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Other potential perpetrators were mentioned by a demobilized member of the AUC paramilitary group, "Ernesto Baez", who testified that the murder of Galán was organized by the Colombian mafia with the participation of corrupt members of the military and the DAS. --from the OP -- Luis Carlos Galan was murdered in 1989. Below are Uribe's office-holding dates in Antioquia (location of Medellin). He was the mayor of Medellin before this murder, a senator when the murder occurred and governor of Antioquia afterward. Uribe started his criminal career in Antioquia, where he began organizing the horrors that got writ large, all over Colombia, once he became president. These horrors are described in the letters of Fr. Javier Giraldo Moreno (below), a Jesuit priest (I believe based in Antioquia) who blames Uribe directly for forming the paramilitaries, early in his career, that committed untold atrocities, for creating an atmosphere of barbarism in the country, for intending the extermination of human rights activists and other opposition, and for creating all the mechanisms and strategies that resulted in these barbaric acts. He also says that Uribe put criminals and drug traffickers into public offices, he discusses the DAS spying (by Uribe) and he discusses the corrupt machinations ("sordid in the extreme") surrounding Uribe's re-election in 2006. I don't know if Uribe benefitted from the assassination of Luis Carlos Galan, but that needs looking into. In any case, he created the political establishment in Antioquia, and later in the whole country, in which murder was the first-resort political solution. He turned Colombia into Murder, Inc. It is no surprise that a liberal candidate was shot to death in the blood-soaked political environment that Uribe created in Antioquia. ----- Uribe-wiki Uribe started his political career in his home department of Antioquia. He has held office in the Empresas Públicas de Medellín and in the Ministry of Labor and in the Civil Aeronautic. Later he held office as the mayor of Medellín in 1982, then he was Senator between 1986 and 1994 and finally Governor of Antioquia between 1995 and 1997 before he was elected President of Colombia in 2002.
Before his current role in politics Uribe was a lawyer. He studied law at the University of Antioquia and completed a post-graduate management program at Harvard Extension School.<2> He was awarded the Simón Bolívar Scholarship of the British Council and was nominated Senior Associate Member at St Antony's College in the University of Oxford after completing his term in office as the governor of Antioquia in 1998.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Álvaro_Uribe (my emphasis) -------------------- Here is Fr. Javier Giraldo Moreno's initial letter to Fr. John Dear, an American Jesuit, regarding the shock and scandal of Georgetown U.'s appointment of Uribe to a prestigious guest lecturer position. ----- www.javiergiraldo.org My Dear John:
I send you brotherly and loving greetings.
I write to you with great concern regarding the fact that Georgetown, our Jesuit University, has hired the outgoing president of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe Vélez as a professor. I am constantly receiving messages from individuals and groups who have suffered enormously during his term as president. They are protesting and questioning the mindset of our Company, or its lack of ethical judgment in making a decision of this kind.
It is possible that decision makers at Georgetown have received positive appraisals from Colombians in high political or economic positions, but it is difficult to ignore, at least, the intense moral disagreements aroused by his government and the investigations and sanctions imposed by international organizations that try to protect human dignity. The mere fact that, during his political career, while he was governor of Antioquia Province (1995-1997) he founded and protected so many paramilitary groups, known euphemistically as “Convivir” (“Live Together”), who murdered and “disappeared” thousands of people and displaced multitudes, committing many other atrocities, that alone would imply a need for moral censure before entrusting him with any responsibility in the future.
But not only did he continue to sponsor those paramilitary groups, but he defended them and he perfected them into a new pattern of legalized paramilitarism, including networks of informants, networks of collaborators, and the new class of private security companies that involve some millions of civilians in military activities related to the internal armed conflict, while at the same time he was lying to the international community with a phony demobilization of the paramilitaries.
In addition, the scandalous practice of “false positives” took place during his administration. The practice consists in murdering civilians, usually farmers, and after killing them, dressing them as combatants in order to justify their deaths. That is the way he tried to demonstrate faked military victories over the rebels and also to eliminate the activists in social movements that work for justice.
The corruption during his administration was more than scandalous, not just be-cause of the presence of drug traffickers in public positions but also because the Congress and many government offices were occupied by criminals. Today more than a hundred members of Congress are involved in criminal proceedings, all of them President Uribe’s closest supporters.
The purchase of consciences in order to manipulate the judicial apparatus was disgraceful. It ended up destroying, at the deepest level, the moral conscience of the country. Another disgrace was the corrupt manner in which the Ministers closest to him manipulated agricultural policy in order to favor the very rich with public money, meanwhile impeding and stigmatizing social projects. The corruption of his sons, who enriched themselves by using the advantages of power, scandalized the whole country at one time.
In addition, he used the security agency that was directly under his control (the Department of Administrative Security) (DAS) to spy on the courts, on opposition politicians, and on social and human rights movements, by means of clandestine telephone tapping. The corrupt machinations he used to obtain his re-election as President in 2006 were sordid in the extreme, with the result that ministers and close collaborators been close to jail.
