Colombia

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Re: Colombia

Post by blindpig » Sun Aug 08, 2021 12:46 pm

SALVATORE MANCUSO CONFESSES HOW PARAMILITARISM AROSE IN COLOMBIA
8 Aug 2021 , 2:38 am .

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Salvatore Mancuso was one of the "political commissars" of the AUC (Photo: File)

The war that has plagued the interior of Colombia for some seven decades has gone through various stages of violence, with different actors that often intersect by interests and procedures, with the State playing a leading role -of course- in the equation. Historically dominated by local oligarchies, their interests have been imposed with tactics of extreme violence and strategies that have undermined any trace of peace.

Even researchers and academics have not hesitated to determine the terrorist character of Colombian government policy over the years, which has been systematic in its relationship with Colombian paramilitarism for half a century.

Thus, it has been shown that the Colombian State has delegated a war against the guerrillas and society in general to the paramilitary armies, as confessed by the former head of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), Salvatore Mancuso, in a recent virtual meeting with the Truth Commission.

The forum 'Contribution to the truth and recognition of responsibilities of Salvatore Mancuso' was also held with Rodrigo Londoño, formerly better known as Timochenko (FARC-EP) and 18 direct victims of the armed and social conflict, where both spoke about the origins of his activities, one when he was a paramilitary and the other a guerrilla, his vision of history, they assumed guilt and distributed pardons.


What is interesting in the case of Mancuso is that his privileged position during the time of paramilitary assumption provides a key testimony where, once again, the State appears as the main promoter of terrorist violence, with an essential role and without which the proceeding from these armed groups would not have happened.

WHERE THE LEGAL IS ANOTHER WAY OF DEFINING THE ILLEGAL

Mancuso, in his testimony, relates that the brothers Carlos and Vicente Castaño invited him to found self-defense groups that spread throughout the northern departments of Colombia, in regions where there were long-standing conflicts between the guerrillas, the state army, and the oligarchy. landowner. The conjunction of these last two sectors would outline a political, military and economic project, he affirmed.

He described the ties with various institutions and the Convivir: "There was always direct coordination that made it possible to advance with the self-defense groups."

Let us remember that the Convivir, surveillance cooperatives that were used as a legal facade for paramilitarism, were authorized to operate with Decree Law 356 of 1994, and were intensely supported by Álvaro Uribe Vélez when he was governor of Antioquia (1995-1997).

In 2008, according to a bulletin from the Colombian Commission of Jurists , the paramilitary chief Éver Veloza García, alias "HH", told the Colombian authorities that his armed groups had acted since their creation "and until today" under the protection of the military forces, and that the Convivir Papagayo, from the Urabá region, "always had its headquarters behind the 17th Brigade of the National Army, and that to get to its facilities it was necessary to go through army checkpoints."

Alias ​​"HH" said that "all the Convivir were ours", and the report gives an explanation of their insertion in the paramilitary world:

The Convivir Papagayo is only one example of what these "private security and surveillance" associations really were: true paramilitary groups under the protection of the State, or organizations that acted together and in coordination with the paramilitary groups. This situation had already been denounced for years by human rights organizations, by some State entities and by international organizations for the protection of human rights that saw in these groups the legalization of paramilitarism.

From a US jail where he has paid a penalty for drug trafficking, Mancuso assured that he himself was trained by the Colombian army. The State had articulated with the self-defense groups, this being an illegal actor, to delegate to them the armed confrontation in Colombia against the guerrillas, and characterizing the relationship of the public force with the self-defense groups, Mancuso pointed out: "The role of the Convivir allowed the creation of a hinge between legal self-defense and illegal self-defense ".

What Colombia experienced in the last half of the 1990s was the transition of the AUC "from the military side to the political side. And that is when the Self-Defense Forces take over state power, making pacts, agreements, and what is known as parapolitics. We had mayors, governors, deputies, congressmen and even presidents we managed to help appoint, "explained the former paramilitary chief.

This transition from the legal to the illegal was ideal for the covert actions of the Colombian State, which at least since 1968 urged the population to join the tasks of defense and public intelligence with decrees, laws and orders. But the Convivir was just the tip of the iceberg.


PARAPOLITICS OF YESTERDAY AND TODAY

Tens and hundreds of Colombian politicians have come to power with the support of the paramilitary groups, something unusual if we compare the actions of this sector with the guerrilla, criminalized and even massacred as happened with the thousands of members of the Patriotic Union. Instead, the para-politicians enjoyed immunity and gave protection to the power behind the shadows.

Salvatore Mancuso, in his virtual testimony, used the term "political commissar" to refer to his role within the AUC since he joined in 1995: "The political commissars had a fundamental role in the creation of the structures. I met with mayors , politicians and businessmen, had multiple roles. "

So not only did they work with the Convivir, they also confirmed the various alliances to wrest territorial control from the guerrillas: "I stopped being Salvatore Mancuso and became alias Santander Lozada and I began to have agreements with the institutions, with the Army, the DAS, with the Police, even with the Public Prosecutor's Office attended to the cause of self-defense to jointly confront the enemy of the Nation. "

Indeed, the "communist threat" was the common denominator of Colombian security policy by US mandate, which included the South American country in one of its most important centers of operations in the Western Hemisphere. And that ideological thread, quite violent in practice, led to the formation of paramilitary groups in view of the fact that the State could not cope with the war on its own, or at least that was what it led to believe.

Therefore, it is not surprising that, for ideological, political and profit motives (mostly from drug trafficking and other related illegal activities), especially among sectors of the extreme right, the paramilitary emergence has been supported with such vigor. The former member of the AUC mentioned that at least 35% of Congress had ties with them, pointing out that politicians, through the territorial control exercised by the group, benefited from being able to lead the local population in elections.

When one becomes an actor of territorial control, Mancuso said, it leads to having control over populations and that leads to having social, political, economic, cultural control and one can come to influence elections.

This testimony agrees with what other former paramilitary leaders have said, such as the aforementioned alias "HH" and alias Don Berna, who in 2015 from a jail in Miami confessed that there were members of illegal armed groups within the State, among politicians, military and police.

It is not the first time that Mancuso testifies to the intimate relationships between Colombian institutions and organized crime. At least since 2008 , when he was extradited to the United States, he has been releasing some stories that dot politicians, military and police officers, judges and also the landed oligarchy, especially the one that is more related to Uribism.

In fact, he promises to reveal more details about the policy of "false positives", but for this he prefers to give testimony before the Special Jurisdiction of Peace (JEP), a body that has denied the request because it considers Mancuso an "organic member of the criminal structure, developing a continuous combat function ", dismissing it. Still, by now Mancuso could reveal important information about state crimes in the near future.

It is for something that in these moments of crisis of Uribe, some sectors do not want to hear this part of the story. Especially those who currently occupy the House of Nariño.

https://misionverdad.com/memoria/salvat ... n-colombia

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Re: Colombia

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 13, 2021 1:23 pm

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Heroes or Murderers? Colombian Government Defends its Mercenaries

August 12, 2021 The government of Iván Duque this week spoke up in defense of the Colombian mercenaries who assassinated Haiti’s president Jovenel Moïse at his official residence in Port-au-Prince on July 7.

PSUV deputy Diosdado Cabello, during his television program Con el Mazo Dando, referred to statements issued by Colombian officials who, before multilateral organizations, decided to intercede in favor of the former Colombian military personnel involved in the assassination.

“The latest is that the [Colombian] Ombudsperson’s Office asked the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the OAS for precautionary measures in the case of the Colombian mercenaries who are detained in Haiti for the assassination of Jovenel Moïse,” said Cabello. “Colombia came out to defend its mercenaries.”

In addition, Cabello displayed items published by Colombian news outlets reporting how the relatives of the accused “asked, among other things, that they not call their loved ones mercenaries.” He added that in the midst of these demands a group of people displayed banners demanding “a fair trial for heroes in Haiti.”


In this sense, he reflected on the narrative that the Colombian media is trying to manufacture for the public, based on the treatment that the mercenaries have received in recent days. “The guys are heroes, because they went to assassinate a president,” proposed Cabello. “Duque sent them to assassinate a president.”

Terrorism industry

On the other hand, Diosdado Cabello recalled that Iván Duque, who sent terrorists contracted to kill the president of Haiti, tried to impose another false positive concerning the alleged attack against him, for which Duque is trying to hold the government of President Nicolás Maduro responsible.

“By the way, one of the military ‘heroes’ captured in Haiti is under investigation for false positives in Colombia,” recalled the first vice president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). In Colombia’s false positive (falsos positivos) scandal, members of the military lured innocent Colombians to remote parts of the country with various deceitful promises, then killed them and presented their corpses as those of guerrilla insurgents in order to receive promotions, bonuses, and other military benefits. In addition, another mercenary is the cousin of Ivan Duque’s National Security Advisor, Rafael Guarían.

Likewise, Cabello cited a statement by the Vice President and Foreign Minister of Colombia, Marta Lucía Ramírez, who said that she spoke personally with the relatives of the military personnel involved in the terrorist actions that ended the life of the head of State of Haiti.

Cabello added that the Colombian government, protected by US power groups, is singled out daily as the world champion in drug trafficking, paramilitary criminals, mercenaries, internally displaced persons, massacres, false positives, journalists killed, and persecution.



Featured image: Expensive poster—of the type printed at Kinko’s—in Colombia demanding a “fair trial for our heroes in Haiti, they were hired by legal ‘social’ security companies and they were tricked.” Colombia never ceases to amaze people around the world, commented Orinoco Tribune’s editor. Photo courtesy of RedRadioVE.

