Operation False Positive: Behind the Colombia / Venezuela Tensions

[Judi Lynn]

August 3, 2010
Operation False Positive
Behind the Colombia / Venezuela Tensions
By CONN HALLINAN

If you want to understand what’s behind the recent tension between Colombia and Venezuela, think “smokescreen,” and then go back several months to some sick children in the Department of Meta, just south of Bogota. The children fell ill after drinking from a local stream, a stream contaminated by the bodies of more than 2,000 people, secretly buried by the Colombian military.

According to the Colombian high command, the mass grave just outside the army base at La Macarena contains the bodies of guerilla fighters killed between 2002 and 2009 in that country’s long-running civil war. But given the army’s involvement in the so-called “false positive” scandal, human rights groups are highly skeptical that the dead are members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the National Liberation Army, the two insurgent groups fighting the central government.

“False positive” is the name given to the Colombian armed forces operation that murdered civilians and then dressed them up in insurgent uniforms in order to demonstrate the success of the army’s counterinsurgency strategy, thus winning more aid from the U.S. According to the human rights organizations Comision de Derechos Homanos del Bajo Ariari and Colectivo Orlando Fals Borda, some 2,000 civilians have been murdered under the program.

The bodies at La Macarena have not been identified yet, but suspicion is that they represent victims of the “false-positive” program, as well as rural activists and trade unionists. The incoming Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, was defense secretary when the murders were talking place. Santos also oversaw a brief invasion of Ecuador in 2008 that reportedly killed a number of insurgents. The invasion was widely condemned throughout Latin America.

On edit: adding one sentence from the article.

~snip~
The U.S. may also be tarred with the murder of Colombian trade unionists. According to Kelly Nichollas of the U.S. Office on Colombia, testimony at the trial of former DAS director Jorge Noguera indicated that the U.S. trained a special Colombian intelligence unit that tracked trade unionists.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/hallinan08032010.html

[justinaforjustice]

1. Thanks for Posting This Highly Significant Article. Smokescreen!

[Doctor_J]

2. A spectacular example of the worst things about my beloved country

1. Funding death squads

2. Funding drug profiteers on the "other side" of the "war on drugs"

3. Having Big Media hide 1. and 2.

4. Using 1.-3. to justify war against Hugo

:cry:

[Peace Patriot]

4. A pithy summation--packed with truth! Thanks! nt

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. This is like the "kill figures" during the Vietnam War

Every night on the news, they'd say, "X number of Americans were killed today, and 10-15(X) number of Viet Cong." After a while, you'd start wondering how there could possibly be any Viet Cong left, and then you'd hear that the official figures counted civilian casualties as "Viet Cong."

[Peace Patriot]

5. Thanks for making that point. There are other similarities between the Vietnam War

and U.S. policy with regard to Colombia and Venezuela--haunting similarities, including this gradual major buildup of the U.S. military in the region, under the radar of the American people, and the creation of a client state (Colombia), with $7 BILLION in U.S. military funding, to be the "front" for a U.S. war on Venezuela. I think it's a situation that cries out for we, the people, who are funding all this, to start paying attention.

[Doctor_J]

6. NOt only that, we actually DID kill between 40-60 times as many Viet Namese

as Americans that were killed, and still lost the war.

Similarly, we have lost 4500 soldiers in Iraq, while killing more than a million Iraqis. that means that for every American killed we have killed 200 Iraqis. And the war is lost.

The numbers mean nothing.

[Peace Patriot]

7. That additional sentence that you quoted, got my attention, too.

"The U.S. may also be tarred with the murder of Colombian trade unionists. According to Kelly Nichollas of the U.S. Office on Colombia, testimony at the trial of former DAS director Jorge Noguera indicated that the U.S. trained a special Colombian intelligence unit that tracked trade unionists."--from the OP

I've been wondering about the total diplomatic immunity given to all U.S. soldiers and U.S. military 'contractors' in Colombia by the secretly negotiated U.S./Colombia military agreement last year. One of the arguments of the proponents of this agreement is that it merely ratifies existing arrangements. If so, one wonders why the U.S. military needed a document to this effect SIGNED by Colombia's top government official--the outgoing president Alvaro Uribe--why it was negotiated in secret (from the Colombian people, from the Colombian legislature, from all the other leaders of Latin America and from the American people) and what occurred in the secret negotiation, which was carried out by the Bush Junta-appointed ambassador to Colombia, William Brownfield (who is still in place).

