Colombia: teachers flee paramilitary threat

[Judi Lynn]

Colombia: teachers flee paramilitary threat

Submitted by Weekly News Update on Tue, 07/26/2011 - 09:33. All 44 teachers at the public high school in Las Delicias, a village in Tierralta municipality in the northern Colombian department of Córdoba, sought refuge in Montería, the department's capital, on July 22 after being threatened by a paramilitary group. According to Domingo Ayala Espitia, president of the Córdoba Teachers Association (Ademacor), the paramilitaries sent the teachers text messages demanding 15 million pesos (about $8,535). More than 1,100 students attended the abandoned school.

The threats reportedly came from members of the Gaitanist Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, said to be a group of drug traffickers. Various armed groups--which the government and the media now call "bacrim," short for "bandas criminales" (criminal gangs) --are described as successors to the far-right United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a paramilitary group whose members were demobilized from 2003 to 2006, during the administration of former president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010).

The Las Delicias displacement is the second such incident in the department; last year 12 teachers fled a rural high school in Montelíbano municipality. Four teachers have been killed in Córdoba so far this year, and at least 197, including the Las Delicias teachers, have received threats. (EFE, July 23, via Univision; InfoBAE, Argentina, July 24)

http://ww4report.com/node/10159

[Peace Patriot]

1. Uribe didn't really disband his RW death squads. That is a myth that keeps being perpetuated.

The AUC was transformed into the "Black Eagles"--a network of assassins connected both to Uribe's vast, illegal government spying operation (including spying on judges and prosecutors) and to the bigger, favored and protected cocaine operations. The Colombian government was being run as a criminal organization, with Bush pal, Uribe, as the mafia don and $7 BILLION in military aid from the Bush Junta (or rather from U.S. taxpayers via the Bush Junta).

The corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs" and the Bushwhack "war on terror" (in truth, a war on democracy) were being used to consolidate the trillion-plus dollar cocaine revenue stream out of Colombia (for instance, with state terror including toxic pesticide spraying against small peasant farmers, driving five MILLION peasant farmers from their lands, which could then be taken over by the big drug lords and/or doled out to Uribe cronies or transglobal corporations) and, furthermore, to direct that revenue stream to U.S. banksters, the Bush Cartel and other beneficiaries. (And it occurs to me that this may have been another sore point between the Bush Junta and the CIA, i.e., the Bushwhacks trying to get control of this traditional CIA revenue stream, and increasing and controlling it in ways that the CIA never dared to.)

The political purpose of the "Black Eagles" and its network of thugs and murderers was to decapitate the trade union movement and other advocates of the poor--by murdering labor leaders, teachers, human rights workers, community activists, political leftists, journalists, and peasant and Indigenous leaders-- and to disempower and disenfranchise millions of poor people with forced displacement. The "Black Eagles" operated within and in coordination with the U.S.-funded Colombian military, which Amnesty International said was responsible for half of the murders of trade unionists in Colombia. (The "Black Eagles" also surfaced over the border in Venezuela, trying to spread murder and mayhem into Venezuelan border provinces. Clearly, Uribe was "projecting" when he said the FARC guerrillas were in Venezuela. It was Uribe's thugs who were in Venezuela!)

While this article eventually points to the far rightwing nature of these criminal "gangs" that are still operating throughout Colombia, it perpetuates the myth of demobilization--in truth, it was all a "show"--and positively implies that Uribe opposed far rightwing organized crime. Uribe is a product OF organized crime, which uses rightwing politics to protect its operations. With the help of the Bush Junta, Uribe got control of nearly the whole country (the executive branch and the military). He is associated with the murders of advocates of the poor all the way back to the beginning of his career in Antiquoa. (A local Colombian Jesuit priest testified to this in his letter to Georgetown U., a Jesuit university in Washington DC, in which he protested their giving Uribe an academic sinecure.) (George Tenet is an alumni--but the coddling and protection of Uribe, and the "laundering" of his image, extends into the current U.S. administration, and CIA Director Panetta, and additional actions, including an academic sinecure at Harvard, appointment to a prestigious international legal commission, and the removal of death squad and spying witnesses from Colombia--out of the reach of Colombian prosecutors and over their objections. Obama/Panetta/Clinton may also be covering up U.S. military and embassy involvement in Uribe's crime wave.)