(RedRadioVE) by José Manuel Blanco Díaz with Orinoco Tribune content

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

https://orinocotribune.com/heroes-or-mu ... rcenaries/

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Massacres in Colombia Continue: More Than 60 so far This Year
August 10, 2021
This Sunday, August 8, Colombia’s Institute for Development and Peace Studies (INDEPAZ) reported another massacre in Colombia—the 65th registered this year alone—this time in the Putumayo department.

According to INDEPAZ three people were murdered in the municipality of San Miguel and Valle del Guamuez. “Three men of Venezuelan origin, from the same family were murdered,” wrote INDEPAZ. “The events occurred between Thursday and Friday.”

The reports indicate that the victims were Wilmer Johan González Escalona (21 years old), Leonardo Junior Linares (31 years old), and José Gregorio Escalona Linares (30 years old). “They were murdered in different places,” INDEPAZ detailed.

The Ombudsperson’s Office had issued a resolution classifying the area as highly dangerous due to the presence of various illegal armed groups including paramilitary outfits Los Azules and Los Bonitos and FARC dissidents from the Segunda Marquetalia group

In addition to the humanitarian catastrophe caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Colombians must face a lack of policies that guarantee security. So far this year, in addition to the 65 massacres reported in the country, at least 103 social leaders have been murdered.

Another phenomenon that has arisen in Colombia is the systematic murder of the peace agreement signatories. This Sunday, for example, eight armed men killed Gilberto Samboní, who was part of the reconciliation process.

INDEPAZ asserts that, with the recent event in the country, 34 ex-combatants have been assassinated in the eight months of 2021, and 281 signatories of the Peace Accords have been killed since the agreement was brokered in Havana in 2016.



Featured image: More than 60 massacres registered so far this year in Colombia (Photo: Carlos Ortega / EFE).

(Misión Verdad)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

https://orinocotribune.com/massacres-in ... this-year/

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Still 91 Missing in Colombia’s Uprising (Desaparecidos)
June 8, 2021

Colombians are still looking for 91 people reported missing during the national strike and demonstrations which began on April 28 and have left at least 20 dead, according to a report delivered this Monday by the Ombudsman’s Office to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), an organization dependent on the infamous Organization of American States (OAS). Other independent organizations have reported at least 65 deaths in the protests, most of them at the hands of the police.

“The organization has received 783 reports of people who could not been located, of which 317 were discarded… for having repeated names, because the people were located, or because they lacked sufficient information,” said the ombudsperson, Carlos Camargo.

Colombia’s Ombudsman’s Office sent the report of 466 cases to the General Prosecutor’s Office, he added. The prosecutor’s office did not admit 153 of the cases, and the Urgent Search Mechanism remains active in 91 of these cases.

Several human rights organization have reported the discoveries of demonstrators’ and activists’ corpses, found in rivers or empty lots, and others have denounced mass graves. Colombia has a tradition of human rights violations that most of the time are left unacknowledged because of the submission of its government to US interests.

Regarding the deaths during the strike and demonstrations, Camargo informed the IACHR that 58 have been reported, and the Prosecutor’s Office has determined that in only 20 cases there is sufficient evidence to show that “these alleged homicides occurred in the context of public demonstrations,” without clearly specifying the parameters required for this determination.

The visit of the IACHR team, which arrived in Colombia on Sunday night and will only begin its work-related activities on Tuesday, was requested by social organizations and the opposition, given the human rights crisis faced by civilians enduring bloody repression by Colombia’s authorities, led by President Iván Duque.

It will be a brief trip of just three days, in which the president of the IACHR, Antonia Urrejola, and several senior officials of that body will meet with “various representative sectors of Colombian society,” both governmental and from civil society.

A group from the mission will travel to Cali, Popayán, Tuluá and Buga, in the southwest of the country, where the most worrying scenes have been seen during the strike and demonstrations.

Violation of human rights in demonstrations
In a 110-page document, the Ombudsman’s Office indicated that it had received 417 complaints for alleged violations of human rights during the demonstrations, of which 306 (73%) indicated that members of the security forces were allegedly responsible.

At least 489 people have been affected, including 80 young people, 46 students, 38 women, 36 human rights defenders, 26 members of the public force, 18 social leaders, 10 children, four teachers, six trade unionists, three journalists, and two Indigenous people, among others.

Regarding gender violence, the defender expressed his concern especially about the cases of sexual violence that have been reported to him.

“113 acts of gender-based violence against women and people with diverse sexual orientations and gender identities have been identified during the demonstrations. Of these cases, one corresponds to violence by protesters against a police patrol boat, and 112 correspond to violence by police officers,” said the defender.

The mobilizations, which are entering their seventh week, began on April 28, opposing the economic and social policies of President Iván Duque. Duque’s administration has failed to establish sincere negotiations with the leaders of the National Strike Committee.

ESMAD’s performance in the crosshairs

With the arrival of the IACHR mission, one of the major concerns must be the actions of the Mobile Anti-Riot Squad (ESMAD), an organization that has received the highest number of complaints for human rights violations and aggressions committed against protesters during strike actions and demonstrations.

At the time when the government of Iván Duque announced what the opposition called a “cosmetic” police reform, the ESMAD once again starred in another episode featuring its violent excesses, in an act linked to mobilizations, in which demonstrators were honoring the memory of one of the victims.

Members of social organizations and civilians of the city of Cali reported that on Saturday, June 5, they were attacked while commemorating the late Cristian Delgadillo Sánchez, a young man murdered the day before in El Paso de Aguante.

According to the information provided, at 6:50 p.m. local time in the Loma de la Dignidad community, a tribute to the young victim began, when the Mobile Anti-Riot Squad (ESMAD) suddenly charged in, firing shotguns at attendees.

“At 6:50 pm in La Loma de la Dignidad—before the National Strike known as La Loma de la Cruz—inhabitants of the sector and population of Cali gathered to observe the wake and memorialize Cristian Delgadillo Sánchez, one of the frontline leaders from this community assassinated by security forces last night,” a statement detailed.

Attendees of the memorial service indicated that they were even persecuted once they reached their homes; that there were arrests, searches, intimidation, and attacks by members of the police. Three others were arrested, including a minor.

According to human rights organizations, 15 people have been murdered in Cali, while another 120 people are missing. Police and military repression at points of resistance in the city are only increasing.



Featured image: A riot police officer in Cali. Photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images.

(Ultimas Noticias) with Orinoco Tribune content

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

https://orinocotribune.com/still-91-mis ... parecidos/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Colombia

Post by blindpig » Sat Aug 14, 2021 12:50 pm

Juvenicide: A Crime of the Multidimensional War in Colombia
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on AUGUST 12, 2021
María Fernanda Barreto

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The systematic murder of Colombian youth by the Colombian State is gaining momentum (Photo: Colombia Informa).

At the beginning of the 1990s as the victor of the “cold war”, which in reality had very hot expressions, the United States, having established itself since the second post-war period as the head of the capitalist empire, also consolidated itself as the greatest political and military power, and became the axis of the unipolar world. That had been the objective of the struggle against communism, which justified all wars in a supposed defense of peace that, it was said, only capitalism could sustain.

That was at least the idea that was sold to world public opinion, to convince people that the triumph of the Western bloc of powers would guarantee stability and world peace for the planet. This argument was spread through cartoons, films, speeches and even songs, with which the thriving American cultural industry bombarded the generations that grew up between the 1950s and the 1990s. But the result was that the world continued to be filled with undeclared wars, and it became increasingly difficult to know when an armed conflict was internal and when it was international.

It was necessary to understand who the peace and stability would be for, and what price we, the people, would have to pay. We soon discovered that the “peace” they defended implied more accumulation of wealth for their pockets and more overexploitation for us.

Their peace became the privilege of the countries of the North, while in the countries of the South, in the best of cases, it became the privilege of the big cities. In exchange, we, the peoples, had to submit in silence to the most predatory plundering, the most brutal exploitation and, of course, forget such subversive concepts as independence, sovereignty and social justice.

In this context, the United States, NATO and Israel imposed their increasingly diffuse war models on the world, which generated the flourishing of private military and security companies, as well as paramilitary groups at their service.

The “war on drugs” ended up rearranging the business in their favor to strengthen their economy and finance paramilitary groups, then the “war on terrorism” was declared to legitimize its expansion and all this ended up in the “endless war” as an imperialist strategy, which configured a multidimensional or hybridized war that granted an even more prominent role to the cultural industry and its media corporations.

Venezuela and Colombia are clear examples of this new modality of war, although in different ways. Venezuela is a target of war because it represents a State that after decades of subjugation is insubordinate, taking away political, economic and military power from the North American power in the region, constituting a bad political example and, therefore, catalogued as an unusual and extraordinary threat to the United States.

Legitimization of a genocidal model of social control in Colombia

Colombia, for its part, is the stage and point of export for this war. Subjected to the most brutal dispossession, military occupation and the absolute surrender of its sovereignty, it has become the main imperialist enclave in the region and the exporter of a genocidal model of social control.

In Colombia, genocide, massacres, forced displacement, torture, disappearance and judicialization or lawfare as a State practice against the people in general and against the national and international opposition, have been instituted. This institutionalization, so well achieved, has required the support of the cartelized media corporations that respond to the same economic interests of the political class that has managed to govern the country for two hundred years, subordinating national interests to those of the United States, as the head of imperialism.

