Uribe wants party closely tied to criminal activity to endorse presidential candidate

[Judi Lynn]

Uribe wants party closely tied to criminal activity to endorse presidential candidate
Apr 29, 2014 posted by Alexandra Jolly

Colombia’s former president, Senator-elect Alvaro Uribe, met with one of Colombia’s most controversial political parties over the weekend to seek support for his party’s presidential candidate, Oscar Ivan Zuluaga. The meeting and possible alliance between Uribe and Zuluaga’s Democratic Center (Centro Democratico – CD) and representatives of the Citizens’ Options (Opcion Ciudadana – OC) is controversial because of the OC leaders’ ties to criminal politicians and suspected voter fraud in Colombia’s latest congressional election, those held in March of this year.

Why the controversy?

Citizens’ Option was originally called Citizens’ Convergence (Convergencia Ciudadana), a party in the governing coalition of Uribe (2002-2010). Following the arrest of the majority of its political leaders over the help they had received from death squads to get elected int0 Congress, the party was renamed the National Integration Party (Partido de Integracion Nacional – PIN). The imprisoned Congressmen were replaced by family members or close political allies and received a surprising 8.4% of the votes in the 2010 Congressional election.

The PIN changed its name in 2013 and became the OC, which got three senate seats in the March elections mostly from the northern Sucre department where electoral observers witnessed a 45% higher turnout than Colombia’s national average. According to the MOE, an electoral watchdog, a higher than average voter turnout tends to indicate voter fraud through vote-buying had taken place.

~snip~

Uribe and the paramilitaries

During Uribe’s presidency from 2002-2010, ties were found between the AUC and members of the Uribe government when computers were seized in 2006 showing that paramilitaries had signed pacts with politicians. The computer of AUC commander “Jorge 40? provided the physical evidence corroborating claims by then-opposition senator Gustavo Petro and AUC commander-in-chief Salvatore Mancuso that Congress had been infiltrated by paramilitary frontmen.

More:
http://colombiareports.co/convicted-para-politician-present-support-democratic-center/

[Judi Lynn]

1. "Blatant parapolitician involvement"

Last edited Tue Apr 29, 2014, 06:18 PM - Edit history (1)

More from the article:

Blatant parapolitician involvement

Suspicions about the political alliance and subsequent potential paramilitary links were only heightened with the presence of convicted parapolitician Alfonso Riaño at the meeting. With regards to Riaño and his activity in parapolitics, he was the former House Representative for Santander before his arrest in January 2012 on conspiracy charges which held a sentence of 90 months imprisonment.

The former member of the CC was convicted for receiving electoral support from the AUC’s Central Bolivar Bloc after making a deal with its leader “Ernesto Baez.”

The verdict by the court stated that “Riaño had alliances with paramilitary members in order to gain favorable election results” and he was imprisoned until his release in March 2012.

However, Riaño wasn’t the only person present at the meeting with paramilitary ties. Key members of the Citizens’ Option party with well-known para-politics histories were also present such as Senator Doris Vega, wife of former Senator Luis Alberto Gil, convicted para-politician, Senator Nerthink Mauricio Aguilar, son of Colonel Hugo Aguilar, convicted para-politician, and the party’s President Angel Alirio Moreno who was head of the discredited PIN party.

[center]

Alfonso Riaño[/center]

[Judi Lynn]

2. Many remember the discovery of death squad biggie, "Jorge 40"'s laptop in Colombia.

From an earlier post at D.U.:

According to a laptop taken in an arrest of a para, "Jorge 40," many of the demobilized men they thought had handed in their weapons, and given up this life of extreme violence against the Colombian people were actually hired peasant stand-ins.

Rodrigo Tovar Pupo's ("Jorge 40&quot laptop's contents were just becoming publicized when something huge in Colombia sidetracked the media, 'though I can't remember what it was. Jorge 40's laptop simply faded away in media reference on the spot.

Here's a reference to it I just located in a quick search:

DECEMBER 2006

Colombia’s Peace Processes: Multiple
Negotiations, Multiple Actors

Cynthia J. Arnson, Jaime Bermúdez, Father Darío Echeverri, David Henifin,
Alfredo Rangel Suárez, León Valencia

INTRODUCTION

by Cynthia J. Arnson 1

~snip~
Some of the most damning evidence of paramil-
itary duplicity in the peace process emerged from a
seized laptop computer belonging to paramilitary
leader Rodrigo Tovar (alias “Jorge 40”). According
to police reports leaked to the press, the computer
detailed cocaine smuggling routes; the names of
sympathetic members of the Congress, the military,
and the police; and Tovar’s involvement in ordering
the murder of 558 trade unionists, shopkeepers, and
suspected guerrilla sympathizers in northern
Colombia. The computer also contained e-mail
messages written by Tovar in which he instructed
his troops to recruit peasants to pose as demobiliz-
ing fighters, thereby feigning compliance with the
peace process without disarming his actual fighters.12


