Colombia

[blindpig]

Álvaro Uribe, mastermind of three great massacres in Colombia

Mission Truth
Aug 19 · 6 min read


Demonstration against Álvaro Uribe Vélez in the vicinity of the Palace of Justice in Bogotá, Colombian capital (October 2019). Photo: Colprensa

The massacres in Colombia are becoming common currency, a legacy that greatly promoted, and under a scheme of criminal economy and governmentality, the now former senator and former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, currently on trial for minor crimes with respect to other events that we will report in this note.
There are enough elements on the table for Uribe Vélez to be prosecuted before the Colombian courts, especially because of his direct relationship with the increase, in recent decades, of paramilitary violence and extrajudicial executions carried out by the Colombian army.
Until 2013, Uribe accumulated 276 judicial investigations against him, but 94% of them had "stalled" in the preliminary stage. For years, the leader of the Democratic Center party has managed to avoid accusations about his responsibility for drug trafficking, paramilitarism, murder, false positives and massacres.
The methods of eliminating witnesses who could provide conclusive evidence are at the level of the crimes committed: from bribes, extraditions to the United States or disappearances of people. Crimes that would not have major consequences in a political figure with so much power in some deep structures of the Colombian state.
However, the country was surprised by the announcement of his house arrest, issued by the Supreme Court, as a result of an investigation into accusations of bribery of former paramilitaries. The genesis of this event was a complaint against Congressman Iván Cepeda, 8 years ago, which was finally reversed on Uribe. A paradoxical boomerang.
This Tuesday, August 18, the former Colombian president resigned from his post before the Colombian Senate, claiming "violation of his procedural guarantees."
By making this decision, Uribe would be avoiding being judged by the Supreme Court, since it is the only institution that can prosecute senators.


Uribe is accused of being the mastermind of the most twisted crimes of paramilitarism in Colombia. Photo: The Spectator

Senator Cepeda's inquiries about Uribe's intervention in the El Aro and La Granja massacres, crimes committed in the department of Antioquia (while he was governor in the 1990s) by the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), paramilitaries, are highlighted. who confess to having been trained by the political mentor of the current Colombian president. That was the reason why Uribe tried to retaliate against the congressman.
Although, due to the seriousness of the events and the forcefulness of the evidence, these three cases are the most notorious in relation to Uribe, the truth is that his two presidential governments exhibit alarming numbers:
- Of the 1 thousand 982 massacres recorded by the National Center for Historical Memory of Colombia for the period from 1980 to 2012, around 300 were committed during Uribe's official institutional efforts.
- In the same period, "false positives" (civilians killed by the army and later presented as guerrillas killed in combat to improve statistics) increased by 150% , according to research by the Universidad de la Sabana and the Universidad del Externado .
Let's take a brief look at data on some massacres that are part of Álvaro Uribe's grim record of criminal responsibilities.
Massacre of La Granja (1996) and El Aro (1997)
In mid-June, five peasants were tortured and murdered by a score of members of the Peasant Self-Defense Forces of Córdoba and Urabá, who invaded the La Granja district (north of Antioquia) and threatened the small population with “social cleansing. ”For alleged collaboration with the FARC-EP.
None of those killed had ties to guerrilla groups, as prosecutors who were handling the case later determined.
After the massacre, 700 families had to flee the territory, under threat from the paramilitaries.
A year later, on October 22 , another attack by 150 AUC men left 15 peasants dead in the town of El Aro, near Medellín, again in Antoquia. There were 60 houses in that hamlet, 42 were burned by the paramilitaries.
For 17 days, the AUC took control of the territory, looted, tortured and murdered before the impassive gaze of the Uribe government, which had helicopters flying over the area when the extermination occurred, as reported by the testimonies of those who were present.


El Aro, Antioquia, after the massacre committed by the AUC (1997). Photo: Jesús Abad Colorado

Before the bloody episode in El Aro, the community had requested protection from the government, then led by Uribe, which was denied. In addition, testimonies from the families that survived said that "it was the paramilitaries with the army who entered El Aro."
The Colombian justice also determined that in La Granja there was cooperation from the region's military and police .
In 2015, Judge María Consuelo Rincón made a request for Álvaro Uribe, already as a senator, to be investigated for “action or omission” in the La Granja and El Aro massacres.
That Uribe allowed the paramilitary cells to function and did not order state agents to fight them, is in itself a strong indicator of his ties with them.
Francisco Villalba, one of those convicted of the El Aro massacre, confessed to the authorities that former General Carlos Alberto Ospina was an accomplice in both killings in Antioquia. He also accused Uribe of intellectual author, although he later retracted.
Ospina would be appointed commander of the Colombian Military Forces in Uribe's first administration. Villalba was shot to death in 2009, when he had just passed to serve house arrest.
Other statements by paramilitaries would once again mention that "the Self-Defense Forces had support from businessmen, the Police, the Army and the Antioquia Government."

The massacres in San Roque (1996-1997) and the murder of Jesús María Ovalle (1998)
On June 13, 1996, four people were killed by men from the AUC Metro Block. This case is the most mentioned of a series of massacres that took place in various villages in San Roque, carried out by the paramilitary group, whose declared objective was to eradicate the ELN from that area.
The testimony of Juan Guillermo Monsalve, interviewed by Senator Iván Cepeda in 2011, is essential to know the evidence that Álvaro Uribe involved in the forging of the Metro Block.
Monsalve worked at the Guacharacas de los Uribe Vélez farm. He told Cepeda that, like 54 other workers on the farm, he was ordered by his bosses to carry out exterminations in San Roque with the Metro Block, in retaliation for attacks against his farm and theft of cattle, attributed to the presence of the ELN.
Specifically, he declared that Uribe had ordered the massacre that occurred in 1996. In the recorded conversation with Cepeda, Álvaro's brother, Santiago Uribe Vélez, was also splattered. There were several meetings where they planned the “social cleansing”, together with Santiago Gallón Henao, and the brothers Luis Alberto Villegas and Juan Villegas, each of them linked to the livestock business, but also to drug trafficking and paramilitarism .
According to Monsalve, Uribe was in charge of "the military."
“From 1996 to December 31, 1997, more than 150 citizens of the region were murdered, among them leaders of community action, humble peasants, owners of community shops, teachers and transporters,” said Jesús María Valle Jaramillo, lawyer and activist of human rights, before being assassinated on February 27, 1998, by the gang of hitmen "La Terraza".


Jesus Maria Valle Jaramillo. Photo: El Colombiano Archive

Following the cases of La Granja, El Aro and San Roque, Valle Jaramillo denounced a “ tacit agreement ” between “General Carlos Alberto Ospina; the Antioquia Police Commander, Carlos Emilio Gañán; the then governor Álvaro Uribe Vélez; Pedro Juan Moreno, former Secretary of Government; and Carlos Castaño, paramilitary commander ”.
Colombian institutions and paramilitaries united to counterattack the "fearsome" peasants who "besieged" defenseless ranchers and drug traffickers.
In 2018, the Superior Court of Medellín sentenced the material authors of the murder of Jaramillo to 30 years in prison and requested that an investigation be opened against Uribe.

https://medium.com/@misionverdad2012/%C ... f03fe11507

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Colombians Mobilize in Response to Endless Massacres


Youth march in Samaniego one week after nine young people were killed in a massacre. August 22, 2020. | Photo: Facebook/ Harold Rosero

Published 23 August 2020 (19 hours 50 minutes ago)

Protests come in response to an uptick in massacres and lack of adequate response from the government of Ivan Duque.

