ENCLAVES, MERCENARIES AND EXTERMINATIONS: THE COMMON BETWEEN COLOMBIA AND ISRAEL
Eder Peña
31 Jul 2021 , 11:33 am .
Militarization as a tool for ordering looting and regional destabilization is common in both imperial enclaves (Photo: Oliver Ehmig)
It has been a long time since it has been heard that Colombia is the Israel of Latin America, this statement has been made by different analysts and political figures, especially when in the last decade its role as a North American base has deepened, which serves as an experiment and a focus to destabilize the zone.
In that country, a never specified number of military bases have been located that have actually served as counterinsurgency troops, because when it comes to drug trafficking, their failures are more than evident, and even overwhelming. Having seen the news this week regarding coordination among some senior officers of the Army and narco - paramilitary groups, particularly p rotegían the actions of the Clan Barros a peasant clan ally of the Clan of the Gulf dedicated to drug trafficking and smuggling petrol in the departments of La Guajira, Cesar, Magdalena, Atlántico and the south of Bolívar.
Colombia is the first supplier of cocaine to the United States, each year it beats its own record as a country that produces the alkaloid and this data is closely linked to two aspects in which its coincidence with Israel is total: war as a permanent mechanism of an elite to exercise supremacy and paramilitarization of that mechanism.
However, on the issue of drug trafficking, which today is vital for the capitalist economy, the two imperial enclaves are not similar. In this "division of labor" they do not play the same role because Colombia provides the raw material while Israel provides the weapons and genocidal strategies to protect production.
ENCLAVES OF IMPERIAL CONTROL AND BATTERING RAMS OF MILITARIZATION
Both enclaves have the mission of imposing the war that the United States is leading in Latin America and Western Asia respectively. In the case of the neighboring country and its Plan Colombia, the failure has been evident because the real objectives of "preventing the flow of illegal drugs to the United States" were not achieved.
The only achievement was to weaken the FARC guerrilla movement by trying all kinds of strategies until incubating a counterinsurgency model that could be applied in other latitudes such as Mexico or Afghanistan, where the results have been as disastrous or more disastrous.
The militarization of Colombian society has impacted the guerrilla insurgency and the political opposition to neoliberalism more than drug trafficking, the numbers of which are increasing unstoppably (Photo: AP Photo)
Meanwhile, a State that arose on the basis of the violent expulsion of the Palestinian population that had inhabited that territory for many centuries, called "Israel", is testing in an open-air laboratory both the repression and the tests of the largest weapons of the country. world in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip. There he has a captive population of several million Palestinians while he says that it is the resistance movements that carry out this kidnapping.
Their origins are dissimilar, but the corporate plans emanating from the United States have made the coincidences more than evident, the elites of both countries have tried to make them widely armed and financed. Israel, with an important nuclear arsenal, has sought to crush as much Arab revolutionary expression as possible, it has also invaded its neighbors Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, annexing strategic territories such as the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Jerusalem.
The symbiosis between Colombia and the United States is such that Uribism, in government for almost 20 years, accelerated plans to maintain control of the region by installing US military bases. The results are reflected in the report of a member of the Proclade Foundation, promoted by the Claretian missionaries, "North American Military Bases in Colombia", which highlights:
" From the beginning of Plan Colombia and later the Plan Patriota, the Tres Esquinas and Larandia bases, located in the Department of Caquetá, had been used for the operation of planes and North American technical intelligence. From there the fumigations with glyphosate were controlled. and control over the population was maintained, increasing the war and increasing the number of displacements. As in the case of the communities of Bajo Ariari in the Department of Meta, or the communities of Puerto Asís in Putumayo, it is evident the true intentions: in these regions the military control was directed towards the civilian population, there were murders and disappearances under the responsibility of the Military Forces ".
Colombia, after the so-called Plan for Peace and the Strengthening of the State (alias Plan Colombia), which has given the population less peace and less State, has gone in the opposite direction to the objective postulated by the Pastrana administration in 1998: to promote peace, economic development, increase security and end the illegal drug trade. What it has achieved is to strengthen the army, which had 35 helicopters in 1999 and had more than 200 aircraft in 2015, after the supposed completion of the plan.
