Published on Thursday, April 19, 2001 by Agence France Presse
"The Chainsaw Massacre" Is Not a Movie in Colombia: Witness
by Jacques Thomet
BOGOTÁ -- "The Chainsaw Massacre is not a film in Colombia," said government ombudsman Eduardo Cifuentes, referring to the April 12 paramilitary massacre in Alto Naya, 650 kilometers (404 miles) southeast of here.
He was revealing details of the massacres of civilians which occurred during Easter week in this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country in a wave of right-wing paramilitary and leftist guerrilla violence.
It left some 128 people dead, including 40 in Alto Naya, according to official reports quoted by Cifuentes in an interview with AFP.
The former Constitutional Tribunal president visited the massacre sites Monday at a remote jungle area in the Western Andes mountains, in the Cauca department.
Around 400 paramilitaries took part in this "caravan of death" against civilians accused of supporting leftist guerrillas, Cifuentes said in his Bogota office.
"The remains of a woman were exhumed. Her abdomen was cut open with a chainsaw. A 17-year-old girl had her throat cut and both hands also amputated," said the ombudsman, providing details of "the cruelty and extreme abuse of the paramilitaries."
"They carried a list of names around. The would kill many for insignificant reasons, like not explaining where they got their cellular phone," he said.
"A neighbor pounced upon a paramilitary that was ready to shoot him and took his weapon, but unfortunately he didn't know how to fire a rifle. They dragged him away, cut him open with a chainsaw and chopped him up," a witness of the massacre told El Espectador daily.
(snip/...)
http://commondreams.org/headlines01/0419-04.htm~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The paramilitarisation of Colombia
11/29/2004 - Risal, RevistaPueblos
Since the fifties, paramilitaries have existed in Colombia, like many countries in Latin America, but the current version of para-militarism stems from drug trafficking. In fact the Medellín cartel created the arrangement of armed Muerte a Secuestradores (MAS)
in 1982, in order to pursue guerrillas and members of their family.
Starting from this, during the eighties, paramilitaries operated clandestinely by doing the dirty work of war - as if it could be clean! -. During the nineties, their actions were carried out in broad daylight. They became a true parastate army, not by effecting operations properly speaking of counter insurrection against guerrillas but well, list in hand, by committing massacres within the civilian population, but clearly announcing that its aim was not to confront the Government, but to supplement it and help it.
At the time of the latest parliamentary elections (March 2002), the peasant masses and the unemployed voted under pressure from propaganda, media and landowners and drug dealers - read paramilitaries -, who according to their spokesperson, Salvatore Mancuso, elected 35 percent of the members of Congress. Did these same landowners and drug dealers, who spoke for such a high percentage of Congress members, help elect Alvaro Uribe as president of Colombia? None dares answer this question, but the president of the Democratic Centre- main opposition party and deputy Gustavo Petro, in statements in the newspaper El Espectador, (September 2004) said: "President Uribe is setting up in Colombia a rural world of big landowners, linked with drug trafficking and para militarism (...). All the paramilitary chiefs gathered in Ralito are pro-Uribe (...). The President shares the development bases of paramilitarism".
(snip/...)http://www.educweb.org/webnews/ColNews-Nov04/English/Articles/LaparamilitarisationdelaC.html
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n892/a10.html
Newshawk: Updated - Check it out! http://www.drugsense.org/sitemap.htm
Votes: 0
Pubdate: Mon, 21 May 2001
Source: Newsweek (US)
Section: International, Page 38
Copyright: 2001 Newsweek, Inc.
Contact: letters@newsweek.com
Website: http://www.msnbc.com/news/NW-front_Front.asp
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/309
Authors: Joseph Contreras, With Michael Isikoff in Washington
WAR WITHOUT END
In the foothills of the snowcapped Sierra Nevadas in northeastern Colombia, the Kogi Indians whisper his name in fear. Along the docks of the Caribbean port city of Santa Marta, gangsters speak with awe of his 400-man private army. But everyone knows that when it comes to Hernan Giraldo Serna, it's usually best not to know too much. The gangsters quietly recall, for instance, that in 1999 Giraldo ordered the brutal murders of four construction workers, whose bodies were then cut to bits with a chain saw. Their offense? They had built a special basement to store his multimillion-dollar cache of cocaine, and they knew where it was.
Giraldo personifies a disturbing new trend in Colombia's huge narcotics industry: right-wing paramilitary leaders fighting to take control of the country's coca fields. In the past two years Giraldo and his Los Chamizos ( Charred Tree ) militiamen have joined leaders of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia ( AUC ), a loose-knit coalition of private right-wing armies, to force 20,000 Marxist guerrillas out of many key cocaine- and heroin-producing regions. Colombian intelligence sources now estimate that 40 percent of the country's total cocaine exports are controlled by these right-wing warlords and their allies in the narcotics underworld. These sources believe Giraldo alone is head of a burgeoning drug syndicate that accounts for $1.2 billion in annual shipments to the United States and Europe. That puts him among the country's top five cocaine traffickers. Some Colombian intelligence officials believe that Giraldo, the son of a dirt-poor cattle rancher, may one day rival the late Medellin-cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar in both wealth and power.
Yet when it comes to right-wing drug lords, American policymakers--and even some counternarcotics officials--are rarely accused of knowing too much. In a recent interview, two of Washington's top drug warriors in Bogota said they had never heard of Giraldo. That admission goes to the core of a key problem with Wash-ington's multibillion-dollar program to staunch the export of heroin and cocaine from Colombia. For political reasons, U.S. officials have been largely content to focus on drug-trafficking by Marxist guerrillas who have been fighting the government since 1964. ( Targeting the guerrillas is the central aim of Washington's chief ally, Colombian President Andres Pastrana, and his $7.5 billion Plan Colombia to cut drug production in half. ) But as the leftists retreat, right-wing private armies--which have grown in response to leftist threats to businessmen and farmers--are prospering, and the Colombian government may be looking the other way.
The Bush administration is just beginning to grapple with these issues. Last week Bush nominated hard-liner John Walters as his new drug czar. Walters helped design drug-interdiction efforts in the Andean region for the first Bush administration. But NEWSWEEK has learned that even Walters has expressed some skepticism about Plan Colombia, and that the White House has ordered a policy review. One of Walters's concerns: too much U.S. aid is going to the Colombian military, which has long been tied to the right-wing paramilitaries. "It looks like we're heavily invested in a country where the situation is destabilizing rapidly," says a senior administration official. "It's enough to give everybody pause."
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