Colombian soldiers accused of killing 3 civilians

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Colombian soldiers accused of killing 3 civilians
The Associated Press
Published: January 3rd, 2011 07:22 AM
Last Modified: January 3rd, 2011 08:48 AM

BOGOTA, Colombia - Colombian authorities said Monday that they have accused an army major and four other soldiers of killing three civilians and then falsely presenting their bodies as those of guerrillas slain in combat.

Maj. Juan Carlos Del Rio Crespo and four other troops were charged in the 2002 killings of three members of the Agudelo family in Antioquia state, about 180 miles (290 kilometers) northwest of the capital, Bogota, the attorney general's office said in a statement.

Investigators determined the three were defenseless when they were slain, but that the soldiers later said the deaths happened during combat against the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the attorney general's office said.

It said troops under Del Rio's command seized the three men from a sugarcane field where they were working. Their bodies were found with two shotguns.

Read more: http://www.adn.com/2011/01/03/1629450/colombian-soldiers-accused-of.html

[Arctic Dave]

1. K&R

[Judi Lynn]

2. U.S. citizens need to know about Colombian killings

U.S. citizens need to know about Colombian killings
January 06, 2011 2:00 AM

To the Editor:

Even before being brutally murdered by the Colombian military, the three young siblings, Yenni, Yimmy and Yefferson, had lived a hard life. They'd been displaced by Colombia's brutal war and sought refuge in rural Arauca province, near the Venezuelan border. Six months ago, their mother left them. From then on, 14-year-old Yenni took car of her little brothers, who were 9 and 6. Until that terrible day, she regularly made breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the whole family.

On Oct. 14, their father, Jose Alvara Torres, left early in the morning to find work as a day laborer in the fields. His children stayed home, as they were on school vacation.

Hours later, solders from the Colombian military's 5th Mobile Brigade dragged these three defenseless children out of their homes and took them into the woods where they raped Yenni before stabbing all three to death. Their bodies were buried in a shallow grave just 300 yards from the local military base.

Their friends at school are still terrified that they will be next. Their teacher described them as in a state of panic. Parents indicate their children are afraid to walk to school, as they may encounter a solder. It should come as no surprise that for years the U.S. government poured millions of dollars in military aid into the 5th Mobile Brigade and that at least one of the Colombian military officials fired in the wake of the killing was trained in the notorious School of the Americas at Fort Benning. Lt. Col. James Edison Pineda Parra took a cadet training course at the SOA in 1989.

More:
http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20110106-OPINION-101060370

[Judi Lynn]

3. Took a quick look for more from this area:'Army complicit in Arauca paramilitary crimes' .

'Army complicit in Arauca paramilitary crimes' .
Thursday, 22 July 2010 08:19 Leo Palmer .

Former paramilitary leader Miguel Angel Mejia Munera, alias "El Mezillo," (the Twin) alleged that Colombian politicians, oil companies and the Colombian army had links with the paramilitaries in the eastern Colombian border department Arauca.

Speaking from the Colombian Court in Washington in the U.S, El Mezillo voluntarily provided testimony on Colombia's paramilitary organizations.

Mejia was extradited to the United States on drug trafficking charges in 2009 and was a leader of the "Vencedores de Arauca" paramilitary bloc

Collaboration with the Colombia Army

According to Mejia, the Colombian army was involved in the murder of Angel Chaparro, who was gunned down on January 25 in 2002 along with Mario Ruiz Gonzalez Delgado Heliberto in Tame, Arauca only four blocks from the police station.

Chaparro was the key witness in the case against the Colombian Air Force and American pilots working for Oxy oil, who were implicated in the 1998 bombing of Santo Domingo in Arauca which left 17 farmers dead. Chaparro died in the shooting but Delgado was kidnapped.

