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Judi Lynn

(160,211 posts)
Thu Apr 9, 2020, 03:09 PM Apr 2020

Colombia's VP breaks down in interview over business ties to narco


by Adriaan Alsema April 9, 2020

Colombia’s vice-president broke down in tears on Wednesday during an interview over her businesses ties to a drug trafficker.

In an interview with W Radio, VP Marta Lucia Ramirez (Conservative Party) was fiercely defending her integrity and honor until the shame got the best of her and the VP burst into tears.

“What I have achieved in life I have done working with integrity, and honestly with the utmost clarity that serving the country is always done by setting an example of integrity,” Ramirez said weeping.

Unlike the dynasty politicians and narco-elites who dominate Colombia’s politics, Remirez actually worked her way up from a middle class family and made history in 2018 when she became the country’s first female VP.

While often criticized over her cunning use of her leverage in the financial sector to gain political power, last week’s revelation she and her husband teamed up with “Memo Fantasma” in a construction project was the first time she was ever linked to narcos.

More:
https://colombiareports.com/colombias-vp-breaks-down-in-interview-over-business-ties-to-narco/

The Vice President chose to be sponsored by a sweetheart of a death squad drug lord:



"Macaco" Carlos Mario Jiménez


The Dark Side of Plan Colombia

. . .

Macaco, whose real name is Carlos Mario Jiménez, was one of the bloodiest paramilitary commanders in Colombia’s long-running civil war and has confessed to the murder of 4,000 civilians. He and his cohorts are also largely responsible for forcing 4.3 million Colombians into internal refugee status, the largest internally displaced population in the world after Sudan’s. In May 2008, Macaco was extradited to the United States on drug trafficking and “narco-terrorism” charges. He is awaiting trial in a jail cell in Washington, DC.

Macaco turned himself in to authorities in late 2005 as part of a government amnesty program that requires paramilitary commanders to surrender their ill-gotten assets—including lands obtained through violent displacement. Macaco offered up Coproagrosur as part of the deal.

But the attorney general’s notice made no mention that Coproagrosur had received a grant in 2004 from the US Agency for International Development (USAID). That grant—paid for through Plan Colombia, the multibillion-dollar US aid package aimed at fighting the drug trade—appears to have put drug-war dollars into the hands of a notorious paramilitary narco-trafficker, in possible violation of federal law. Colombia’s paramilitaries are on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations. USAID’s due diligence process “did not fail,” according to an official response from the US embassy there, because Macaco was not officially listed among Coproagrosur’s owners.

. . .

https://nacla.org/colombia_investigation
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