Colombia vows to indict companies accused of funding death squads

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Colombia Reports

by Adriaan Alsema May 25, 2018

Colombia's chief prosecutor on Thursday promised results of more than 16,000 criminal investigations into the country's private sector's ties to illegal armed groups.

The announcement came less than two weeks after the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (IACHR) heard victims of paramilitary groups, many of which were formed and funded by ranchers and corporations.

The phenomenon of using paramilitary death squads for profit has become known as "para-economics."

Thousands of ranchers, miners, farming companies and corporations were never taken to court four decades after the first paramilitary groups formed.

Read more: https://colombiareports.com/colombia-vows-to-indict-companies-that-funded-death-squads/

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One of multiple US companies believed to employ Colombian death squads to control labor problems:

Coca-Cola and Latin American Death Squads
Saturday, 20 July 2002, 8:01 pm
Press Release: Council on Hemispheric Affairs


7/19/2002 02.23

Once Again Coca-Cola and Latin American Death Squads Become Synonymous

* Reminiscent of the slaughter of trade union leaders in the 1980s at the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Guatemala City

* Coca-Cola to be held accountable for "extrajudicial killing, torture, and unlawful detention"-landmark case may help to hold other, multi-national corporations responsible for franchises or foreign subsidiaries' activities throughout Latin America

* Company sued for labor abuses in Colombia

* Colombia about to get the type of negative publicity over the Coca-Cola situation it can ill afford

* Corporation taking urgent measures to dismiss case

* Coca-Cola among the "most notorious" employers in Colombia

* U.S. funds indirectly pay for paramilitary attacks on organized labor, adding to Colombia's political tumult

More:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0207/S00087.htm

[Judi Lynn]

2. Spend some time doing research. The information goes back for many years,

involves vicious violence against so many people you'd start realizing perhaps you should have learned about this earlier.

No time like the present.

Find out about what you don't know, rather than claiming the new (to you) information is bogus.

Jump right in there, start your research, just as anyone looking for the truth MUST. Everyone must bother to use his/her own time and energy to look for what has happened already so many, many times, or remain innocent of all helpful knowledge, taking potshots at subjects you really don't understand.

Oh, also, while you're at it, another one of the companies is Alabama-based Drummond Coal, and you will find similar events happened there, to similar innocent people who worked for those monsters who earlier created an evil history in their US businesses before they opened their devastating business in Colombia. I would hope you would be conscientious enough to research them, too:

Bloodstained coal from Colombia
Massacres, targeted killings, expulsions: Raw material companies in Colombia are believed to have taken part in crimes for years. Even German utilities have received coal supplies from them.

It was around 2 a.m. on February 19, 2002, when about 30 masked paramilitaries appeared in the village, recalls Marina Barbosa. "They stopped at our house and knocked on the door, but I did not let them in. 'Hurry up' or we will throw a grenade!' the men shouted. Later they entered the house and screamed: "You support the guerrilla fighters!"

Marina and her two children, Rafael Arturo and Maira Marleny were forced to lie on the floor while the men searched and destroyed everything in the house. They took away everything of value.

"After they had searched the house, the paramilitaries accused my husband to be a member of the trade union, which was not true. He worked for Drummond and drove trucks. But at the end they dragged him outside and shot him in front our children."

Numerous victims

Marina Barbosa is just one of the many victims of human rights violations by paramilitaries in the coal region Cesar in northeastern Colombia. In its recently published report "The Dark Side of Coal," the Netherlands-based NGO Pax for Peace raised serious allegations against the mine operator Prodeco, a subsidiary of the Swiss Glencore Group and the American family-run firm Drummond.

More:
http://www.dw.com/en/bloodstained-coal-from-colombia/a-17771092?maca=en-rss-en-bus-2091-rdf

[marble falls]

5. Seriously good research. Thanks. I guess the troll couldn't look up the difference...

between 'para' and 'alter'. He can figure it out with his latest in a long series of pizza.

