Colombia seeks more U.S., European aid

[Judi Lynn]

Colombia seeks more U.S., European aid
Mon 29 Jan 2007 23:06:56 GMT

By Patrick Markey

BOGOTA, Jan 29 (Reuters) - Colombia will ask the United States and Europe this week for military cooperation and more economic aid to help consolidate gains against Marxist rebels and the cocaine trade, a top official said on Monday.

President Alvaro Uribe, Washington's staunchest South American ally, has reduced violence from Colombia's four-decade conflict by sending troops to retake areas under guerrilla control and demobilizing 31,000 rightist militia fighters accused of atrocities in a dirty war waged against the rebels.
(snip)

The Andean country produces around 600 tonnes a year of the drug, most of which ends up on the streets of the United States and Europe.

Despite military gains made by Uribe, critics say he has not done enough to develop social projects in impoverished areas hardest hit by the conflict or to provide coca leaf cultivators with viable options to the illicit cash crop.
(snip/)

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/CrisesArticle.aspx?storyId=N29236249&WTmodLoc=World-R5-Alertnet-6


Cha-ching.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Colombian painter, Fernando Botero:

Abu Ghraib's horrific images drove artist Fernando Botero into action
Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic

Monday, January 29, 2007

Fernando Botero must number among the most famous painters alive.

Even people unaware of his name know his manner of giving doughboy features to everything in his paintings and sculpture, from people and animals to automobiles and fruit.
(snip)

"The whole world and myself were very shocked that the Americans were torturing prisoners in the same prison as the tyrant they came to remove," he said. "The United States presents itself as a defender of human rights and of course as an artist I was very shocked with this and angry. The more I read, the more I was motivated. ... I think Seymour Hersh's article was the first one I read. I was on a plane and I took a pencil and paper and started drawing. Then I got to my studio and continued with oil paintings. I studied all the material I could. It didn't make sense to copy, I was just trying to visualize what was really happening there."
(snip)

His New York gallery, which presented the Abu Ghraib work for the first time in the United States, received some hate mail for its trouble, some visitors evidently perceiving the work as anti-American.

"Anti-American it's not," Botero said emphatically. "Anti-brutality, anti-inhumanity, yes. I follow politics very closely. I read several newspapers every day. And I have a great admiration for this country. I'm sure the vast majority of people here don't approve of this. And the American press is the one that told the world this is going on. You have freedom of the press that makes such a thing possible."

No one can accuse Botero of trying to profit from his Abu Ghraib pictures, at least not directly.

"They are absolutely not for sale," he said.

Instead, he has offered to give them to any museum that will commit to keeping some of them on view at all times. Perhaps that, as much as their content, has led to occasional imputations of anti-American sentiments.
(snip/...)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/29/DDGF2NPRO91.DTL

[Say_What]

1. Cha-ching is right!!! Isn't $804 million enough?

Uribe's gonna come beggin' for more?? :wtf:

His para pals want more money. Your tax dollars at work.

[Say_What]

2. Militias grab Colombia's best land

This article is a contradiction to Uribe's statement in the original thread article that he "has reduced violence from Colombia's four-decade conflict by sending troops to retake areas under guerrilla control".


<clips>

SAN ONOFRE, Colombia -- Much of the world has seen Colombia's heartbreaking civil conflict as a clash between illegal armies of the left and right, or a battle for control of the global cocaine industry. Tens of thousands have died.

But the real prize is land. Since the early 1990s, right-wing paramilitary militias have seized from peasant farmers an estimated 26,000 square miles - an area larger than West Virginia that comprises about a quarter of the country's arable land, much of it sitting atop oil or valuable minerals.

The government of President Alvaro Uribe is now dismantling the paramilitaries and says it will force former militia bosses to surrender ill-gotten holdings. But promises aside, it is backing policies that mean most farmers will never get their property back.

The winners are Colombia's elite - landowners, politicians and corporations who bankrolled the militias and used them to expand their holdings. The losers are people of humble means killed or forced at gunpoint to give up their land and join the hundreds of thousands displaced by the conflict.

"So what hope can one have?" said Luis Francisco Garcia, evicted from his farm at gunpoint 3 1/2 years ago with his family. "I who had a farm ... have to beg for a plate of food?"