Mobilizations and ‘cacerolazos’ were held throughout Colombian towns and cities on Saturday in response to frequent massacres and the recent surge of killings of youth and social leaders.

The protests came as the country learned of another three massacres in a span of 24 hours.

The community in Samaniego, Nariño marched through the town one week since nine youth were killed in a massacre.

Marchers carried signs saying “we are not guerrillas (combatants),” “we are not drug traffickers” and “we are not criminals—we are just young people.”

Additionally, protests have focused on the issues of the resurgence of paramilitarism, police abuse and brutality, violations by the military against civilians and against the normalization of violence throughout the country as the government of Ivan Duque has failed to uphold the 2016 Peace Accords.

Pot-banging protests, called ‘cacerolazos,’ took place at 7pm on Saturday in cities like Cali and Bogotá and were held by Colombians on the exterior, like in the protest held by the community in Barcelona.

Meanwhile, Ivan Duque has been presenting highly dubious figures on ‘collective homicides’ or massacres and making the argument that Colombia has made gains in lowering the rates of such violent crimes.

These massacres and homicides and what’s been reported as a reconfiguration of paramilitary organizations have taken place in North Santander department where U.S. troops are stationed.

The number of massacres in Colombia up til August of this year has nearly surpassed figures for 2019, with 31 of those massacres in Antioquia, Cauca, Nariño, North Santander and Putumayo--which are also the departments which have seen the highest numbers of killings of human rights defenders.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/col ... -0007.html

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Three Massacres in Colombia in 24 Hours


A body is carried onto the back of a truck, La Guayacana, Tumaco, August 22, 2020. | Photo: Twitter / @HernanTeleSUR

Published 22 August 2020

Seventeen people have been killed since Friday in the latest string of massacres under the government of Ivan Duque.

The government of Colombia’s Nariño department has confirmed a new massacre in the area of La Guayacana, a rural area of the municipality of Tumaco.

There, six young people were murdered and two more are missing, according to preliminary information.

It’s not yet known who was behind this latest massacre.

The incident occurred just hours after President Ivan Duque traveled to Samaniego, where last weekend eight people, between the ages of 17 and 25, were murdered while leaving a farm.


Six people were killed by armed groups on Friday in El Tambo, Cauca department while five were killed in Arauca.

In days prior, five people were killed in Cali and three Indigenous people were murdered in Ricaurte, Nariño.

Despite this, President Ivan Duque has boasted about Colombia’s homicide rates in 2019, saying it was among the lowest in four decades. He also claims that homicide has been reduced by 11 percent in 2020, posting a fundamentally flawed graph to twitter.

The governor of Nariño, Jhon Alexander Rojas, has called for social investment and other measures to take control of the violence.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/thr ... -0005.html

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Iván Duque, Operation Gideon and a low-budget false positive
Mission Truth

Sep 9 · 5 min read


Photo: Las2orillas

When sanitary measures were just beginning in Venezuela to contain in advance the exponential growth of infections by Covid-19, in parallel, in the Colombian Guajira, Venezuelan and American mercenaries hired by Juan Guaidó were refining the details of what would later be known as the ( failed) Operation Gideon.
The plans had a setback at the end of March when a truck that transported military arsenal from Barranquilla to be taken to this irregular group installed in Riohacha, was intercepted by the Colombian police.
On March 24, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro denounced this fact, adding that the weapons were going to be delivered to " a certain alias Pantera ."
The complaint was expanded by Jorge Rodríguez, then Minister of Communication, who had been making a detailed record of the antipolitical route that the Venezuelan opposition, under the leadership of Washington and with the support of Bogotá, had taken under strings, with outstanding outcomes such as the assassination. in a degree of frustration against the President of the Republic and other high-ranking officials of the Venezuelan state, in August 2018.
The panorama became clearer with the arrival of the month of May.
The details of the mercenary operation off the Venezuelan coast are now widely known to all; from the use of Colombian territory for the training of Gideon's paramilitaries, the links with drug trafficking in that region and the collaboration of the DEA, to the outsourcing of the coup plan to the Silvercorp company and its details, which included assassinations. of political figures of Chavismo and the installation of an occupation force in Venezuela.
As with previous plans, the Venezuelan government's military intelligence was key to dismantling Operation Gideon.
Now that the dolphin of Uribismo, Iván Duque, with several months of delay tries to alter the evidence that incriminates his government in these plans, using the capture of a group that was stranded after the events of May, it is worth repeating the answer which was given by Jorge Rodríguez: since 2017, the Venezuelan government has denounced 92 times the presence in Colombia of irregular elements related to drug trafficking and paramilitarism who have carried out violent actions against Venezuela.


Photo: Archive

"Double agents" to "destabilize the Colombian state"

Last Thursday, September 3, Rayder Alexander Russo, Yacsi Alexandra Álvarez, and the brothers Juvenal and José Sequea Torres were captured.
All were involved in the coordination of mercenary camps in La Guajira, Colombia, led by Clíver Alcalá. Since May 8 there are arrest warrants issued by the Venezuelan Prosecutor's Office against each of them.
The Venezuelan Prosecutor's Office requested the extradition of these criminals to the Colombian Attorney General's Office.
Iván Duque confirmed the capture of these four people and accused them of "preparing destabilizing actions" with "alleged financing from Nicolás Maduro."
"In the last hours four individuals who were linked to acts of destabilization in Colombian territory were captured (...) They were planning destabilizing actions in Colombia in order to delegitimize the institutions of the Colombian State," said the Colombian president.
Later that story of the "double agents" was followed by the director of the National Police, General Óscar Atehortúa, who contributed alleged "intelligence elements" collected on one of the detainees, Yacsi Alexandra Álvarez:
“She was in charge of generating international contacts to buy weapons and carry out failed operations against the Colombian State. This woman was an interpreter for General Alcalá y Goudreau for the coordination of the purchase of weapons and the training of Venezuelan soldiers in our territory ”.
According to Atehortúa, the Venezuelan deserter Rayder Russo would have been the one coordinating the recruitment of the military for said "failed operations" against the Duque government.


Photo: Archive

El Espectador also made its contribution to the loose conspiracy narrative.
The Colombian media said that it had consulted intelligence sources who were in the capture operation and the statements they compiled only repeat what Duque said: those four mercenaries who carried out the paramilitary operation against Venezuela would be stationed in Colombia by President Maduro to "form illicit groups and carry out irregular activities."
The context of the false accusations in Bogotá
The support of the Casa de Nariño for the irregular activities that were carried out in Colombian territory to destroy Chavismo in Venezuela is understood, especially when it is recalled that the Venezuelan government insistently shared with Bogotá the coordinates of where they were carried out.
Iván Duque now pretends to have “put together the puzzle” of Operation Gideon with that false positive of “Maduro infiltrators” to attack Colombian institutions, which was quickly supported by the Washington representative in Venezuela, Juan Guaidó.
A crude maneuver that reflects the state of crisis in both characters due to the events that are taking place in the Venezuelan political sphere and that point to the resolution of the conflict that the United States unleashed to achieve the delegitimization of the presidency of Nicolás Maduro by some factors international and escalate the financial asphyxia against the country.
On the other hand, as referred to by the now candidate for deputy, Jorge Rodríguez, it must be anticipated that with this capture, the Duque government is probably protecting his accomplices in Gideon's failed plans, as well as the extradition of Clíver Alcalá to the United States. he exonerated him from being accountable to the Venezuelan justice for his participation in the anti-Chavez coup plot.
The fear that the European Union and the United Nations will support the December electoral process produces desperate measures like the one we see today from Bogotá, so simple to dismantle.
However, this narrative of "aggressions against Colombia", although brought by the hair from Gideon's approach, only needs the protection of Washington for it to be considered by the international community, which, at least in the European case, has shown have little tendency to behave as an independent actor in the political situation in Venezuela.

