
The Government of Colombia plans to intervene in the 65 municipalities with the highest security risk to protect the lives of the most vulnerable. | Photo: The Colombian
Published 28 August 2022
The president reiterated in Ituango the call to the armed groups to agree on a multilateral ceasefire and accept his total peace proposal.
Police officers from the Colombian department of Antioquia found an explosive device this Saturday in the municipality of Ituango, minutes before President Gustavo Petro arrived in that community to meet with its members and authorities.
After the incident, the president met with the community at the Pedro Nel Ospina Educational Institution, after setting up a Unified Command Post (PMU), and analyzing the security situation in the region, while reiterating his call to the groups armed to participate in his policy of total peace.
After the security team detonated the explosive device in a controlled manner, the commander of the Antioquia Police, Colonel Daniel Mazo, stated that "at no time was the president's life at risk."
The officer detailed that, under the anti-explosive protocol that is carried out during presidential visits, a dog detected the presence of a suspicious device in a "secondary road" and the security forces proceeded to carry out a controlled activation.
"The place was completely cleared, there is no danger to the community and material is collected in the sector to send to the laboratory, in order to verify whether or not there was an explosive in the place," Mazo said.
Meanwhile, the head of state avoided that "I propose to these groups throughout the country a multilateral ceasefire, human security is measured with lives and that is why I make this proposal" in the company of the Minister of the Interior, Alfonso Prada, and the Defense Minister Iván Velásquez.
Similarly, the leader of the Executive intends to focus the fight against illegality on confronting the illegal economies that finance the war in Colombia and are engines of violence; in addition to instructing the Minister of Defense, Iván Velásquez, so that the mayors have autonomy and can make timely decisions.
In this sense, he revealed that various armed factions that commit crimes in Ituango have shown interest in approaching the proposal for total peace; such as the cases of El Clan del Golfo and the dissidents of the 36th front of the FARC.
The Colombian Government has defined the 65 municipalities that are most at risk for social leaders, and in this sense they intend to intervene in these communities to protect the lives of the most vulnerable. Ituango was the second PMU to be installed after Norte de Santander.
https://www.telesurtv.net/news/hallan-e ... -0002.html
Massacre denounced in Colombia, number 70 during 2022

As in other areas of the country, the Ombudsman's Office had issued an alert for the department due to the territorial dispute that is taking place between irregular armed groups. | Photo: Colprensa
Published 27 August 2022
The massacre took place in the Pueblo Nuevo neighborhood of Cúcuta (capital of the department) and resulted in four people being killed.
The Institute of Studies for Development and Peace (Indepaz) denounced this Saturday the perpetration of a new massacre in Colombia, this time the event took place in the department of Norte de Santander.
According to Indepaz, the massacre took place in the Pueblo Nuevo neighborhood of Cúcuta (capital of the department) and resulted in four people being killed, "so far the identity of the victims has not been recognized," they said.
As in other areas of the country, the Ombudsman's Office had issued an alert for the department due to the territorial dispute that is developing between irregular armed groups, "events such as forced disappearances, murders, forced recruitment are occurring," they add. .
The Colombian authorities detail that the following irregular armed groups are present in the department: The National Liberation Army (ELN); the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AGC); the Second Marquetalia; FARC dissidents; transnational gangs.
According to Indepaz, so far this year 70 massacres have been perpetrated and 120 social leaders and 32 ex-combatants included in the Peace Agreement have been assassinated.
https://www.telesurtv.net/news/colombia ... -0012.html
Google Translaor
********************
WAR OR LANDS? THE DILEMMA IN THE NEW COLOMBIAN ANTI-DRUG POLICY
29 Aug 2022 , 2:25 pm .

Colombian President Gustavo Petro promised accompaniment and protection to rural producers to contribute to the regulation of drugs (Photo: File)
"We will move from the failed war on drugs to a comprehensive process of substituting economies and lands in favor of a productive economy that dignifies rural populations and protects nature," reads the government program of the Historical Pact Coalition with which the current Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, won the last June elections.
The economist in charge of the neighboring country has been critical of the "war on drugs" policy implemented in recent decades with the backing of the United States, since it failed to reduce the cocaine market in the country or lessen its impact on criminality. He has stated that the fight against drugs will be one of the points on which Bogotá and Washington must come to an agreement and he has set himself up for it.
