Colombia orders arrest of reporter in rebel case

[Judi Lynn]

Colombia orders arrest of reporter in rebel case
(AP) – 3 hours ago

BOGOTA, Colombia — A Colombian court has ordered the arrest of a well-known journalist based in Venezuela on charges he conspired with leftist rebels.

Prosecutors accuse William Parra of crimes including financing terrorist activities and sedition.

Parra was press secretary for then-Colombian President Ernesto Samper in the 1990s and has recently worked with Telesur, the regional TV network backed by Venezuela's leftist government.

Prosecutors say they have e-mails Parra exchanged with Raul Reyes, a rebel commander killed in 2008. They say that in one, Reyes asks Parra to buy missiles in the Middle East.

Parra issued a communique Tuesday declaring his innocence. There appears to be no evidence Parra ever tried to buy missiles.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gPqEzE7V1cn3-GXURQSPepmVE38gD9I37GQ80

[Judi Lynn]

1. Judge seeks arrest of journalist accused of FARC links

Judge seeks arrest of journalist accused of FARC links
Tuesday, 07 September 2010 07:50 Adriaan Alsema

http://colombiareports.com.nyud.net:8090/pics/media/william_parra.jpg

A Colombian judge ordered the arrest of, and requested an international warrant against, William Parra, a Colombian journalist from international news network Telesur who is suspected of having ties to the FARC, RCN Radio said Monday.

Parra is one of the people facing charges following claims by Colombian authorities that his name appeared on computers found in the camp of guerrilla commander "Raul Reyes," who was killed by Colombian armed forces in Ecuador in 2008. According to RCN, the journalist is facing charges including conspiracy, rebellion, and financing terrorism.

Evidence allegedly found on Reyes' computers, together with witness testimonies, allegedly indicates that Parra had friendly relations with Reyes. The journalist was also mentioned as a possible mediator with Middle Eastern armed groups over the purchase of mid-range missiles, said the radio station.

If Parra appears on Interpol's list of international arrest warrants authorities in all countries collaborating with the international police force are obliged to arrest him.

So far, all individuals indicted for "FARC-politics" because of their alleged appearance in files found on Reyes' computer have seen the charges against them dropped because of lack of evidence.

http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/11701-colombian-judge-asks-arrest-of-telesur-journalist.html

[rabs]

3. So, the "magic laptopS" strike again.

Or not.

(From the article)

So far, all individuals indicted for "FARC-politics" because of their alleged appearance in files found on Reyes' computer have seen the charges against them dropped because of lack of evidence.

[Judi Lynn]

7. That's great, isn't it? They are going to have to put more pressure on their version of the C.I.A.,

just the way Cheney did.

That's how to make their charges stick. Just force people to provide the evidence, or make it up.

You'd think they'd be too embarrassed to keep doing this, but noooooo!

[Judi Lynn]

5. You may agree William Parra resembles this Colombian comedian prior to his assassination:

Remembering Jaime Garzón means keeping his dream alive
Thursday, 13 August 2009 23:52 Pablo Rojas Mejia

http://colombiareports.com.nyud.net:8090/pics/2009/08/jaime_garzon.jpg

Thecountry would do well to reflect on the 10-year anniversary of the murder of comedian Jaime Garzon, who dared to build national optimismon a foundation of piercingly honest humor.

In the 1990’s, Colombia was in dire need of a laugh. Decades of escalating violence had dehumanized the country. Pessimism, repression andresignation had virtually silenced honest political discourse. Most of the country’s leaders were inactive, confused, corrupt and abusive and few people had the power or courage to hold them accountable.

JaimeGarzon, a comedian with big dreams and the country’s working class inhis heart, challenged this fear and pessimism with a uniquely Colombian and remarkably brave brand of humor.

Of his countless memorable characters, shoe shiner Heriberto de la Calleis perhaps the most dear to Garzon’s fans. Heriberto was illiterate andconfused by Colombia’s chaotic history and politics, but his kind-heartedness and innocence shed light on the gravity of thecountry’s problems and even showed the country a way forward.

Heriberto’s harmless exterior and immense popularity led many national leaders toaccept an offer for a shoeshine and informal interview. By asking simple, naïve questions, heastutely cornered national figures into showing all their stupidity,self-importance, selfishness and distance from the Colombian people.

Heriberto added a human touch to the distant, dehumanized world of Colombian politics and served as the people’s ambassador to the political class.Nobody spoke the truth more directly and simply than Heriberto. Nobody showed more clearly Colombians’ ability to remain happy despite the absurdity and brutality of their daily lives.

Inone particularly chilling interview, Heriberto asked journalist Alfredo Molano about life under paramilitary threats. Molano’s description of his own fear and isolation was unusually honest for Colombian television. Rarely did the national TV audience get a similar chance tounderstand the political and emotional cost of paramilitary repression.

