Isabel Hilton (Guardian Unltd): Terror as usual

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Tuesday September 23

Terror as usual
By Isabel Hilton

When eight foreign tourists - including two Britons - were kidnapped earlier this month, the first reports attributed the crime to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - the Farc. Colombia has the world's highest rate of kidnapping and most of them are attributable either to the Farc or their fellow rebels the ELN. But the Farc denied this particular episode and probably they are telling the truth. This could mean that the ELN did it. Or it could mean that elements much closer to power - to the security forces and finally to the government - are responsible.
Colombia is not a story of sin on one side and virtue on the other. But few of the superficial narratives in Colombia stand up to scrutiny. The current tale about the government of Alvaro Uribe, to which Britain and the US subscribe, says that he came to power last year with a fresh commitment to fight subversion, crime and drug trafficking. Elected as the peace efforts of his predecessor, Andres Pastrana, were collapsing, Uribe promised a combination of vigorous US-backed military action against the "narco-guerrillas" and the terrorists of the rightwing paramilitary organisation, the AUC (the self-styled United Self Defence Forces of Colombia), amnesty for those who would take it and the creation of citizens' militia to fight subversion.
But under Uribe, the level of political assassination has doubled, drug cartels now control 60% of the land and 3 million people have been forced from their homes. Human rights violations by the government or its associates are higher than ever, and the instruments set up to investigate these violations have been disabled. Far from dismantling rightwing terror and drug trafficking, Uribe has protected the state's alliance with the extreme right to the point that some observers speak of the takeover of the state by narco-terrorism - perpetrated by the AUC, the armed wing of an alliance of big landowners, businesses and drug traffickers.
The Colombian security services have had a long-term strategy of civilian terror and sabotage of negotiation with the guerrillas. When, for instance, negotiations with the M-19 guerrilla group in the 1980s resulted in a ceasefire and its transformation into a legal political party, its candidates in the subsequent elections were systematically assassinated. In the 1990s, even as President Pastrana was negotiating with the Farc during a ceasefire, the army used the AUC to try and dislodge the Farc from areas they controlled with wholesale terror against the civilian population.

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[izzie]

1. Well I read this someplace

That the USA has a good size army in that country guarding the oil lines but it is kept very low. Bush and co do not wish that out. What do you think?