https://medium.com/@misionverdad2012/iv ... ed7073b93b

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Imperialism, Colombia's massacres, and what you can do about it


Beatriz González, Los Papagayos (1987)

The lack of outrage in the Western press about the serious human rights abuses in Colombia is not surprising but an all-too-common display of hypocrisy. For decades, the United States has supported consecutive right-wing administrations in Colombia which permit multinational corporations to exploit cheap labour in the country. Since the start of Colombia’s armed communist insurgency around fifty years ago, the US has dug its imperial talons even deeper into Colombia’s internal affairs — from leading an operation known as Plan Lazo to crush peasant uprisings in the 1960s to providing increasingly overt and extensive funding of the Colombian military in more recent decades.

Although Colombia has one of the highest rates of extrajudicial killings in the world, liberal and conservative media outlets consistently turn a blind eye to the pervasive violence experienced by people in the South American nation. This year alone at least 223 social leaders have been massacred for their political beliefs. To the Western press, human rights are not a matter of fulfilling obligations society has to all people, but a weapon in the war of information used to turn public opinion against its enemies and towards its allies — including the Colombian government.

Since August, a particularly intense wave of massacres (defined as killings of three or more people in a single attack) has hit Colombia. On Friday, August 21, a week which saw five massacres occur across the country ended tragically with three massacres in one day. Many of these massacres are taking place in areas where the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and other leftist guerillas used to hold power, where a power vacuum has developed after the 2016 peace deal.

The assassinations of social leaders, combined with the recent violent police murder of Javier Ordóñez, sparked protests in September which left at least 13 dead after the use of lethal force by police — 13 more than were killed during the widely covered Hong Kong protests. As has been highlighted repeatedly, Western mainstream media is selectively humanitarian in the sense that they apply ‘international’ pressure on governments only when it is in their region’s economic or geopolitical interest. The Colombian state, a long-standing ally of the West, does not receive such pressure. Rather, despite the indisputable and verified evidence of systematic state killings of social and political leaders, and more recently of students and young protestors or even bystanders, is reported as an ambiguous ‘surge of mass killings’. In other words, they give the West, and the rest of the world, a sterile and unimpassioned account of what would amount to genocide if it were taking place in a rival country.

If we home in on what’s been happening since August alone we find that there’s a clear pattern of young people who are working-class, Black, Indigenous, and of mixed descent, being massacred. Western reporting on these massacres often involves implicating left-wing armed groups, the favoured boogeyman of the Colombian state. The preliminary investigations into the recent massacres, however, uncover a truth that is too hard a pill for Western society to swallow because of the complicity that it would entail.

Right-wing paramilitary groups, with verifiable links to the state, are said to be consolidating their power over a large part of the rural territory now that left-wing armed groups have demobilised due to the 2016 peace-deal. Social and political leaders, especially students and young activists, in these rural areas are seen as a real threat to this expansion by the state-sponsored terrorists and are, therefore, targeted incessantly.

In general, the Western world has conveniently regarded Colombia as either a mere cocaine manufacturer for the world, as a naturally and inherently violent place, or more recently, as a fun and culturally vibrant place to go on vacation. Of course, all of these stereotypes are vacant of the proper historical and political context that is needed to understand what’s happening accurately. The more recent and growing stereotype among Westerners, Colombia as an attractive holiday or gap-year destination, is beginning to play a significant role in concealing the ongoing violence of the state on Colombian people, either through policy or bullets.

The Western world is not only committing an injustice by turning a blind eye to the terrorism of the state and state-sponsored groups, they are actively involved in this project. The West itself turns a blind eye to what is going on in Colombia because it often plays a role and benefits from this violence, transnational corporations (TNCs) being some of the biggest perpetrators. Colombia is rich in land, resources and most importantly, easily exploitable labour. Free market economic policies allow for transnational corporations to take advantage of basically non-existent labour laws, allowing for higher profit to be extracted from exploited workers. When people try to stand up for their land or demand basic rights they are met with harsh repression.

TNCs utilizing local military and police to protect their own economic interests is commonplace in the global south, and in Colombia, many companies have even gone so far as to contracting right-wing paramilitaries. Oil companies, such as British Petroleum, have been known to contract the military, as well as paramilitary forces, to protect pipelines and even intimidate or kill oil union workers, or those protesting environmental degradation. Agricultural industries, such as the palm oil industry, have been able to rapidly grow in the past two decades due to paramilitaries forcibly displacing peasants and farmers, selling this land back to the corporations.

In the 1980s Coca-Cola hired paramilitaries to intimidate and kill union workers. Canadian mining companies are infamous for dispossessing and destroying the land of campesinos and indigenous people all across Latin America, including Colombia. In 2017 Cosigo Resources Ltd attempted to convince an indigenous group in the protected nature reserve Yaigoje-Apaporis National Park to lift mining restrictions, and when they refused the company threatened to sue Colombia for 16.5 billion dollars.

The West's interests in maintaining their economic holdings within Colombia has resulted in not only exploitation of the land and people, but the deaths of tens of thousands. It is in their own interest to turn a blind eye, as they often play an active role in the violence and repression.

The U.S. military and government has a long history of working with the Colombian state in repressing its people, going back to Colombia's ‘independence’. The U.S. has funnelled money and resources into counter-insurgency programs in Colombia to protect their own political and economic interests. In the 1960s the U.S., to give a concrete example, sent research teams to the South American country and advised that the police be directly linked to counter-insurgency programs and also masterminded the Plan Lazo. This gave the army political and judicial power that was directly responsible for widespread state terror directed at civil society, an ideology that is still prevalent and materially harmful to this day.

Over the second half of the 20th century, the U.S. sent billions of dollars in military aid and resources to Colombia, with the underlying intent of fighting insurgency and maintaining a pro-U.S. government and free-market economic policies. However, when the fight against communism began to lose its legitimacy as a reason for interventionism they turned to the War on Drugs policy. It gave new legitimacy to a U.S. presence within Colombia that would allow them to funnel billions of dollars into the increased surveillance and militarization of the country, all for the purpose of ‘fighting narco-traffickers’.

However, since the War on Drugs has begun, drug production and exportation has increased over the years rather than decreased. It has been discovered that the military and government officials often have links to narcotrafficking, and U.S. and European banks are known to launder money for narcos. The U.S. has little interest in fighting narco-traffickers, but rather maintaining control over the Colombian state. Plan Colombia saw $6-9 billion go into the improvement of military tech, counter-insurgency intelligence, and the joint training of troops and police. Even ICE has played a role in the training of the Colombian Police force. Today Colombia is the second-largest recipient of military aid from the U.S. after Israel, meaning the U.S. directly supports the terror that the military inflicts upon the civilian population.

