Colombian Senator: Death Squads Met At Uribe's Ranch
Scandal Over Paramilitary Ties Widens
By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
BOGOTA, Colombia, April 17 -- An opposition lawmaker on Tuesday alleged that paramilitary death squads met at the ranch of President Álvaro Uribe in the late 1980s and plotted to murder opponents, an explosive charge in a growing scandal that has unearthed ties between the illegal militias and two dozen congressmen.
Basing his accusations on government documents and depositions by former paramilitary members and military officers, Sen. Gustavo Petro said the militiamen met at Uribe's Guacharacas farm as well as ranches owned by his brother, Santiago Uribe, and a close associate, Luis Alberto Villegas.
"From there, at night, they would go out and kill people," Petro said, referring to the sprawling ranch owned by Álvaro Uribe, who served as a senator from 1986 to 1994.
The allegations, made at a congressional hearing on the "para-politics" scandal, were vigorously denied by the government. In a rebuttal, Interior Minister Carlos Holguín said that all manner of rumors have arisen about Uribe's farm.
~snip~
The Supreme Court and the attorney general's office are investigating nearly 20 other current or former members of Congress, most of them allies of the president. And the court is collecting evidence and interviewing witnesses to establish whether the president's cousin, Sen. Mario Uribe, had met with paramilitary commanders to plot land grabs; the senator denied any links in a recent interview.
~snip~
But Uribe, since he first ran for office, has also been dogged by the fact that paramilitary groups grew dramatically during his term as governor in the northwestern state of Antioquia, from 1995 to 1997. During that time, he helped spearhead the creation of Convivirs, legal vigilante groups. Some were later denounced for having morphed into paramilitary death squads or for serving as fronts for paramilitary warlords.
In a two-hour presentation in which military intelligence reports and affidavits of mid-level military officers were made public, Petro provided a detailed sketch of Colombia's fearsome paramilitary movement, from its first links with cocaine kingpins including Pablo Escobar to its use of massacres to spread terror to its liquidation of the leftist Patriotic Union party.
He spoke of how banana companies, including foreign firms, bankrolled death squads and helped paramilitary groups traffic in cocaine. And he read from a government statement provided by an army captain who was present at meetings between a former general, Rito Alejo del Rio, and paramilitary commanders. President Uribe has long been close to del Rio, who was charged in 2001 with having paramilitary ties. The charges were later dropped.
The senator said that despite a common perception, the generation-old paramilitary movement did not surge because of the lack of state presence. "Paramilitarism was founded with the help from some sectors of the state," he said.
More:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/17/AR2007041702007.html~~~~~August 25, 2004
The Death Squads of Colombia
Uribe's Boys
By PHILLIP CRYAN
"The judgment of History will recognize the goodness and nobility of our Cause."
--Salvatore Mancuso, military commander of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC)
Salvatore Mancuso delivered these triumphant words in a July 28 address to the Colombian Congress. He and two other commanders of the AUC flew to Bogotá in a Colombian Armed Forces plane, as part of their negotiations with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Vélez's administration. The AUC is a right-wing paramilitary federation responsible for murdering tens of thousands and terrorizing millions of Colombian civilians, often using unspeakably gruesome means, and working together with Colombia's armed forces.
The latest AUC proposal turned out to be pretty straightforward: not only should the government pardon their crimes, Mancuso argued, but the whole society should celebrate their heroism. "The reward for our sacrifice for our country, for having freed half the country from the guerrillas and having prevented another Cuba or the old Nicaragua establishing itself on the nation's soil, cannot be to send us to prison."
A human rights defender named Dilia Solano was dragged from the Congress shouting, "The victims' blood cries out. Peace can't come at the cost of impunity!" Solano had been seated next to the daughter of the late Senator Manuel Cepeda, who was murdered by the paramilitaries.
Background
Colombia's paramilitaries were organized in the 1980s, out of a network of alliances between military officers seeking a more effective counterinsurgency strategy, large land-holders wanting to protect their properties from seizure and their families from kidnapping by guerrillas, and drug traffickers needing private armies to conduct their business.
The paramilitaries established a reputation early on for spectacular massacres, open coordination with military and police officials, "social cleansing" policies that dictated conditions of daily civilian life, perverse tactics such as public tortures and decapitations, and primarily targeting civilians they accuse of collaborating with guerrillas rather than guerrillas themselves.
Paramilitary takeover of the northwestern banana-growing region of Urabá in the mid-1990s took place during current President Uribe's governorship there. A stern young Uribe oversaw deployment of the CONVIVIR, a government-sponsored "civilian surveillance and intelligence" force in which a number of today's AUC leaders reportedly served. According to a 1991 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report obtained by the National Security Archive, Uribe was also "a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar" and among "the more important Colombian narco-traffickers." Under his watch, paramilitaries wiped out civilians and seized territory, with homicides in Urabá tripling from 1994 to 1996. Military leaders hailed Uribe's "pacification" of the region.
Shortly after taking office as President in August 2002, Uribe announced "peace talks" with the AUC.
With great fanfare, approximately 1,000 of the AUC's estimated 15,000 troops demobilized by late 2003. In theory, they turned in their weapons and were "re-inserted" into civilian life. However, even U.S. Ambassador to Colombia William Wood has pointed out that "the world doesn't really know what has happened to the former combatants who participated in the program."
