Bush visits Colombia as death-squad regime is exposed

Colombia receives the most U.S. military aid outside the war-torn Middle East and Afghanistan. Colombia also leads in union leaders assassinated, along with mass displacement of peasants, Afro-Colombians and Indigenous peoples, and massacres and arbitrary detentions—all with almost complete impunity for those who commit these crimes.

The criminals are mostly paramilitaries or death squads that have increasingly been exposed as collaborators of many pro-President Álvaro Uribe politicians, Congress members and Colombian elite.

In the weeks before U.S. President George W. Bush’s whirlwind tour of five Latin American countries, there were significant developments in Colombia. Eight members of Congress were arrested and jailed for their connections to deadly paramilitaries. Among the arrested are the brother and father of former Foreign Relations Minister Consuelo Araújo, who had been forced to resign by public pressure.

Most significant, Jorge Noriega, Uribe’s head of the secret police or DAS, is among them. Noriega has been accused of giving a list of union leaders’ names to the paramilitaries. Some whose names are on that list were eventually murdered.

The president himself is accused by opposition politicians and many human-rights and social organizations of allowing these crimes and also of having ties with paramilitaries.

Two years ago, in a much publicized and televised ceremony, Uribe started what was called the “demobilization” of the AUC, the United Self Defense Units of Colombia, better known as paramilitaries. Hundreds appeared to lay down their weapons. Yet what was proclaimed as “pacification” turned out to be a mere reorganization of these criminal forces.

Now they are calling themselves Black Eagles, or the “new generation” of paramilitaries that have been extremely active throughout the country.

On Feb. 10, in the offices of the Confederation of Unions (CUT) in Bucaramanga, a note signed by the Black Eagles was delivered. The note threatened the Coca Cola and Nestlé union SINALTRAINAL and its leaders. In a written statement, SINALTRAINAL points out: “This threat comes after the claim by Vice President Francisco Santos on radio Caracol News of Dec. 12, 2006, in reference to the attorney general’s investigation into Colombian football clubs, that ‘there are campaigns to malign Coca-Cola and Nestlé as well as other private corporations led by sectors of the extreme radical left, infiltrated in trade unions, that are generating absolutely absurd campaigns against the corporations.’”

This SINALTRAINAL statement exposes the Colombian government’s loyalty to the U.S. transnational corporations. It also shows the criminal irresponsibility of a government that instead of protecting its people puts them in peril. The Colombian president and vice president both know full well that these types of accusations are a message to the paramilitary forces to target the victims.

Uribe himself has accused Carlos Lozano, the editor of the Communist magazine Voz, of having ties with the guerrilla FARC-EP, and Gustavo Petro, senator of the opposition Party Alternative Democratic Pole, PDA, of being a “terrorist in business suit.” Uribe’s response to the exposure of the paramilitary ties of Congress members and his intelligence chief, all members of pro-Uribe parties and organizations, has been to provoke more violence against the social progressive movement.

Two days after Uribe’s statement, a death threat was sent to dozens of social, labor, student and alternative media organizations by the new paramilitary grouping the Black Eagles. Petro’s brother was also threatened. Two members of the PDA were killed under unclear circumstances.

Paramilitaries have threatened to kill Sen. Petro, since he has been instrumental in disclosing these ties. He visited Washington, D.C., the week of March 5 in an effort to expose the grave situation of his country. Here he met with non-governmental organizations and representatives of several members of Congress to alert them to the danger Colombians are facing, particularly now that the Free Trade Agreement between Colombia and the United States is being discussed.

In a March 7 news conference, Petro laid out the objectives of his visit. First was to propose the renegotiation of Plan Colombia, which currently transfers to Bogota $700 million per year mainly for military purposes. Conceived during the presidency of Bill Clinton supposedly to eradicate drugs, this plan has provided Colombia around $4 billion. The money has been mainly used, under U.S. oversight, to fight the armed revolutionary movement and to fumigate large land areas, risking the lives and health of thousands of peasants. It is a de facto war plan against the people of Colombia.

Petro instead proposed a Plan Colombia for the victims of the paramilitary and state violence. He said that the power of the paramilitaries resides in their close association with a significant sector of the Colombian state, including the judiciary, which has allowed the crimes to go unpunished. “Ten percent of the legislators make laws in the morning and in the evening order massacres. As a program to counter drugs, Plan Colombia has failed,” Petro said.

Another Petro objective was to renegotiate the FTA, which has been signed by Bush and Uribe but awaits confirmation in both the U.S. and Colombian Congresses. Petro referred to this agreement as one that benefits the paramilitaries whose financial base is narcotraffic. He explained, for example, that the agricultural chapter in the FTA will hurt 90 percent of small farmers and 15 million peasants who produce grains and other food harvests. Since the production that the FTA will benefit—like wood, rubber and African palm—need extensive capital, large areas of land and several years to produce, only the “narcoparamilitaries,” who are also wealthy large landowners, would be the big winners.

As Bush’s six-hour visit to Colombia to support the scandal-surrounded Uribe attests, the U.S. government not only ignores the state’s genocidal war and repressive actions against the social movements, but aids this war at all levels. The White House dweller’s visit to Bogota took place amid a gigantic display of the state’s repressive forces: 21,000 police and other national armies, helicopters, sharpshooters in roofs, water cannons, rubber bullets and tear gases.

The “security” operation lasted for almost a week before Bush’s arrival. It included extensive raids. Nevertheless, anti-Bush forces held demonstrations in several Colombian cities to repudiate his visit. In Bogota, the police refused permits for demonstrations, yet thousands of people, mostly youths, courageously took to the streets where they were met by harsh repression from the police. At the end, according to Nikzor, a human-rights organization, more than 400 people had been detained.

The U.S. government not only allows violent repression and genocide in Colombia through the states’ forces and paramilitaries, whose joint actions have been widely exposed, but was itself the initiator of paramilitarism after World War II. (www.HRW.org)

This U.S. war against the Colombian people should be high on the agenda of all the anti-imperialist and anti-war forces in the United Sates, for it is a war to destroy the progressive organizations and leaders and secure Colombia as a U.S. proxy to wage war against those Latin American countries moving further to the left.

Next: The role of the United States in Colombian paramilitarism, paramilitaries against Venezuela, interview with Iván Cepeda, son of assassinated Patriotic Union member.