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"The threats reportedly came from members of the Gaitanist Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, said to be a group of drug traffickers. Various armed groups--which the government and the media now call 'bacrim,' short for 'bandas criminales' (criminal gangs) --are described as successors to the far-right United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a paramilitary group whose members were demobilized from 2003 to 2006, during the administration of former president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010)." --from the OP

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This sort of "laundered" news report may be inadvertent (the result of ignorance), or the result of fear (many Colombian journalists murdered or threatened). Or it could be corpo-fascist owners/editors playing along with U.S. State Department cues on how certain issues are to be handled. (The U.S. State Department, for instance, sent a letter to the judge in the Drummond Coal death squad case, here, pressuring him not to force Uribe to testify and implying that "national security" would be jeopardized if he did. That was quite an overt signal, that corporate media owners could pick up, but there could be covert signals and directives as well.)

These "criminal gangs" are operating freely in Colombia because of Uribe and U.S. support of Uribe. Instead of stopping "criminal gangs," Uribe and his gangs were stopping teachers and trade unionists and peasant farmers--stopping them forever. And because of the Obama administration's evident obligation to cover the Bush Junta's criminal trail in Colombia, Uribe gets to benefit from U.S. "laundering" of his image and is plotting his return to power in Colombia, where his network of assassins, drug traffickers, arms traffickers, blackmailers, thieves, spies and purveyors of bribes, extortion and other corruption will be doing his bidding again and perhaps is doing so now but without direct government and U.S. taxpayer assistance.

I think we can presume that almost any surviving criminal gang in Colombia is operating because of the vast diversion of funds and other resources to decapitate and terrorize grass roots political leadership, and has very likely been favored--fostered, permitted to operate--because they supported Uribe and his criminal rightwing cabal. This may change over time--since, for one thing, Santos doesn't seem to be sympathetic to Uribe (Uribe loathes him--or says he does), and, also, the Colombian justice system has managed to retain some independence from the crime bosses. Though it has been extremely slow to solve many extrajudicial murders, this may be because the criminal network has been entwined with the government and because of certain U.S. actions to frustrate investigations of death squad murders and spying. But Colombia's justice system has managed to investigate, prosecute and imprison many of Uribe's political cohorts. With a president, Santos, who seems to want distance from Uribe (though they are of the same rightwing political party), the justice system--free (or freer) of the threats and illegal monitoring that they were subjected to by Uribe--may begin to operate more effectively on extrajudicial murders. I think the desire for justice is there but no one can know if it will prevail, especially if Uribe returns to power.

Thus, the implication of this article that the crimes that it reports are the work of disbanded rightwing paramilitaries--random gangs engaging in extortion and threats--is first of all to ignore that the victims are teachers (one of Uribe's targets), and secondly, is to ignore the on-going investigations of Uribe and the investigations and prosecution/imprisonment of his criminal cohorts, and the massive and very bloody crime wave that he oversaw, with U.S. (Bush Junta) support.

[Judi Lynn]

2. You're right. Even the rights groups like HRW, Amnesty admitted the deactivation is a farce

several years ago, yet the corporate media still keep laying down that disinformation daily. Makes a person sick.

Since it's only a matter of time until Uribe is utterly, wildly exposed, the more Santos can houseclean, rid his administration of the Uribe criminals, the cleaner he'll look, regardless of what he's doing about his civil war, etc. Uribe started losing his effectiveness a little before the Constitutional Court decided they wouldn't let him run for a third term. Things were just getting too hot by the time the Washington Post even started admitting the ugly truth of "false positives" years after everyone knew about them already. They admitted it formally through Juan Forero's article because it was such an OPEN secret it could nesver really be surpressed sufficiently again.

Thank god something went haywire sometimes during _Bush's regime, however, or they'd all still be doing business exactly as they were in the first place. They must have all just gotten too ruthless, too grabby, too dirty, and made some critical mistakes they couldn't cover.

The dirty, monstrous spectres of Rumsfeld, Cheney, however still seem far too close, too threatening now, after all this time. They had BIG plans for Colombia, as their "lilypad," their "forward operating location." No doubt their plans are still intact, having undergone some modifications, adjustments to new situations, new faces.