Fake News and political establishment leading Colombia back to war

[Judi Lynn]

2. For anyone who's unaware of the atrocities in Colombia:

RIGHTS-COLOMBIA:

Paramilitaries Extend Their Tentacles
By Constanza Vieira

The United Nations and human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch hold the paramilitaries responsible for the great majority of the atrocities committed in Colombia's armed conflict.

http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=25838

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But the paramilitaries have rarely engaged in combat against the guerrillas. Instead, often working closely with government forces, they've focused on unarmed social movements, assassinating thousands of trade unionists, peasant leaders, human rights advocates, and politicians. "They've destroyed the legal left," says Hector Mondragon, economic adviser to a coalition of rural, black, and indigenous groups.

Paramilitaries have also carried out most of the war's civilian massacres, a major factor convincing three million Colombians to flee their homes since 1985. Now 61 percent of the nation's arable acreage is in the hands of 0.4 percent of landholders, according to a study by the Agustin Codazzi Geographic Institute and the Colombian Agriculture Research Corporation. Paramilitary chiefs themselves acquired more than twelve million acres abandoned by peasants between 1997 and 2003, according to a December report by the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement. Bolstering the land grabs, Uribe and his allies have removed teeth from agrarian reform laws, including a 1936 measure allowing public reallocation of parcels left idle.

Paramilitaries have played a key role in turning the narcotics trade into Colombia's largest export sector. The United States has requested extradition of at least seven paramilitary chiefs on drug-trafficking charges. They include Mancuso and AUC founder Carlos Castano, now missing. Both were indicted INDICTED, practice. When a man is accused by a bill of indictment preferred by a grand jury, he is said to be indicted. in 2002 for allegedly exporting more than seventeen tons of cocaine over the previous five years.

Across the country, the paramilitary movement has infiltrated city halls, provincial governments, and federal agencies, most notably the health care program and the attorney general's office. The infiltration helps them control a range of illegal activity. "Here in Cucuta, not a single kilo Thousand (10 to the 3rd power). Abbreviated "K." For technical specifications, it refers to the precise value 1,024 since computer specifications are based on binary numbers. For example, 64K means 65,536 bytes when referring to memory or storage (64x1024), but a 64K salary means $64,000. of coca is sold without their authorization," says Wilfredo Canizares, executive director of the Progress Foundation, a human rights group in that city. "They'll kill you."

https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Along+for+the+ride:+how+Colombia/'s+paramilitaries+retain+power:+the+...-a0132674579

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The far-right paramilitary militias, which in the 1980s joined the security forces in their fight against the leftist rebel groups that emerged in 1964, have been blamed by the United Nations for the lion’s share of the human rights crimes committed in the armed conflict.

. . . .

"Disappearance is a monstrous crime," former Bogotá mayor Antanas Mockus told IPS. "That is why…we started this march at the Magdalena river," he said, after accompanying hundreds of mainly indigenous and black people displaced by the war on the three-day march from Flandes.

"We were inspired by an audiovisual testimony by the artist Clemencia Echeverri, who recently showed, in a sophisticated Bogotá art gallery, a night-time recording taken from the two shores of the Cauca river" in the northwestern province of Antioquia, said Mockus. (Antioquia is a paramilitary stronghold.)

"On the recording, you hear the sound of the water flowing, and above that you hear the screams of peasant farmers and chainsaws running, and you can see people with sticks, fishing pieces of clothing out of the river," he added.

According to testimony from numerous survivors and members of paramilitary groups, the latter frequently used chainsaws to cut their victims up alive.

Jusice and Peace also reported that 1,700 indigenous people, 2,550 trade unionists and 5,000 members of the now-defunct leftist political party Patriotic Union were murdered between 1982 and 2005.

"The paramilitaries have perpetrated more than 3,500 massacres and stolen more than six million hectares of land, and since their demobilisation they have killed 600 people a year. They also achieved control over 35 percent of the seats in Congress," said the Movement of Victims of Crimes of the State (MOVICE), which organised Thursday’s nationwide march.

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1170/61 /

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Coca-Cola, Nestle, Chiquita on 'trial' in Colombia
By Constanza Vieira

Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, who are frequent paramilitary targets. Although private armed groups have long existed in Colombia, today's paramilitary groups emerged in the early 1980s, financed by landowners to fight the leftist guerrillas, who were kidnapping and extorting wealthy ranchers. The collaboration between paramilitaries and the armed forces has been well documented by the United Nations, the US State Department, and Colombian government investigators, who hold the paramilitaries responsible for the lion's share of the atrocities committed in Colombia's four-decade civil war.

http://www.theglobalreport.org/print.php?news_id=561

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Forced Displacement, Land Reclamation, and Corporate Power in Colombia
April 26, 2008 By Eustaquio Polo

Eustaquio Polo Rivera is Vice President of the Major Leadership Council of the Curvaradó River Basin, Chocó, Colombia. He is an active leader in his community's struggle for justice and food security, as they fight to reclaim collectively-titled lands stolen and occupied by oil palm plantations since the 1997 displacement of the region's inhabitants at the hands of the US-funded Colombian military and affiliated paramilitary death squads. Colombia has the second-largest internally displaced population in the world; sixty percent of the roughly four million dispossessed Colombians have been driven from areas of "of mineral, agricultural or other economic importance," according to Amnesty International. For his advocacy and efforts to help his community reclaim what is rightfully theirs, Mr. Polo has received threats of assassination from paramilitaries reformed after the purported "demobilization" process.

