Colombian Governor Surrenders in Scandal

[Judi Lynn]

Colombian Governor Surrenders in Scandal

By JAVIER BAENA
The Associated Press
Tuesday, March 13, 2007; 6:58 PM

BOGOTA, Colombia -- The governor of a northern province in Colombia on Tuesday surrendered to federal prosecutors, becoming the first opposition politician arrested as part of the widening scandal over links between the country's political elite and far-right militias.

Chief prosecutor Mario Iguaran on Monday ordered the arrest of Trino Luna, an opposition-party governor of the province of Magdalena, for his alleged ties to paramilitary leader Hernan Giraldo.

Luna, anticipating the indictment, took leave last week and President Alvaro Uribe's government emphasized that move on Monday by formally suspending Luna from his duties.
(snip)

Giraldo is alleged to have ordered his fighters to intimidate voters into electing Luna in 2003, when he was the only candidate for governor.
(snip/...)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/13/AR2007031301331.html



Governor Trino Luna, paramilitary leader Hernan Giraldo with the snappy white hat & scarf, tasteful coral necklace

[arcos]

1. "Opposition-party governor"...

According to this article who calls him an "opposition-party governor", he is a member of the Liberal Party... which, yes, technically, is in the opposition, but is actually an ideological mess where Alvaro Uribe has a majority (he's a former member of the Liberal Party, and currently has the support of most of the party's members in congress). Plus, the Liberal Party only gathered 11% of the vote in last year's elections, while the REAL opposition, the center-left Polo Democrático got a healthy and unexpected 20%+. Lots of left winger members of the Liberal Party left in order to support the Polo Democrático.

If I were writing the article, I certainly wouldn't call him an "opposition-party governor", regardless of the party he is nominally affiliated to.

[Bacchus39]

3. who did he surrender to??

Uribe's prosecuter correct??

[Judi Lynn]

2. A short practical guide to understanding all about the "para-politics" scandal

A short practical guide to understanding all about the "para-politics" scandal
by Élber Gutiérrez Roa
March 09, 2007

Revista Semana, in Rebelion 06-03-2007

~snip~
The first concrete event that prompted the investigations was the accusation made by Clara Lopez, former candidate for mayor in Bogota for the Democratic Pole.(2) Lopez decided to ask the court to investigate members of Congress to establish whether declarations made years earlier by Salvatore Mancuso (3) were true according to which the Self Defence groups controlled 35 per cent of Congress. Although the disputed quote had been rejected by legislators of all parties and some included it in sensational debates about political control, Lopez was the first to ask the justice system to investigate the case.

The press too played an important role through its insistent coverage and denunication of the case. Semana revealed in detail how the tentacles of now demobilised commander of the Self Defence groups' Northern Bloc, Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, "Jorge 40", inflitrated the DAS (4) and how the electoral frauds of 2002 and 2006 were concocted. Those accusations, denied at first by President Alvaro Uribe, were proved little by little in the courts. El Tiempo, Cambio (5) and some research by Caludia Lopez (also published in Semana.com) touched the sore spot on how the paramilitaries shared out votes on the Atlantic Coast so as to make sure their friends made it into Congress.

All these initiatives added to valiant attempts by Congress towards political control by legislators like Gustavo Petro (who uncovered paramilitary infiltration in Sucre, Cordoba, Cesar and Magdalena) (6) the Public Prosecutor and other State entities and Senator Piedad Cordoba, who in more than five debates spoke out on the infiltration of the DAS and the armed imposition of candidates for municipal office, governorships, the Chamber and the Senate.

As if this were not enough, the authorities confiscated a computer from the paramilitary Edgar Ignacio Fierro, known by his alias of "Don Antonio", containing detailed information on Jorge 40's contacts with politicians; five members of congress were expelled from Uribe's party on his orders, owing to their links with paramilitaries, but they then remoulded themselves into other parties - also supporters of Uribe; one paramilitary deserter known as "Pitirry" (currently in exile in Canada) gave new details of the massacres carried out in Sucre; some senators out of nervous desperation admitted contacts with the Self Defence groups; and recently Salvatore Mancuso released a document compromising 28 leaders on the Atlantic Coast in a deal with the Self Defence groups to "refound the Homeland"

With all this evidence as well as the testimonies of various demobilised paramilitaries and relatives of anonymous victims the courts began to build a trial. These are the key pieces.
(snip/...)

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=9&ItemID=12297

[Judi Lynn]

4. More on paramilitary leader, Hernan Giraldo

February 9, 2006
Hernán Giraldo gets away with it

In 2001, Newsweek reporter Joe Contreras spent some time in the Caribbean port of Barranquilla, Colombia’s fourth-largest city. There, he reported on Hernán Giraldo, the drug-trafficking paramilitary leader who was perhaps the most powerful figure in the city, the nearby port of Santa Marta, and in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region to their south.

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.

Colombian intelligence sources at the time told Contreras that “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.”

In 2000, Contreras reported, Giraldo even took out a contract on the lives of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents.

It was on the evening of Feb. 18, 2000, that the DEA office in Barranquilla heard that a ruthless right-wing paramilitary chieftain named Hernan Giraldo had put out a $500,000 contract on the U.S. special agents assigned to investigate the top drug lords of northern Colombia.

On October 9, 2001, Semana magazine reports, Giraldo ordered the murder of three Colombian anti-narcotics police agents who were working closely with the DEA. The crime even drove a wedge between Giraldo and the rest of the AUC, at the time led by Carlos Castaño, who sent hundreds of men to Giraldo’s zone to pressure him to turn over the trigger-pullers. The resulting violence claimed dozens of lives, but Giraldo and the AUC soon reconciled. He has since been accused of ordering the February 2004 murder of Marta Lucía Hernández, the ranger in charge of Tayrona National Park, from whose shores Giraldo is believed to control the dozens of go-fast boats taking cocaine northward.
(snip/...)

http://www.ciponline.org/colombia/blog/archives/000213.htm