Of course, Jaime Garzon himself received threats during much of his career and was murdered by the AUC in 1999 for attempting to facilitate therelease of hostages held by guerrillas. Allegedly, in a display of hisusual courage and decency, Garzon tried to schedule a meeting with paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño shortly before his assassination todiscuss death threats he had received.

More:
http://colombiareports.com/opinion/the-colombiamerican/5432-remembering-jaime-garzon-means-keeping-his-dream-alive.html

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_GY7hphYow8s/SShl92jr0qI/AAAAAAAAABg/f5tohi37fQQ/s320/jaime+garzon.jpg







Monument placed near where he was assassinated, swastika added
by idiot probably from the same people who killed him.



Jaime Garzon's recurring character, a shoeshine boy,
"Heriberto de la Calle" memorialized for his many friends & admirers.

[Judi Lynn]

6. I didn't realize until it was too late to catch it, I've mislabeled a hate sign on the guy's statue.

Was going too fast to recognize the symbol is a hammer and sickle, NOT a swastika. Thanks for someone who mentioned it to me, or it would have taken even longer....

Of course the person who put it there did intend to devaluate the guy for his politics.

The man who ordered that assassination, Carlos Castano, has publicly stated he did it as a favor to the miltiary.

Carlos Castano, whose death squads murdered an ungodly number of people, was himself murdered, along with his body guards on orders from his brother, another AUC leader.

http://i.telegraph.co.uk.nyud.net:8090/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01109/carlos-castano_1109710c.jpg

http://vbjorgan.files.wordpress.com.nyud.net:8090/2009/12/carlos-castano-01.jpg http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk.nyud.net:8090/media/images/40337000/jpg/_40337519_carlos_afp300body.jpg http://www.latinamericanstudies.org.nyud.net:8090/castano-2002.jpg

Carlos Castano
~snip~
On August 13, 1999, Garzon was murdered, allegedly by the AUC, a right-wing paramilitary organization, some time after they declared him a military objective. Carlos Castano Gil, leader of the AUC, was later convicted in absentia for Garzon's murder, and sentenced to 38 years in prison.

http://malijula.blogspot.com/2008/10/jaime-garzon-forero-born-october-24.html

~~~~~
Carlos Castano's history summarized:

August 2001

Carlos Castaño's criminal career spans almost twenty years. It encapsulates the involvement by important sectors of the Colombian army in a Dirty War that originated with President Betancur's 1982 peace overtures to the guerrillas, and has since frustrated the efforts of four other Colombian governments to find a negotiated solution to the guerilla insurgency.

Castaño's story begins in the most geographically strategic and resource-rich region of Colombia, known as the Magdalena Medio. He was 16 years old when, in 1982, he and his older brother Fidel, now allegedly dead, joined an army-sponsored "self-defense" group, "MAS" -- "Muerte a Secuestradores," (Death to Kidnappers). Motivated to avenge the killing of their father by the FARC, the Castaño brothers received their military training from the Bombona Battalion of the army's 14th Brigade, based in Puerto Berrio in the Magdalena Medio. Carlos enlisted as a civilian "army guide" and informant, attached to 14th Brigade forces.

The "MAS" provided the model for all the regional "Self Defense groups" that proliferated around the country in the '80s and '90s, and that were transformed into a national force, united under Castaño's command, in l997, when he organized the AUC. Set up by a consortium of wealthy Magdalena Medio political and business leaders and cattle ranchers to protect themselves and their property from the guerillas, "MAS" took its name and inspiration from a Medellín death squad, formed a year earlier by drug baron Pablo Escobar, and "self defense" had little to do with its activities. After receiving their training, "MAS" members were quickly incorporated into army operations and set out to "cleanse" the Magdalena Medio region of suspected "subversives," a code word that applied to anyone critical of the army or their far right supporters, or who sought to promote then President Betancur's peace overtures to the guerrillas.

Through the '80s, Pablo Escobar and his associates bought vast tracts of land in the Magdalena Medio. Establishing a pattern that has not altered, drug money flowed to the "MAS," the death squads flourished, and by 1986, some 1,000 Magdalena Medio peasants had been killed and tens of thousands forcibly displaced to clear the land for the traffickers. Civic and community leaders, trade unionists, Indian leaders, opposition politicians, priests, human rights defenders, and journalists, also became victims of the irregular, regional war.

In 1987, with support from army officers, the traffickers imported foreign mercenaries from Israel and Britain to run a death squad school in the Magdalena Medio to impart the skills of the Israeli Special Forces and the British S.A.S. to the Colombian death squads. Retired Israeli army colonel, Yair Klein (last heard of in June 2000, when he was sprung from jail in Sierra Leone) transformed the peasant militias of the MAS into a professional killing machine. Reputedly, Carlos Castaño was Klein's star pupil. By then, he and his older brother Fidel were paramilitary leaders in their own right. They had their own 150-man paramilitary army, "Los Tangueros," and ruled a fiefdom in the northern state of Córdoba from which they trafficked drugs, conducted a war in the banana fields of coastal Uraba that put one small guerilla faction, (the EPL) out of business, and perfected the art of parlaying services -- protection, intelligence, and high-ticket assassinations -- to create alliances, first with Pablo Escobar, then with the Cali Cartel. More:
http://www.crimesofwar.org/colombia-mag/career.html

