Spy chief sold guns to rebels, court told (CIA and FARC)

[Say_What]

The CIA, hard at work signing off on a arms deal that went to the FARC in order to garner support for Plan Colombia (Plan of Death).

<clips>

The former chief of Peru's intelligence service gave Colombian rebels 10,000 rifles, prosecutors have claimed.

The arms were said to have been bought from Jordan in a complex transaction involving Brazilian drug lords and a Ukrainian flight crew.

The spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, who appeared in a Lima court on Tuesday, is accused of having orchestrated a plan in which the rifles were air-dropped in 1999 to rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). At the time, Mr Montesinos was a close ally of the US and the Clinton administration.

Mr Montesinos, 58, has been in custody since 2001 and is facing dozens of trials on charges ranging from drug trafficking to authorising assassinations.

He had been a paid CIA informant since the 1970s, providing intelligence in the fight against drugs and terrorism in the Andes, according to Peruvian authorities.

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/21/1074360830426.html

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On edit: Pravda version

<clips>

"Operation Siberia" links the CIA to Colombian narcos

...Interior Minister Fernando Rospigliosi told Reuters: "This is a very, very important case because it shows how both Montesinos and Fujimori were involved in dealings with a terrorist and drug-trafficking group like the FARC. There is abundant evidence of the participation of Montesinos, which could bring a very heavy sentence." According to the prosecutors FARC rebels paid the "cargo" -parachuted into Colombia's rainforests- with drugs.

"Operation Siberia" became known in August 2000, when Fujimori announced that Peru's intelligence services had smashed a major arms smuggling ring, code-named that way. However, prosecutors believe Montesinos and the CIA were behind the operation, despite Washington spent $2 billion in fighting Colombian guerrillas. In an interview with El Comercio newspaper on Sunday, Gamarra said: "In the case of arms trafficking to FARC guerrillas, Montesinos appears to have counted on the support of the CIA. We do not have any hard proof of that, but we do have various indications that would prove this relationship." In fact, Montesinos, has been linked to the CIA since he was in the military in the 1970s.

Fujimori's August 2000 news confernce unveiled the case only one month before a video showing Montesinos bribing a lawmaker was aired on television, ignited the scandal that toppled the government.

In 1990, as Fujimori rose to power, Montesinos became the president's advisor and mediator in his relations with the SIN and the army. Under the presidency of Fujimori, Montesinos continuously enlarged the SIN's importance and shifted people of confidence into key positions. Especially after Fujimori's "selfcoup" in 1992, allegedly inspired by Montesinos, the SIN became, like the military, a state within the state.

http://english.pravda.ru/world/20/91/368/11837_Montesinos.html

[On the Road]

1. Jesus Christ, What IS it with These Guys?

I know the whole Chomsky line on Latin America. I know the US supports dictators. But I thought the US really did want to defeat FARC.

This I just don't understand. Were Montesinos and the CIA just in it for the money? Is there some other angle I'm missing?

[Say_What]

2. Article yesterday

... The possible participation of CIA agents might have been a strategy to gain support for Plan Colombia, a Colombian government anti-drug initiative into which the United States had poured more than $3 billion, Vargas said.

He noted that Fujimori, who governed from 1990-2000, had then stated his fear that the Colombian conflict might spill over into neighboring countries, including Peru.

Vargas added that Fujimori, who enjoys asylum in his ancestral homeland of Japan, may possibly have "been involved" in smuggling arms to the FARC. The Jordanian rifles were dropped by parachute from planes flying over the Colombian jungle. EFE gta/rws/dr

http://www.efenews.com/includesasp/noticias.asp?opcion=0&id=5915157

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IMO, the US could care less about FARC's or the narcos activities. What they want to do is protect their OIL interests, and that becomes difficult when you have insurgents (FARC and ELN) in a 40 year old civil war.

The irony is that Colombia is the world's third largest recipient of US aid and also holds the hemisphere's record for the worst human rights abuses. 85% of the US aid goes directly to the military who in turn trains and advices the paramilitaries who, along with FARC and ELN are on the US terrorist list. The paras, however, carry out 70% of the atrocities in OIL-RICH Colombia mostly on OIL-RICH ancestral land belonging to the indigenous. The result is many massacres and 2.5 million people displace as well as more union leaders murdered than in any other country. Our tax dollars at work. What happened in Central America is happening today in Colombia, but the press never reports about it. :puke:

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/Dec2003/x-Dec2003-Livingstone.html

[psychopomp]

3. Arm *both* sides and keep the war going

Keep the people hopeless and maintain the elite's dependence on cash, guns and military "advisers."

[Say_What]

4. makes for *justification* for Plan Colombia--Plan of Death

From yesterday's NYTs.
<clips>

Colombia's Landed Gentry: Coca Lords and Other Bullies

...Some leading political analysts believe that progress on land reform will depend on the United States, which has spent $25 billion on the Andean region in the past 20 years, most of it in Colombia and most in the form of military hardware and military training for the drug war.

Not just in Colombia but throughout the Andes region, governments suffer from weak institutions, shoddy education, corruption and lax tax collection. In a recent report on the region, the Council on Foreign Relations said the United States can help by providing guidance and, where necessary, pressing governments to carry out difficult reforms.

Tolerating the status quo could be self-defeating for American policy. Consider the case of Pedro Alberto and his wife, Piedad, who found out how fast they could lose their eight acres one day last year when paramilitary men arrived in their town, Viotá. The gunmen killed several people and forced hundreds of people to flee. The couple had owned two small farms, raising chickens and fish and growing plantains, manioc and coffee.

"We lived there 35 years and now we have nothing," Pedro Alberto said Tuesday morning at a Catholic relief agency in Bogotá. He asked that his last name not be used, for fear of retribution. "That land was priceless to us. Everything you could plant there grew."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/21/international/americas/21LETT.html