During the civil war, in an attempt to inflate numbers of insurgents killed and to receive more funding from the U.S., the army would kill civilians and dress them up in guerrilla uniforms to justify the killings. These cases, known as false positives, are believed to have victimised around 10,000 civilians, most of them vulnerable young people. These state-sponsored massacres continue today even after the peace agreement was enacted in 2016.

By financing and supporting the Colombian army, the U.S. is funding paramilitary groups by proxy. Often, senior Colombian military personnel have been found to have direct ties to paramilitary groups and their terrorist activities. One of many such instances is a massacre that occurred in Chengue, Sucre, in 2001, where paramilitaries removed dozens of people from their homes, individually crushed their heads with stones or sledgehammers, and set fire to the village as they left. The military had participated in blocking the village off so people couldn't flee, and even gave information to the paramilitaries beforehand.

Furthermore, Colombia is a strategic geopolitical ally for the U.S. military as it neighbours Venezuela. The U.S. has attempted to invade Venezuela many times to overthrow the government in hopes of crushing the Bolivarian revolution and has often worked with the Colombian Army in doing so. The U.S. turns a blind eye to the violence in Colombia as they utilize and strengthen the militarized state to crush emerging and existing radical and progressive movements within Colombia, and throughout Latin America, that threaten the U.S. empire and free-market capitalism.

The recent massacres are then linked back to capitalism and imperial domination from the North. So what can we do to bring an end to the cycle of violence in Colombia? By exposing the neglect of our situation in Western mainstream media we are not calling for Western society to come and save us. Instead, we want Westerners to understand that they have an active duty to put an end to the violent situation made possible by their governments and businesses.

Western society needs to force their elected governments to stop meddling in our affairs, halt their business and political partnerships with our ruling class, and put an immediate end to the funding and training of local military and paramilitaries.

Once the powerful capitalist-imperialist interests are dealt with, we argue that the only viable solution is a socialist worker’s state. The country’s workers will assume this role by exercising power through a representative government in which legislators are nominated by popular organizations such as trade unions, women’s organizations, and organizations which fight for the rights of racially oppressed groups.

Only a truly independent Colombia, with help from socialist allies, will win their centuries-long struggle for liberation.

The Red Condor Collective is a Colombian diaspora (and allies) initiative with the objective of securing material and non-material support for the communist/socialist movement in their home country. With rife persecution, killings, disappearances, and general harassment that Leftist political and social movements face in the South American country, we find that communists are more likely to be targeted and less likely to be supported. In the West especially, solidarity, if it exists all, is commonly reserved for actors that align with their liberal ideals.

Our mission is to help strengthen international support for the most radical sectors of Colombian society in order to bring about a more structural and deep-rooted transformation. All of our members are volunteers and that means that all of the financial support that our organization collects will be wired directly to legal organizations on the frontline.

Join the Red Condor Collective today and help bring about a new Colombia in peace with political, social, and economic justice.

You can donate to our fundraiser for legal support for imprisoned Colombian protestors here.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/legal-defenc ... e=customer

https://www.ebb-magazine.com/essays/imp ... o-about-it

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Hundreds of people participate in the protest against police brutality in Bogotá, on September 21, 2020 (Photo: Leonardo Muñoz / AFP)

THERE IS A NATIONAL STRIKE IN COLOMBIA: WHAT ARE THE DEMANDS OF IVÁN DUQUE?
21 Oct 2020 , 10:49 am .

The National Unemployment Committee called a strike for this Wednesday, October 21 in Colombia, with the aim of defending life and democracy, protesting against violence and demanding the negotiation of the national emergency document.

The organizers of the strike together with the indigenous Minga agreed that their demands would be divided into these four transversal axes.

Here are the demands point by point:

Rejection of murders, massacres and the "brutality of the repressive apparatus", more than a month after the death of taxi driver Javier Ordóñez due to police abuse.
Defense of the peace agreements signed between the State and the FARC and their implementation.
Demand for "full respect for the protest and civil liberties."
Requirement of judicial independence.
Guarantee care during the pandemic and working conditions and biosafety for health workers.
Guarantee "zero enrollment" in public universities.
Access to a basic income for at least six months for people in vulnerable conditions.
Rescue of micro, small and medium-sized companies in the face of the coronavirus crisis.
Defense of food sovereignty and security.
Protection of sensitive or discriminated sectors such as women, the LGBTI and Afro population.
Rejection of the emergency presidential decrees on the grounds that "they have deteriorated living conditions."
Repudiation of Decree 1,174, which creates a new social protection scheme for those who work part-time.
Defense of state companies against possible privatizations.

https://misionverdad.com/hay-paro-nacio ... %A1n-duque

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The Colombian Minga arrived in the capital on October 18, 2020 (Photo: Raúl Arboleda / AFP)

The Colombian Minga arrived in the capital on October 18, 2020 (Photo: Raúl Arboleda / AFP)
EIGHT THOUSAND INDIGENOUS PEOPLE ARRIVE IN BOGOTÁ TO DEMAND A MEETING WITH IVÁN DUQUE
19 Oct 2020 , 12:19 pm .

The Colombian indigenous Minga arrived in Bogotá on Sunday, October 18, after traveling more than 600 kilometers, to begin their mobilizations in the Colombian capital on Monday, October 19. He demands a meeting with President Iván Duque and rejects the extreme violence that affects the native peoples of the neighboring country.

This is a large mobilization, made up of some 8 thousand people, which left the Cauca department on October 10 to Cali, the capital of Valle del Cauca, where they hoped to hold a meeting with Duque that did not take place. Given the presidential absence, La Minga decided to travel to Bogotá to demand the meeting.

He is also expected to participate in the national strike called for next Wednesday.

In a statement from the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC), which is also part of the minga, it is demanded that the right to protest be respected with "full guarantees" and it is stated that "problems and conflicts are possible to resolve with more democracy and less repression, with respect for the other and not with stigmatization and discrimination ".

What are La Minga's requests? The demand for guarantees from the State in the face of the increase in violence, compliance with the Havana Peace Accords and the restitution of the lands that have been seized by transnational corporations and illegal armed groups.

This year at least 40 indigenous leaders have been assassinated until last June. For its part, ONIC raises this figure to 242 homicides since the signing of the Peace Accords in 2016.

https://misionverdad.com/ocho-mil-ind%C ... %A1n-duque

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COLOMBIA, LABOR
Support Colombia’s National Strike – NO REPRESSION!
November 19, 2020



SEND AN EMAIL TO COLOMBIAN AUTHORITIES IN SUPPORT OF THE NATIONAL STRIKE
https://afgj.salsalabs.org/supportcolom ... index.html

Today, November 19, 2020, under the direction of the Confederations of the Workers Unions and the Confederations of Retirees, the Colombian people are holding a National Strike with mobilizations in Bogotá, and the capitals and municipalities of the country. Among the objectives of the strike are:

Life and Peace – an end to the killings of social leaders and the repression of popular movements, fulfillment of the peace accords;
Democracy – Respect for civil liberties and the right to protest, independence of the judiciary;
Repeal of Decree 1174 and negotiation of the Emergency Document – The Emergency Document contains points related to the defense of sovereignty and national food security, compliance with the agreements signed with Fecode, the defense of employment and basic income. President Duque has refused to negotiate.
Saturday marks the anniversary of last year’s National Strike that lasted for weeks, and turned out hundreds of thousands of people across Colombia in the largest demonstrations since the 1970s. The protests were violently repressed by Colombia’s Armed Forces, and especially by the ESMAD riot police, who were co-created by the US government through Plan Colombia, and who receive U.S. weapons and training. Since last years mobilizations, the National Strike committee has stayed together, and there have been a series of subsequent national strikes and other activities in support of the demands. The response of the Colombian government has been to refuse to negotiate in good faith while labor rights continue to be abrogated, the peace process languishes, and killings of social movement leaders soar. Meanwhile, the White House has advocated against key components of Colombia’s Peace Accords, and the Congress, with ample support on both sides of the aisle, passed the highest military and security aid package to Colombia in nine years.