The number of military personnel increased by 50 thousand soldiers and 80 thousand new members were incorporated into the National Police, which depends on the Ministry of Defense even though its function is supposedly civilian.
Eduardo Giordano affirms that after the peace agreement, the Pentagon sought to have the Colombian military replace its marines by establishing links between Plan Colombia, the Merida Initiative and the Initiative for Regional Security in Central America. This is how the Colombian Army has been trained in anti-guerrilla techniques by the Southern Command and, in turn, they have trained forces from other countries such as the Joint Task Force (JTF) of the Paraguayan army.
This support coincided with the massacre of two Argentine girls aged 12 and 11 respectively last November, they were staying in a camp of the Paraguayan People's Army (EPP), a guerrilla organization formed in 2006 that took hold in some rural territories after the legislative coup. against former president Fernando Lugo in 2012. President Abdo Benítez, in the style of any recent Colombian government, reported them as casualties of guerrilla forces in combat.
LOOTING GENDARMES
Multiple investigations report the results of the militarization of the enclave that Colombia has become, how it has focused on rural territories and its correlation with extractive interests, that is, with the ordering of the world based on the plundering appetite of the Global North.
The resistance of rural populations, expressed in peasant, indigenous and Afro-Colombian struggles, is fought with blood and fire by the Colombian State, which, like the gendarme of a large mine, imposes a regime of terror that orders the primary accumulation of capital, both monoculture (which includes coca), such as mining and extensive cattle ranching.
Colombia is a country where, according to Oxfam , 1% of owners have 81% of the land in their possession, meanwhile, the remaining 19% -which produces 78% of the food- is distributed among 99% of the small owners; militarization has intensified the concentration of rural property, paramilitarism and forced displacement.
Only in the Catatumbo region of the Norte de Santander Department, on the border with Venezuela and with a greater extension of coca cultivation, there are outstanding 9,200 members of the Military Forces (without adding the police) and there are almost 300,000 people. This means one military man for every 33 inhabitants.
This does not translate into security for the communities, the Indepaz Foundation georeferenced the risk for both social leaders and opposition politicians, and found that it is greater in the territories with the highest concentration of military personnel and concluded that the municipalities are the most violent for society. organized are in Catatumbo, Cauca and Arauca.
In parallel, the government of Iván Duque has sustained the war to maintain the authoritarian and genocidal policies of his mentor Álvaro Uribe with the excuse of an internal enemy, it has done everything to sabotage the opportunity to eradicate war as a political code in Colombia.
It has failed to comply with the peace agreement, mainly the comprehensive rural reform that allowed the expropriation of lands from the large landowners to give them to the peasants, who could recover them, and return to their territories. It has reversed the logic of the Alienation of Property Rights, a legal figure contemplated in the 1992 Constitution to be able to expropriate land from the big and give it to the peasants, putting more and more land in the hands of transnationals through internal displacement.
Indigenous communities have mobilized for the Uribista government of Duque to concretely resolve the violence and displacement in their territories (Photo: La República)
In addition, in August 2020 he signed the Free Trade Agreement between Colombia and Israel, which has been criticized by various sectors , including the BDS organization, because it violates International Humanitarian Law. Four of the 312 Israeli companies that exported their products to Colombia between August 2014 and August 2015 have their headquarters in territories illegally occupied by Israel since 1967, so, more than coincidence, it is a coexistence based on dispossession and subordination.
Colombian exports will be less than Israel's, which would create uneven competition. In terms of telecommunications, Colombia will open itself to Israeli companies, while Israel closes itself to the participation of Colombian companies in its market.
Official documents of the Ministry of Commerce confirm the increase in imports of weapons and military equipment, which was 49.6% in 2010, and with the treaty, they assure that imports will grow more easily, which may affect the already complicated transition to the post-conflict country.
PEACE ACCORDS AS AN IMPETUS FOR MORE EXTERMINATION
Another coincidence (or coexistence) is that, in both countries, dialogue is only a way to buy time to organize the extermination of those who resist looting and occupation. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), founded in 1969 as a representation of a nation without territory, Palestine, sought to unify those living in the occupied territories and in refugee camps.