I learned about the La Macarena massacre about the same time that I was beginning to wonder about this U.S. need for a SIGNED immunity document. I've read that the massacre occurred nearby to a U.S. military base in Colombia, but I haven't been able to find corroboration of that. If it's true, then what were the U.S. commanders at that base DOING while some 2,000 people were slaughtered and thrown into a mass grave--so full of dead bodies, eventually, that local children began to get sick from the grave's pollution of their drinking water. What I know for sure is that this slow-motion massacre occurred in the context of a Pentagon/USAID-designed "pacification" program in the La Macarena region. See

http://www.cipcol.org/?p=1303

Also...

The 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.html

Colombia: Mass Grave Discovered In La Macarena
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO1005/S00001.htm



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The conclusion of the article is noteworthy:

"As Latin America grows in economic strength and political independence, U.S. policy seems locked into a previous century when it was the major power in the region. Rather than retooling its diplomatic approach to fit the new reality in Latin America, Washington is expanding its military footprint.

It is will soon be operating out of seven military bases in Colombia and has reactivated its 4th Fleet, both highly unpopular moves in Latin America. Rather than taking the advice of countries in the region to demilitarize its war on drugs, the U.S. recently announced it is deploying 46 warships and 7,000 soldiers to Costa Rica to “interdict” drug traffic and money laundering. From 2000 to 2009, less than 40 percent of U.S. aid to the region went to Latin America’s militaries and police. The Obama Administration has raised that figure to 47 per cent.

Washington and Bogota may try to demonize Venezuela, but they are playing to a very small audience, and one that grows smaller—and more irrelevant—by the day." --from the OP

-------------

The U.S. is playing to a "small and irrelevant" rich ruling class, which, in Colombia, the U.S. has armed to the teeth, and which, in Honduras, overthrew Honduran democracy with U.S. help and is also now tolerating death squad killings of trade unionists, community activists, teachers and others; which consists of rich white separatists in Bolivia (whose insurrection against indigenous president Evo Morales was funded/organized right out of the U.S. embassy); which, with U.S. support achieved a brief rightwing coup in Venezuela, in 2002, during which the coupsters suspended the Constitution, the courts, the National Assembly and all civil rights--and, perhaps most important of all, it is a rich ruling class that eagerly sells their countries' resources and labor forces to U.S. multinationals, raking riches off the top for themselves and leaving the vast majority of people in the country extremely poor, and without help--education, medical care, good wages, pensions--to improve their lot.

This rich minority is most certainly small and it is increasingly irrelevant in countries where democracy has taken hold, but I wouldn't call it "irrelevant" in the countries that have become, or are fast becoming, U.S. client states, for it is they who let the U.S. multinationals and war profiteers and World Bank banksters into their countries, and who repress and rob their own people and aim to cripple and defeat movements for social justice and sovereign independence.

This use of local rich elites for the benefit of our multinationals and war profiteers has occurred, and is occurring, in every country where the Pentagon has laid its imprint down, whether in outright U.S. military bases or with the U.S. "war on drugs" (militarizing the country to bolster fascist forces--not anything to do with drugs; the drugs just keep on flowing). We've seen this selling of countries to the U.S., by their own rich elites, in Colombia and Honduras, in progress in Peru, in Mexico, in Panama, and now in Costa Rica of all places. Wherever the Pentagon has military bases and the U.S. "war on drugs" funding has been injected, like a poison, into the local military and police establishments, the poor suffer acutely, not only from the violence of the "war on drugs," but also generally from poverty, for U.S. militarism is intended to keep them poor and to optimize conditions for "free trade for the rich."

U.S. provision of technical training to the narco-thugs running Colombia, for spying on and targeting trade unionists for assassination needs to be seen in this overall context. It is consistent with atrocious U.S. economic and political policy in the region. It is consistent with other uses of U.S. militarization ("war on drugs") funds. And it is consistent with U.S. lawlessness in Iraq and Afghanistan and in general in the U.S. "war on terror" --including mass slaughter of innocent people and the torture of prisoners. In this sense, it is no surprise, though it is always a surprise and shock--I don't know why--when U.S. government actions in the world are the exact opposite of what they SAY they are doing, and egregiously violate principles that most of the American people hold dear.