We are especially concerned about the safety of today’s participants in the strike. Only two months ago, ESMAD and Colombian police massacred 13 people in one day who were protesting police brutality and the beating death of Javier Ordoñez for a curfew violation. ESMAD forces are currently attacking rural protesters in the Department of Putumayo. Yesterday, just in time for today’s National Strike, the Tribunal of Bogotá has revoked a ban on the use of tear gas against public demonstrations. We support the calls of Colombian popular movements to disband ESMAD and we call on the U.S. government to end all funding, training, and arms sales for ESMAD.

We who are involved in U.S. popular movements must recognize the links we have with Colombian protesters. Our own taxes support repression in Colombia. More importantly, our struggles for labor rights and peace, and against violent police repression, are intimately and intricately linked.

https://afgj.org/support-colombias-nati ... repression

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Thousands of People Marched in Colombia Despite Heavy Rains


A woman holds up a sign that reads, "We are no military target, No more social leaders murdered," during the National Strike, Bogota, Colombia, Nov.19, 2020. | Photo: EFE

Published 20 November 2020

New mobilizations are expected on Saturday, November 21, and on Monday, November 23, the day that commemorates the first anniversary of young Dilan Cruz's murder.

The torrential rains that fell on Bogota this Thursday did not prevent a new day of protests by unions and social organizations against violence and the economic and social policies of Colombia's President Ivan Duque.

Thousands of people took to the streets of the different cities of the country to also reject the Duke's labor policies, which affect labor stability by permitting hourly hiring.

The demonstration took place two days before the first anniversary of the beginning of the protests that lasted for several weeks between November and December of last year in rejection of the Duque's government.

In Bogota, members of the United Workers Central (CUT came out with drums as they led a bandwagon that marched to the Bolivar Square, which is the center of the Colombian establishment. Andean music groups walked along with them.

#Colombia | A new day of national mobilization will take place, "for life, democracy and the negotiation of the emergency plan," led by unions, workers' centers, students, farmers, and other social sectors.https://t.co/h4tiG6Nltt

— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) November 19, 2020
Former combatants of the ex-guerrilla group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) also joined the protest to reject the violence that has taken the lives of 241 former guerrillas since the signing of the Peace Agreement in November 2016.

In other cities such as Medellin, Cali, Barranquilla, and Bucaramanga, small groups also took to the streets despite heavy rains.

New mobilizations are expected on Saturday, November 21, and on Monday, November 23, the day that commemorates the first anniversary of young Dilan Cruz's murder by the Colombian police.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Col ... -0002.html

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TWO YEARS BEFORE THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS
THE GHOST OF "CASTROCHAVISMO" RETURNS TO COLOMBIA
Maria Fernanda Barreto


"Castro-Chavismo returns to attack!", Say the Colombian media (Photo: Diario de Cuba)

29 Nov 2020 , 9:14 am .

Two years after the next presidential elections in Colombia, the largest Colombian newspaper titled a few days ago: "They investigate a plan from Venezuela to affect the elections in Colombia", and, of course, the matrix began to reproduce.

According to this article, there are caravans of people who cross from Venezuela with the sole purpose of requesting Colombian citizenship, and the surprise for the authorities of that country is that the number of claimants for that right has grown, but what confuses and ignites them the most. Their alarms are that, according to their own words, they have observed that "the vast majority returned immediately" after completing the procedure.

According to the figures they review, from 22 thousand 147 people in 2014 and 93 thousand 975 in 2017 they went to 159 thousand 413 in 2018, 142 thousand 208 in 2019 and, ending 2020, the figure is 42 thousand 586 sons and daughters of people born in Colombia who claim their right to nationality by birth.

What has a simple explanation and should be viewed normally is beginning to be assumed as a national security issue, according to the Colombian media corporations and their associates. According to what has been said, the only possible explanation for this is that President Nicolás Maduro has activated his already known world powers to destabilize countries that were "extremely stable", and guarantee that an option that is ideologically related to him will win the presidential elections. 2022 in Colombia.

THE EVIDENTIAL ELEMENTS OF THIS MEDIA MATRIX
Like all ghosts, the interference of "Castro-Chavism" in the political processes of popular rebellions in other countries can only be verified with the use of parapsychology or its cognate in social communication, which are rumors.

This is how, in a very not very serious exercise of journalism, sadly common, only this proof is provided: "A little over a month ago, information (from a very good source) arrived at the Casa de Nariño about an alleged plan of the Nicolás Maduro regime to try to influence the presidential elections. "

To do this, they also indirectly accuse the Bolivarian Government of corrupting the already very corrupt Colombian institutions. And although they deny the existence of popular support for the Venezuelan government, they do say that it is capable of an operation to infiltrate Colombia with no less than 600,000 "Castro-Chavista" agents who, as 200 years ago, would cross the border to free Colombia from the eternal alternation in power of the different currents of the same right subordinate to the United States, which have led it since Santander marked such an unworthy destiny.

The little sense of ridicule would be surprising if we did not know that behind this matrix, as always, is the most murderous oligarchy on the continent preparing for the electoral debacle that is coming.

We will try to provide a dose of reality here because the ideologization of the journalistic exercise imposed by the right wing and its business consortiums is really worrying, and even painful, for those of us who know that to build peace in Colombia it is necessary to democratize the country, and for this it is necessary to a sine qua non condition that reality be known and analyzed, the one experienced when walking through the streets and fields, not the virtual reality that they build and design in Washington.

And because this matrix continues to fuel the conflicts between Colombia and Venezuela, which is extremely dangerous for both peoples.

WHAT THE FIGURES SAY
Two years ago we published a critical analysis of the figures offered by Migración Colombia on Venezuelan migration. In it we detail that in the section entitled "Transit Migration" the following could be read: "In this chapter you will find the number of Venezuelan citizens who use Colombia as a transit country to third countries." There it was pointed out that, already in 2018, approximately 26% of the people who crossed the border from Venezuela immediately returned to the country.


The Colombian-Venezuelan border continues to be a critical point of conflict between the two countries (Photo: Archive)

After the xenophobia crises unleashed by the right against Venezuelan migration last year and the terrible health crisis that places Colombia among the countries with the most deaths from covid-19 on the continent, there has been a massive return of the Venezuelan migrant population , which even the authorities and the Colombian media corporations have had to acknowledge .

The reason is simple and they know it: Venezuela is not as bad as they say, much less Colombia is as good as it is promoted. So that return to Venezuela is absolutely understandable and, even in terms of its statistics, normal.

They also fear an increase in the number of voters in Venezuela, since for the last Colombian presidential elections, 304 thousand 8 people were registered to vote at their consulates in Venezuela, which for the moment constituted much less than 10% of the estimated population .