The mafias that manage the media cartels in Colombia have been fundamental to render invisible the social and armed conflict that the country is experiencing, presenting it as a fight between criminal gangs that are enemies of the State, and naturalizing the genocide that continues to be carried out. Dissident voices that accidentally emerge in the media are marginalized, and often face all those forms of institutionalized violence we have mentioned.

However, the paradox of the saturation of information generated by the massification of social networks is that they can be tools at the service of psychological operations for commercial and even military purposes, or they can be popular tools to open gaps through which the truth can break through. Goebbels’ dream or nightmare, depending on how they are used. Despite the algorithms that make evident the power of big capital in the networks.

The appropriation capabilities of these relatively new mass communication tools developed by alternative media and even by individuals defending popular interests, have made it possible to establish fundamental trenches of counter-hegemonic communication within them.

Unfortunately, the correlation of forces in this area continues to be on the other side. While imperialism and its governments only need a few hours of protests in Cuba to make a big media scandal, it takes massacres in broad daylight in the big cities carried out by the police, spread by social networks, people who risk their lives to cover and analyze such news, and the titanic effort of alternative media, for the world to know what is happening in Colombia.

The social outburst generated by the National Strike called on April 28th managed to reverse at least temporarily that correlation nationally and internationally, to such an extent that the world’s major media corporations were forced to make visible what was happening in the streets of the main cities of Colombia. Although their media coverage was partial, trying to minimize the seriousness of the events, delegitimize the protest and justify the violent repression, this popular communication exercise was so strong that some national corporate media were also forced to open spaces to denounce the massive violations of human rights and to report the popular demands in order not to lose the large audience they still reach.

But in spite of this, the much-vaunted “journalistic ethics” is today an eccentricity among those who occupy the great podiums of world journalism. During the days of popular struggle in recent months in Colombia, the loss of these ethics has been more than evident to public opinion and this has contributed to unmasking the links of Colombian media corporations with those who have mercilessly violated the people.
In Colombia, the Mobile Anti-Riot Squad (Esmad) – the police that is massacring protesters – is the US model of counterinsurgency applied to the civilian population.

via @Mission_Verdadhttps://t.co/AX52IjHjUO

– Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) May 5, 2021

Gerontocracy and class-based juvenicide

The most painful thing about this new genocide that has been committed mostly in Cali, but also in Bogota and other cities in the country, is that the main target has been the brave Colombian youth.

The systematic and planned murder of young people that is being committed in Latin America has been called “juvenicide” by Mexican researcher José Manuel Valenzuela Arce, and based on that category, Professor Renán Vega Cantor denounces that in Colombia a class juvenicide is being carried out.

Time, which always plays in favor of whoever is in power, has undoubtedly generated attrition that is manifested in a decrease of the intensity of the protest in the streets that, however, at very high costs, obtained great achievements that have placed Colombia on the verge of an organic crisis and, undoubtedly, have sown an accumulated history that the institutional political opposition can harvest in the next elections to Congress and Presidency in the year 2022.

But the most important thing of all is that it will be gathered by the young men and women of the popular sectors who continue to raise their voices, in processes as interesting as the Popular Assemblies that have been taking place in the last month throughout the country, in which the First Lines have participated as an emerging political actor that is an expression of this dissident generation without forming an organization per se, but with the unquestionable legitimacy that provides them with the local roots and the diversity that this implies.

Without dissimulation, while the media controlled by the mafias that dominate the country victimize the mercenaries who assassinated the president of Haiti and minimize the reports that Colombia has become the main supplier of mercenaries qualified by the United States and Israel to assassinate presidents. Criminalizing social protest is an editorial line that is becoming more and more widespread, with which, for example, the youth who have spontaneously formed the First Line in their communities, especially since April 28 of this year, are presented as a single group that is labeled as terrorist and even criminal, thus legitimizing the juvenicide that the criminal State is executing.

This juvenicide, which contravenes the most basic instincts of conservation of a species, is added to a series of State crimes. Ethnocide, massacres, political assassinations, torture, disappearances and forced displacements, and memoricide, in which those mafia-like media corporations that misinform the country play a decisive role.

Colombia has become a worthy object of study to understand capitalism at its climax in the countries of the South. An efficient synergy between government, military and paramilitary forces, drug trafficking, cultural industry and press, at the service of corporations and the hegemonic great power. This scenario also renders it a launching pad for imperialism in the region and an export model, as well as the theater of operations of a multidimensional war of the State against its own people.

Two hundred years of power of the same families that only look after their own interests and subordinate the national interests to the designs of the United States, refurbished with the emerging cadres of the new rich families born from drug trafficking and their lucrative laundering of assets, have consolidated a dictatorship where the traditional oligarchy and the emerging mafias intermingled shamelessly and it is no longer possible to differentiate them. Two hundred years are enough, and that model has grown old.

The model of supposed Colombian democracy that assumed that a revolution could be prevented by shooting, is today a genocidal and “gerontocratic” dictatorship that has demonstrated by force of blood that, while fear of the people is constant, today it is specifically the fear of the strength of the young people that causes them to tremble because they assumed the weight of the protest, transcending by far the initial call, because history has placed this generation before a desolate panorama in which risking their lives is their only alternative.

The Colombian Minister of Defense himself, Diego Molano, just a few hours ago publicly threatened the youth of the First Line, warning that “not a single one will be left at liberty”, while the intelligence agencies and their paramilitary groups continue to detain, prosecute, kidnap, disappear and murder young people from all over the country.

To abandon the Colombian youth in their trenches would be a crime that the youth of the world and particularly of the region would regret sooner rather than later, but above all the previous generations who were unable to do what this one is doing at the cost of their lives.

The countless images of cruel murders of young people that have traveled the world in these last months of National Strike are the most recent proof that the Colombian State murders and criminalizes the youth systematically and deliberately, because to perpetuate itself in power it needs to keep the country immersed in an endless war, even if that means massacring a generation.

At the same time, the peoples of the region should be on alert, because this class-based juvenicide that is being committed in Colombia will soon become even more internationalized if, through ignorance, selfishness or apathy, this generation will be left to fight alone and this brutal crime will be normalized.

Translation by Internationalist 360°

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/08/ ... -colombia/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Colombia

Post by blindpig » Wed Sep 15, 2021 1:51 pm

More than 600 environmentalists have been assassinated in Colombia since the peace agreement

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65 environmental defenders were assassinated in Colombia during 2020. | Photo: EFE
Published September 15, 2021 (3 hours 42 minutes ago)

The NGO Global Witness revealed that Colombia is the most dangerous country for environmental leaders.

Regarding the report that indicates that Colombia is the most dangerous country for environmental leaders, the Institute of Studies for Development and Peace (Indepaz) reported that 611 leaders and leaders who defend the environment have been assassinated since the signing of the agreement on peace.

According to Indepaz figures, 332 of the murders have been perpetrated against different indigenous populations, 75 against members of community councils of African descent, 102 against peasants, 25 against environmental activist leaders and 77 against members of Community Action boards.

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For its part, the NGO Global Witness, which keeps a worldwide count of crimes against environmentalists, revealed that during 2020 there were 65 murders of environmental defenders.

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Indepaz pointed out that in Colombia there are more than 152 environmental conflicts due to mining-energy, agro-industrial and infrastructure megaprojects that go against the interests of indigenous communities.

According to the Global Witness list, Mexico is behind Colombia, with a total of 30 homicides, a number that does not even reach half of the figures in Colombia.

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To date, Indepaz has documented 116 leaders assassinated so far in 2021, of which two people are environmentalists and 1,231 since the signing of the peace agreement.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/colombia ... -0005.html

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Here we see the correlation of capitalism and democracy........
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Re: Colombia

Post by blindpig » Mon Oct 04, 2021 12:57 pm

FIVE YEARS AFTER THE AGREEMENTS BETWEEN THE FARC-EP AND THE COLOMBIAN STATE
1 Oct 2021 , 2:21 pm .


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Signing of the FARC-EP-government agreements at the Teatro Colón, Bogotá, Colombia (Photo: Semana)

Five years have passed since the signing of the peace accords between the Colombian State and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People's Army (FARC-EP), in Havana (Cuba), after four years of negotiations.

Despite the fact that this agreement was only signed with what was by then the largest of the guerrilla organizations, the government and media discourse made it seem like the end of the war in Colombia and began to speak of a new era of "post-conflict ", as if with that signature the social and armed conflict in Colombia had ended.

But after half a decade, these agreements repeat the historical tragedy experienced by other similar ones in the history of Colombia, which have always been followed by an extermination of the demobilized forces and non-compliance by the State.

In the 20th century, an emblematic case was that of the agreements between the government of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla and the liberal guerrillas in 1953 , which was followed by the persecution and extermination of former guerrillas.

Even the FARC-EP themselves already had a failed attempt in their history when in 1984 they signed agreements with former president Belisario Betancur, which gave rise to the Patriotic Union in 1985, an organization that immediately began to be the victim of a systematic extermination of his militancy, that is, of a political genocide whose balance is more than 6 thousand militants murdered and assassinated.


Beyond the criticisms that can be made to the very content of the agreements, the expectations that the lives of former combatants would be respected and that economic subsistence alternatives would be opened to them, that forced eradications would cease and that the voluntary substitution of crops be imposed, as well as other social demands that were part of the signed text, today they once again look like a utopia.

Undoubtedly, the intensity of the fighting in many rural areas decreased in the first years after the signing and this contributed to the perception of progress towards tranquility, but little by little that calm also faded when the paramilitary groups, supported directly or indirectly by the military forces , they took over a large part of the spaces that the insurgent organization abandoned.