More:
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/10935-army-complicit-in-arauca-paramilitary-crimes-the-twin.html

[Judi Lynn]

4. Terrorizing Colombia: Obama Continues Bush Administration’s Militarism

Terrorizing Colombia: Obama Continues Bush Administration’s Militarism
By: Garry Leech
Date Published: June 1, 2010

Many Colombia observers hoped that the arrival of President Barack Obama in the White House would bring about a significant shift in US policy toward that troubled South American nation. The hope was that the new president would reduce aid to the military with the worst human rights record in the hemisphere and prioritize social and economic issues. That major shift did not occur during Obama’s first year in office. And to the degree that a shift in policy did occur, it constituted an increased militarization of US intervention in Colombia.

~snip~
Less than three weeks after 9/11, Democratic Senator Bob Graham of Florida, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, launched a campaign to portray the FARC as a major international terrorist threat: “The FARC are doing the same thing as global level terrorists, that is organizing in small cells that don’t have contact with each other and depend on a central command to organize attacks, in terms of logistics and finance. It is the same style of operation as Bin Laden.”

In October 2001, the State Department’s top counter-terrorism official, Francis X. Taylor, declared that Washington’s strategy for fighting terrorism in the Western Hemisphere would include, “where appropriate, as we are doing in Afghanistan, the use of military power.” Taylor left little doubt about the “appropriate” target when he stated that the FARC “is the most dangerous international terrorist group based in this hemisphere.” Meanwhile Taylor’s boss, US Secretary of State Colin Powell, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the FARC belonged in the same category as Al-Qaeda: “There is no difficulty in identifying as a terrorist and getting everybody to rally against him. Now, there are other organizations that probably meet a similar standard. The FARC in Colombia comes to mind.”

~snip~
Oil war

What Graham failed to mention was that a huge majority of so-called terrorist attacks against the US by Colombian guerrillas consisted of bombing oil pipelines used by US companies. In other words, they were designed to hurt corporate profit margins, not US civilians. In fact, the Florida senator neglected to point out that these attacks did not kill a single US citizen in 2000, the year to which Graham was referring. Nevertheless, the propaganda campaign vilifying the FARC successfully laid the groundwork for US Ambassador Anne Patterson’s announcement at the end of October that the United States would provide counter-terrorism aid to Colombia as part of Washington’s new global war on terror.

More:
http://www.leftturn.org/terrorizing-colombia-obama-continues-bush-administration%E2%80%99s-militarism

[Judi Lynn]

5. Here's SourceWatch's page on Occidental Oil in Arauca, Colombia:

Occidental Petroleum Corporation (Oxy) is an international oil and gas exploration and production company with operations in the United States, Middle East/North Africa and Latin America. Oxy is the fourth largest U.S. oil and gas company, based on equity market capitalization. Oxy is the largest oil producer in Texas, the largest gas producer in California, and has additional operations in Kansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico. Oxy has assets in Libya, Oman, Qatar, and Yemen and is a partner in supplying natural gas from Qatar to markets in the United Arab Emirates. Oxy has operations and assets in Colombia and Argentina.

~snip~
Corporate Accountability

Labor

Human Rights

~snip~
A Laboratory of War: Repression and Violence in Arauca
This document discusses Occidental’s human rights violations, including the XVIII Brigade which is reportedly funded by Oxy that has collided with paramilitary forces and the Santo Domingo killings. <10>

Occidental Pipeline in Colombia Strikes it Rich in Washington
The Occidental pipeline is often attacked by guerrilla groups, more than 1000 times since its 1986 construction. It has spilled more than 2.9 million barrels of crude oil (more than 11 times the amount spilled by Exxon Valdez) and has polluted more than 1,625 miles of river. <11>

Special Issues and Campaigns: World Report 1999
Human Rights Watch claims that Occidental along with Ecopetrol and Royal Dutch/Shell, took no action to address reports of extrajudicial executions and a massacre committed by the state forces assigned to protect the consortium’s facilities. The companies’ response was that human rights violations were the responsibility of governments, and they did not announce any programs to ensure that their security providers do not commit human rights violations. <12>

