Indigenous organization ONIC said that the paramilitaries identified themselves as members of the “Aguilas Negras.”
More:
https://colombiareports.com/paramilitaries-displace-700-in-west-colombia/
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AUC
Written by Laura Ávila - LAST UPDATE NOVEMBER 17, 2015
The United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia – AUC) was a coalition of right-wing death squads that used the conflict to camouflage their illicit economic activities. These included drug trafficking, displacement, kidnapping, and extortion. The AUC once operated in two-thirds of the country with approximately 30,000 soldiers.
. . .
These groups began operating under new names even before the demobilizations officially ended in 2006. The new groups — now referred to as “criminal bands” or BACRIMs, for the Spanish acronym — include the Urabeños, the Rastrojos, ERPAC, the Paisas, the Machos, Aguilas Negras, and Renacer, among others. These groups are now dedicated to drug trafficking and organized crime, as well as attacks on civilians, especially activists and community leaders.
For many Colombians, the peace process and the AUC’s demobilization did not improve their situation. While more than 30,000 paramilitaries demobilized, many remained at large or abandoned the process and have since been implicated in grave human rights violations, drug trafficking, extortion, kidnappings and many other criminal acts.
More:
https://www.insightcrime.org/colombia-organized-crime-news/auc-profile/
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Paramilitarism in Colombia)
Right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia are paramilitary groups acting in opposition to revolutionary Marxist-Leninist guerrilla forces and their allies among the civilian population. These paramilitary groups control the large majority of the illegal drug trade of cocaine and other substances and are the parties responsible for most of the human rights violations in the latter half of the ongoing Colombian Armed Conflict.[citation needed] According to several international human rights and governmental organizations, right-wing paramilitary groups have been responsible for at least 70 to 80% of political murders in Colombia per year.[citation needed] The remaining political murders are often committed by leftist guerrillas and government forces.[citation needed]
The first paramilitary groups were organized by the Colombian military following recommendations made by U.S. military counterinsurgency advisers who were sent to Colombia during the Cold War to combat leftist political activists and armed guerrilla groups.[citation needed] The development of more modern paramilitary groups has also involved elite landowners, drug traffickers, members of the security forces, politicians and multinational corporations. Paramilitary violence today is principally targeted towards left-wing insurgents and their supporters.
. . .
Controversy Surrounding Directive
Human Rights Watch (HRW) concluded that these intelligence networks subsequently laid the groundwork for continuing an illegal, covert partnership between the military and paramilitaries.[citation needed] HRW argued that the restructuring process solidified linkages between members of the Colombian military and civilian members of paramilitary groups, by incorporating them into several of the local intelligence networks and by cooperating with their activities.[citation needed] In effect, HRW believed that this further consolidated a "secret network that relied on paramilitaries not only for intelligence, but to carry out murder".[43]
HRW argued that this situation allowed the Colombian government and military to plausibly deny links or responsibility for paramilitary human rights abuses.[citation needed] HRW stated that the military intelligence networks created by the U.S. reorganization appeared to have dramatically increased violence, stating that the "recommendations were given despite the fact that some of the U.S. officials who collaborated with the team knew of the Colombian military's record of human rights abuses and its ongoing relations with paramilitaries".[43]
HRW stated that while "not all paramilitaries are intimate partners with the military", the existing partnership between paramilitaries and the Colombian military was "a sophisticated mechanism--in part supported by years of advice, training, weaponry, and official silence by the United States--that allows the Colombian military to fight a dirty war and Colombian officialdom to deny it."[45]
More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_paramilitarism_in_Colombia
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End The Silence About Colombia’s Paramilitary Death Squads
10/31/2017 11:30 am ET Updated Nov 01, 2017
Though you would not know it from the utter silence of the mainstream press, Colombia continues to be plagued by right-wing paramilitary violence. As Justice for Colombia in the UK explains, over 100 social and political activists have been killed so far in 2017, and the paramilitaries are responsible for the lion’s share of these killings. The BBC recently explained that the murder of social, political and human rights activists is actually increasing in Colombia even as the overall murder rate in Colombia is decreasing, and despite the disarming of the left-wing FARC guerillas as part of the Colombian peace accords. Indeed, it is quite clear that the paramilitary groups are exploiting the very absence of the FARC guerillas to acquire territory and to violently wipe out peaceful social movements in Colombia. And, this is all according to plan.
Thus, the paramilitary death squads trace their roots back to the early 1960’s when U.S. General William P. Yarborough first conceived of them as an instrument to advance U.S. economic interests by violently destroying progressive social movements. The idea was that because the paramilitaries are not official military forces, the U.S. and its allies would have plausible deniability for their conduct. In other words, they would be a “hidden weapon . . . of hired killers” which carry out the dirty war which the regular troops “cannot do officially.”
. . .
And, of course, the mainstream U.S. press is complicit in covering up the very existence of these paramilitary groups by giving them zero media coverage.
The results of all of this are devastating, especially for the Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities who, as usual, bear the brunt of paramilitary violence. According to Amnesty International:
In some departments, including Chocó, Cauca, Antioquia and Norte de Santander, crimes under international law and human rights violations persist, including the murder of members of AfroColombian communities and Indigenous Peoples, collective forced displacements, confinement of communities in certain areas of the country, forced recruitment of children to serve in the armed groups, sexual violence, and the use of anti-personnel mines.
More:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/end-the-silence-about-colombias-paramilitary-death_us_59f76892e4b044942833784d
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Colombia: Paramilitary Group Threatens Indigenous Protesters with ‘Social Cleansing’
October 21, 2013 Amnesty International
Human rights groups have long accused Colombian security forces of working in tandem with paramilitary units (Declassified U.S. government documents requested by the National Security Archive confirm this connection). But in 2006 and 2007, a series of scandals broke that implicated top public figures. The former foreign minister, at least one state governor, several legislators, and the head of the national police have all been tainted by the “parapolitics” scandal. In March 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported that the head of the army collaborated with paramilitary groups on military sweeps to eradicate left-wing militias.
As of April 2007, fifty politicians had been implicated. The widening scandal has cast doubts on President Alvaro Uribe, but some say it is the natural byproduct of the paramilitary demobilization process. “The charges underscore the remarkable independence that Colombia’s newly reformed judiciary is exercising,” says a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Funding for the judiciary has increased markedly under President Uribe.
Multinational corporations have also been linked to the paramilitaries. In 2007, Chiquita Brands admitted in U.S. court that it paid nearly $1.7 million to paramilitary group over eight years. Other corporations including Coca-Cola and Drummond are now under investigation.
Evolution and Fragmentation
In September 2007, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe told the United Nations that in Colombia, “today there is no paramilitarism. There are guerrillas and drug traffickers.” Many observers—from the United Nations to Colombian analysts—disagree. On the contrary, they say, the paramilitaries are smaller, more clandestine, and operating with just as much impunity as before the AUC’s demobilization.
. . .
In its written death threat on October 15 the Rastrojos paramilitary group specifically named individual indigenous leaders and organizations in Cauca, Caldas, Risaralda, La Guajira, Huila and Antioquia regions.
The paramilitaries told the protesters to return to their homes within 24 hours or they would be considered military targets and would be singled out for “social cleansing” killings (limpieza social). The paramilitaries claimed the indigenous protesters were being used as “cannon fodder” by the guerrilla group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC).
“Given the reports of excessive force used against indigenous protesters in the past 10 days, we have very serious concerns about the safety of the indigenous leaders and members of the organizations named in the paramilitary death threat,” said Pollack. “In the past those labeled subversives or guerrilla collaborators have frequently been the target of serious human rights violations by paramilitaries, either acting alone or in collusion with the security forces.”
More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/archives/colombia/colombia-paramilitary-group-threatens-indigenous-protesters-with-social-cleansing/
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Neoliberalism Needs Death Squads in Colombia
September 3, 2009 Hans Bennett
In her new book Blood & Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia, author Jasmin Hristov writes: “For roughly forty years, the Colombian state has been playing a double game: prohibiting the formation of paramilitary groups with one law and facilitating their existence with another; condemning their barbarities and at the same time assisting their operations; promising to bring perpetrators of crime to justice, while opening the door to perpetual immunity; convicting them of narco-trafficking, yet profiting from their drug deals; announcing to the world the government’s persecution of paramilitary organizations, even though in reality these ‘illegal armed groups’ have been carrying out the dirty work unseemly for a state that claims to be democratic and worthy of billions of dollars in US military aid.”
As the largest recipient of US military aid in the hemisphere, Colombia has long been the US’ most important ally in Latin America. Simultaneously, Colombia has also become the hemisphere’s worst human rights violator, with Colombia’s numerous paramilitary organizations recently taking center stage, as they’ve gradually become directly responsible for more human rights atrocities than the formal military and police. In the name of fighting “narco-terrorism,” poor people and dissidents are massacred, assassinated, tortured, and disappeared, among other atrocities done to eliminate particular individuals and to “set an example” by intimidating others in the community. Ninety-seven percent of human rights abuses remain unpunished.
In recent years, a variety of human rights organizations, as well as mainstream academics and journalists have found it impossible to ignore the astronomical human rights violations. However, even though these groups have accurately reported on the actual atrocities, Jasmin Hristov argues that in their reports, the atrocities are largely de-contextualized from the powerful forces in Colombia and the US that directly benefit from this repression. According to Hristov, this mainstream presentation serves to mask the fact that US and Colombian elites directly support (via funding, training, supervising, and providing legal immunity for) state repression carried out by the police and military, as well as illegal paramilitary groups that are unofficially sanctioned by the government. Whether it is murdering labor organizers or displacing an indigenous community because a US corporation wants to drill for oil on their land, Hristov passionately asserts that death squad violence is purposefully directed towards sectors of society that stand in the way of the ruling class’s efforts to maintain economic dominance and acquire more resources to make even more profit.
More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/archives/colombia/neoliberalism-needs-death-squads-in-colombia/
I have faith that all progressives, Democrats who haven't had the time to start looking beyond the "perception molding" which has always passed as actual news on Colombia, will start thinking about what has been left out of your understanding of the long, long civil war in feudal Colombia. Once you look beyond the surface, beyond the programmed picture we are all given lies the truth, and you will recognize it instantly because of its stark difference from all of your previous "news."
It's right there, within grasp for everyone who has the time to start reading, and thinking, rinse and repeat. The insight gained in learning the difference between what we are told and what is actual will encourage you to start looking hard at all the other Latin American countries, and you will have passed the point of no return. You will NOT be able to believe you had actually bought what was being delivered regularly to you to form your image of all those many millions of struggling and suffering people of the Americas who are being exploited as cheap labor, and kept in desperate poverty.
You will also realize the difference in motivations behind positions taken by those who have bothered to learn the truth for themselves, and those who aspire daily to attack them on message boards, drive them away by making it so only one point of view, upholding the official story remains.
It's right in front of your eyes the moment you start looking forward. You will not be disappointed, and you will have the satisfaction of realizing you found it yourself, and it clearly has the ring of truth, and satisfies your need to see through the stuff you are expected to swallow.