....

Thank you for letting me address you tonight. Please receive a warm welcome from the Chocó county of Colombia and from myself, Eustaquio Polo Rivera. I am Vice President of the Major Council of the basin of the Curvaradó River, and legal representative of a smaller council.

I come here with the grace of God and the support of the church of Justicia y Paz and also with help from Molly and Jake. I have been asked to tell you a little bit about the human rights abuses that the people of the Chocó territories are suffering.

These lands are the lands where most of the Africans brought to Colombia as slaves have lived for a long time. Three groups of people share culture here—people of African descent, people of mixed descent, and people of indigenous descent. There has been a shared culture there for many years now.

This is land that is recognized by Law 70 as collectively owned by the three groups of Afro-Colombians, mixed race people, and indigenous people. We used to have farms in this territory. The land supported our families, and we also sold bananas to the United States.

Then, in October of 1996, an operation called Operation Genesis came in, led by the General Commander Rito Alejo Del Rio.

This military operation was in conjunction with a paramilitary group called AUC.

This military group came in and asked the peasants to move out. They said, "Move out, or people will come after us to kill people, to take your heads."

In the same year, 1996, in a place called Brisas, they killed 6 people. They killed them and threw them into the river. That year half of the people who lived in the area left. The other half stayed, and we stayed resisting the displacement. But the incursions from the military and paramilitaries continued. They tied the peasants down. When the paramilitaries or military would get people, they would cut off their fingers, their ears, and their private parts. And they killed them with chainsaws. They would cut right through their chest cavity and take out their internal organs. In our river basin they killed 113 people just that way.

Then in 1997, the incursions from the military and paramilitaries increased. The military and paramilitary alliance came and said to us that we needed to leave, all of us. They threatened saying that if we didn't leave, they could not respond for their actions. They said that the reason we needed to leave is that they would be bombing that territory to take the guerrillas out. A lot of people left then. One part of the peasants left toward the hills, and other people fled to other places in Colombia.

In the year 2000, a group from the police collected signatures from members of paramilitaries and some peasants left in the area. They said they were collecting the signatures to get three military bases in the area, and they claimed that this was so peasants could return to their land. This was not the case. These signatures were used by businesses to take over the land and implement the planting of African palm plantations in the collectively-titled territory. They used them to prove that peasants were in agreement with the planting of the palm, but the peasants were actually outside the territory, fled to the hills.

More:
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/17339

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Wikipedia:

Right-wing paramilitarism in Colombia
Human Rights Violations


. . .

Right-wing paramilitary groups have been blamed for the vast majority of human rights violations in Colombia. The United Nations has estimated that approximately 80% of all killings in Colombia's civil conflict have been committed by paramilitaries, 12% by leftist guerrillas, and the remaining 8% by government forces.[91] In 2005, Amnesty International stated that "the vast majority of non-combat politically-motivated killings, disappearances, and cases of torture have been carried out by army-backed paramilitaries".[11] In its 1999 report, Human Rights Watch cited estimates from Colombian human rights organizations CINEP and Justice and Peace, which indicated that paramilitary groups were responsible for about 73% of identifiable political murders during the first half of 1998, with guerrillas and state security forces being blamed for 17 and 10 percent respectively.[92] The Colombian Commission of Jurists reported that, in the year 2000, approximately 85% of political murders were committed by the paramilitaries and state forces.[93]

Paramilitary violence is overwhelmingly targeted towards peasants, unionists, teachers, human rights workers, journalists and leftist political activists.[95][96]

Paramilitary abuses in Colombia are often classified as atrocities due to the brutality of their methods, including the torture, rape, incineration, decapitation and mutilation with chainsaws or machetes of dozens of their victims at a time, affecting civilians, women and children.[15][94][95]

Paramilitary forces in Colombia have additionally been charged with the illegal recruitment of children into the armed ranks. Though this is an offense punishable by national law, the prosecution rate for these crimes is less than 2% as of 2008.[97]

Many of these abuses have occurred with the knowledge and support of the Colombian security forces. A 1998 Human Rights Watch report stated:

... where paramilitaries have a pronounced presence, the army fails to move against them and tolerates their activity, including egregious violations of international humanitarian law; provides some paramilitary groups with intelligence used to carry out operations; and in other cases actively promotes and coordinates with paramilitary units, including joint maneuvers in which atrocities are the frequent result. ... In areas where paramilitaries are present, some police officers have been directly implicated in joint army-paramilitary actions or have supplied information to paramilitaries for their death lists. Police have also stood by while paramilitaries selected and killed their victims. On many occasions, police have publicly described whole communities as guerrillas or sympathetic to them and have withdrawn police protection, a violation of their responsibility under Colombian law to protect civilians from harm. Instead of reinforcing the police after guerrilla attacks, police commanders have withdrawn officers, thus encouraging or allowing paramilitaries to move in unimpeded and kill civilians.[35]

A 1999 human rights report from the U.S. State Department said:

At times the security forces collaborated with paramilitary groups that committed abuses; in some instances, individual members of the security forces actively collaborated with members of paramilitary groups by passing them through roadblocks, sharing intelligence, and providing them with ammunition. Paramilitary forces find a ready support base within the military and police, as well as local civilian elites in many areas.[98]

In 2006, Amnesty International reported that:

The security forces have tried to improve their human rights image by letting their paramilitary allies commit human rights violations and then denying that the paramilitaries are operating with their acquiescence, support or sometimes direct coordination.[72]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_paramilitarism_in_Colombia