Even so, abstention among the Colombian population living in Venezuela and registered to vote was 89%, that is, only a number close to 1% of the Colombian population living in Venezuela turned out to vote (33,175 voters ), because the majority of the Colombian migrant population in Venezuela arrives excluded from their own homeland, so it is common that they do not have the necessary documentation to register with the consulate and because, in addition, they are not usually interested in maintaining any type of relationship with the Colombian institutions, much less vote.

But according to their figures, they would now have 184,794 more Venezuelan-Colombians and Colombians to vote in 2022, and counting on the culture of electoral participation that has been promoted in the country, it is likely that more than the usual 10% (18,479 people) want to vote in 2022. They fear popular participation.

What many people do not know is that all Colombian consulates in Venezuela have been closed since February 23, 2019, despite the fact that, by the way, they continue to report 125 thousand 55 dollars a month in expenses to the Colombian State. And therefore, the millions of Colombians who live here are in the forgetfulness of the Colombian State, for better and for worse. For this reason, to carry out any documentation process it is necessary to cross the border and go to the service points arranged in the Simón Bolívar International Bridge, Maicao, Arauca and Inírida.

This violates our fundamental rights, although it does not seem to interest the State and not even the opposition congressmen, who will surely remember it when the presidential elections that Uribism fears so much.

As we have already pointed out repeatedly, unlike Colombia, Venezuela is a country used to receiving immigrants. After at least five decades of intense Colombian migration to Venezuela, calculations made by our own community indicate that there are at least 5.5 million Venezuelans who have the right to claim their nationality by birth according to article 96 of the Political Constitution of Colombia, which now, according to the press, the national registrar Alexander Vega threatens to suspend, with some unprecedented maneuver that, in any case, would be supralegal.

Therefore, it must be said that a very small part of those more than five million have applied for their nationality in these years with full rights. The other thing is that the rebound in the figures provided by Migración Colombia, which can always be doubted given their demonstrated arithmetic disabilities and tendentious handling of statistics, occurred in 2018 and that the following two years have progressively decreased.

It does not make sense, then, that just when there are 73% fewer of these records, a scandal starts, unless it is nothing more than a media maneuver to cover up other objectives.

URIBISMO KNOWS THAT IT WILL SUFFER AN ELECTORAL DEBACLE IN 2022
The debacle of Uribismo in the next presidential elections is easy to predict. We already pointed this out in 2019 after the regional elections on October 27 because the analysis was obvious. The defeat of the Centro Democrático party and its related candidates in that electoral process made it clear.

That was the first tangible evidence of the damage that Uribe's permanence in power was going to cause to Uribe itself, because, as we also warned in 2018, this mandate corresponded to " Uribe without Uribe ."

Today the polls say it . The popularity of Iván Duque has fallen steadily while the rejection against him has grown, which in any case is still less than the rejection of Uribe Vélez, which only between August and October of this year increased 8 points according to the most largest pollster in the country. But this is more accurately demonstrated by the demonstrations and strikes that have continued to take place even in the midst of the pandemic.


The popularity of President Duque has been declining steadily in recent months (Photo: Archive)

This does not mean that the system is at risk, since beyond Uribismo, the Colombian right has many partisan expressions that support it, even when they are from the center-right, and these continue to be the most popular and ally against Uribismo, even with the so-called "center-left", to seek the Gatopardian maxim of " change so that nothing changes ", an alliance that in the last regional elections resulted in a large number of diverse coalitions that obtained the majority of the votes.

For all this, nothing better than to dust off early on the tired ghost of "Castrochavism", in which fortunately fewer and fewer people believe, but which for the moment continues to be useful to them.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/el ... e-colombia

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Forces in the Bogota Senate have called for reforms for the Colombian military forces (Photo: @COL_EJERCITO / Twitter)

FALSE POSITIVES, INFORMATION CONCEALMENT AND NATO
THE INTRICACIES OF THE COLOMBIAN ARMED FORCES
Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein

4 Dec 2020 , 9:21 am .

Colombia's institutional crisis is long-standing to the point that it is already part of the political system, in other words, the elites designed a model through which the crisis is seen and accepted as an expression of democracy. Of course, the breakdown of the State has limits as long as it does not affect the oligarchic interests that have controlled that country since independence.

The armed forces are not immune to this phenomenon. They were created for "... the defense of sovereignty, independence, the integrity of the national territory and the constitutional order," according to Article 217 of the Political Constitution. However, since the only external conflicts that Colombia has had since 1948 have been caused by Bogotá: the incursion of the corvette Caldas in 1987 in jurisdictional waters of Venezuela and the invasion of Ecuador in 2008, the military establishment has been involved in an internal war - which they have not been able to win in the military field - for more than 60 years in defense of that "constitutional order" that serves the elites and marginalizes the people who are mired in high levels of poverty and exclusion.

In the case of the armed forces, the highest degree of decomposition was manifested through the policy of false positives through which the Uribe-Santos pairing prostituted an important part of the Colombian military component. That crime, which according to the International Criminal Court (ICC) "can be classified as against humanity and war" became State policy in 2012 if it is considered that these murders were committed to increase the rates of military success, transforming death of civilians as an instrument for obtaining greater international resources to achieve its objectives

In this regard, in a report prepared in November 2012, the Court stated:

"A state policy does not necessarily have to be conceived at the highest level of the state machinery, but can be adopted by local or regional state bodies. Even a policy adopted locally or regionally can be classified as state policy."

These events, which not only manifested the horror of the war waged by the State against the people, were an expression of discontent in certain sectors of the Colombian armed forces that did not accept that they were used to formalize the violation of human rights, taking into account the The impunity that the oligarchy of that country has had internally throughout history, and externally, the endorsement that the United States has granted it to commit all kinds of crimes in the name of democracy.

According to Colombian political analyst Juan Carlos Tanus, in his country there are three sectors within the armed forces: those who make a living from drug trafficking, those who make a living from the fight against drug trafficking, and a third party that opposes linking the military institution with the national and transnational crime.

The peace talks in Havana between the FARC and the Colombian government manifested a debate in the official sessions and outside them between the guerrilla leaders and the Colombian military chiefs who were part of the government delegation. As happened in a similar event at the beginning of the 90s of the last century in the negotiations that culminated in a peace agreement between the forces that faced each other in the civil war in El Salvador, communication between the guerrillas and the military became fluid and auspicious. Only those who know war and have participated directly in it deeply appreciate the value of peace.

On the contrary, in both cases, government political elites delayed, torpedoed, and underestimated the value of dialogue and negotiation. However, the results obtained were dissimilar: in El Salvador, where since 1992 an environment of peace has prevailed in which weapons gave way to politics, while in Colombia, this has been impossible, even when since the government of Iván Duque A permanent bombardment of the agreements has been established, which has generated a climate of impunity that has led to the murder of around 250 combatants, approximately 4% of the total demobilized after the apparent end of the conflict. A similar number of social leaders, peasants, indigenous people and human rights activists have also been assassinated with total impunity.

It cannot be assumed that all the Colombian military endorse such behavior. One sector, as Tanus said, believes that peace must be given a chance. Finally, it must pass through the heads of some that these armed forces are heirs to the traditions of Pantano de Vargas and Boyacá, they know that the founder of their army was the Liberator Simón Bolívar, who in the midst of the combat in 1820, he was able to understand and promote a negotiation with the Spaniards —at a time when the final victory was seen nearby— just to avoid greater suffering and pain for the people.

