Official Confirms Skeleton Is Warlord's

[Judi Lynn]

Official Confirms Skeleton Is Warlord's
09.04.2006, 03:22 PM

Resolving one of the mysteries in a brother-against-brother story that has transfixed Colombia, the nation's chief federal prosecutor confirmed Monday that a skeleton dug from a shallow grave belonged to warlord Carlos Castano, the founder of the far-right paramilitaries who mysteriously disappeared two years ago.

"The federal prosecution has the full identification that this is Castano," said Mario Iguaran, pointing to a 99.99 percent match between Castano's DNA and that of the skeleton, which was uncovered in northern Colombia on Friday after a paramilitary gunman who confessed to killing Castano in April 2004 led investigators to the scene.

The federal prosecutor accuses Carlos's older brother Vicente of ordering the killing, allegedly because he feared his younger sibling would turn over information on his drug-trafficking activities in exchange for leniency in negotiations with the United States.
(snip)

As one of the founders of Colombia's far-right paramilitaries, for two decades Carlos Castano operated at the center of the country's underworld and civil war, becoming one of the main protagonists in shaping this South American nation's modern history.
(snip/)

http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneurs/entrefinance/feeds/ap/2006/09/04/ap2991749.html



The late right-wing mass murderer Carlos Castaño

[Judi Lynn]

1. More on this right-wing "freedom fighter!"

Reinventing Carlos Castaño

by Garry Leech

The U.S. Justice Department timed its request for the arrest and extradition of Colombian paramilitary chief Carlos Castaño on drug trafficking charges to coincide with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's arrival in Washington. Undoubtedly, the White House wanted to use the issuing of the extradition request and the "anti-terrorism" pow-wow between President Bush and Uribe as evidence that Washington and Bogotá are combating right-wing paramilitaries as well as leftist guerrillas in Colombia. But while this charade was clearly a public relations ploy, what's not so obvious is the reasoning behind Castaño's announcement that he is willing to cooperate with the extradition request and face justice in the United States. One possible explanation is that the Bush administration has entered into some kind of Faustian deal with Colombia's notorious death squad leader.

Castaño, a former army scout and associate of drug lord Pablo Escobar, took over the reins of Colombia's largest paramilitary force, the Self-Defense Forces of Córdoba and Urabá (ACCU), in 1994 after his older brother Fidel disappeared. The ACCU and other regional paramilitary groups in Colombia worked hand in glove with the U.S.-backed Colombian military, which routinely provided them with intelligence, weapons and transportation so they could effectively target suspected rebel sympathizers including labor leaders, community organizers and human rights activists. With funding from drug traffickers, wealthy landowners, and the business community, Colombia's paramilitaries grew dramatically during the 1990s from an estimated 850 paramilitary fighters at the beginning of the decade to approximately 12,000 today. In 1997, Castaño oversaw the merging of the regional paramilitary forces into one national organization, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC).

AUC fighters routinely induced fear in the rural population by entering villages and rounding up the residents in the town plaza. They would then brutally kill a handful of villagers, often dismembering them with machetes and chainsaws, before ordering the rest of the people to leave the region. By forcibly displacing the rural population in this manner, the paramilitaries hoped to eliminate local support for the guerrillas. This strategy has aggravated the already grossly inequitable distribution of arable lands as large landowners, as well as multinational corporations interested in oil, coal and natural gas resources, have taken over much of the abandoned land. More than 2.5 million rural Colombians have been displaced by the conflict in the past 15 years, many of them fleeing to the impoverished shantytowns that are rapidly encircling many of Colombia's cities.

In recent years, however, Castaño has become increasingly conscious of his organization's public image. The normally reclusive militia chief has recently given several interviews to U.S. and Colombian journalists. And in an attempt to gain political legitimacy, the paramilitaries have begun implementing a strategy of selectively assassinating one or two victims at a time over a prolonged period instead of perpetrating a single large massacre. Because a massacre is defined as three or more people killed at the same time, in the same place, for the same reason, this tactic allows a smaller percentage of Colombia's massacres to be attributed to the right-wing death squads. It has also resulted in fewer negative news stories by media organizations that often only deem mass killings to be newsworthy.
(snip/...)

http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia133.htm



Immortalized forever, his old boss,
in Fernando Botero's "The Death of Pablo Escobar"

[Judi Lynn]

4. I'd like to take the time to point out that these rightwing paramilitaries

were, as the above article indicated, closely connected to the Colombian military, which has been the recipient of BILLIONS of U.S. taxpayers' dollars in the last few years.

This is material which affects AMERICANS, even though many haven't taken the time to notice. Your money is going to Colombia, which has become a black hole, millions of people are displaced, and yet we remain completely in the dark because our pResident doesn't particularly want any Americans knowing a lot about this, as we'd only start asking questions.

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

2. Slightly OT comment about that headline

For some reason that title sets my teeth on edge- it shows what a bad reporter can get away with. Should it not read "Official Confirms Skeleton Is That Of Warlord"??? The way it is, it makes it sound as if the Warlord is in official possession of somebody else's skeleton.

I'm not usually a grammar nazi, but this one got to me. :evilgrin:

Now back to your regularly scheduled madness.

[TheDebbieDee]

3. I've noticed many such errors

as this in the last few years. It's almost as though there aren't any real journalists and editors in newsrooms anymore!

Used to be, you could use newscopy as a basis for correct punctuation, phraseology and fact...........now it all seems to be biased speculation dressed up as the truth.

[Sven77]

5. School of the Americas

The leader of the AUC (United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia), the central command for the 19 paramilitary "fronts," is a sadistic scoundrel named Carlos Castaño, who supervises a killing program right off the pages of the CIA's Phoenix Program's operations manual. The RAND report details how Castaño's AUC routinely executes "suspected guerrilla sympathizers" in order "to instill fear and compel support among the local population." When that strategy fails to deliver, the AUC simply launches an all-out attack on the villages and slaughters the inhabitants. RAND dispassionately notes that the AUC justifies these atrocities, in language that even Bob Kerrey might admire, as a legitimate way to "remove the guerrillas' supply network."

The robust ties between the paramilitaries and the Colombian military (not to mention the CIA and the Pentagon) are cursorily dispensed with by RAND in a brisk few sentences, concluding that, given the circumstances, such relations are only natural. RAND fails to note that many of the leaders of paramilitary groups were once officers in the Colombian military, some of them trained at the School of the Americas. Although there are nearly as many paramilitary fighters as there are guerrillas, there is a gross and telling disparity between the numbers of paramilitaries (76) versus guerrillas (2,677) killed by the Colombian military.

http://www.antiwar.com/cockburn/c080201.html