~~~~~
The mystery about the death of Carlos Castaño and his brothers.
Posted on December 20, 2009
by vbjorgan|

Castaño is charged with more than 20 massacres and more than three thousand assassinations of what Castaño suspected were subversives and guerrilla collaborators wearing civilian clothes, meanwhile the human rights organizations accused him of murdering simply peasants. Thus, any version of their whereabouts, are still somehow valid. The story that he had simulated and plotted his own death grows stronger, since this plan would have managed to divert the ‘alleged’ interest of the authorities and the Colombian justice for his whereabouts. With the same reasoning, about his death, Castaño was not extraditable in order to make him accountable for his crimes in the United States.

In the world of drug trafficking mafias anything can happen. But in a family so powerful as that of the Castaño brothers, who were never precisely ‘narcos’, is not credible that his own brother and partner Vincente ordered his own security chief, alias ‘Monoleche’ to kill Carlos Castaño, in order to avoid Carlos surrender to U.S. justice and Carlos possible cooperation with the americans on information about various Colombian drug lords.

Carlos Castano could then be living anywhere in the U.S. or Israel covered in the witness protection programs, like his wife. And perhaps he did collaborate, obviously according to his convenience.

More:
http://bloggersoftheamericas.com/2009/12/20/the-mystery-about-the-death-of-carlos-castano-and-his-brothers/

[Judi Lynn]

2. Google translation from Colombian paper on William Parra:

7 Sep 2010 - 1:05 pm
William Parra pleads " not guilty "of alleged links to FARC
The journalist said he has asylum in Venezuela.

Colombian journalist William Parra, whose arrest was ordered by the Prosecutor of Colombia , pleaded guilty to the accusations linking him to the FARC guerrillas and said he has asylum in Venezuela , according to a statement released Tuesday in Bogotá.

"I am a decent person , an innocent person on the wickedness which had no other way to attack the illicit use of evidence , illegal evidence and violations of all kinds to my fundamental rights, " Parra said in a statement.

The journalist, who worked as a correspondent for Telesur multistate chain and was press officer of former (Colombian) President Ernesto Samper ( 1994-98), demanded respect for their fundamental rights and announced that he will take this request before international bodies .

" This requirement shall be brought before national and international bodies concerned, taking into account not only the rape and suffered in my fundamental rights, but also now against this new violation that occurs despite I am an owner of asylum in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela"He said.

Attorney General Guillermo Mendoza, Confirmed Tuesday that an arrest warrant was issued against Parra and noted that " the most important data ( in this case) were collected from computer (Raúl ) Reyes.

Reyes , who was number two the leftist FARC , was killed in an attack by Colombian military forces to a rebel camp in Ecuador in March 2008, where two computers were seized .

Parra was investigated in court since 2006.

http://www.elespectador.com/articulo-223052-william-parra-se-declara-inocente-de-presuntos-vinculos-farc

[Judi Lynn]

4. Arrest warrant issued for Colombian reporter accused of ties to rebel group

Arrest warrant issued for Colombian reporter accused of ties to rebel group
By Ingrid Bachmann/SH

William Parra Jaimes, who worked for the multi-state channel Telesur in Colombia, is being investigated for alleged links to the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) that go beyond his role as a journalist, reported El Espectador and the Associated Press. An international arrest warrant for Parra charges him with conspiracy, rebellion and financing terrorism, added EFE and Colombia Reports.

According to the Colombian prosecution, Parra is mentioned in various emails on the computer of Raúl Reyes, leader of the guerrilla group who was killed in 2008. However, the journalist declared his innocence and said his rights are being violated, added Reuters.

Although at first the Colombian media said Parra was employed by Telesur, the news station says that the journalist has not been associated with the channel since 2008, explained the news agency ANSA. Telesur emphasized Parra's professional integrity and quality, and said the charges were an attempt to criminalize his work.

Posted at 2010-09-07 14:55

http://knightcenter.utexas.edu/blog/arrest-warrant-issued-colombian-reporter-accused-ties-rebel-group