There have been more since then. The silence on the subject, in the months following the CIPCOL revelations (first I read of it), was damned spooky. The CIPCOL site has links to a description of the USAID "pacification" program for the La Macarena region. You have to read between the lines of its cleansed, bureaucratic language, but basically the program went like this: The Colombian military would come through with a scorched earth policy, targeting the local community leadership--activists, human rights workers, trade unionists, advocates of the poor, as well as random poor people (murdering people merely to up their "body count" and terrorize the community); a team of USAID-trained Urbistas would swoop in (in helicopters) and appoint puppet leaders who would be loyal to Bogota; a residual police/military force would be left behind to enforce that loyalty; and the military would move on to the next "pacification" area--the excuse for all this being Colombia's 40+ year civil war between the have's (the rich elite) and armed leftist guerrillas.* Very like U.S. operations in Afghanistan.
The La Macarena massacre: recent mass grave discovered, containing up to 2,000 bodies whom local people say were local, 'disappeared' community activists, nearby to a U.S. military base; the graves have dates from 2005 to 2009, but no names; includes a description of, and links to docs about, USAID/Pentagon-designed military ops in La Macarena)
http://www.cipcol.org/?p=1303The UK military connection
http://www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/2010/02/04/silence-on-british-army-link-to-colombian-mass-grave/U.S. and Colombia Cover Up Atrocities Through Mass Graves, by Dan Kovalik 4/1/10
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-kovalik/us-colombia-cover-up-atro_b_521402.htmlColombia: Mass Grave Discovered In La Macarena
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO1005/S00001.htmThe silence about this massacre in the corpo-fascist press, early on, and even on the internet (except for CIPCOL), was a red flag to me. There have been articles about the Colombian military's murders and the activities of the rightwing death squads in the NYT and other corporate sources. Not this. This story has just begun to break, and I suspect that the delay has to do with the CIA's need to control the story--to break it as part of a (false) narrative of change for the better in Colombia. The context of the killings points to possible U.S. military complicity, more directly than through $7 BILLION in U.S. funding of the Colombian military. The CIA may have needed to smother this aspect of the story. Most of Latin America is no longer obeisant to the U.S.. They take human rights seriously. And they have strongly objected to the secretly negotiated U.S./Colombia military agreement, which, among other things, grants total diplomatic immunity to all U.S. soldiers and U.S. military 'contractors' in Colombia, no matter what they do in Colombia. So, if it were to get out that U.S. troops were engaged in "turkey shoots" in Colombia, this would be very, very bad for the U.S. in countless ways. What is already known is bad enough.
Another red flag is the secrecy with which the U.S./Colombia military agreement was negotiated and signed (by the Bush Junta-appointed ambassador, Wm Brownfield, last year). It was kept secret from the Colombian legislature, the Colombian people and all the other leaders of Latin America (who were very pissed--they didn't even get courtesy calls, warning them of its announcement, on such a sensitive issue). And the argument used by U.S. spokespeople is that the agreement was no big deal--it merely confirmed existing arrangements. Why did they need this agreement IN WRITING, signed in secret by the pResident of Colombia? The main part of the agreement formalizes the U.S. military occupation of Colombia. That is the most dangerous part of the agreement. It provides the Pentagon cover for escalation of forces. But the immunity part--which I had just begun to think about seriously, when I happened upon the CIPCOL site--may be related to the delay in reports of the La Macarena massacre. It provides a legal argument for RETROACTIVE immunity for U.S. military personnel.