Human Rights Watch World Report 1998
Arauca province was the site of the Occidental Petroleum, Royal Dutch/Shell, and Ecopetrol consortium's Caño Limón-Covenas oil fields and pipeline. By putting the companies in a new relationship to the military, the contracts had raised serious questions. The direct contracts signed with the Ministry of Defense inappropriately tightened the companies' relations with an abusive military and compounded the fundamental problem: that the companies relied on that abusive military institution for security and thereby assumed a responsibility to take concrete, programmatic measures to prevent violations and to confront those that may arise. The companies have taken very little action in regarding human rights. <13>

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Occidental

[Judi Lynn]

6. Attorney asks court not to hear Uribe in Drummond case

Attorney asks court not to hear Uribe in Drummond case
Tuesday, 04 January 2011 07:12 Adriaan Alsema

The attorney of former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe sent a 38-page letter to a Washington court asking it not to force the former president to testify in a civil case against coal giant Drummond for alleged ties to death squads.

According to Miami newspaper El Nuevo Herald, attorney Gregory B. Craig claimed in the letter that an obligatory statement by Uribe would harm Washington's relations with the Colombian government.

"The point is this: the result of the dispute will not only affect President Uribe. If the court orders President Uribe to testify despite Colombia's request for immunity, the relation between Colombia and the United States and our partnership in the war against drug trafficking and terrorism will be clearly affected," the Miami newspaper quoted the letter.

Craig's theory is that the government of Juan Manuel Santos–referred to as Juan Miguel Santos in the letter–will restrain from fighting left-wing guerrilla groups out of fear of facing similar legal action in the U.S.

Uribe was asked to testify in a case filed by victims of paramilitary violence in the region where Drummond was active. The plaintiffs accuse the coal company of ties with the paramilitary organization AUC and want Uribe to testify his knowledge about the situation.

More:
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/13573-attorney-asks-court-not-to-hear-uribe-in-drummond-case.html

[Judi Lynn]

7. Interview: Afro-Colombian Farmers on Displacement and Resistance

Interview: Afro-Colombian Farmers on Displacement and Resistance
Written by Jake Hess
Wednesday, 05 January 2011 19:33

Five years after the alleged demobilization of army-backed paramilitaries in Colombia, violence and human rights abuses remain widespread in the countryside, displaced Afro-Colombian farmers and community leaders Juan Sanchez and Roberto Guzman* say. Activists working on behalf of Colombia’s internally displaced population are subjected to extrajudicial killings and death threats by paramilitary groups supported by the Colombian army and palm oil firms active in rural areas, Sanchez and Guzman report. "They say we're guerrillas and that they're going to kill us," says Sanchez.

~snip~
JS: The military came around to the different communities and told the people to get out of the area because they were "going to combat the guerrillas." We didn't want to leave because we weren't part of this problem. But they kept on insisting and saying that "if you don't leave, the people who cut heads are coming behind us"; they were referring to the AUC (an army-backed paramilitary organization). Massacres were committed and attacks continued in other parts of the region. We would see bodies floating down the river, and we would see birds that were eating the corpses. Both the military and paramilitaries kept threatening us that we had to leave. This was 1997.

That's how they got us out of the area. In 2000, 2001, we found out that the real objective of this operation wasn't to get rid of the guerrillas, but to get rid of us from the area in order to implement large-scale palm oil monocultures, cattle ranching, and other types of monocultures including teak and rubber plantations.

~snip~
In the Western media it's often argued that paramilitary groups were 'demobilized' during Alvaro Uribe's tenure and that Colombia is vastly more peaceful now as a result of this. Have the paramilitaries gone away?

JS: In 2005, there was a so-called demobilization effort, but what we say as rural farmers who live there is that there was no demobilization; it was a way to legalize these groups. Because those paramilitaries continue to operate and work in the same things they did before. The same people are now part of groups such as the Black Eagles, and criminal bands called the Rastrojos and Gaitainistas. There's a military post near the humanitarian zone of Canedas, and right next to it there's a paramilitary post, separated by a small river. There's a lot of collusion (between paramilitaries, the military, and police.)

More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/2846-interview-afro-colombian-farmers-on-displacement-and-resistance