It is known that in Colombia it is the middle strata who send their children to the military academies, the oligarchy does not send their descendants to war, but to the American universities to train in order to assume power and control the country's economy, Likewise, they go to the seminaries to train as priests capable of guarding the soul of the parishioners and the sacrosanct private property, they are the ones who persist in an absurd war that uses the children of the peasants as cannon fodder in a conflict that does not belongs.

In recent days it has become known how the former attorney general Néstor Humberto Martínez, a champion of warmongering and confrontation, in alliance with the US DEA forged evidence to incriminate Iván Márquez and Jesús Santrich in drug trafficking, forcing them to continue the armed struggle to safeguard his life and that of thousands of combatants who gave a chance to a peace that for the second time has been betrayed by the elites. Uribism in Colombia intends to obtain through assassination and massacres what the armed forces could not achieve in the war terrain.

Within this framework, the complaint of the inspector general of the National Police, General William José Salamanca, against the director of that instance, General Óscar Atehortúa, and other police chiefs for the possibility that he has tried to erase information related to investigations within the institution.

Likewise, doubts have been expressed in Colombian society regarding who the perpetrators of the repeated massacres of the population are, in particular of humble young people, which Duque and Atehortúa have insisted on blaming the ELN guerrillas and "dissidents "of the FARC, without having presented any evidence in this regard so far. It is known that Atehortúa is a protégé of Defense Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo who aspires to be the standard-bearer of Uribism in the next elections, so that once again the security forces are being used for the petty interests of a group.

The same is happening in the Army. On September 22, Colonel Pedro Javier Rojas Guevara, director of the National Army Doctrine Center, presented his resignation from the armed forces. Rojas, who has 33 years of service, directs the body that is responsible for developing the doctrine that supports the planning and execution of military operations. This institution is also responsible, since 2011, for implementing the Damascus Plan, aimed at modernizing the Army to make it more in line with its peers in NATO, an alliance that Colombia joined in 2013.

In his resignation letter addressed to President Iván Duque, Rojas let him know that:

"I must show you in a respectful but emphatic way [...] that I have absolutely lost confidence in the institutional High Command, headed by General Eduardo Enrique Zapateiro, commander of the National Army, which, without a hint of a doubt, not only prevents me from continuing under his orders but, in addition, it goes against my Christian principles and values ​​such as loyalty, fidelity and transparency ".

Interviewed on December 1 by the Bogotá newspaper El Tiempo , the officer declared that: "There is an evident internal leadership crisis. We have 25 fewer generals than there should be and officers from other ranks have also left." And regarding the Damascus Plan, according to El Tiempo , Colonel Rojas pointed out "that they continue to enroll it as a doctrine developed by one of the parties: General Alberto Mejía, former commander of the Military Forces. And that is why support has been withdrawn. ".

The military continues saying that: "Since 2011, Generals Navas, Mantilla, Rodríguez, Lasprilla, Mejía, Gómez and Martínez supported the doctrinal evolution called Damascus within the framework of the Army transformation plan (2011-2030). The strange thing is that the current commander wants to erase something that has been beneficial to the institution. " El Tiempo believes that "for Rojas it is clear that this lack of leadership and internal incompetence do not generate confidence in the middle management and the troops."

It is clear that all this complicated trance is an expression of the deepening of the internal crisis in the military institution. What has happened is the manifestation of a public response from a military sector that saw in the Havana Accords a positive route out of the entrapment of the war. In this way, he is responding to the most recalcitrant group of warmongering uribism that is not used to revealing these issues to public opinion, but which underlies despite the little that has been openly known.

The current military leadership, arbitrarily imposed by Duque, removed from their posts all the military sympathizers of the peace process and began an internal "hunt". What Colonel Rojas has done is dare to show his face to show that today there is an alternative to Uribism and war. In this sense, it is likely that other active or retired uniforms support Rojas, if not before, they will also be subjected to strong sanctions and / or their expulsion from the armed institution.

In an article written by journalist Andrés Dávila and published by the Razón Pública portal on July 22, 2019, it is stated that after the peace negotiations:

"The Army understood that, although its size and functions were not discussed in Havana, it had to adapt and anticipate the changes that the post-agreement would bring. Of course, in highly conservative hierarchical organizations, adverse to change and inertial, these changes take time, and produce tensions, divisions and internal debates ”.

These dissident demonstrations are likely to be an expression of those "internal tensions, divisions and debate" of which Dávila speaks.

In the midst of the predicament, the Army rushed to refute Colonel Rojas in the same media in which the military made his assertions, saying that the Damascus Doctrine is "established, and based on it, training continues. certain that it will stop ". In the same way, he pointed out that at this moment 30 instruction manuals are being worked on, ensuring that: "It is not a political issue, it is the tactical, operational and strategic guidelines of military action," according to a senior military officer who rejected identify.

Curiously, as if it were a pot that is being uncovered, at the same time that this public debate on the integrity and capabilities of the armed forces is taking place, the newspaper El Espectador de Bogotá in its edition of December 2 gives Know that on November 26, in response to the request made last July by the president of the Truth Commission, Francisco de Roux, the Military Forces delivered three reports on the genesis and operations of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia ( AUC), denying a priori any link between the armed forces and paramilitarism.

Recognizing that the self-defense councils were made with the objective of "allowing citizens to defend their property from the attack by guerrilla organizations," the military believes that said structures had "the incorporation of drug trafficking organizations into the national scene" that they became irregular armed groups like the AUC. Based on this, the report justifies them with the argument that in the context in which these organizations were created, "the presence of criminal groups increased, generating conditions of insecurity for many of the inhabitants of different regions of the country," thus trying to establish an unacceptable difference between paramilitarism and AUC as if they were not an expression of the above.

The Spectator believes that:

"... although the document denies the existence of systematic actions between the Armed Forces and the AUC, the Court, until September 2019, had delivered 22 judgments against the Colombian State for the violation of human rights: several of these for" omission "of their duty in the face of criminal acts perpetrated by paramilitaries."

In short, as stated in popular slang: "If the river sounds, it brings stones." It is evident that events are occurring within the Colombian armed forces that, in light of recent events in the country, are only the beginning of actions by increasingly broad sectors (including the armed forces) that will try to rescue decency and the decorum of the country's institutions.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/el ... e-colombia

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The DEA’s Failed Entrapment of Colombians Who Signed the Peace Agreement
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on DECEMBER 13, 2020



The Colombian newspaper El Espectador has revealed that the narcotrafficking case against communist leader Jesús Santrich was based on false charges. Santrich, a demobilised member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), was arrested on April 9th, 2018 at the request of a U.S. federal grand jury in connection to a cocaine trafficking deal with the Mexican Sinaloa cartel. After spending a year in prison, Santrich fled back to Colombia’s jungle to escape probable extradition.

The investigation revealed that the indictment came from a testimony given by Marlon Marín Marín, nephew of guerrilla leader Iván Marquez. He informed U.S. intelligent agents of a 5-kilo cocaine deal in 2017. It turns out that the agents posed as Sinaloa Cartel members and gave Marín $7,000 to acquire 5 kilos, supposedly a sample of a future 1-ton shipment.

Marín delivered the illicit drugs but it has now come to light that he acquired them through a “controlled” government operation approved by the Attorney General of Colombia on October 17th, 2017. Marín, however, later testified in the grand jury indictment that Santrich had been involved in delivering the 5-kilos of cocaine which Marín then gave to the DEA agents.