US officials, in the voice of Rahul Gupta, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), consider that they can open a dialogue with Petro in pursuit of "a holistic approach that takes into account livelihoods in the countryside and illicit activities", while Petro, for example, has been in favor of taking steps towards the legalization of cannabis, as a way to reduce the illegal market and take advantage of its medicinal and industrial potential .
In addition, the Colombian president wants to put on the table the conditions under which Colombians are extradited to US jurisdiction because of drug trafficking. According to the press, his intention is that Colombian criminals are only extradited in case of non-compliance or recidivism in Colombia, since his primary intention is that criminals pay for their crimes in national territory.
According to Sputnik Mundo , this "philosophy" gained more strength in Petro after the extradition of alias 'Otoniel' , leader of the Clan del Golfo (or Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) who was sent to a New York Court to answer for crimes, even though had shown affinity to collaborate with the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP).
WAR OR LANDS?
Another passage from the government plan of the Colombian president says:
" We will articulate the most effective instruments of the National Crop Substitution Plan and the ISDA (Comprehensive Community and Municipal Substitution and Alternative Development Plans) to the new productive economy policy in which Colombia moves from the fossil and illegal economy of cocaine to an economy based on work and food production in which the small rural producer will not be prosecuted, fumigated or displaced but on the contrary, within the framework of land and economic substitution find a decent place and the conditions of capital, associativity and knowledge to contribute to the regulation of drugs".
This has begun to show. The National Police of Colombia suspended the work of forced eradication of crops for illicit use to change it to voluntary eradication and substitution. In this he contrasts with former President Iván Duque, who insisted on the idea of fumigating illicit crops with glyphosate even after the Council of State stopped aerial spraying with that chemical.
In this way, and as the press comments, Petro has been seeking the decriminalization of drugs, a task in which he cannot work alone and, on the contrary, he needs to reach consensus with the White House. These steps began last Tuesday the 23rd when he and his defense, agriculture and foreign ministers met with envoys from the White House to discuss the changes that will be made in anti-drug policy.
Gupta, sent by Biden, assured from the Casa de Nariño that "the United States and Colombia have had 200 years of shared history to forge a trajectory in anti-drug policy. President Biden is aware that many of the policies of the past have marginalized some people, they haven't worked for many populations and we can do better.

The image of who loses the war on drugs is seen on the bandaged fingers of a raspachín who collects coca leaves during the harvest of the leaves on a small coca farm in Guayabero, (Guaviare) Colombia (Photo: John Vizcaíno)
The presence of the head of Agriculture, Cecilia López , is not fortuitous, since the Petro administration wants to launch an agrarian reform that recovers unproductive land and redistributes it among landless peasants. The alternative is more military operations where coca and violence grow. In its recent final report of 900 pages and in which it collects the testimonies of 30 thousand victims of violence, the Truth Commission indicates that in 52 years the internal conflict claimed 450 thousand lives, 121 thousand 700 disappearances, 50 thousand kidnappings , 8 million displaced people and 16,200 children and adolescents recruited into the guerrillas.
Even after the peace accords, Colombia maintains 500,000 police and military personnel, twice as many as Brazil with a population four times larger. The Pentagon, for its part, has no interest in losing its seven bases in a country with extensive Pacific and Caribbean coastlines. For the current government, the key is better land redistribution accompanied by comprehensive approaches.
Some data-opinions:
The State is running out "of conventional tools" because traditionally the fight has focused on forced eradication -manual or spraying- and voluntary eradication and crop substitution, but all face problems: Luis Felipe Cruz, researcher at the NGO Dejusticia .
99,097 families were linked to the Comprehensive National Program for the Substitution of Illicit Crops (PNIS), but as of December 31, 2020, after the 29-month period established by the government to execute the PNIS in its entirety, only 5,516 families (5.57% of the total) had completed the stages of the program: Monitoring report of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
Strengthening the PNIS would imply making it more comprehensive and connecting it with another strategy of the peace agreement, the Development Programs with a Territorial Approach (PDET), which would help focus these efforts on rural development: María Alejandra Vélez, director of the Center for Security Studies and Drugs (CESED) of the Universidad de los Andes.