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1102AP_Colombia_Land_Grab.html

[Judi Lynn]

3. Oh, my God. This is horrendous. Astonishing. Hideous.

From the article:

Others, however, have come forward. One congressman publicly acknowledged that he and 29 other politicians, including two state governors, signed a cooperation pact with paramilitaries in 2001. Thousands of ranchers, meanwhile, signed a defiant open letter in which they admitted paying the paramilitaries.

That happened before Uribe was elected, but even as the scandal plays out, his government's policies appear to be enshrining the land grab into law.

A bill that Uribe's agriculture minister is championing in Congress would allow someone to gain title to land by proving it has been in his possession for five years. The Colombian Commission of Jurists, a human rights group, says the proposal "maintains, expands and legalizes the control the paramilitaries established in blood and fire over millions of hectares of land."

Even if the government were committed to helping peasants get their land back, the challenge is monumental. Paramilitary leaders have hidden plundered parcels of land behind front men. Land registrars have been murdered and records have disappeared in suspicious fires. The demobilization process has failed to bring the land forfeitures by paramilitaries that victims had hoped for.
(snip)

A Senate human rights commission hearing in late November drew nearly 1,000 people - but just two members of Congress - to a dusty stadium in San Onofre, the town where most of Sucre's mass graves have been uncovered. Witnesses testified that paramilitaries ran the seaside cattle town like a concentration camp as recently as 2005.

Paramilitary gunmen killed on a whim and took San Onofre's women as sex slaves, according to the witnesses, while a nighttime curfew let the "paras" transfer tons of cocaine to speedboats in the Gulf of Morrosquillo.

But the victims said the main motivation was land.
(snip/...)

Aren't you SHOCKED that this article ever got published by our corporate media? What the hey?

Paul Wellstone would be very glad to know that some Americans are starting to find out now.

And _Bush has made us all their SPONSORS. We are UNDERWRITING this hell.

Thanks. I think you know what a big story this is. I already made a copy for permanent files. Don't want to lose it.

[Say_What]

5. Censors must have been asleep when it came over the wire...

A few years ago there was nothing in the MSM about Colombia.

How about that bill that they're pushing through the Colombian congress. The paras sit on the land they forced rightful owners off of for five years and then according to the bill, it belongs to them. Doesn't matter that these slimeballs are responsible for most of the atrocities in Colombia, they're getting off with a monthly stipend and a huge land grab. That demobilization process is a joke--a gimme for Uribe's pals the paramilitaries. US taxpayer dollars at work.

[Judi Lynn]

6. There's a deadly connection to ANOTHER US-backed right-wing regime.

This is info. Americans have simply never heard, or ignored, even though their taxes were invested in Banzer's filthy, murderous reign:

COLONEL HUGO BANZER
President of Bolivia

In 1970, in Bolivia, when then-President Juan Jose Torres nationalized Gulf Oil properties and tin mines owned by US interests, and tried to establish friendly relations with Cuba and the Soviet Union, he was playing with fire. The coup to overthrow Torres, led by US-trained officer and Gulf Oil beneficiary Hugo Banzer, had direct support from Washington. When Banzer's forces had a breakdown in radio communications, US Air Force radio was placed at their disposal. Once in power, Banzer began a reign of terror. Schools were shut down as hotbeds of political subversive activity. Within two years, 2,000 people were arrested and tortured without trial. As in Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, the native Indians were ordered off their land and deprived of tribal identity. Tens-of-thousands of white South Africans were enticed to immigrate with promises of the land stolen from the Indians, with a goal of creating a white Bolivia. When Catholic clergy tried to aid the Indians, the regime, with CIA help, launched terrorist attacks against them, and this "Banzer Plan" became a model for similar anti-Catholic actions throughout Latin America.
(snip)

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/dictators.html



Banzer and Pinochet

So this has actually been happening BEFORE, WITH OTHER U.S.-SUPPORTED South American Presidents who represent the very wealthiest only.

They stand on the backs of the poor, and we, the U.S. taxpayers, are required to finance them.

[Say_What]

7. America’s Other War: Terrorizing Colombia

Interesting we never hear about this from the MSM. While they continually shriek about 'freedom of the press in Venezuela' they have never mentioned the jailing of teleSUR journalist Freddy Munoz Altamirano, who was finally released for lack of evidence in early January but now fears for his life. Munoz is well known for his reporting of the paras forced displacement of Colombians.