From its birth it vindicated a democratic, secular and non-racist Palestine, and its leader Yasser Arafat, after years of leading the resistance against the Zionist entity, accepted UN Resolution 242, which recognizes its existence as a State of Israel; later he also agreed to negotiate the Oslo Accords.
In these agreements, signed in 1993 between Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, United States President Bill Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, it was agreed to create a Palestinian state limited to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that barely exists in one limited administration of the current Palestinian National Authority (PNA), in a West Bank occupied by Zionist troops and its illegal colonies.
While Arafat was poisoned with polonium 210, the two-state policy did not prevent the process of forced displacement of the Palestinian people, but Israel has tried to occupy the entire territory of historic Palestine.
In Colombia, according to data presented to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Colombian State produced 6 thousand victims after a peace agreement signed in 1985 between the then-conservative president, Belisario Betancur, and the FARC to end almost three decades of armed conflict. As the negotiations advanced, members of the Patriotic Union (UP) were being killed or were fleeing, as the political formation made up of former guerrillas, communists, trade unionists, communal action boards and left-wing intellectuals was called.
Murders, disappearances, torture, forced displacement and other abuses contributed to the figure, between May 1984 and December 2002 at least 4,153 full members of the party were assassinated. This figure includes 2 presidential candidates, 14 parliamentarians, 15 mayors, 9 mayoral candidates, 3 members of the House of Representatives and 3 senators. Not a month went by without a murder or disappearance of a militant.
Within 14 months of the liberal Virgilio Barco Vargas taking office in May 1986, some 400 members of the UP were assassinated. Journalist Dan Cohen cites an investigation by Colombian journalist Alberto Donadio who claims that the "Red Dance" was devised by Barco Vargas, implementing a plan drawn up by the decorated Israeli spy Rafael "Rafi" Eitan.
The mass extermination of pacified opposition groups is a story that repeats itself within Colombia but is also common to Israel (Photo: File)
From the signing of the 2016 peace agreement to the present, 1,219 murders of social leaders have been registered with a high concentration in the most militarized areas. In addition, 278 signers of the peace agreement have been assassinated and 400 former combatants still remain in jail to whom the agreed amnesty has not been applied.
Neither are the committed development plans being carried out, which would allow ex-combatants to be able to integrate into civil society. The reintegration has stopped persecuting them, putting them in jail and killing them, but it does not allow them to live for integration.
MERCENARIES: LETHAL WEAPONS FOR HIRE
Another coincidence (or coexistence) is the export of "human talent" for the war. In 2019, the Israeli daily Haaretz revealed that Israeli officials were training mostly Colombian and Nepalese foreign mercenaries in camps financed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the Negev desert, located in the south of the occupied territories. The mission was to participate in the aggression that began in March 2015 against Yemen, in which the Saudi coalition had left, until last December, some 233 thousand deaths according to the UN, most of them due to "indirect causes" such as malnutrition thanks to the naval blockade. supported by the United States.
Another Israeli came to Colombia to "train" manpower for supposed security, it is Yair Klein who complied with training narco-paramilitaries on how to defeat the FARC. Out of former Israeli police and special operations units the retired military officer founded a mercenary company called Hod Hahanit (Spearhead) in 1984.
In his research, Cohen recounts how Hod Hahanit supported the "notoriously brutal" Christian Falangist militias that massacred between 800 and 3,500 Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps under Israel's direct military supervision in September 1982.
Klein trained in Colombia the brothers Carlos and Fidel Castaño, the leaders of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) financed by Colombian landowners, drug traffickers, ranchers, politicians, and the military, responsible for massacres in which chainsaws were used to assassinate and dismember Colombia. peasants, to the point that the UN estimated in 2016 that they were responsible for 80% of the deaths in the conflict.