Keep posting the truth and the facts, people got your back!

[Judi Lynn]

7. It's not such an ordeal, really, taking the time to start the journey from ignorance to reality.

As you see, some refuse to spend their time looking for the truth, and some know the truth already and are determined to muddy the waters so completely they can convince people who are led by what they have heard through mass perception molding that they already know the truth, and there's no reason to look for themselves.

Anyone wanting to know about the birth of massive, big business nation-wide perception manipulation should look at the first maga-practitioner of bogus "news" of US foreign policy, Edward Bernays:

Edward Louis Bernays (/bərˈneɪz/; German: [bɛɐ̯ˈnaɪs]; November 22, 1891 ? March 9, 1995) was an Austrian-American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations".[2] Bernays was named one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century by Life.[3] He was the subject of a full length biography by Larry Tye called The Father of Spin (1999) and later an award-winning 2002 documentary for the BBC by Adam Curtis called The Century of the Self.

His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom" and his work for the United Fruit Company connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. He worked for dozens of major American corporations including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and for government agencies, politicians, and non-profit organizations.

Of his many books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928) gained special attention as early efforts to define and theorize the field of public relations. Citing works of writers such as Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Walter Lippmann, and his own double uncle Sigmund Freud, he described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct—and outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desirable ways.[4][5]

. . .

World War I
After the U.S. entered the War, the Committee on Public Information hired Bernays to work for its Bureau of Latin-American Affairs, based in an office in New York. Bernays, along with Lieutenant F. E. Ackerman, focused on building support for war, domestically and abroad, focusing especially on businesses operating in Latin America.[17][18] Bernays referred to this work as "psychological warfare".[19][20]

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays


Thank you, so much, for posting your comment, marble falls. It's more encouragement than you know.

[Exotica]

4. United Fruit

[Judi Lynn]

6. Too few people realize, still, the history of United Fruit (Chiquita) in Colombian life and murder.

From Wikipedia:

The Banana massacre (Spanish: Matanza de las bananeras or Spanish: Masacre de las bananeras[1]) was a massacre of workers for the United Fruit Company that occurred between December 5 and 6, 1928 in the town of Ciénaga near Santa Marta, Colombia. After U.S. officials in Colombia, along with United Fruit representatives, portrayed the worker's strike as "communist" with "subversive tendency", in telegrams to the U.S. Secretary of State,[2] the United States government threatened to invade with the U.S. Marine Corps if the Colombian government did not act to protect United Fruit’s interests. Although the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude references the number dead around three thousand, the actual number of dead workers is unknown[citation needed] after the conservative government of Miguel Abadía Méndez sent the Colombian army to end a union strike for better working conditions.

Gabriel García Márquez depicted a fictional version of the massacre in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, as did Álvaro Cepeda Samudio in his La Casa Grande.

Strike
The workers of the banana plantations in Colombia went on strike in December 1928. They demanded written contracts, eight-hour work days, six-day work weeks and the elimination of food coupons. The strike turned into the largest labor movement ever witnessed in the country until then. Radical members of the Liberal Party, as well as members of the Socialist and Communist Parties, participated.[3]

Massacre
An army regiment from Bogotá was dispatched by the government to deal with the strikers, which it deemed to be subversive. Whether these troops were sent in at the behest of the United Fruit Company did not clearly emerge.

The troops set up their machine guns on the roofs of the low buildings at the corners of the main square, closed off the access streets,[4] and after a five-minute warning[1] opened fire into a dense Sunday crowd of workers and their families including children who had gathered, after Sunday Mass,[4] to wait for an anticipated address from the governor.

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_massacre

(Please read the "Official U.S. telegrams" from the Embassy to the US Dept. of State. In the grand scheme of things, this atrocity wasn't really so very long ago. United Fruit remains, doing super well, but under a different name. It's important people realize how many US famous politicians (right-wing, of course) we involved personally in United Fruit, including George H. W. Bush.)

Thank you, Exotica.

[Exotica]

8. yw!