The flak that Uribe threw up, in his last weeks in office--accusing Venezuela of harboring FARC guerillas--was a third red flag. The charges are absurd. Colombia is the one who has destabilized the Colombia/Venezuela border. The "evidence" that Uribe's minions presented to the OAS is on the level of Colin Powell's "evidence" for WMDs in Iraq before the UN. Fabricated bullshit. So what was this all about? Merely more anti-Chavez psyops? Set up of the trigger for the U.S. proxy war against Venezuela (border incident, like the "Gulf of Tonkin")? Some kind of cover to distract from Uribe's many crimes, or payment to his puppetmasters for continued protection? It's not clear yet what Uribe's motives were--and those of his handlers--but it's possible one of them was to promote the notion that Venezuela is somehow responsible for the horrors in Colombia, which could be twisted round to justify the Bushwhacks going too far (authorizing U.S. military killings of Colombians)? If that were to come out, can't you just hear the rightwing liars in our press saying, 'But Venezuela supports the terrorists!'? (Thus, anything is justified, no matter how horrible, no matter how illegal, no matter how much "collateral damage" there is, no matter how egregiously unfair.) The corpo-fascist political narrative is never rational or fact-based. It plays with stereotypes and impressions. And it covers up corpo-fascist crimes with clouds of irrelevant points. Uribe's wild charges may have been a rightwing, coverup "talking point" in the making--for something just like this (U.S. military participation in this atrocity).
There is NO evidence that I know of, for direct U.S. military participation in this massacre. There are only red flags. And we may never know. We live under an "Iron Curtain" of disinformation and coverups and sweepings under the rug of enormous crimes by the Bush Junta. To figure things like this out, we need to pay attention to such red flags--how the news is handled, what flak stories are being thrown up, etc.--and learn to read between the lines. This is also important in trying to anticipate what our government may do in the future. This is not idle speculation. It is well-informed speculation, in an effort to understand the true policies of the U.S. and what they may mean for us and for others. We have a serious, ominous U.S. military buildup in Colombia and in an arc around Venezuela including its Caribbean oil coast. We have an Obama administration, esp. Hillary Clinton, with a desperate need for democracy cosmetics in Colombia, to get the U.S./Colombia "free trade for the rich" agreement through Congress. We are paying a $7 BILLION tab, in Colombia--for whom? For what? We have a bunch of heinous war criminals, here, running around free. That they may have authorized war crimes in Colombia as well, is not really speculation. It is a high probability. And, who knows?, maybe accountability for these war criminals will occur via a circuitous route through South America. In any case, we are not going to get the truth from our own government, nor of course from the corpo-fascist press. We have to figure it out for ourselves.
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*(For perspective, Amnesty International attributes 92% of the extrajudicial murders of trade unionists in Colombia to the Colombian military (about half) and its closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads (the other half). Other stats are similar. The vast bulk of political murders in Colombia are committed by the state security forces, not by the leftist guerillas. Clearly what is going on here--as has occurred in many other countries under U.S. influence, in Latin America, in the past--is state terror and political cleansing, in situations where SOME people can't take it any more, arm themselves and fight back, and that is used as the excuse to punish and slaughter others who are merely exercising their human and civil rights. The poor are the majority, thus the poor and their advocates must be prevented from exercising their human and civil rights. Their deaths are not "collateral damage" in a just war. Their deaths--often in manners that defy description, they are so horrible--are quite literally intended to eliminate community leadership (the people who organize others to vote, who advocate for candidates and causes, who educate and lead the community in many ways) and to terrorize the survivors, in order to retain political control of the country for the rich elite, for the big, protected drug lords and--not incidentally--for Occidental Petroleum, Exxon Mobil, Monsanto, Chiquita and other multinational corporations.
(The Colombian military has also driven some 5 MILLION peasant farmers from their land--the second worse human displacement crisis on earth. About half a million poor Colombians have fled into Venezuela and Ecuador for refuge. That is another thing you don't hear about in the corpo-fascist press. Venezuela and Ecuador have decent governments that respect human rights and use resources to benefit the poor. That is WHY so many Colombians have sought refuge there. There is no flight the other way. No Venezuelans or Ecuadorans are fleeing to Colombia for refuge from the Chavez or Correa governments. The Colombian refugee problem places several burdens on these democracies--including the cost of humanitarian aid, and further destabilization of their border areas, which already suffer spillover violence from the Colombian civil war, the steady flow of cocaine out of Colombia, and other kinds of trafficking. Both of these countries have lots of oil, leftist governments and are Pentagon targets.)
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