The fight against drug trafficking is a multilateral fight "and must include the efforts of all countries. Colombia has to adequately coordinate with other relevant actors in this matter within the production or distribution chain": Hernando Herrera, director of the Corporation of Excellence in Justice (CEJ).
THE WAR OF FAILURE
María Alejandra Vélez added that the challenge will be to focus on rural development and start a medium-term conversation "about the failure of the war on drugs and how we are assuming the costs as a producing country." In reality, most analyzes agree on the failure of the so-called "War on Drugs" and this is not new .
This is an unmitigated failure and for which Petro has proposed a "paradigm shift" that includes, in addition to eradication, subsidized credits and recognition of land titles to coca farmers.
The same day of the meeting in the Casa de Nariño, the Colombian Minister of Justice, Néstor Osuna , denied to El País that his administration had plans to decriminalize cocaine.
"Cocaine is not going to be legalized in this government," he said. "The intention is not to persecute the peasants who live by growing cannabis or coca leaves. The policy is to substitute crops and land where they can grow other products," he explained. "Faced with consumption, the policy will be public health, not prohibitionism," he added.

The cultivation of coca leaf skyrocketed in 2014 in Colombia, according to a White House report published in May 2015, aerial eradication with glyphosate did not achieve its reduction and yet Washington maintained the pressure to maintain it (Photo: AP)
The current government has set out to help farmers get their products to market, something especially difficult in a country as rugged as Colombia, with no railways and few penetration roads. For their part, the drug structures pay on the spot and in dollars for the coca, their aircraft then take the cocaine to places like Los Angeles or New York, where a kilo can cost 60 times more than in the places of origin, whether these are in Colombia. , Peru or Bolivia, where 5% of the business remains, according to the UN.
Rather than defeating narco-capitalism, the war has strengthened it, its production has doubled to 2,400 tons per year due, among other reasons, to increased productivity and better irrigation of illegal cultivation areas, which takes place in areas mountainous areas where water abounds, such as national parks and other protected areas.
In four years of mandate, the government of Iván Duque only reduced 5% of illegal crops, according to the UNDOC, the United Nations agency against Drugs and Crime, which does not appreciate differences between the areas where there were forced eradications, to hand or with herbicides, and in which not.
Other data:
*Official figures indicate that between 2005 and 2015 the cost of eradicating illicit crops with glyphosate was 8.8 billion pesos, "that is, in ten years it was 88 billion pesos, which is equivalent to the budget of the Ministry of Agriculture in 50 years".
*The latest UN measurement of illicit crops shows that, although the number of hectares planted with coca fell in 2020, the potential for cocaine production has been rising for several years. In 2020 alone, the increase was 8%, going from 1,137 metric tons in 2019 to 1,228 tons in 2020.
*More coca with less raw material implies technification and a greater use of chemicals that end up in water sources and soil, experts point out.
*A document published by Dejusticia indicates that between 2005 and 2014 the Police captured 2 million 479 thousand 630 people, of which 29.3% were for carrying, trafficking or manufacturing drugs. That leaves an average of 80,787 arrests per year for drug behavior, which is equivalent to nine arrests every hour. In the same period, behaviors such as money laundering or conspiracy to commit a crime represented only 0.5 and 0.7%, respectively, of the arrests.
*As of June 2021, 18,426 people were incarcerated in Colombian prisons for drug trafficking, manufacturing, or possession, according to INPEC data. It is the fourth crime that has more people behind bars, representing 11.5% of criminal behavior.
HOW WILL IT INFLUENCE TO AND FROM VENEZUELA?
A fight against drugs that bases its success on casualties and intercepted tons has become one of the structural causes of violence in Colombia, also of racism and inequality. In addition to incubating where the Colombian State has maintained little presence, violence has also been present since that time in the Venezuelan State.
As a natural effect of such an intense war, Venezuela has been affected since its explosion in the 1980s and 1990s, and the border area has been involved in a network of sociopolitical problems that are difficult to gauge. This has resulted in displacement to Venezuela with the respective export of poverty and social exclusion.
This is how Petro has understood it, who held a summit with mayors and governors of the Pacific, one of the areas most disputed by illegal organizations. "And what is the response from Bogotá, and from Washington? Well, fill this with soldiers. And the others [illegal groups] also arm themselves and those who are dying are black," he said on the first trip after his presidential possession.