Already the government of Juan Manuel Santos slowed down the fulfillment of the agreements and the Uribe campaign to disapprove them was the winner in the plebiscite held shortly after signing them. The convening of that consultation was a great political error by then-President Santos, which Uribism knew how to take advantage of very well and allowed him to start the electoral campaign early to end up winning the presidency of the country.

Forced eradications, fumigations, massacres, forced disappearances, also forced displacement, the criminalization of poor peasant families who are forced to plant coca as a result of state abandonment that closes them all alternatives, continue. Meanwhile, the construction of agricultural roads and subsidies, credits and technical advice never came or disappeared, and the agricultural communities of Colombia survive in very precarious conditions at the mercy of the large drug cartels and in the middle of the war.

This week the United Nations (UN) recognized that 292 former FARC-EP combatants who signed the peace accords have been assassinated since 2016. This year alone, the non-governmental organization Indepaz counts 37 signers murdered and assassinated to date. . To this terrible figure must be added that of his relatives who were also murdered because of their relationship.

The failure to comply with these agreements, the slowness in the few achievements made and the genocide of former combatants confirm that the Colombian oligarchy has never bet on peace , but on the pacification of Colombia.


But despite this failure, their observance continues in popular demand and has been, for example, one of the repeated demands by various social organizations that joined the National Strike.

For the same reason, it is part of the agenda of the progressive pre-candidates and candidates who are expected to execute what is established in said document that Juan Manuel Santos signed on behalf of the Colombian State, and the dialogues that the Uribe government suspended with the National Liberation Army (ELN), currently the largest guerrilla organization in Colombia.

With only nine months to go before handing over the presidency, there is no longer a reasonable expectation that the ultra-rightist government of Iván Duque will comply with the Havana agreements or even stop the genocide of ex-combatants in which the direct and indirect participation of the institutions of the State has been repeatedly denounced.

We should add, to the situation already described, the prosecution, entrapment operations and false positives that continue to advance against those who once risked to trust the State's offers.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/ci ... colombiano

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Re: Colombia

Post by blindpig » Thu Oct 07, 2021 2:04 pm

"I am serving a sentence for the crimes of organized rebellion" - Interview with ELN member inside prison.


I interviewed an ELN guerrillero inside a colombian "security prison". On his Facebook he is posting photos with guns inside his cell. The ELN is strong inside Colombian prisons.
K. Nazari Jul 15

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If you are tracking activities of insurgents, social media is one of your strongest tools. During my routine check for Colombian guerillas on Facebook, I stumbled upon something extraordinary. “Are those ELN guerilla members organizing openly in jail? Oh what, they are currently hosting a Facebook livestream? Wait, is that guy having an AK-47 leaning on the wall in his cell?”. - I asked myself in disbelief.

I came across a page of a guerillero in a Colombian prison, dressed up in the typical ELN style clothing and posting pictures of his gun online.

This guy is not the exception. The ELN guerilla is strong inside Colombian prisons and bragging about it on social media. Footage of large parades of militant prisoners under their flag, TV shows via live-streams and more are propagandized on central ELN channels.

What previously could not be recorded by any television camera is now being made public by the prisoners themselves via smuggled smartphones: The Colombian state has little control over what goes on in its prisons, while the guerrilla opposition organizes prisoner collectives across the country.

I interviewed an inmate of the "security prison" in El Cauca, who is posting about his life in jail on his Facebook.

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ELN militants inside prison

F[O]: Who are you and why are you in jail?

I am Andres “El Indio” (the Indian), this is how they call me in the family of the 'Ejercito de Liberación Nacional', ELN (National Liberation Army). I am serving a sentence for the crimes of organized rebellion and aggravated extortion. Currently I have been already 5 years in high and medium security prison in the province of Cauca.

F[O]:What conditions are you facing in prison?
The conditions of an inmate in prisons of the Colombian State is quite precarious, you can say it like that, why ? The simple reason that fundamental rights are violated in prisons.

A prison should not be a place outside the law, the people held in a penitentiary establishment should not be eliminated from society, every person deprived of liberty should be treated humanely and with the respect due to the inherent dignity of the human being. But here in Colombia, the constitutional rights are only on paper, in reality they are not implemented.

F[O]:Do you face a different treatment, because you are an enemy of the state?
As a revolutionary in Colombian prisons we are treated as simple common criminals, there is no difference between a common law prisoner and a revolutionary. The work of a revolutionary is full time, for us revolutionaries there are no borders, dungeons cannot be a reason to let go of our revolutionary goals.

This regime does not care about the universal declaration of human rights. Right to freedom of opinion, expression and communication: they violate the article 19, which reads “Every individual has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, this right includes the right not to be troubled because of his opinions and to disseminate them, without limitation of borders, by any means of expression.”

A revolutionary has the task to take initiatives, to continue fighting from any place we can find ourselves in during this arduous journey. From these prisons we continue working for the prison population, where day by day we are treated as animals. There is no respect for our lives, there is no program or policy that helps prisoner rehabilitation, as we enter so we leave. Some will reflect but most others will take the same criminal path, not seeing other alternatives, it can be said that this prison does not help to the resocialization of the individual.

The prisons are only for the poor, because the corrupt white-collars, those who commit crimes from the circles of power are in 5-star hotels or farms with all the imaginable comfort. Just like “the Catedra”, the self-designed prison of the narco (drug trafficker) Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria.

F[O]:Many pictures and videos show the ELN openly organizing inside prisons, how is that possible?

The ELN is organizing prisoners and political prisoners collectives nationwide. Anywhere a revolutionary steps inside a jail, there must happen a development of consciousness together with the prisoners for our struggle. There are no forbidden places for us, we have to face the oppressors anywhere. Today four walls separate us but our will to fight remains intact, because when men carry the same ideal in their minds nothing can isolate them, not the walls of a prison, nor the earth of graveyard, from the graveyard our ideas will spring like water sources in winter time.

The prison system prohibits all political activity to the revolutionary organizations, but through our initiatives, we invented all kinds of ways to spread the propaganda of our organization. In a country where corruption reigns, it is not difficult to have access to things that are forbidden, as you can see right now I’m having this conversation on a high-end telephone.

It is also possible for high security prisons to be centers of contamination of hallucinogenic substances like crack, coke, marijuana, liquor, in short, all hallucinogenic substances. Also at the time of the Uribe government in the Picota prison of Bogota, there were great confrontations between guerrillas and paramilitaries with all types of firearms. It is nothing new in a country permeated by corruption.

F[O]:Can you tell us more about the life of a guerillero inside prison?
The mission of a rebel is to continue to fight for the civil rights that the government system continues to violate. As prisoners all our rights are violated, those related to our health, nutrition, the sewage system, discrimination, in short many essential things for the human being are stripped from us. From the collectives we transmit written demands with the help of friends that have knowledge of civil and criminal rights.

The life of any prisoner is not the same whether he has money or not. Freedom is priceless, but some who have a stable economic position are given the luxury of having more comforts, because there are no upright officiers with any ethical values, they are capable to sell even the soul of their mothers. A revolutionary with a clear conscience always maintains a high morale, tough while doing the years that the system has imposed on him.

Revolutionaries are only restricted in their physical freedom, because in our conscience we are free and we let our imaginations fly and dream, a revolutionary breaks these physical borders of the confinement every day.

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Our interview partner in his cell

F[O]:You have photos of weapons inside the prison on your Facebook, how is that possible?

Weapons are means of self-defense, as I said in a previous paragraph the guerrilla and paramilitaries are located in the same sections, and it is not rare to carry weapons, be it a knife or a firearm. We learned from the stories of the prisons in Picota, Modelo or Bogota. (Cases of clashes inside prisons between leftist guerrilas and right wing paramilitaries.)

I hope I could give the best answers to your questions, but it is not easy to write adequately in a penitentiary. We have to be very alert not to be discovered by the cameras or the eyes of the guards who like to hunt us. Guards will earn a revenue if they catch us. There will certainly be retaliations by the prison system for having made these accusations.


Translated by Pierre

https://frontlineonline.substack.com/p/ ... the-crimes
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Re: Colombia

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 10, 2021 2:23 pm

They report a new massacre in Colombia, number 86 of 2021

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Indepaz denounced through its social networks that the incident occurred in the inspection of La Paz, in San José del Guaviare. | Photo: The Spectator
Published November 10, 2021 (4 hours 18 minutes ago)

According to Indepaz, the identities of the victims of the massacre in the rural area of ​​southeastern Colombia are still unknown.

The wave of violence and murders in Colombia does not stop, an example of this situation is the new massacre reported in the department of Guaviare, where four people were murdered.

The Institute of Studies for Development and Peace (Indepaz) denounced through its social networks that the incident occurred in the inspection of La Paz, in San José del Guaviare.

"The events occurred in the areas known as Bodega India and the village of Cartucho, in that rural area that is three hours from the capital of the department of Guaviare," Indepaz wrote.


According to Indepaz, the identities of the three men and the woman murdered in the rural area of ​​the southeastern Colombian department are still unknown.

Indepaz reported that the Ombudsman's Office had issued an alert in the presence of irregular armed groups that have subjected the communities of the region to forced recruitment, selective assassinations, forced displacements, threats, extortion and forced disappearances.