Through multiple phone calls, Marín and the Sinaloa Cartel (undercover DEA agents) planned the larger transaction of several tons of cocaine and insisted that he put his uncle, Ivan Marquez, on the line. El Espectador reported that a source from the Attorney General’s office had admitted that the plan of the agents was to have Marín bring his uncle to a warehouse in which they would place 10 tons of cocaine and incriminate the guerrilla leader.

Marín was unable to get Marquez to come to the phone or attend any meetings, and so they failed to entrap him. Instead, they used tampered audio and video evidence to attempt to indict Santrich.

Since he had signed the peace agreement, Santrich was supposed to be subject to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) for possible crimes he may have committed. The JEP requested the audio evidence in the case of Santrich, but several thousand files were denied to them by the DEA and Colombia’s Attorney General’s Office.

It was only in November that El Espectador was able to reveal the entrapment operation led by the DEA, an act that has been seen by many as a coup against Colombia’s peace process.

In the years since Santrich’s unlawful arrest, the Colombian government has continued to fail to meet its side of the peace deal which includes political and agrarian reform. Futher, it has provided no special representative bodies for victimized territories, no guarantees for social protests nor an end to paramilitarism.

Ex-congresswoman Piedad Córdoba has pointed to a coup d’etat against the peace process in which the entrapment operations, such as the one which victimized Santrich, greatly damaged the public’s perception of demobilized FARC leaders and members.

This entrapment scheme was a joint operation between the U.S. and Colombian governments, the latter hiding its intentional shortcomings in the peace agreement behind a façade of war on narcotrafficking.
Cordoba also emphasized that, though she disagrees with the decision to take up arms again as Santrich and Marquez have done, she understands this decision has not come from a capricious mindset. Instead, she understands that the Segunda Marquetalia have taken up arms in the midst of fear from political repression which has already seen hundreds of demobilized militants killed since laying down their arms in 2016.

Diaspora Tribune

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2020/12/ ... agreement/

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US Embassy Involved in DEA Plot to Discredit Colombia's JEP


A letter sent in February by a US agent working with the DEA Colombia office requested half a million dollars from Colombia's Attorney General's Office in an illegal operation against the Special Jurisdiction for Peace. | Photo: Colombia Reports

Published 14 December 2020 (16 hours 57 minutes ago)

Evidence released by Colombian outlet Noticias Uno shows that a U.S. Embassy official was intimately involved in a Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) conspiracy to discredit Colombia’s war crimes tribunal (JEP) last year.


A letter sent in February last year by special agent Craig M. Michelin, part of the DEA’s Colombia Office, requested of his liaison at Colombia’s Attorney General's Office to provide $500,000 for an illegal operation against the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP).

Michel was previously involved in a local conspiracy leaked by local media that resulted in the arrest of former FARC leader “Jesus Santrich” and sunk Colombia’s peace process in crisis in April 2018.

In October, the criminal conspiracy to extradite Santrich started to fail, after which a DEA agent arrived in an attempt once again to entrap JEP chief prosecutor Giovanni Alvarez and magistrate Ivan Gonzalez.

Michelin then wrote prosecutor Mauricio Nieto on February 25, 2019, after the second conspiracy failed, indicating that “a criminal organization” agreed to meet “in order to sell, delay or omit decisions that are part of criminal and administrative drug trafficking processes…in exchange for a sum of approximately $500 thousand dollars.”

The United States government admits that its $11,600,000,000 in “assistance” for Colombia including $10,000,000,000 for Plan Colombia has been a colossal FAILURE.



Colombia remains the world’s largest cocaine producer and today the Colombian people are being SLAUGHTERED.
— Camila (@camilateleSUR) December 14, 2020

Days before assistant prosecutorJulian Carlos Bermeo received $40,000 while in the company of the convicted criminal and former Senator Luis Alberto Gil, former Prosecutor General Nestor Humberto Martinez personally granted the money requested on February 27.

In a different location in Bogota, one of Gil's associates, Orlando Villamizar, simultaneously received $460,000.

The prosecution claims that Bermeo agreed to delay the JEP’s testing of evidence against Santrich, which was rejected by the suspect and dismissed by Alvarez, who said to the media that Bermeo could in no way influence the proceedings.

Martinez resigned in May 2019 after the JEP ordered an investigation against the former chief prosecutor and DEA agents who were conspiring against Santrich and the FARC’s former political head, Ivan Marquez, since even before June 2017.

El Espectador made records public last month by revealing that the prosecution was conspiring to frame FARC members and pro-peace politicians since February 2017 without any success.

The US government’s interference in Colombia's internal affairs strained relations between the US government and Colombia’s judicial and legislative branches, spurring Santrich and Marquez to regroup and rearm.

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

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Audio Leaks Implicate Former Colombian VP in Drug Trafficking


Colombian newspaper El Espectador leaked audio Monday revealing the role of the DEA, the Attorney General's Office and former Colombian Vice President Oscar Naranjo in drug trafficking and non-compliance with the Peace Accords. | Photo: Twitter/@elespectador

Published 9 November 2020

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Colombian Attorney General's Office denied the delivery of audio clips to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP).


A series of conversations intercepted from Colombian drug traffickers by U.S. authorities have referred to an alleged direct involvement of former Colombian Vice President Oscar Naranjo in a drug trafficking operation.

In the audios released Monday by the newspaper El Espectador, it was revealed that Colombian drug traffickers in conversations with agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, posing as Mexican drug traffickers, spoke of Naranjo as an accomplice to move the drugs to Bogota from a point in the south of the South American country.

According to the conversations, he was "given some resources because it was not 500 kilos of drugs that he was going to move but 1,000. He was given that yesterday, that is in his custody. But it turns out that he came now alerting about this shit, what I am showing him now," indicates Marlon Marín Marín.

Marín is the nephew of Iván Márquez, former chief peace negotiator of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People's Army (FARC-EP), who took refuge as a protected witness after the operation of the US authorities together with the Colombian authorities.

El Espectador had access to the 24,000 audios of the operation carried out between 2017-2018, which are in the file of Jesús Santrich, and which were not delivered to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP).


Regarding the case of the ex-Vice President, both Marlon Marin and a Mexican, supposedly the son of drug trafficker Rafael Caro Quintero, linked the Naranjo surname again in a call on March 28, 2018, as if it were an old acquaintance in the world of alleged drug traffickers.

In that call, the winding dialogue between Marin and the Mexican DEA agent was recorded as follows: "I don't know if his compadre told him how these things are. From the commitment that was made, that responsibility was handed over to the rotten orange," Marin affirmed.

To which the Mexican asked: "And what does this gentleman have to do with it, well? And Marlon Marín answered: "He has the responsibility of providing the shipment which is two and a half hours away from Bogotá."

Naranjo himself, who was a negotiator of the Peace Agreement in Havana, stated, "I don't know Marlon Marín, I don't know the Mexicans, I was never informed and, given the seriousness of what they are telling me, I am going to the Prosecutor's Office to ask them to investigate, this is supremely serious."

Before the accusations against Iván Márquez, the Prosecutor's Office itself reiterated "that it does not have an investigation under way for drug trafficking against Iván Márquez after the signing of the Peace Agreement."

The audios of the DEA operation against Santrich were requested by the JEP, but at the time the Colombian Prosecutor's Office had denied them.

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