Colombia rejects human rights blacklisting

[Judi Lynn]

Colombia rejects human rights blacklisting
Saturday, 16 April 2011 10:11
Adriaan Alsema

Colombia on Friday rejected a decision by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to maintain the country on its human rights blacklist and called for the OAS body to analyze advances made "in the field.".

"I invite them to analyze Colombia's situation in the field and to hear the different spokesmen of civil society and the state," Vice President Angelino Garzon said while on a visit to the country's second largest city, Medellin.

According to Garzon, Colombia is "open to be examined and scrutinized by the international community" and blamed the country's illegal armed groups for the majority of the violations of human rights.

The IACHR has maintained Colombia on its "black list," due to continued concern over the country's human rights situation, it said in the organization's 2010 annual human rights report.

More:
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/15647-colombia-rejects-human-rights-blacklisting.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. "...blamed the country's illegal armed groups...". Amnesty International said that almost HALF of

the murders of trade unionists in Colombia were committed by the Colombian military (and the other half by their closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads).

And it was the Colombian military which had a POLICY of encouraging false "body counts" which prompted military units to murder young men, and dress their bodies up as FARC guerrillas, to earn bonuses and promotions.

The entire country was being run as a criminal enterprise by U.S./Bushwhack-supported Alvaro Uribe--vast domestic spying (on judges, prosecutors, human rights groups, political leftists, trade unionists and others--with the likelihood that death squad hit lists were being passed along)--with some 70 of Uribe's closest political cohorts under investigation or already in jail for illegal spying, bribery, corruption, ties to the death squads, drug trafficking and other crimes. A mere change of administration--to Manuel Santos (Uribe's Defense Minister for several years)--in such an undemocratic country, where thousands of trade unionists, teachers, community activists, human rights workers, advocates of the poor, journalists, peasant farmers and others have been murdered, and where 5 MILLION peasant farmers were driven from their lands--is not going to change this culture of murder, state terrorism and mind-boggling corruption.

The murders of innocent people, for merely exercising their civil rights, continue. And the resonance of state terror continues and will last for decades. You raise your head in a leftist cause in Colombia, you might get it blown off, or you might end up hacked to pieces in a mass grave--and your murderers will not be caught. That is the "message" that has been driven home with bullets and machetes in Colombia. Virtually NONE of these thousands of murders have been prosecuted. And to this day, the U.S. is protecting and coddling Uribe and it appears that they hand-picked his successor Santos, among things to keep a lid Bush Junta ties to crimes in Colombia.*

It is this CULTURE of murder and mayhem--blessed by the Bush Junta, and encouraged by the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs," with $7 BILLION of our tax money given to the Colombian military--that must be addressed, and it is not going to be easy. I see little sign that anything is being done about it. It is all being swept under the rug, just as with Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld's crimes of torture and unjust war. When you do that--when you immunize the powerful from prosecution--you become their co-criminals.

------

*(Early this year, the U.S. State Department "fined" Blackwater for what it called "unauthorized" "trainings" of "foreign persons" IN COLOMBIA "for use in Iraq and Afghanistan." What is THAT all about? Personally, I don't believe the word "unauthorized." I think there is a dreadful scandal lurking in this "fine.")

[naaman fletcher]

2. how it works

"
*(Early this year, the U.S. State Department "fined" Blackwater for what it called "unauthorized" "trainings" of "foreign persons" IN COLOMBIA "for use in Iraq and Afghanistan." What is THAT all about? Personally, I don't believe the word "unauthorized." I think there is a dreadful scandal lurking in this "fine."


What happens is that the US state department puts out contracts for security at overseas installations. The winning bid on the last contract last fall was something like $6/day. Most of the guys in the new contract will come from Uganda.

Anyway, Blackwater had obviously won a contract for these services and went and recruited colombians for the job. Under US arms control laws, training is considered an arms transfer and must be approved.

The way approval work is that you tell the state department what you want to do like say, sell some AK's to Egypt, or train Colombians, and the state department has 30 days to tell you not to do it. If you don't hear back from the state department you can go ahead and do it. (There is also a list of countries you cannot do anything with at all, so don't bother asking).

Anyway, blackwater in their hubris decided they didn't need to bother getting approval. They got caught and were fine. Had they submitted it for approval they surely would have gotten it.