According to Indepaz's balance to date, 86 massacres have been perpetrated in Colombia during 2021.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/colombia ... -0005.html

Google Translator

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They denounce the murder of former combatant number 290 since the signing of the Peace Accords in Colombia

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After confirming the murder of former combatant Gilberto Córdoba, the Communes Party maintains its position of complying with what was signed. | Photo: Colprensa
Published November 9, 2021 (12 hours 30 minutes ago)

Indepaz points out that since the signing of the Peace Agreement in 2016 to date, Colombia has recorded 1,266 murdered social leaders.

The Communes Party denounced this Tuesday the murder of a former combatant in the Colombian department of Nariño, so the number of those killed since the signing of the Peace Agreement in 2016 to date, amounts to 290.

According to the organization created after the peace process, the victim went by the name of Hugo Gilberto Córdoba and his murder was perpetrated in the municipality of Samaniego, "we continue to move forward despite the stigmatization generated by the extreme right, which makes us kill in the territories, "they said.

Although the authorities have not given details about the incident, preliminary reports indicate that the victim was attacked by unknown men in a mechanic shop when he was fixing his motorcycle.

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After confirming the assassination of former combatant Gilberto Córdoba, the Communes Party maintains its position of complying with what was signed and demanded that the Colombian State accelerate the implementation of the points established in the Peace Agreement.

In addition to the systematic assassination of peace signatories, social leaders are also targeted by irregular armed groups, the Institute for Development and Peace Studies (Indepaz) details that 151 leaders have been assassinated so far in 2021.

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Indepaz explains that since the signing of the Accords in 2016, 1,266 social leaders have been killed, with the departments of Antioquia, Cauca, Chocó and Norte de Santander with the most alarming murder rates.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/colombia ... -0036.html

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This is the 'democracy' that the US brings to the world.

If we workers do nothing about it we are complicit.
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Re: Colombia

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 17, 2021 2:58 pm

FARC Returns to the Battlefield: At War in the Aftermath of the Failed Peace Deal

K. Nazari
Nov 4

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In November, about 5 years ago, the Colombian state was ready to sign a peace agreement that would end a 50-year war between the state and the communist insurgents. High officials of the state came together at the same table with their biggest enemies. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) signed the peace deal after long negotiations. While the agreement gave the people hope for peace and change, current President Juan Manuel Santos bathed himself in the limelight of the international press; Santos was presented with the Nobel Peace Prize.

While 7,000 men and women of the FARC guerrillas surrendered their weapons with the sincere hope of peace, the state had its own unique motivation. The Colombian elite recognized: War against communists is bad for business.

The high hopes of the FARC, which announced its reformation as a legal political party, were disappointed: land and political reforms agreed to in the peace treaty have not been implemented, and now unarmed they face the already existing threat of paramilitary and state violence. More and more leading cadres of the legal party broke away from it, accusing the leadership of betraying the revolution. The party made the final break with its former revolutionary history when it decided to rename itself from FARC to COMUNES, which translates to ‘Together’.

In 2016, the FARC-EP (eng.: Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – Peoples Army) was ready to give up its weapons. Now, unarmed FARC veterans are being shot by their enemies. About 1,600 former FARC guerrillas will be murdered by the end of 2024 if the current trend of targeted killings continues, the Colombian Tribunal for Transitional Justice announced on April 28, 2021.

Not all are surrendering to this fate. Currently, the structures of the "new" FARC-EP have a national presence in 138 municipalities, indicating tremendous growth since 2016, the year the peace process between the "old" FARC-EP and the Colombian government was concluded. It should be noted that the growth has occurred mainly in the municipalities where the FARC-EP was already present before, even though new recruits now represent the majority of the total membership. Currently, there are three distinct lines of the FARC-EP, with two military/political lines relevant to a national insurgent movement.

The Origin and Perspectives of the “Segunda Marquetalia”
The story of the Segunda Marquetalia begins with the headlines about the dramatic disappearance of various former top guerrilla commanders from "reintegration zones." The zones were disarmed areas where the former guerilleros and guerilleras were to be reintegrated into civilian life.

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The bitter betrayal of the peace treaty on the part of the state was the motivation for many former members, commanders and guerrillas of the FARC-EP and the associated Clandestine Communist Colombian Party (PCCC) to resume armed struggle.

In addition to differences over the handling of the peace process, it is clear that there was an irreversible rift between Márquez, Santrich and other commanders of what is now known as the "Second Marquetalia" with the Timochenko sector of what is now the COMMUNES Party. They are accused of despondency by acting during the peace process and afterward in its (non)implementation, and by their actions of wiping out the insurgent movement.

After numerous historically significant FARC leaders separated from the legal political party on August 29, 2019, they regrouped militarily and announced the reconstruction of the communist party along with the construction of a new political line.

The "Second Marquetalia" emerged from a group of former FARC-EP commanders around Iván Márquez, Jesus Santrich, El Paisa and Romaña. In the video communique, which went viral across the world, in which the FARC-EP Segunda Maquetalia announced its creation, the political manifesto of the organization was read.

The name "Segunda Marquetalia" is an anecdote to the "commune" Marquetalia, an area held by communist peasants in the Colombian Civil War in the 50s. After 16,000 soldiers overran the Marquetlia area, which was defended by only about 50 armed people, the surviving communists banded together and formed the FARC-EP guerrilla organization.

Jesús Santrich reiterated in an interview, "In essence, the FARC-EP (Segunda Marquetalia) is a continuity of the historical project in both areas, the political and the military." Santrich continued, however, that the near-complete destruction of the organization has had an impact on tactics and strategic plans. "Since the reestablishment, we have distanced ourselves from some practices such as kidnapping people for economic purposes. In any case, we operate as a political-military force with an army and party structure, a Marxist-Leninist and Bolivarian party that follows the legacy of Commander Manuel Marulanda (founding member of the FARC).

The focus of our strategic deployment also had changes that affect the military reserves, including changes within what we know as the new strategy. In essence, the procedures of surprise, siege, attack, and capture are maintained, without focusing on offensive actions against the police or army. The character of our actions is defensive and resistant to the army."

The Segunda Marquetalia has less military power than its rivals in the Gentil Duarte structure but has greater political appeal. Segunda Marquetalia combines three major organizational structures as part of its overall strategy: armed guerrilla forces, armed and unarmed militia units, and a completely unarmed clandestine party. Segunda Marquetalia insists on being primarily a political party as opposed to an armed group.

Direct clashes between the Segunda Marquetalia and its rivals in the other FARC structure under the command of Gentil Duarte prove that military clout does not always equal military victories. The fighting between the two structures in the Argelia region of Cauca at the end of October was the most intense since the peace agreement. The Segunda Marquetalia tried to defend its territories against the frente Carlos Patiño. An informant in the Segunda Marquetalia guerrillas told us, "We inflicted losses on them in the fighting and we also have the support of the population, a factor that gives us a great advantage."

Decades of political work at the leading level, and the accompanying existing political relations with the outside world and former infrastructures of the party and guerrillas, ensured that the Segunda Marquetalia is now at the center of the international debate on revolutionary prospects in Colombia, not least because international media repeatedly scandalize the guerrillas' relationship with the Venezuelan state.

Santrich and Marquez have historically good relations with Caracas, but these have become more complicated after the reconstruction of the FARC. Caracas has an opportunistic relationship with the guerrillas, on the one hand tolerating the use of the border area as a retreat for the FARC, on the other waging war against the guerrillas and being responsible for the death of some of their commanders. In addition, the recent information about the death of one of their great commanders, Jesús Santrich, shows that the country of refuge is now no longer 100% safe.

The FARC-EP Segunda Maquetalia aims to end rivalries between the armed leftist organizations in the country and unite them under the FARC banner or enter into alliance partnerships with them. They achieved some success in bringing Bolivarian groups under their command and forming cooperative alliances with what is now the largest Marxist guerrilla in the country, the ELN (National Liberation Army), and the smaller EPL (People's Liberation Army).

A key issue in the future of the FARC-EP, Segunda Marquetalia, will be the adaptability of its structure. A major contradiction is the enmity between the Segunda Marquetalia leadership and the leadership around Gentil Duarte. A serious threat to the Colombian state would be FARC unity.

Gentil Duarte and the "Western Coordination Command"

Gentil Duarte was a commander of the FARC since the late 1990s and many, including from the current party, recognize his political and military skills. He is active in the 7th Front with about 400 fighters. During the peace negotiations, he travelled to Havana and participated in the talks there. The FARC directive eventually sent him to Colombia to prevent a commander by the name of Iván Mordisco from leaving the guerrillas. Eventually, however, he joined the dissidents and set his goal towards the unification of all dissident groups.

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Unlike his Segunda Marquetalia rivals, Duarte's structure was based on the FARC guerrilla base and built from the bottom up, which in some regions had advantages over the Segunda Marquetalia because the base was already present before Segunda Marquetalia commanders were sent to these areas to build a base.

Nevertheless, there are significant strategic differences with the old FARC. Duarte's line forms the construction of an umbrella organization for all military fronts of the guerrilla, the Western Coordination Command (CCO), which has a (semi-)autonomous command hierarchy. The CCO was created as an umbrella organization of various, sometimes formerly competing post-FARC groups in order to act united against other armed actors such as ELN, EPL, and the Segunda Marquetalia.

The CCO's clout was demonstrated on June 27, 2021, when shots fired at President Duque's helicopter revealed how fragile the situation in Colombia currently is. In addition to the right-wing head of state, other passengers on board included Defense Minister Diego Molano and high-ranking officials from the judiciary and military. Later, the FARC-EP Magdalena Medio Bloc released a video communiqué in which they claimed responsibility for the attack on the helicopter, a U.S. military base, and army forces. The Magdalena Medio Bloc belongs to the CCO structure.

