Prominent columnist quits over paramilitary claims

[Judi Lynn]

Prominent columnist quits over paramilitary claims
Wednesday, 31 August 2011 10:05
Alice Boyd

A columnist for one of Colombia's most influential newspapers resigned Wednesday after media reports he had ties to slain paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño.

Ernesto Yamhure, columnist for El Espectador, handed in his resignation "for personal reasons" after having written for the newspaper since 2000.

The columnist came under fire after reports that he regularly had contact with Castaño, one of the founders of the paramilitary AUC, and allowed the paramilitary leader to modify his columns.

A USB containing evidence, now in the hands of the public prosecutor, revealed the nature of conversations between the two men, in which Castaño Gil would encourage Yamhure to change his articles in order to reflect the ex-paramilitary's own interests.

More:
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/18683-ex-paramilitary-leader-influences-colombia-press.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. Carlos Castaño, described in an old article written before he was murdered by his brother's henchmen

http://www.tamilnet.com.nyud.net:8090/img/publish/2006/02/carlos_castano_51317_140.jpg http://www.latinamericanstudies.org.nyud.net:8090/castano-2002.jpg

Carlos Castaño
March 2001
Terror in Colombia - Paramilitary violence escalates

~snip~
The AUC is believed to be responsible for some 80% of the human rights violations committed against civilians each year in Colombia. The AUC’s commander, Carlos Castano, has publicly admitted that he was behind various high profile assassinations in Colombia in recent years. In spite of the numerous atrocities carried out under his command, Castano has been allowed to enter the United States. His two children attend private schools in London.

Cleaning up “drugs” with a US-backed dirty war against the left
The Colombian government is a close ally of the United States. The US has ploughed around $1.3 billion (£900 million) into Colombia in military aid to the Bogota government and there is more to come. Some 80 per cent of these funds will come in the form of 60 helicopters to help the Colombian military hunt down drugs “traffickers”. Amnesty says that the low-level air war, which is carried out with training and planning in the US, stems from the “same policy that backed death squads in El Salvador in the 1980s”.

In order to justify the war against the left, the Colombian government and the US are portraying military action as a war on drugs in spite of the fact that the far-right AUC and other paramilitaries are themselves funded by drugs money. As Peter Dale Scott pointed out in his book, Cocaine Politics, “corrupt Latin American politicians helped to invent the spectre of the drug-financed narco-guerilla, a myth”. He also cites a US military official who said that the way to counter “those church and academic groups that have slavishly supported the insurgency in Latin America” is to put them “on the wrong side of the moral issue”.

The US-financed “drugs war” is part of a wider government economic initiative known as “Plan Colombia”, which is opposed by nearly every trade union, human rights group and other non-governmental organisations in the country. Colombia’s neighbours and the European Union also oppose it. At the beginning of last month the European Parliament voted 474 to 1 against “Plan Colombia” after President Andres Pastrana asked for 750 million euros to back the plan.

Colombian military officials both are trained and give training in the US in the “art” of crushing left-wing insurgents. Many of these people are associated with the death squads. Some have even served at the Colombian Embassy in Washington DC. One example out of many is former Major-General Harold Bedoya Pizarro, who was chief defence attaché at the embassy in the mid-1990s. He was forced to resign “for reasons of state” after refusing to stand down as head of the Colombian armed forces in 1997.

More:
http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/index.php?link=template&story=95