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of last year, which granted total diplomatic immunity to all U.S. soldiers and all U.S. military 'contractors' in Colombia, no matter what they did in Colombia. I wondered at the secrecy with which the agreement was negotiated and at the argument used by its promoters, both in the Pentagon and in Colombia, that the agreement merely ratified existing arrangements. Why would the U.S. need a last minute (end of the Bush/Uribe era), secretly negotiated (--kept secret from the Colombian legislature, the Colombian people and all the other leaders of Latin America, as well as from the American people), SIGNED agreement--signed by the outgoing president of Colombia and the outgoing (Bushwhack) U.S. ambassador--giving U.S. military personnel and 'contractors' total diplomatic immunity? Why did they need this--a SIGNED document that, when it was finally announced, stirred up a raft of shit among the other leaders of Latin America and also within Colombia (where the supreme court recently declared the agreement unconstitutional because the congress had not been consulted)? Why create all this trouble if the provisions of the agreement had already been implemented? (In addition to the total diplomatic immunity, it included U.S. military use of seven additional military bases in Colombia and U.S. military use of all civilian infrastructure, including airports, naval facilities and roads, no tolls for U.S. military personnel on toll roads, no taxes on goods purchased, etc.)
Around the time that I was wondering about this, I happened, by accident, upon the CIPCOL site, and news about the discovery of a mass grave in La Macarena, Colombia, containing some 2,000 bodies, in an area of particular interest and activity by the U.S. military and the USAID. In fact, the Colombian military ops in that region resembled U.S. ops in Afghanistan (a "pacification" program, involving eliminating local community leadership, installing leaders friendly to the Uribe government, leaving a residual force to remind locals of the consequences of opposing the Uribe government, and moving on to the next "pacification" area). One account that I read said that the La Macarena grave site was nearby to a U.S. military base. It occurred to me that the Pentagon was using Colombia as "turkey shoot" practice for Afghanistan. I had also picked up somewhere that Blackwater was "training" people in Colombia, and I wondered if they might have been involved. (Local people say that the bodies in this mass grave are 'disappeared' local community activists and other community members. The Colombian military said that the bodies are FARC guerilla fighters but the Colombian military is notorious for its "false positive" policy--rewarding local commanders for high "body counts," who then kill civilians and dress the bodies up like guerilla fighters. The investigation of this massacre is on-going.)
Rightwing DUers scoffed at my speculations, but I knew that it was only a matter of time before U.S. complicity in the Colombian military/death squad murders of innocent civilians would be revealed. I mean, we're talking about Bushwhacks here. They were doing it in Iraq--terrorizing the local population with random imprisonment, torture and murders, and targeting local leaders for assassination. Why wouldn't they at least be encouraging the same horrific policies in Colombia--a bought and paid for client state, and their proxy state for destroying the leftist democracy movement that has swept Latin America? And why wouldn't they then assist the Colombian military in the political cleansing of the countryside and use the opportunity of the Colombian military "turkey shoots" to inure U.S. soldiers or military 'contractors' to shooting civilians? The U.S. military was said to be involved in "training" the Colombian military, but who was "training" whom? The Colombian military were "old hands" at this kind of "pacification" of the civilian population. They've been at it for over 40 years--exacerbated recently by the infusion of $7 BILLION in U.S. military aid.
What's interesting about this State Department settlement with Blackwater and its revelation of frequent Blackwater violations of State Department rules about training foreign forces and weapons trafficking is that it exists at all. What the State Department/CIA may be doing is aiming at Blackwater taking the rap for what was a U.S. policy in Colombia, i.e., they are covering Rumsfeld's, Cheney's and Junior's asses, once again, for war crimes. The article does not explain how the writer got the settlement document. Is it a secret document? Was it leaked? Officially? Unofficially? Or is it public record (non-secret)? That would help determine what the U.S. government is up to, in this instance, and generally in Colombia. There may be some things that they cannot keep a lid on, so they have to find scapegoats and use misdirection.
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