That the military structure of the Gentil Duarte line appears better organized and more powerful than that of its rivals, however, is of limited relevance. While the CCO takes offensive action against the army and police, the Segunda Marquetalia is deliberately in a military-defensive position, while the clandestine one builds the political organs that the CCO lacks.

There are regular criticisms from the ELN, EPL and the Segunda Marquetlia that the Gentil Duarte structure, especially some specific fronts, have turned into paramilitary-like drug trafficking organizations and have discarded their revolutionary goals.

An informant in the ranks of the Segunda Marquetlia, who was stationed in Argelia at the time of the heavy fighting in late October 2021, told us:
“The Carlos Patiño front no longer fights for the people, they fight like paramilitaries trying to take over the territories where coca is grown, harassing the farmers in the area. From my point of view, the former FARC-EP forces are trying to create a corridor from the Pacific to Venezuela through their military movements. The dissidents would have control of a corridor for trafficking cocaine, gold, and arms from the Pacific, passing through the borders with Ecuador, Peru, Brazil and Venezuela to Arauca. This is a competitive advantage to strengthen Duarte's criminal alliances around the marijuana business with cartels in Brazil and cocaine with Mexican cartels. His fight is no longer for the people, it is corrupt and it is a shame that they are tarnishing the legacy of the FARC-EP.”

Life in the Countryside, Mountains and Guerrillas

Colombia is characterized by very uneven population distribution. Only about 23% of the population does not live in a city. About half of the land area, especially in the south, is very sparsely populated. 17 % of all workers are employed in agriculture. Colombia is responsible for 70% of the world's cocaine production, as this is more profitable than growing staple crops or coffee.

Social conflict within the country intensifies most in rural areas, and much of the armed conflict between guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, drug cartels and the state is fought here.

While paramilitaries and cartels are in the countryside for profit, the guerrillas rely on the historical support of the rural population and the protection of the mountains and rural territories from state forces. The Colombian Armed Forces are behind enemy lines in the countryside, partly because of the presence of the guerrillas and partly because of their hostile relationship with the rural people since the state security forces are not seen as liberators but rather as occupiers because of the decades of experience of the population.

Often, the local population is considered fundamentally suspicious of cooperating with the guerrillas. And so, it is not uncommon for local people to simply disappear during military operations and be subjected to false trials, presented to the public as supposed guerrillas, or never seen again.

Attacks by the army are often accompanied by human rights violations, threats, and displacements. Between 2002 and 2008, there were at least 6,402 extrajudicial executions, so-called "falsos positivos." The murdered civilians were later presented as guerrilla fighters killed in action.

In rural areas, the guerrillas are the de facto ruling counterforce to the state. Infrastructure and laws are built by the guerrillas. The local population, raised as children in the guerrillas' schools and living side by side with them their entire lives, sees them as a stabilizing force in their lives and the only defence against the brutal despotism of the cartels, state paramilitaries and international corporations. Gender equality makes the guerrillas attractive to many women who come from feudal households. They fill about 40% of the ranks of the FARC-EP and ELN.

The Unity of the FARC-EP is Far Away

The fact that the two lines have not come together has different historical backgrounds. While the Gentil Duarte structure always stuck to the armed struggle and considered the peace process a betrayal, Iván Márquez himself, as the negotiator of the "old" FARC-EP, became a traitor in the eyes of Gentil Duarte. Second, during the meetings between the two structures, there were disagreements over the future level of command after the potential unification.

Moreover, the disagreements over territorial control and, consequently, economic sources of revenue in the different provinces, made for a strengthening of the conflict rather than a need for dialogue between the two structures. Even though the Segunda Marquetalia refers to Commander Duarte in documents as a "respected comrade," in reality there are military power struggles between the two organizations, with a tendency to intensify. At the moment, it is hard to imagine a dominant actor consolidating to gain power over both organizations. Historically, political-military organizations have always had more staying power and survival skills than those that are not political.

Although FARC unity is currently abstract, there have been important military developments in relations with other organizations, such as the Segunda Marquetalia alliance, the ELN and EPL. Historically, there have been times when all of the three organizations have fought each other.

It remains to be seen how the paths of the two groups will continue and when the next moment for unifying talks will come. For only through this will it be possible to sustain a national insurgent movement for the struggle for political power in the country.

https://www.militantwire.com/p/farc-ret ... medium=web
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Re: Colombia

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 25, 2021 1:46 pm

Death Squads threaten Colombian Human Rights Defender Darnelly Rodriguez twice in two weeks
November 23, 2021

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We are very worried for the safety and security of Centro Pazífico coordinator, Darnelly Rodriguez. On November 19 2021, she received the second of two death threats in two weeks. This threat came from the AGC paramilitary group. She was listed along with several other social movement and union leaders in a pamphlet that was left under the door of Cali’s largest labor federation. A translation of the threat is included at the end of the page.

Darnelly is also the coordinator for the Francisco Isaías Cifuentes Human Rights Network (REDDHFIC)’s Valle Del Cauca chapter. Threats against Darnelly have increased over the past year, and already last February, she had had to change her residence.

We are asking that people send emails to the authorities to demand adequate protection from the National Protection Unit (UNP) for Darnelly and all the persons who were threatened along with her.

INTERVIEW WITH DARNELLY RODRIGUEZ
Coordinator for the Pacific Center for Human Rights (Centro Pazífico)

Conducted by James Patrick Jordan of the Alliance for Global Justice, in celebration of the first anniversary of the Centro Pazífico’s founding.

The Centro Pazífico, or, by its full name, the Pacific Center for Human Rights, was founded in the Fall of 2020 in Cali, Colombia, the largest and capitol city of the Department of Valle del Cauca. It was established as both an international and local response to extreme repression in the region. Southwest Colombia has the highest levels of political violence in the entire country. Many around the world saw evidence of this when we witnessed the police, military, and paramilitary assaults against the National Strike. During the strike, the Centro Pazífico was a safe place and distribution center for medical supplies. Overall, the goal of the Center is to provide office, meeting, and training space for regional popular movements, and short- and medium- term housing for threatened social leaders and human rights accompaniers.

Darnelly Rodriguez, the Centro Pazífico coordinator, is one of the most capable people I know. She is articulate, energetic, well-organized, and a comprehensive source of information. Above all, she is courageous. Earlier this year, in February, AFGJ sent out an alert asking for protection for Darnelly after she had to move for the second time in several months because of the threats against her. In the interview that follows you will read about how police viciously beat her while she undertook a mission of verification. Just the morning after finishing the interview, Darnelly texted me that she had received yet another threat—the second in two weeks. Yet, she doesn’t back down.

Question: When the Centro Pazífico opened, we were in the worst days of the pandemic. However, almost from the beginning, it was necessary to give shelter to 15 individuals displaced from a neighborhood in Buenaventura (a mostly Afro-Colombian city that is the country’s largest port on the Pacific). Can you talk a little bit about this experience? How did you organize so quickly with so few resources to receive them? What caused their displacement?

Answer: These 15 social leaders (including two youth) are from Buenaventura, Valle de Cauca. Their displacement is due to their organizational work so that minors of age can avoid recruitment by armed groups. They have community processes that present theater, dance, music, among other art forms to prevent the dispersion of children and young people in the municipality and from becoming armed actors. Because of this work, the armed groups considered the community leaders a risk for their activities, and they began to make threats and carry out assaults against them, shooting at some of them at their homes, disappearing the family members of others. They recruited four of another man’s sons and two of them were returned to his house in plastic bags. This is why the 15 leaders had to leave.

Receiving them was not easy. First, we had to go to friends in other social organizations to ask for their solidarity, in order to buy tickets from Buenaventura to Cali for these persons. That was very difficult because of the pandemic. There was no public transportation, so that we had to find private transportation, which was triple the normal costs. Additionally, we had to buy food for these persons. Once we were able to get them out of Buenaventura to our house of refuge, at first, some had to sleep on the floor, on blankets and mats, since we didn’t yet have all the beds for them. Later, we received donations from people (blankets, sheets, towels, among other things).

Q: Has the Centro Pazífico continued to offer shelter to people displaced or threatened by political violence? Can you give another example to help our readers understand the nature of this service?

A: Yes, at the Centro Pazífico we have constantly received comrades in complex and risky situations. An additional case I could mention is the following.

A young human rights defender is falsely accused of being an insurgent. They make an illegal raid of his house, stealing his computer, cell phones, documents, the same with his housemate. They begin surveilling his house, they threaten the owner of the house so that she will not rent to him so that he has to urgently leave this place.

For his security he takes shelter in the Pacific Center for Human Rights [Centro Pazífico], where he continues his activities as a Human Rights defender for one month, and subsequently he was able to secure employment to be able to find another place to live.

Q: We, as internationals, looked on with horror at what happened in Cali with the repression of the National Strike. Is this something you experienced directly and personally? Can you tell us a little about the statistics—how many people were assassinated, detained, disappeared? Can you tell us something about the victories the people were able to achieve?

A: The National Strike began on April 28, 2021, and Santiago de Cali was a strong city in the strike and counted 23 “Resistance Points” (Puntos de Resistencia, where they had concentrations of protesters throughout the day and during all the three months of the National Strike.)

