Israel's Latin American trail of terror

[StandWatie]

I learned an infinite amount of things in Israel, and to that country I owe part of my essence, my human and military achievements” said Colombian paramilitary leader and indicted drug trafficker Carlos Castao in his ghostwritten autobiography, Mi Confesin.




Castao, who leads the Colombian paramilitaries, known by their Spanish acronym AUC, the largest right-wing paramilitary force to ever exist in the western hemisphere reveals that he was trained in the arts of war in Israel
as a young man of 18 in the 1980s.

He glowingly adds: “I copied the concept of paramilitary forces from the Israelis,” in his chapter-long account of his Israel experiences.

Castao’s right-wing Phalange-like AUC force is now by far the worst human rights violator in all of the Americas, and ties between that organisation and Israel are continually surfacing in the press.

http://english.aljazeera.net/Archive/News/GlobalNews/Features/2003/News+Global+Features.htm

[Turbulence]

1. interesting

Castaño also describes training that could not have taken place without the express permission of the highest authorities of the Israeli Defense Forces, such as when he performed "airborne maneuvers and parachuted at night over islands of the Mediterranean. I had to carry weights as ballast to adjust my free-fall speed." However, sources in Israeli daily Ha'aretz doubted the veracity of this story, when this author asked them about it.


http://www.narconews.com/Issue29/article729.html


AUC drugs-for-weapons ring allegedly operated here

A joint US, UK, Costa Rican and Panamanian sting operation called "White Terror" has resulted in at least six arrests for an alleged conspiracy by the right-wing Colombian AUC paramilitary to trade $25 million worth of cocaine for 9,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 300 pistols, grenade launchers, 300,000 grenades, rocket launchers and 53 million rounds of ammunition. Meetings involving alleged AUC supply operatives were secretly videotaped in London, the Virgin Islands and Panama, and arrests and seizures were made in Costa Rica, the United States and Panama.

US ambassador knew of arms deal

The latest twist to the scandal over a large shipment of AK-47 assault rifles that on paper went from the Nicaraguan police to the Panamanian police, but actually went to Colombia's AUC paramilitary, is that the US ambassador to Nicaragua knew about the deal, or at least part of it. Nicaraguan government officials say that they cleared the transaction with American Ambassador Oliver Garza before purportedly selling the weapons to Panama via Israeli-owned and Guatemala-based GERSA, an arms trading company. The US State Department has confirmed the Nicaraguan version, but Garza says that he didn't know the weapons were headed for the AUC.

http://www.thepanamanews.com/pn/v_08/issue_21/news_briefs.html

The tale of how a Nicaraguan police arsenal of AK-47s made its way into the hands of Colombias right-wing AUC (United Colombian Self-Defense) death squads continues as an international musical chairs legal farce. The brief description of the underlying transaction is that, using paperwork that purported to describe a sale of some 3,000 assault rifles and other war material by the Nicaraguan police to the Panamanian police, and with the prior approval of US ambassador to Nicaragua Oliver Garza, the weapons were loaded onto the Otterloo, a freighter of obscure and shifting ownership, and taken to the Colombian port of Turbo. Acting as middlemen were three Israeli arms merchants, Panama-based Shimon Yelinek and Guatemala-based Oris Zoller and Uzi Kissilevich. The Turbo area is more or less the AUC paramilitarys turf, but in the port itself the Colombian government does maintain a presence. For the arrival of the Otterloo, however, Colombian customs officials conveniently disappeared for two days, during which the AUC off loaded the arms into trucks, which headed out of town to points unknown. The Otterloo then steamed off to Panama.

http://www.thepanamanews.com/pn/v_09/issue_16/news_03.html



The Bush administration does include many high-ranking officials from the period when the U.S. directly inserted itself, with disastrous results, into Central America's civil wars and revolutions. Reich, Elliot Abrams, John Negroponte, and John Poindexter among others, all helped direct Ronald Reagan's Latin American policy, and all were implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal that nearly brought down the administration. And while the language may have changed_"terrorism," not Cuban-Soviet communism, is the specter that now haunts Latin America_the repertoire of the Colombian counterinsurgency is all too familiar. Political murders like the shooting of a Catholic archbishop in Cali (he was a sharp critic of the paramilitaries, guerrillas, and the government, and his death remains a mystery), and the mass killings and disappearances of peasants, trade unionists, human rights activists, leftists, and anyone suspected of sympathizing with these have characterized the conflict, which has exhibited marked similarities with the political violence that tore apart El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica twenty years ago.

http://www.counterpunch.org/leary0512.html


Both overt and covert support for right-wing death squads are Otto Reichs specialty.

http://www.indybay.org/news/2002/06/134156.php


UNITED STATES: Another contra scandal?

