Killers target leaders of Colombia's dispossessed as new Victims Law takes effect

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Killers target leaders of Colombia's dispossessed as new Victims Law takes effect
FRANK BAJAK, VIVIAN SEQUERA
Associated Press
1:02 p.m. EDT, August 13, 2011

SAN ONOFRE, Colombia (AP) — The cornerstone of President Juan Manuel Santos' year-old government is a bold plan to compensate an estimated 4 million victims of Colombia's long-running civil conflict.

The so-called Victims Law, enacted in June, is an ambitious proposition: Nothing similar has ever been attempted on any continent.

~snip~
Colombia's is a dirty war in which most victims are civilians, and land tenancy has been at the heart of the nation's bloodletting since independence two centuries ago.

Shadowy far-right militias known as paramilitaries have done most of the killing. First formed in the 1980s to defend ranchers and drug traffickers against rebel extortion, they evolved into criminal bands that often operated in concert with the military. Shakedown artists and drug runners, many now work as hired guns for holders of stolen land.

Read more: http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/nationworld/sns-ap-lt-colombia-killed-for-land,0,1940110.story

[NM Independent]

1. If this country every wanted to do any good by policing the world...

Then we would send a few people to take care of the right wing paramilitaries and the people that helped to create them...oh, wait.

[saules0gaisma]

2. care of the right wing paramilitaries??

are you kidding? The USA military IS right wing.

[Peace Patriot]

3. This is an Associated Pukes article. Watch out for Puke framing.

Puke framing = Republican lies, Bushwhack lies, war profiteer lies, transglobal corporate lies, bankster lies, Wall Street lies, rightwing and far rightwing lies, lies of the rich and the super-rich, and (alas, too often) Corporate Democrat lies.

The Associated Pukes shills for them all. And I've seen so-called reporter Frank Bajak's name on many a piece of crap journalism and rightwing propaganda about Latin America.

For instance, consider the Puke phrase "the so-called Victims Law" in this article. Ever see "the so-called Patriot Act"? Or "the so-call Help America Vote Act?" The latter are two of the most treasonous and evil pieces of legislation the U.S. has ever seen! They don't get called "so-called." But a law in Colombia to help FIVE MILLION poor peasant farmers who were brutally driven from their lands by deliberate policy of the Uribe regime, with $7 BILLION in U.S. military aid from the Bush Junta, in collaboration with rightwing paramilitary death squads, gets tagged by the Associated Pukes as "the so-called Victims Law," so that, right off the bat, subliminal doubts are planted in readers' minds: 'are these really victims'? is this really a good law? won't the whiny, grabby, dishonest poor, always portraying themselves as "victims," cheat solid citizens out of their property? should government be helping the poor at all? isn't this socialism?') (--lotta fire power in that phrase, which actually means "so-called victims.")

Another for instance, consider this Puke lie: "Shadowy far-right militias known as paramilitaries have done most of the killing." Some 70 of the closest political cohorts of Bush pal, Alvaro Uribe, including family members and top government officials, are under investigation or already in jail for ties to these "far-right militias" (death squads), drug trafficking, bribery, land theft, illegal domestic spying, election fraud, ponzi schemes and other crimes. The Colombian military itself, under Uribe's command, and with billions in U.S. funding, is responsible for about half the murders of labor leaders in Colombia, and their closely tied "far-right militias" for the other half (according to Amnesty International), and furthermore the Colombian military had a POLICY of giving bonuses and promotions to local military commanders on a "body count" basis, which resulted in the military murdering many innocent civilians and dressing their bodies up like FARC guerrillas (the infamous "false positives" scandal). Uribe meanwhile was running a vast, illegal, domestic spying operation--even spying on judges and prosecutors--which had many uses, including providing names to the death squads for murder and death threats, and interfering with prosecution of death squads murders.

In summary, the Colombian government was being run as a criminal organization, under Uribe, with U.S. (Bush Junta) help. These so-called "shadowy far-right militias" were intricately entwined with the government and were part of Uribe's tool-kit for driving five MILLION peasant farmers from their lands and decapitating the grass roots leadership of the poor, including thousands of murders of trade unionists, peasant farmer organizers, displaced organizers, Indigenous leaders, teachers, community activists, human rights workers, journalists and others.

These are not "so-called victims." And their oppressors are not mere random "shadowy" criminal gangs hired by random landowners to kill and steal land from the poor. It was government and military POLICY to drive the peasants from the land with state terror, and furthermore it was a "pacification" program designed by the Pentagon and the USAID, in at least one region of Colombia (La Macarena), where a mass grave with 500 to 2,000 bodies has been found.

Beware of Associated Pukes framing. They sometimes lie outright. More often, they use little bits of the truth, leaving out large chunks of the truth, and set those "little bits" in a narrow and highly distorted "frame" ('so-called victims' of 'shadowy militias') to cover up the crimes of the rich and powerful.