As far as statistics, unfortunately, we have to mention that just in the City of Santiago de Cali, we had the murder of 84 persons, and in the Department of Valle del Cauca, a total of 91. There was a total of 401 cases of arbitrary detentions (all are now free), and 22 persons in penal establishments who are facing judicial frame-ups on the part of the Colombian State. With regard to the disappeared, we had a total of 181 persons, of whom 104 were found. We couldn’t get much information, either because of the fear of their families, friends, and companions, or because persons couldn’t get back to their homes and turned up later. Of these cases of forced disappearances, we had very grave cases such as the following: a girl of 17 years, detained and taken from the city of Cali to the city of Yumbo, where she was tortured, sexually abused, without food, over three days, and the fourth day, she was left in the street, without shoes, without money, and she had to walk almost 20 kilometers before she found someone who would help her.

Yes, I personally lived through many situations in the National Strike, the most grave, and the one that almost caused our deaths, was the following [she provides a copy of the alert released by REDDHFIC]:

“At around 8:40 p.m., a verification mission [arrived] composed of… delegates from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights [UNHCHR], the Attorney General’s Office and the Ombudsman’s Office, and human rights defenders Darnelly Rodríguez (REDDHFIC, Francisco Isaías Cifuentes Human Rights Network) ,Ana María Burgos (FCSPP, Committee in Solidarity with the Political Prisoners Foundation), James Larrea of the Human Rights Committee of the Congreso de los Pueblos [People’s Congress] and the Human Rights Committee of the CUT Valle [labor confederation], Rubén Darío Gómez coordinator of the…archdiocese of Cali.

At the police station there were evidently four people in custody, 3 of them… not part of the National Strike…, and a young man who was [at demonstrations] in the sector of La Luna , who had bruises, and an open wound in his leg, due to physical aggression by agents of the National Police and the Mobile Anti-Riot Squad (ESMAD). Once the verification was done… a police officer asked the UN and the Attorney General’s Office to verify the police officers who were apparently injured…. The human rights defenders James, Ana and Darnelly were left behind. They began to be verbally assaulted by a police officer, who, in an intimidating manner… shouted ‘you are useless, you don’t defend our rights, you are useless, go away!’.

Immediately, barracked police officers began to come out of the police station and surround the human rights defenders…. A police officer assaulted the human rights defender James Larrea and as a result of the blows he was thrown to the ground…. and a plainclothes police officer kicked Ana Maria Burgos in the back and hit Darnelly Rodriguez in the head, without removing his helmet. Despite the aggressions and the defenseless state of the group of defenders, about 150 policemen surrounded them and shouted, ‘Go away, go away! You are useless! You are killing us or is that we have no rights?’.

Then, frightened, the human rights defenders and the official from the Ombudsman’s Office left the place. Arriving at the corner… some street inhabitants… accompanied them in a human chain to stop the aggressions…. Several police officers… shouted, ‘This time we are going to kill them!’. At that moment police officers began to fire their guns against the human rights defenders, then ESMAD arrived…. The people from the street stood in front of them, shielding Darnelly Rodriguez and Ana Maria Burgos. Meanwhile, the police officers threw a stun grenade… and continued firing into the air and towards the human rights defenders and the people in the street. Dazed, the two human rights defenders… Darnelly Rodriguez and Ana Maria Burgos ran away, [but]… Darnelly Rodriguez received two impacts with what was apparently a blunt force weapon. One of her wounds is on the left side of her breast and the other in the calf of her left foot. The two women were helped by a bystander…to go to where the rest of the mission was. At that precise moment… Darnelly Rodriguez received what apparently was a blow in her coccyx which prevented her from moving normally. Then a police officer arrived at the scene and took them away, running, and told them, ‘Get out of here because these people are very emotional, and anything could happen’.”

Because of these aggressions, I have a spinal injury, a herniated disc, for which I have to undergo surgery. But it is difficult since it is a complicated surgery. Above all, it is a long period of quiet time (two months) that would prevent me from working. Therefore, it keeps getting postponed since I cannot stop working for that long because I have to care for my daughter.

Q: Were Centro Pazífico groups involved in the National Strike? Many of us contributed to funds for the street medics, funds that were distributed by Centro Pazífico members and allies.

A: Yes, fortunately we had your help for the street medics, or the health brigades, as they are known here. It helped us buy medications, cots, and thousands of supplies for attending to the wounded.

The Pacific Center for Human Rights served as a warehouse for the collection of food and medicines to assemble the first aid kits that were delivered during the national strike to all the points of resistance. It was also used as a site for non-emergency health care, that is, for minor cases…, these people were taken to the Human Rights Center and treated by health workers.

Likewise, the Centro Pazífico was our meeting place, where we slept to be able to cover the points of resistance. Approximately 20 human rights defenders would sleep there. It was where we were planning for the next day, where we received the information coming in from the street, where we were making declarations, where we held press conferences, among other activities. The role of the Centro Pazífico was fundamental for the work of the human rights groups among us.

Q: The number of victims of political violence almost always increases during the holidays. Is the Centro Pazífico and its member organizations prepared to receive more threatened leaders, more displaced people? Do you have the tools you need to defend human and labor rights? What are their immediate and current needs: groceries, printer, beds, furniture, security camera, anything else?

A: Yes, we human rights defenders, always, throughout the year, are ready to attend to whatever situation presents itself, late at night or in the morning, Sunday or Monday. Wiithout regard to the day or the hour, we are there to help, above all, when our comrades’ lives and security are at risk.

At the Centro Pazífico, we have many needs. We already count on all the financial help we have received for rent and utilities, but we do not know where all the materials will come from in order to attend to our fellow social leaders.

This is what we need at the Centro Pazífico: cots so that people will not have to sleep on the floor, sheets, blankets, pillows, towels, but, above all, we need funds so that when we receive some threatened social leader, we can offer them the food necessary for their subsistence while they are staying there.

Additionally, for training, declarations, and communication work, we need a computer that is constantly at the Human Rights Center, a printer, a video camera, a projector, and to be able to keep our comrades in the territories constantly trained.

Regarding security, we think it is important to install a security camera system in the center that will allow us to monitor the house.

Finally, we are thinking of being able to acquire a house, not a rented one but our own, so that this work we do will last for many more years, will be constant as our rights are being violated.

Q: The repression of the strike was made possible by bullets and guns and helicopters and tear gas from the U.S. government. As we prepare for a season dedicated to peace and good will to all, do you have any final words in closing on the importance of international solidarity?

A: First, we would like to thank the Alliance for Global Justice for their constant support, not only financially, but also for their constant accompaniment of our social movements, for sharing everything that is happening in our country, and for pressuring the Colombian state to provide guarantees for human rights defenders. We would also like to thank James, Raquel, Maya [staff and volunteers at AFGJ], and everyone for always being there.

International solidarity has always been so important for us, because at the national level we do not have the resources for our work, but also because it makes our situation visible in their countries, and we put an end to the lies that the national government is telling about Colombia. The solidarity shows the social and political reality, and that is very brave and important for us. We hope that this support continues for a long time and that we can help many social leaders in Colombia, especially here in the Southwest where the repression is so heavy.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

TWO WAYS YOU CAN HELP:
Send and alert to Colombian authorities demanding adequate protection for Darnelly Rodriguez and all the social leaders in Cali who were named along with her in recent threats


Support the mission and continued presence of the Centro Pazífico with your tax-deductible contribution!


If you have any further questions about the Centro Pazífico, please send an email to either centropazifico@gmail.com or James@AFGJ.org

https://www.afgj.org/death-squads-threa ... -two-weeks

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US To Take Colombia's FARC Off List of Terrorist Organizations

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Various sources confirm that senior White House officials are evaluating the measure as part of an inter-agency review process that takes place every five years. | Photo: Twitter/@AndyVermaut

Published 23 November 2021

The United States announced that it would remove the FARC from a list of foreign terrorist organizations, a move intended to demonstrate U.S. support for the peace accord. The Wall Street Journal reported citing U.S. and Congressional officials.


According to the newspaper, the officials said the move could occur on Tuesday, coinciding with the fifth anniversary of the historic peace agreement between then-President Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia rebels.

It also reports that officials who were part of the negotiating group with the FARC had been quietly pressuring U.S. officials to withdraw the terrorist designation against the group.

In that sense, the Biden administration would recognize the steps taken by Farc members to transform their group into a political party, now called Comunes.

The lifting of the designation also sends a message to other armed groups on the list, whether in Colombia or in other countries, that the United States wants to put pressure on them to see that they can be removed from the list if they abandon violence.

Last October, the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo had advanced that Washington was beginning to seriously consider the exclusion of the FARC from its list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO).

Various sources confirmed to the newspaper that senior White House officials were evaluating the measure as part of an inter-agency review process that takes place every five years.

The issue was also the focus of a private roundtable organized by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in late October.

"We convened this private roundtable in Bogota to talk about the positive effects that an eventual suspension of the application of U.S. sanctions could have on the former combatants who signed the 2016 agreement," Steve Hege, deputy director of the Latin America program at USIP, told El Tiempo at the time.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/US- ... -0011.html

I do not understand how the current arrangement in Columbia can be called 'peace'. Looks more like surrender to me, with pretty poor terms at that, the surrendered are hunted at will, as are those whom they defended. All that's left is a petty bourgeois political party as inept as the rest. This explains the US posture entirely.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Colombia

Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 17, 2021 2:15 pm

NOTES FOR A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF DEMOCRACY

COLOMBIA AND VENEZUELA: WHERE IS THERE A DICTATORSHIP?
Maria Fernanda Barreto

Dec 16 , 2021 , 10:34 am .