[Judi Lynn]

10. Also surprising, blatant misuse of US taxpayers' funding:

From the article:

Uribe certainly has reason to shift the attention away from Colombia and toward Venezuela. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights is pressing its investigation of the “false-positives” murders, and Uribe’s brother has been accused of working with death squads. Santiago Canton, an Argentinean and former head of the rights commission, said “If you put all this together, the extrajudicial executions, the espionage of human rights defenders, it’s all really consistent over the years.”

And where was the Obama Administration in all this? Firmly supporting Uribe, railing against Venezuela’s suspension of diplomacy with Bogota, and, according to an investigation by the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), secretly funneling money to the media operations of Chavez’s right-wing opponents. Right-wingers in Bolivia and Nicaragua are also receiving money.

“Between 2007 and 2009, the State Department’s little known Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor channeled at least $4 million to journalists in Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela through the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF),” says NACLA’s Jeremy Bigwood. In doing this, the State Department violated its own rules requiring that “all publications” receiving money “acknowledge that support.” According to Bigwood, the U.S. waived that requirement for PADF.

Colombia is Washington’s closest ally in the region, so it hardly surprising that Uribe’s right-wing government and Washington’s visceral hatred of Chavez should find common ground. But the attack on Chavez is also a proxy assault on the newly formed, 32-member Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), the first regional organization not to include the U.S., Canada, or European countries.

Meeting in Caracas this past July, CELAC selected Chavez and the newly elected conservative president of Chile, Sabastian Pinera, as co-chairs of the forum that will draft statutes for the organization. While it seems like an odd pairing, the U.S. media’s cartoonish characterization of Chavez is not shared widely in Latin America. “Chavez…has shown himself adaptable to making major compromises in order to further Latin American and regional integration,” says Alexander Main of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.

[naaman fletcher]

8. Is Chavez a liar?

Chavez has said that the tensions are because of Colombia's accusations about FARC camps in Venezuela. This article says its about an internal Colombian matter that has nothing to with with Venezuela. Is Chavez lying?

[Judi Lynn]

9. Where's your link for Chavez' statement "the tensions are because of Colombia's accusations?"

Feel free to post it in order to create a foundation for your question.

[Peace Patriot]

11. Simplistic thinking! Is it not possible for BOTH things to be true?

Uribe had plenty of reason to throw up a lot of flak about Venezuela, and to cause a fracas with Venezuela, because of on-going investigations of Uribe, some 70 of whose political cohorts are under investigation or in jail--for bribery, corruption, drug trafficking, ties to deaths squads and other crimes--any of which could land Uribe himself in deep doo-doo, plus additional on-going investigations, such as Uribe's widespread domestic spying (with high tech U.S. help), and La Macarena and other mass graves just coming to light.

Venezuela was on the receiving end of Uribe's "Colin Powell" number at the OAS. The "tension"--Venezuela's reaction (putting border forces on alert, cutting off diplomatic relations) was caused by Uribe's false charges, but WHY Uribe made the false charges, and alarmed the entire region, including many other leaders, with fear of a war, is quite another question. Was Uribe trying to start a war? Was he triggering a U.S. war plan? The FARC was used as the excuse for the bombing/raid on Ecuador in 2008. Was that the rehearsal and this the main play? Was this Uribe's last service to his paymasters and protectors in Washington--to spark a war with Venezuela in his final days in office? Reasonable questions, under the circumstances. And when Santos didn't back him up (for now, anyway), then the question became: What other motive would Uribe have for doing this? Lula da Silva, said, early on, that, "This is personal." I think he meant personal between Uribe and Chavez (--long history of Uribe treachery against Chavez, who has survived it all, while Uribe is now out of power). That could be part of it as well. But, given Uribe's filthily corrupt connections and methods, his own personal vulnerability to prosecution seems the likely cause of his outburst--at least for purposes of analysis in the short term. What may have been going on in the Bush Junta/Wm Brownfield/Uribe "axis of evil"--to provide Uribe with the endlessly exploitable "miracle laptop" (later, laptopS), for instance--may take some time to unravel.