BY GARRY M. LEECH

NEW YORK  During the 1980s, the Reagan administration became mired in the Iran-contra scandal following revelations that it illegally sold weapons to Iran and used the proceeds to covertly arm and fund Nicaraguan contra forces attempting to overthrow the Sandinista government.

Last year, Israeli arms dealers bought 3000 assault rifles and ammunition from the Nicaraguan security forces and covertly sold them to Colombia's counter-revolutionaries (contras), the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC).

The fact that President George Bush's Latin American policy-making team includes former Reagan administration contra war warriors Otto Reich, Elliot Abrams and John Negroponte, raises questions regarding the possibility of a Washington connection to the purchasing, selling and shipping of these weapons to Colombian paramilitaries who are on the State Department's list of terrorist organisations.

While the Reagan administration had the audacity to illegally sell arms to Iran, an arch-enemy of the United States, the Colombian arms deal involved a cast of far more likely characters. The principal brokers of the deal were Israelis working for a Guatemalan-based company, GERSA, which is a representative of the Israeli government's arms industry.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2002/503/503p17.htm

Meanwhile, Samper was urged yesterday by Israel Aircraft Industries executives to confirm within the next few days a slot in space for a satellite Israel hopes to launch. Colombia has until Saturday to confirm the slot it has reserved with the International Tele-communications Union (ITU) since 1992. The reservation is crucial for Israeli plans to launch a telecommunications satellite for Colombia and four other South American nations within the next three years.

http://www.jpost.com/com/Archive/07.May.1997/News/Article-6.html

Recast as a theater in the new "war on terrorism," the Colombian civil war reminds us instead that the horrors of torture and war--and the more massive scourges of poverty, illiteracy, and inequality--have not left the hemisphere that gave the English language a dreadful word, "the disappeared."

http://www.counterpunch.org/ottoreich1.html

Israeli arms dealers and government officials openly admit that they will sell their military wares to just about any government that requests them. Said one Israeli official: "When a country asks for help, we don't ask whether it is democratic or non-democratic and we don't ask about its motives."

The trouble is that this single-minded drive for sales has frequently embarrassed U.S. Administrations. At a time when the Somoza regime in Nicaragua and Guatamala were on the U.S. arms blacklist because of human rights violations, the U.S.'s ally, Israel, went right on selling arms to them-arms such as fighter and transport planes, communications and anti-terrorist equipment, mortars, submachine guns, and Galil assault rifles. The apartheid government of South Africa has long been relying heavily on Israel to help it build up its navy, purchasing, among other equipment, patrol boats and gunships equipped with Gabriel missiles (between 1970 and 1979 it bought 35 percent of all the seacraft manufactured in Israel). It also bought 105 mm. howitzers, air-to-air rockets, anti-tank missiles, assault rifles, radar and other surveillance equipment.

A little over a year ago, U.S. customs agents found Israeli military equipment on board an Ecuadoran cargo plane which was refueling at New York's Kennedy Airport. Administration officials said that the plane was destined for Argentina, which at the time was in a war with Britain over the Falkland Islands and in desperate need of war supplies. Argentina, together with Peru, purchased close to $150 million from Israel's munitions factories last year. Yet the U.S. had made it clear that it was backing Britain in the war.

http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/061383/830613003.html

In arming the contras, U.S. operatives generally sought weapons of Soviet or Eastern bloc manufacture, thereby allowing the insurgents to employ ammunition captured from the Sandinista army, which was largely equipped with Soviet-type weaponry. (The use of Soviet-type weapons also made it easier for the contras and their backers to claim that they were obtaining their arms from defectors or fallen Sandinista soldiers, rather than from the United States.) To obtain such arms, the CIA drew on a variety of sources. In May 1983, for instance, retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord, acting on behalf of CIA Director William Casey secretly obtained several tons of Soviet-type munitions that had been confiscated from PLO forces by the Israelis in 1982. These weapons, and additional ex-PLO munitions acquired from Israel in March-July 1984, were then transferred to the CIA and, through a variety of clandestine channels, passed on to the contras.(7)
http://www.nisat.org/publications/us_arms_central_america.htm