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What is democracy in the 21st century? Where is there a true democracy? (Photo: Carlos García Rawlins / Reuters)

They say that all comparisons are hateful, but at the same time they are inevitable. In the case of Colombia and Venezuela, the comparison between their political systems is made permanently by the Colombian political class, and of course, it is supported by the cartels that make up their media corporations and their powerful entertainment industry, which do not hesitate to establish that While Colombian democracy is old, strong, and in good health, Venezuela has degenerated into a dictatorship .

This cartoon is thoughtlessly repeated even by large sectors of the Colombian opposition out of ignorance, fear or simple laziness in critically analyzing the propaganda with which they are bombarded daily and, with that veil, it will be impossible to chart the course of profound transformations. that the country requires.

The media war against the Bolivarian Revolution whose axes are Miami, Madrid and Bogotá; the lawfare under construction against President Nicolás Maduro himself and the political guidelines emanating from the United States that support this propaganda, derive from the complex geopolitical context generated by the world capitalist crisis, the mortal wound of the unipolar world and the consequent relaunch of the Monroe Doctrine about Our America.

That is why we have decided to make this comparison based on the statement that breaks with what they usually say: neither Colombia is as good as they paint it nor Venezuela as bad as they say.

Nor is it intended to say with this counter-hegemonic intention that Venezuelan democracy is perfect because, like all social processes, the Bolivarian Revolution is imperfect and always perfectible.

Today, the seriousness of that belief so installed in Colombian public opinion takes on more importance in light of the events of this week, when Defense Minister Diego Molano again made statements that seek to generate a binational conflict since, the statement that in Venezuela there is a dictatorship and in Colombia a democracy worth exporting is one of its central arguments.

At this moment in which Uribismo is known to be lost, since two decades in the executive power are about to come to an end in just five months, either because of the expected triumph of the progressive and leftist sectors that have united in the Historical Pact, or by the triumph of other center-right and right-wing alternatives that respond to more traditional interests of the Colombian oligarchy, all far from Uribe ; only the intensification of the internal conflict and the threat of an international conflict could perhaps change the result that already seems imminent. So once again it is an urgent task to defeat the warlike language of the Uribe government.

On this side of the border, the statement that there is a dictatorship in Venezuela while there is an exemplary democracy in Colombia is endorsed by the Venezuelan opposition, legitimizing it in some popular sectors with the permanent support of transnational media corporations and the Colombian entertainment industry that It is widely disseminated on social networks.

Having explained the reasons for this analysis, which is carried out in defense of both peoples and in the pursuit of peace, we provide nine points from which a comparative analysis of the health of democracy in both countries can be started.

It is important to clarify that the following comparison focuses on the actions of the States and their governments, since undoubtedly from the Colombian popular organizations there are real and nourishing experiences that advance in the truly democratic construction.

THE NINE POINTS PROPOSED FOR THE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
1. Relationship with the United States as the center of the capitalist empire

Colombia is a state subordinate to the United States. That implies an absolute surrender of its natural, mining-energy resources, its great workforce and the concession of its regional geostrategic importance to turn the country into a center of accumulation by dispossession, the main military enclave of the United States and one of the the two enclaves of drug trafficking on the continent. US interference in internal affairs is absolute and the word "sovereignty" has disappeared from political speeches, even from so-called progressivism, remaining only in the minority voices of the true left.

The Venezuelan State, for its part, is an insubordinate State, from its own Bolivarian doctrine historically confronted with the Monroe doctrine. This insubordination has cost him a political, economic and even military siege from the Northern power. Harassment that in 2015 went so far as to declare it "an unusual and extraordinary threat " to the security of the United States. That executive order has sustained a brutal blockade, with serious consequences for the Venezuelan people and is the root of the emigration phenomenon.

2. Political power of the oligarchies

Political power in Colombia has been in the hands of the most economically powerful families in the country for approximately a century and a half, which increasingly turns it into a plutocracy. With the aggravating circumstance that, in the last three decades, that oligarchy has become involved to a greater or lesser degree with drug trafficking and paramilitarism.

On the other hand, just twenty-two years ago the Bolivarian Revolution broke out, and with it the Venezuelan oligarchy was displaced from political power, which traditionally had also held it in the 20th century and much of the 19th century.

3. Armed conflict

Colombia is a country at war. It is immersed in a social and armed conflict that continues unresolved and again tends to escalate. The democratic solution would be the political and negotiated solution that broad sectors of the Colombian people have been demanding, however, the bet of the oligarchy has been that of a military solution with which it seeks to pacify the people and win the war, that is, bet on pacification which is very different from peace.

On the contrary, Venezuela remains at peace despite the military siege of the United States, the paramilitary invasion of Venezuelan territory from Colombia, the incursion of mercenaries and the repeated execution of terrorist operations of territorial control popularly called "guarimbas". The most relevant thing for this comparison is that in the face of the violence generated by the last guarimbas in 2017, President Maduro went to the maximum expression of democracy, which is the call to the Constituent Power . The day after that call, the sectors that were promoting the violence demobilized and no similar operation has been carried out since then.

4. Communicational hegemony vs. counterhegemonic communication

The Colombian media corporations are in the hands of three families that are part of the four richest in the country, so that, despite occasional disputes of interests, the story is unified in defense of oligarchic power, in favor of the world capitalist system and The imperialism. The alternative and popular media are permanently attacked and persecuted, which is why the communicational hegemony of the media corporations is overwhelming.

Different happens in Venezuela where world communication hegemony and counter-hegemonic communication are confronted. This debate has, on the one hand, a large number of private national and international communication companies and social networks that operate in the country spreading the hegemonic discourse, and on the other, to the state media, the media that have state participation and the abundant alternative and community communication media, which give the battle of counter-hegemonic communication. Which places it closer to the democratic exercise of communication.

5. Land ownership

Although the latifundio is historical in all of Our America and particularly in the two countries in question, in Colombia, in the last six decades, the peasantry has been deprived of nearly eight million hectares in coordinated action between large landowners, transnational companies, drug traffickers. , military forces and, above all, paramilitaries.

Thanks to the enactment of a new land law during the government of President Hugo Chávez, in Venezuela about 6 million hectares have been rescued and expropriated from landowners. Most of these lands, with evident critical nodes and some setbacks in recent years, have been awarded to peasants.

This means that while in Colombia the tendency is to concentrate land ownership, in Venezuela a process of deconcentration of it began.

6. Uses of language in the National Constitutions

Venezuela has the first constitution in Castilian that used inclusive language, that is, written by and for its citizens. Although the current Constitution of Colombia was also the product of a more or less recent Constituent Assembly, it continues to use an exclusive language in which only its citizens are named and does not account for the great struggles of Colombian women for inclusion.

7. Respect for human rights

Despite the highly questionable decision of the International Criminal Court to close the preliminary examination to the Colombian State, before even moving to the investigation phase and, on the contrary, to open an investigation against the Venezuelan State, in Colombia there are reasons to affirm that the violation of human rights is State policy.

The genocide that is committed in Colombia against leaders and social leaders, human rights defenders, signatories of the most recent peace agreement, educators, trade unionists, among others, implies an ethnocide and also a class juvenicide.

Between January 1 and December 2, 2021 alone, 162 leaders and social leaders have been victims of this genocide , 44 former signatories of the agreement and 90 massacres have been committed. To this must be added the terrible images that circulated throughout the world of the brutal police and para-police repression of the National Strike called this year in Colombia.

In Venezuela, for its part, where victims of human rights violations have occasionally been registered, there is no record this year of any massacre. On social networks, in fact, only one alleged massacre is reported at the beginning of the year, which even the international media outlines in quotation marks since it occurred in the context of a police operation that killed a criminal gang and in which there are many elements to believe that it was deaths during a confrontation. Neither is there any murder of social leaders. It is worth clarifying that on the few occasions in which these murders have occurred, the victims are generally sympathizers of the Bolivarian Revolution.

The truth is that the occasional human rights violations by the State security forces -which are not justifiable because they are few-, and the fact that a large part of them are investigated by the Venezuelan Prosecutor's Office, contribute to the affirmation that the defense of human rights is the policy of the Venezuelan State.

8. Human development index

This index, defined as an instrument that measures the average advancement of a country in terms of basic human capacity represented by life expectancy, educational level and per capita income, is measured by the United Nations Program for the Development (UNDP) that presents a ranking of 189 countries each year , the first being the country with the highest index and the last with the lowest.

In recent years, Venezuela has always been above Colombia in this index, although it is worth noting that Cuba has ranked above both in the same period. Only after the blockade of Venezuela in 2015 did it begin to fall in that ranking and, however, despite the harsh economic and social situation it faces today, it only ranked below Colombia in the last two reports of 2019 and 2020 The reason for this drop, according to the UNDP itself, is mainly due to the drop in per capita income.

9. Voting system

We have discussed this last point of comparison on several occasions and we will illustrate it again with a table that we published for the first time in 2018, given that neither system has undergone modifications since then.

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This comparison is made from the experience that has allowed me to vote in both elections and participate as a member of the polling station and electoral witness in the elections of the two countries.

The summary of the picture is that Colombia has a highly vulnerable manual electoral system, while Venezuela has a highly reliable automated electoral system, which has been classified by Jimmy Carter as the best electoral system in the world.

These are some of the elements with which it is proposed to deepen the debate on the true meaning of democracy and pose two complementary questions to the title of this article: What is democracy in the 21st century? Where is there a true democracy?

https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/colo ... -dictadura

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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