More importantly, Uribe's government insisted a unilateral AUC cease-fire was the precondition for opening negotiations. No one even pretends to believe this has happened. Mancuso told Congress that "the ceasefire the Self-Defense Forces declared in December 2002 does not free us from the responsibility to defend people and regions from guerrilla attacks." The killing continues.
The team asked by Uribe to prepare a confidential assessment of the nascent negotiations concluded in early 2003 that paramilitary leaders' main goals included "judicial security" and "legalization of a part of their fortune," according to a Washington Post reporter who saw the assessment.
Uribe and his supporters have pushed for a bill offering them just that: amnesty and legality. If they have their way, Colombia's longstanding impunity for paramilitary crimes will be formalized. The slate will be wiped clean. And, if some can negotiate their way around U.S. extradition orders for drug trafficking, AUC leaders might well try to parlay what Mancuso called their "difficult, heroic and even mythical history" of "safeguarding a free Colombia" into political careers.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/cryan08252004.html
~~~~~
Colombia's death squads terrorise opposition to President Uribe
international | rights and freedoms | opinion/analysis Monday March 24, 2008 17:29Right-wing paramilitaries in Colombia killed four more civilians this month. If the western media had done its job during the recent border confrontation between the government of Alvaro Uribe and its neighbours, the death squads might have thought twice before adding to their bloody hit-list.
The right-wing paramilitaries that have terrorized Colombia for the past twenty years moved quickly when social organizations organized national demonstrations against them on the 6th of March - http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41489. The sight of people willing to defy their threats and take a public stand must have enraged the cowardly thugs. Within a fortnight, they had killed four of the organizers – two before the protests, two after - http://www.colombiasolidarity.org.uk/content/view/145/45/.
As the death squads congratulate themselves on snuffing out another four lives, they should pause to thank their de facto allies in the western media, who have helped create the best possible climate for Colombia’s paramilitaries to operate by faithfully swallowing the propaganda line of their sponsors in Bogota and Washington.
That may sound like a very harsh judgement, and the journalists in question would no doubt deny it with great passion. But if they had done their job during the recent border crisis provoked by Colombia’s president Alvaro Uribe, reporting the facts instead of the black propaganda pumped out by Uribe’s regime, the paramilitaries might not have felt so confident that they could murder four more people and get away with it. In a very real sense, the western media outlets that have performed so dismally have blood on their hands.
THE BACKGROUND - OR LACK OF
Not so long ago, an RTE journalist told his listeners with a straight face that Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez was a ‘Holocaust denier’. You almost had to admire the man’s shamelessness – even the most fanatical critics of Chavez have never thought to level that charge in his direction. In fact, the journalist probably didn’t even realize that he was lying – he just got his cue cards mixed up, telling people what was wrong with Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad instead. After all, they are both dark-skinned men from oil-producing states whose relationship with the US government is anything but friendly. How can you expect someone who takes their world-view from State Department press releases to remember the difference?
A similar confusion may explain the disastrous mis-reporting of recent events in Latin America. If people had been following the reports of the corporate media, they would have got a clear impression of the presidents of Colombia and Venezuela. On the one hand, we have a popular, democratically-elected leader whose domestic policies have won him high approval ratings; on the other, an autocratic thug who enjoys a close relationship with drug-dealing terrorists and denounces opponents of his regime as traitors to the nation. This is all very true – the trouble starts when the media has to tell its readers which ruler is which.
Presidential elections were held in both countries in 2006, offering a useful comparison. In Colombia, 55% of the electorate stayed at home. The main opposition alliance, the Alternative Democratic Pole, was unable to campaign in many parts of the country because of threats from right-wing paramilitaries. Some of its activists were murdered while the election was in full swing. The death squads issued a statement on the eve of the vote affirming their support for Uribe and threatening a blood-bath if his opponent won.
More:
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/86825
~~~~~
'Uribe's brother led paramilitary death squad' .
Sunday, 23 May 2010 22:47 Adriaan Alsema
http://colombiareports.com.nyud.net:8090/pics/2010/05/santiago_uribe.jpg
The younger brother of Colombian president Alvaro Uribe led a paramilitary death squad in the early 1990s, a former police major told U.S. newspaper the Washington Post.
According to former official Juan Carlos Meneses, Santiago Uribe led the local paramilitary group in Yarumal, where the Uribe family had a business. The group allegedly killed petty thieves, and suspected guerrillas and their sympathizers.
Meneses claims that the president's brother was the main fundraiser and strategist behind the "12 Apostles," a group of prominent citizens that led a number of hitmen. According to Meneses, he attended meetings with the group in which it was decided who was going to be killed. The former police commander's role was to make sure no authorities would be present at the time of the murder.
"First, it was drug addicts and small-time criminals winding up dead. Then, there were more and more and more dead," an anonymous former town official told the newspaper.
Meneses had earlier admitted to human rights organizations that he collaborated with the paramilitary group, and recently told Colombian judicial authorities that he is willing to collaborate in an investigation of the 12 Apostles. According to the former police commander, he was paid $2,000 a month for his services by Uribe personally.
The alleged paramilitary ties of the Uribe family were investigated by Colombian prosecutors in the 1990s, but none of the suspects were convicted.
An anonymous judicial official told the Washington Post that the case against the Uribes "can be revived" if prosecutors consider Meneses' testimony credible.
More:
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/9851-uribes-brother-lead-paramilitary-death-squad.html
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