Investigators probe FARC global network

[Zorro]

Source: The West Australian

European and Australian authorities have opened an investigation into the overseas links of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebel group, the Bogota newspaper El Tiempo has reported.

Investigators are eyeing four Spaniards, two Italians, a Dane and an Australian for their ties to FARC, who have been behind drug trafficking and hundreds of kidnappings over four decades fighting the Colombian government, according to El Tiempo.

The Dane is connected to the establishment in Sweden of the Anncol news agency, which FARC uses to distribute its messages, it said.

Read more: http://www.thewest.com.au/aapstory.aspx?StoryName=502859

[Demeter]

1. OOH! I'm so scared of the big, bad FARC!

Not! When do the international investigations into the BFEE begin?

[Peace Patriot]

2. It's called a witch-hunt. Anybody who opposes the Colombian narco-state and

its $6 BILLION U.S. taxpayer funded extermination campaign against union leaders, political leftists, small peasant farmers, community organizers, human rights workers and journalists in Colombia, is fair game now. They have their Rumsfeldian "Official of Special Plans" laptopS, allegedly retrieved from the mayhem of ten U.S. "smart bombs" dropped on a FARC camp inside Ecuador's border (killing the chief FARC hostage negotiator and 24 others without benefit of trial), and their McCarthyite "lists" of known commie pinkos and they are out for blood.

We have seen this fascist movie before.

[hack89]

3. So are you saying that FARC does not deal in drugs

or that it does not matter because they are on the "right side"?

[Peace Patriot]

4. The corrupt, failed, murderous "war on drugs" is an excuse for militarizing society,

a war profiteer boondoggle and a menace to civil liberties. I don't support it. It is as evil and wasteful as the "war on terror" which has slaughtered a million innocent people in Iraq and destroyed our Constitution.

Your question is like the old trap, "When did you stop beating your wife, Senator?"

Because I see what the "war on drugs" is being used for--to imprison, slaughter and oppress the poor, and to target union leaders, community organizers, political leftists, human rights workers and journalists--doesn't mean that I support violent crime, gangsterism or ill health, whoever is responsible for it. But I don't think that the fascist criminalization of drug use has gotten anywhere in reducing violent crime, gangsterism and ill health, and was never intended to. It is an EXCUSE to commit far worse crimes--destruction of our Constitution, human rights violations, and really BIG theft.

I don't know if FARC deals in drugs. I don't trust ANYTHING the Uribe or Bush governments, or police state profiteers, say about it. It is an unknown. (And FARC denies it.) But even if they did, I would not necessarily object, depending on what ELSE they did. To me, drug use and sale are not crimes. It the gangsterism that is fostered by criminalizing drug use that is the problem.

And as to the misuse of drugs, the pharmaceutical corporations who profited from the Anthrax attack, and who have poisoned our soldiers with vaccines, and who routinely rip off the old and the sick, are far worse criminals than most "illicit" drug dealers.

There are good reasons to discourage (not criminalize) certain drugs--including a lot of legal ones, but I'm thinking of cocaine and heroine. There is no reason whatever to be concerned about marijuana or coca leaves (for chewing, or tea). In fact, the latter are beneficial. So I don't care if the dealers are rightwing (except for their fucking hypocrisy), leftwing, or anything else. It shouldn't be illegal. A good government can encourage, discourage, test, recommend and do a lot of useful things with regard to drugs, but it should not be telling people what they may ingest, or sell, on pain of jail time. I totally oppose this police state mentality around drugs. And this current witch-hunt against leftists is a good reason why. It is MISUSED. It is not a "war on drugs." It is a WAR ON THE POOR.

[hack89]

5. So does FARC political kidnapping and murder equal gangsterism?

or only those acts that violently support the drug trade?

[Peace Patriot]

6. Yeah, kidnapping innocent people is gangsterism. And even Fidel Castro has

criticized them for it. As for murder, Amnesty International attributes 92% of the murders of union leaders in Colombia to the Colombian military and closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads, and only 2% to the FARC.

So who are the gangsters? It is not easy to sort that out in a 40+ year civil war. How come Colombian apologists never mention who is committing most of the violence?

I don't side with either party in this civil war, although I think I understand FARC better than I do the narco-fascists running the government and the military (allied with George Bush and Dick Cheney, and recipients of $6 BILLION in U.S. military aid through Bushite fingers). In a country where union leaders are chainsawed and their body parts thrown into mass graves, by rightwing death squads, and children's throats are slit on suspicion of their parents being leftists, and whole villages are slaughtered, I am not altogether certain that I myself could sustain pacifism. I'm with the poor and the oppressed, not with the overlords. But I also feel--looking at it from the outside--that this civil war MUST BE STOPPED, and more violence is NOT the answer.

Posters like you keep asking posters like me, do we "support" the FARC (whether as to kidnapping, fighting or drug trafficking)? That is not really the right question. It a baiting question--like, "when did you stop beating your wife, Senator?". Because I believe in the rights of the poor, and understand why the desperate poor sometimes turn to violence, doesn't mean that I approve of violence. I don't--not by anybody. But saying yes or no to the FARC doesn't solve the problem, does it? The problem is an extremely unjust society, in which the have's have taken to exterminating the have not's. How do you stop both that extermination and the reaction against it (the FARC)? Certainly not by pouring $6 BILLION into one side of the conflict, which of course aids the exterminators and their drug trafficking.

In regard to Colombia, I feel rather like I did in regard to Vietnam. Did I approve of the Vietcong killing our soldiers? Of course not. But how about the U.S. military slaughtering TWO MILLION people in Southeast Asia, before it was over--to prevent Vietnam from ELECTING (legitimately) a communist government? Difficult as it is, you have to make judgements about the RELATIVE justice of the opposing sides, in a conflict like that. But it's not that I sided with the Vietcong. It's that I judged that the entire conflict was invented, by "our side," for purposes of war profiteering and denying ordinary people (the people of Vietnam) self-determination.

I think something similar is going on in Colombia. I don't approve of FARC murder or kidnapping or drug trafficking (which they deny, by the way), but I understand why it is happening, what drives people to do that--and condemning them for it does not solve the problems that motivate them, and have motivated them for 40+ years. A ceasefire is what is needed. And of course Bushites don't like ceasefires. They like everybody killing everybody, and the ones with the biggest guns get rich, and "win."