He manipulated the coordination between the Army and the paramilitary groups that resulted in 14,000 extrajudicial executions during his term of office. His strate-gies of impunity for those who, through the government or the “para-government”, committed crimes against humanity will go down in history for their brazenness.
The decision by the Jesuits at Georgetown to offer a professorship to Álvaro Uribe, is not only deeply offensive to those Colombians who still maintain moral principles, but also places at high risk the ethical development of the young people who attend our university in Washington. Where are the ethics of the Company of Jesus?
I am writing you these lines because I am sure that you will share our concerns and perhaps you can forward them to the Jesuits at Georgetown and to other circles of thoughtful persons you know and to those who are in sympathy with justice.
With a fond embrace,
Javier Giraldo Moreno, S.J.http://www.lab.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=613:usa-protests-over-uribe-appointment&catid=66:analysis&Itemid=39(my emphasis) ----- Below, a totally amazing letter of Fr. Javier Giraldo Moreno, ripping into Uribe. One of Uribe's henchmen, Dr. Diego Palacio Betancourt, answered the above letter in the media, without notifiying Fr. Moreno. This is Fr. Moreno's reply, in which he discusses Dr. Palacio's complicity in Uribe's crime wave, and further describes the crime wave. Here are just two parts of his reply (it's a long one): ----- Letter of response from Javier Giraldo Moreno, S.J. to Dr. Diego Palacio Betancourt
City of Bogota, September 27, 2010
Do you think, Dr. Palacio, that the attitude of the former president Uribe before the Peace community of San Jose de Apartado was not based in deep feelings of hatred? How do you explain that he never took any measures whatsoever to protect that population from the continual massacres, extra-judicial executions, forced disappearances, forced displacements, indiscriminate bombing, sexual abuses, lootings, pillaging, theft of work animals, of farm animals, burning down of homes, crop destruction, death threats, persistent extermination notices and many other atrocities, all perpetrated by direct or indirect agents of the State, since the paramilitaries worked side by side with the army, coordinating their movements and even eat lunch together all within the sights of their victims? Even though Dr. Uribe was given detailed and prompt information regarding each crime, why do you think that he eluded during eight years in which you were by his side during every control and protection action, such as you are ordered to be by specific precepts in the National Constitution? Still more, why do you think Dr. Uribe slandered the Peace Community, on five different occasions, and these were disseminated by all the mainstream media? He did not retract even though it was demonstrated that his action was in violation of what is laid out by the constitutional court in its sentence T-1191/04?
Perhaps you would argue, Dr. Palacio, as has been argued by many of your cronies, that former president Uribe cannot be made responsible for the many lamentable things that occurred during his government and over which he would not have had decision-making power. Even so, all of the procedures and strategies that I mentioned in my letter to Father John Dear, constituted articulated elements of policies consciously designed, many times denounced but stubbornly maintained active or passively, going against constitutional precepts which make the Chief of State the supreme guarantor of constitutional rights. Today universal justice, staying a step ahead of the elusion of responsibility ... in numerous genocides throughout history, has more rigorously defined the responsibility of governance, identifying the roll of one that directs a criminal apparatus without giving a single concrete order to commit a crime, but knowing that the machinery that they direct and control, through its various mechanisms, commits them wholesale. In reality, the judicial order observed by international tribunals establishes that a person may be held responsible for the results of an action as if it were their own, even though they did not personally commit the crime, when the duty to prevent the action ... was legally necessary. The Colombian Constitution leaves no doubt regarding this. (Translated by Diana Méndez, a CSN Volunteer Translator. Edited by Teresa Welsh, a CSN Volunteer Editor) http://colombiasupport.blogspot.com/2010/11/letter-of-response-from-javier-giraldo.html------------------ Good article. Oct 2010. (SNIP) Uribe’s post at Georgetown has sparked a controversy at one of the country’s most esteemed international universities and across academia. On Sept. 29, more than 150 scholars, including 10 Georgetown professors and leading experts on Latin America and Colombia, signed a letter calling for Uribe to be fired. The letter, authored by a Jesuit priest, Father Javier Giraldo Moreno, one of Colombia’s foremost human-rights proponents, argued that Uribe’s appointment “is not only deeply offensive to those Colombians who still maintain moral principles, but also places at high risk the ethical development of the young people who attend our university.”(SNIP) Human-rights accusations have dogged Uribe since he was governor of Antioquia in the 1990s, when allegations first surfaced about connections to the paramilitary groups that have been responsible for some of Colombia’s bloodiest violence. Uribe has not been formally charged with wrongdoing, but more than 100 of his political allies, including relatives, are under investigation for paramilitary ties. With the so-called false-positives scandal, meanwhile, Uribe’s administration received a considerable black eye after it was discovered that members of the Army had been killing civilians and dressing them as guerillas to inflate body counts. Last week, an investigation into the illegal wiretapping of human-rights workers, court justices, and Uribe’s political opponents implicated his chief of staff.http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/10/13/appointment-of-colombian-ex-president-sparks-controversy-at-georgetown.html(my emphasis) --------------------------------
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