These disclosures were preceded by equally
damning accusations that members of Colombia’s
domestic intelligence service known as the
Department of Administrative Security (DAS) had
collaborated with paramilitary and organized crime
groups, tipping them off about ongoing police or
military investigations, providing them with infor-
mation about targets for intimidation or assassina-
tion, and interfering in congressional and presiden-
tial elections.13 In October 2005, Uribe had accept-
ed the resignation of DAS director Jorge Noguera,
who had served as regional coordinator for Uribe’s
presidential campaign on the Atlantic coast in 2002,
in light of allegations of paramilitary infiltration of
the intelligence service.14 Colombia’s Procuraduría
General (Inspector General) filed disciplinary charges
against Noguera in November 2006, accusing him of
sharing intelligence information with paramilitary
leaders and of diverting public funds for personal
enrichment.15 Noguera was also accused by a former
associate of organizing massive vote fraud on Uribe’s
behalf during the 2002 presidential elections.16

In what appeared to be a burgeoning scandal,
judicial authorities acted in November 2006 on evi-
dence gathered by Colombia’s Supreme Court
regarding paramilitary infiltration of the Congress.
Two senators and one deputy, all of them members
of parties forming part of President Uribe’s coali-
tion, were arrested on charges of conspiring with
paramilitary groups; one of the senators, Álvaro
García Romero, was charged additionally with
“organizing, promoting, arming, and financing”
paramilitary groups in the department of Sucre.17

Some of the evidence against all three reportedly
had been obtained from “Jorge 40’s” seized comput-
er. Six other pro-Uribe lawmakers were called for
questioning by the Supreme Court in December.

The investigations and charges reflected, on the
one hand, an invigorated effort by the office of
Colombia’s attorney general and the Supreme Court
to prosecute members of the political elite for collab-
orating with paramilitary groups. On the other hand,
the charges appeared to confirm what has long been
alleged but few have documented: that paramilitarism
in Colombia is a phenomenon far deeper than its mil-
itary apparatus, penetrating Colombia’s political, eco-
nomic, and institutional life. How close, if at all, the
scandal will come to President Uribe himself remains
to be seen. But senior officials, notably Attorney
General Mario Iguarán, have not shied from compar-
ing the current crisis to the Proceso 8000, the investi-
gation of former President Ernesto Samper for having
accepted campaign funds from the Cali drug traffick-
ing cartel in 1994. The controversy dogged Samper
during most of his presidency and led the United
States to revoke his visa. The paramilitary scandal,
according to Iguarán, is worse.18

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4537153

[center]

Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, center, white scarf

He, along with other high-profile, notorious narco-trafficking death squad leaders,
was hustled off, as soon as could be arranged, to the United States to stand trial
here for their drug-related offenses, rather than standing trial in Colombia for
their many crimes against humanity, shockingly brutal torture, and massacres, as
well as targeted political assassinations.[/center]

[Judi Lynn]

3. Of course, here's what pushed "Jorge 40's" laptop computer's explosive contents out of the road!

Colombia’s Magic Laptops
Nov 3 2008
Daniel Denvir

In September, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced that it was designating one former and two current high-ranking Venezuelan government officials as collaborators with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Hugo Carvajal, in charge of Venezuela’s Military Intelligence Directorate, and Henry de Jesús Rangel Silva, head of the Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services (DISIP), were both said to have aided the FARC’s drug-trafficking operations, while Ramón Rodríguez, former minister of interior and justice, was accused of being “the Venezuelan government’s main weapons contact for the FARC” and trying “to facilitate a $250 million loan from the Venezuelan government to the FARC in late 2007.”

These assertions came a day after Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez announced that he was expelling the U.S. ambassador in solidarity with Bolivia’s Evo Morales, who had done the same a day earlier. While OFAC did not specify its sources, an anonymous Bush administration official told The New York Times that the allegations were partly based on evidence from laptops recovered from a FARC camp in Ecuadoran territory bombed and raided by the Colombian military on March 1.

This sequence of events was a familiar one: the expulsion of an ambassador, closely followed by charges of FARC collaboration based on evidence from the laptops. On March 2, Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa expelled the Colombian ambassador, charging that Colombia had knowingly violated Ecuador’s sovereignty, despite the doublespeak coming from Colombian officials, including President Álvaro Uribe, that Colombia had bombed Ecuador without violating its airspace. Hours later, Uribe’s press secretary told reporters that computers belonging to Raúl Reyes, the FARC’s second in command who was killed in the raid, had been recovered and that they revealed disturbing links between the Correa government and the FARC. Colombian National Police general Óscar Naranjo then held a press conference in which he accused Ecuadoran security minister Gustavo Larrea of having met Reyes in January and agreeing to place Ecuadoran military units less hostile to the FARC along the border. Larrea denied this but did say he met with Reyes, the FARC’s de facto ambassador, as part of approved hostage negotiations that were known to the Colombian government.

Colombia claimed to have found eight “computer exhibits”—consisting of three laptops, two external hard disks, and three USB thumb drives—that luckily survived the bombing, which killed 25 people. At first, Colombia variously claimed that the laptops contained 10,000 or 16,000 documents (as reported by The New York Times and The Washington Post, respectively). An Interpol report on the computer exhibits released in May found that they collectively contained almost 38,000 written documents (like Word files and PDFs), more than 10,000 sound and video files, and almost 211,000 images. Despite the massive volume of files—equivalent to almost 40 million pages in a Microsoft Word file, according to Interpol—the Colombians claimed to have culled from them specific, strategic information on the Correa and Chávez administrations within 24 hours.

More:
http://nacla.org/news/colombia%E2%80%99s-magic-laptops