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The AUC was promoted by the Colombian oligarchy and its training supported by Yair Klein, a retired Israeli official whom the Zionist entity refuses to extradite for the murder of Luis Carlos Galán (Photo: Pedro Ugarte / AFP)
The AUC was promoted by the Colombian landowning oligarchy and its training underpinned by Yair Klein, a retired Israeli official whom the Zionist entity refuses to extradite for the murder of Luis Carlos Galán
In 2012, he told the BBC that, for his work with the paramilitaries, he had had the direct support of the Army and other Colombian state institutions, in addition to having received funding from someone who would later become president of the country. "He was one of the landowners in the area, who paid like all landowners so that I could do the training at that time," he said.
He also trained Jaime Eduardo Rueda Rocha, the material author of the murder of the presidential candidate of the Liberal Party, Luis Carlos Galán, the great favorite to win the elections. He imported the Israeli-made weapon used from Miami and remains in Israel, where authorities refuse to hand it over to Colombia for extradition.
The clearest example of where all these coincidences are headed is the announcement by John Kirby, a spokesman for the United States Department of Defense, who confirmed that the Pentagon trained at least seven of the 23 former Colombian military personnel who participated in the assassination of the president of Haiti, Jovenel Moise, on July 7.
Although the warmongering bureaucrat refused to provide the names of those involved, he affirmed that, being active military personnel, they participated in "training courses" that, according to him, did not seek to encourage events such as those that happened in Haiti.
A paramilitary network supported and encouraged by the Colombian State, such as the so-called "security companies", participated directly in the assassination. Colombian authorities admitted that four of them were involved.
Five Americans of Haitian origin, those in charge of the president's surveillance and a Haitian doctor living in Florida participated in the operation in which the mercenaries were recruited by Anthony Intriago, an anti-Chavista Venezuelan representative of CTU Security LLC, and Alfred Santamaría, a Colombian close to Uribe and Duque.
Intriago carried out with the Colombian president the Live Aid Venezuela concert in Cúcuta in February 2019 that sought to prepare the ground for a "humanitarian" invasion of Venezuelan territory and called the Battle of the Bridges. Recently, the president of the National Assembly of Venezuela, Jorge Rodríguez, announced that he had information that links CTU with the attempted assassination of August 4, 2018 against President Nicolás Maduro.
Militarization focused on repression and extermination is functional to a concept that has privatized the war, the Colombian military "human talent" is trained for these objectives and is cheap labor, or a weapon for hire. The military forces have up to 220,000 troops and thousands are retiring due to lack of promotion opportunities, misconduct or after serving 20 years of service.
Regarding Venezuela, in addition to the 153 paramilitaries captured in 2004 when, with the demonstrated support of the Uribe government, a plan was hatched from Colombia to assassinate then-President Hugo Chávez.
Recently Israeli mercenaries participated in Operation Gideon against the Venezuelan government, the operation with full participation of the US Drug Control Administration (DEA) was articulated by the Venezuelan Major Juvenal Sequea Torres, both for the entry into Venezuelan territory of mercenaries and to stop the kidnapping and transfer out of the country of the president and deputy Diosdado Cabello.
Judgment No. 89 of the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice states that "Two platoons of Israeli commandos would participate in the group of mercenaries, who are in the Caribbean Sea aboard the Fourth Fleet of the United States under the direction of the Admiral Craig Faller (…) justifying the Operation according to the unfounded accusations against the Venezuelan State as a Narco State ".
NEITHER REPUBLICS NOR DEMOCRACIES
The transformation of Colombia into an imperialist enclave seeks the deconfiguration of regional stability and integration. Its impact is already beginning to be seen in the assassination carried out in Haiti, which has sought to deepen the crisis of a country on the brink of total collapse.
Inside Colombia, the rural population is exploited, oppressed and displaced with methods that resemble the apartheid applied by Israel against the Palestinians. In addition to being expelled, the population is stripped of their basic rights, turning them into second or third class people within their own country.
The notion of the State that sustains both countries is based on being war machines at the service of political-economic networks that exercise hegemony to the detriment of impoverished sectors. They do this using territorial displacement as a fundamental tool.
The coexistence of Colombia and Israel, today, is only justified by war and the looting of resources. It is not about national identity, much less about republican or democratic values: it is about accumulation by dispossession in its very essence.
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