<clips>

...While Colombia has the highest number of journalists killed by paramilitary death squads in the world, it was the Colombian state that recently acted against one well-known journalist. On the evening of November 19, Colombia’s secret police (Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad, DAS) detained Freddy Muñoz Altamirano, a Colombian-based journalist and correspondent for teleSUR, a multi-state-owned news channel located in Caracas. Recognized throughout Latin America for his investigative reporting on the forced displacement of Colombian civilians at the hands of state and paramilitary forces, Muñoz was arrested on charges of “rebellion and terrorism” relating to “terrorist attacks” in Cartagena and Barranquilla during 2002.

...One of the methods in which the state has promoted the actual suppression of journalists is best described by Doug Stokes, author of America’s Other War: Terrorizing Colombia. Stokes specifically criticized the Uribe government for becoming more than opponents to the free press but structurally reactionary in methods of silencing—or threatening to silence—those within the media who are critical of the state:

Uribe is also pushing for tighter control of the Colombian media by seeking to pass laws which censor reporting on Colombian ‘counter terrorism measures’ and Colombian military activity. One of the ‘anti-terrorism’ bills seeks to hand down sentences of eight to twelve years in prison for anyone who publishes statistics considered ‘counterproductive to the fight against terrorism’, as well as the possible ‘suspension’ of the media outlet in question. These sanctions will apply to anybody who divulges ‘reports that could hamper the effective implementation of military and police operations, endanger the lives of public forces personnel or private individuals’, or commits other acts that undermine public order, ‘while boosting the position or image of the enemy’ . . . The media censorship laws also mean that the reporting of human rights abuses will be harder.

From a more cultural perspective Leech contends that as a result of the state’s hegemonic presence, the reporting of journalists has been restricted through a fear of political reactionary aggression or occupational reprimand:

… the reality of the country’s conflict is rarely reflected in the mainstream media is largely due to the way journalists operate in Colombia. Foreign reporters mostly cover the country’s civil conflict from the safety of the capital Bogotá, rarely venturing into dangerous rural zones except on press junkets organized by the Colombian military or the US embassy.

Colombian union leaders Eberto Díaz Montes and Juan Efrain Mendiza pronounced that the persecution of Muñoz once again demonstrates “that the prevailing regime in Colombia violates all the fundamental rights of the citizens, especially when they are left-of-centre”. The President and General Secretary of La Federación Nacional Sindical Unitaria Agropecuaria (FENSUAGRO) went on to state that the voices of those inside the media—and society—are increasingly allowed to only transmit ideas that are in alliance with those of the state and if one publishes another realm of truth they are immediately exposed to the persecution of the regime.

The Uribe administration increasingly resembles not only a state that restricts the right of information and press freedom, but, more disturbing, a governing body that limits the actual human right to disseminate information relating to state policy and the suffering of the country’s masses. It is hoped that the Muñoz incarceration is not long and that justice will be found.

http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia248.htm


Freddy Munoz Altamirano

[Judi Lynn]

8. Tremendous information. I wonder how many Americans know their taxes are being handed to a leader

who has been controlling ALL communications concerning his government for ages. How many of them know we are supporting a country with the HIGHEST rate of murdered journalists IN THE WORLD.

Colombia is the 3rd greatest U.S. foreign aid recipient in the world.

Just what IS it that free trade and Plan Colombia are doing to improve the lives of Colombians, anyway? I've never heard of any progress toward a better culture there yet, not even once. On the contrary, we're aware of the hundreds of thousands of people who've left their homes in fear, and so many of those who stayed who have had their homes taken, anyway, permanently by the paramilitaries working hand in hand with the Colombian government as we are learning.

They're getting rid of the poor, driving them out, just as it happened in Bolivia, right before US-trained and supported Hugo Banzer started his drive to lure white South Africans to settle on the newly available land which had belonged to the indigenous Bolivians only a short time before.

Anyone in doubt about this should look it up on the internetS.

[rman]

4. So what's their problem?

"31,000 rightist militia fighters accused of atrocities in a dirty war waged against the rebels"

or

"Marxist rebels"

Which of the two do they need help with?