The flow of cocaine to Venezuela grew considerably in the first ten years after Plan Colombia was launched and the Medellín, Cali and Norte del Valle cartels disappeared. However, some satisfactory figures began to become evident when the DEA was expelled from the national territory.

Venezuela maintains its anti-drug policy that combines the disabling of routes with an agricultural and social policy that seeks the presence of the state and the real economy in the territories (Photo: File)
Sources from the same establishment based in Washington have shown that Venezuela is a minor route for Colombian drug trafficking, however, this does not minimize the impact of the disputes between organized armed groups in the border territories on the Venezuelan side or the effect it has on the Bolivarian Republic. being a neighbor of a country at war and permanent exclusion.
Given this, the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) has been developing the Bolivarian Shield Operation with results that have minimized the operation of the so-called Tancol , while, even in the midst of coercive measures and blockade, there is extensive experience of social coverage in the border municipalities.
The relationship with Venezuela does not seem to influence the relationship between the Petro and Biden administrations; Bogota has already appointed representation in Caracas and vice versa. Meanwhile, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Petro himself have spread expectations regarding the gradual opening of the border.
Washington has not sought that Colombia recognize the anti-Chavista Juan Guaidó as head of the Venezuelan government; Apparently, and until now, he advocates that the government and opposition return to the dialogues started in Mexico.
If some type of cooperation were established between Venezuela and Colombia regarding the eradication of drug trafficking in all its phases, the benefits would reverberate in the communities and economies on both sides of the border. However, the debt is long.
https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/gu ... colombiana
Google Translator
********************

Democratic capitalism is no solution for the Colombian people, nor for Latin America
In the second round of the elections in Colombia, the most reactionary and criminal forces of the Colombian bourgeoisie were electorally defeated. But as long as these forces continue to hold onto their capital, their lands, and their military might, the only peace the people will continue to experience will be the peace of the grave.
The elected president, Gustavo Petro, consistent with what he has been expressing for a few years, ratified the same night of his election that his task is to continue developing capitalism. His government proposals, such as the energy transition, agrarian reform without expropriation and some welfare measures, aim to modify some consequences of capitalism, but leaving intact the exploitation of the working class, the private appropriation by the monopolies of socially produced wealth and the power of the landowners, drug trafficking and mining monopolies in the countryside.
Both Petro, as well as Boric and Obrador, owe their electoral victory above all to large mobilizations of dissatisfaction against the shock policies of capital that have impoverished the peoples. They have mounted large waves of protests, and paradoxically their role is to deactivate them, essentially because they represent the interests of the ruling class, and it is with them that they assume the commitment of social stability to ensure capitalist development in times of crisis and the maximum profit for monopolies.
The recent examples of Mexico, Chile, and even Argentina and Peru, show the great risks for the working class and the popular sectors of going back and submitting to the policy of "social peace" that Latin American social democracy proclaims. Day by day, these governments negotiate and agree with the sectors of the bourgeoisie that they promised to defeat; and they align themselves with one or another imperialist pole, particularly with the United States, as the Summit of the Americas showed. Meanwhile, they pressure and blackmail popular forces to give in, and when this is not achieved, they do not hesitate to use repressive mechanisms to maintain "social peace", like the governments of Boric and Obrador.
Capitalism has generated serious social and economic problems that plague Latin America: the exploitation of the working class, extreme poverty, millions of migrants and displaced persons, unemployment, racism against native peoples and Afro-descendants, oppression against women, destruction of the environment , high crime rates and paramilitary violence. In the last 70 years in Latin America there have been “revolutionary” nationalist governments, old and new social democrats, even self-styled “21st century socialists”, who have not been able to permanently put an end to any of these problems.
Therefore, the Communist Party of Mexico assumes no illusions in the face of these social democratic governments. Faced with the dispute between two sectors of the ruling class, and faced with the two versions of capitalism that they offer, the "savage capitalism" of neoliberal efforts or the "democratic capitalism" of social democracy or progressivism, the only dilemma to the What the working class and the popular sectors are facing is to intensify their struggle and mobilization against capitalist barbarism, or to submit once again to a sector of the bourgeoisie, to the point of disenchantment and disillusionment.
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
The International Section of the CC of the PCM
http://www.comunistas-mexicanos.org/par ... n-colombia