Colombia’s repression, U.S. gov’t collusion

If the immense suffering of the Colombian people were not so terribly real, Colombia these days would be the perfect expression of the “magical realism” of its most famous writer, Gabriel García Márquez.

Extreme poverty coexists with the enrichment of the oligarchy allied to U.S. and other imperialist financial interests that for the most part use paramilitary forces to guarantee their profits, leaving behind massacres, displacements, and labor and human rights advocates assassinated.

But there also exists an armed insurgency that has defended the country’s sovereignty for more than 40 years and a growing social unarmed movement of peasants, Indigenous people, unions, Afrodescendants, women, students and others struggling against privatization, and for peace with social and economic justice—who, in spite of seeing their efforts marred by the state repression that is in collusion with the paramilitaries, continue courageously struggling in the streets.

And lately, all these forces are framed within the exposure of the political scandal of corruption in the government where the paramilitary infiltration is being proved and which the current Colombian president Álvaro Uribe tries unsuccessfully to cover up his complicity with.

And the political situation of Colombia extends way beyond its borders. Not only to neighboring countries like Ecuador where the Colombian military, in its war against the insurgency, irresponsibly aerial sprays glyophosphate, thereby poisoning Colombian and Ecuadorian people, vegetation and drinking and irrigation waters.

It also affects Venezuela, although in a different way, through the involvement of the deadly Colombian paramilitaries who are being used as part of the U.S.-backed destabilization campaign against the Bolivarian government of Hugo Chávez.

And it also travels north, right to the U.S. where the war in Colombia was first created and sustained. An example has been the extradition and trial in U.S. federal court of Ricardo Palmera, alias Simón Trinidad, an important member of the FARC-EP (Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces-People’s Army) who was their peace negotiator.

Trinidad was extradited to the U.S. in 2004, and tried for the first time last year in Washington, D.C., resulting in a hung jury. After the recusal of the first judge for giving preferential treatment to the prosecution to the detriment of the defendant, Trinidad faced U.S. prosecutors for the second time last month; but this time, the U.S. government was determined to convict him.

For that they brought Colombian police officer John Frank Pinchao, who had recently escaped after being retained by the FARC along with others. The FARC’s purpose in retaining military, police or government officials is to have a lever to negotiate with the Colombian government and attain a prisoner exchange.

The U.S. was hoping that Pinchao’s testimony would link Trinidad to the three U.S. military contractors held by the FARC, and therefore “prove” that Trinidad was part of the kidnapping of the three. However, in spite of the attempts of the U.S. officials who had been keeping Pinchao close to them, rehearsing his lines, in his testimony, Pinchao, who had been held with the three U.S. contractors, when asked by the prosecution if he had seen Trinidad, responded “never.” (www.Cambio.com.co)

This trial was developing somewhat similarly to the first one, when all the efforts of the prosecution and the judge to portray Trinidad as a violent and terrorist person failed. During the first day of the second trial, a juror quit, stating that she was “feeling too much sympathy for the accused” and that she “recognized that she was including him in her prayers.”

After days of deliberations, the jury handed a note to the judge saying that, “At this point we are at an impasse and do not believe that we will be able to reach a unanimous verdict.”

The judge, a Republican conservative, sent them back to continue deliberating. The prosecution had stated thatthe possibility that Trinidad may never have seen the contractors didn’t matter because he tried to negotiate a prisoner swap using the contractors as leverage.

On July 9, Trinidad was found guilty of complicity in the kidnapping of the three contractors. The jury will continue deliberating other charges, among them, terrorism.