The devastation of Colombia's civil warIn Colombia, years of civil war and assassinations have torn

[Judi Lynn]

The devastation of Colombia's civil warIn Colombia, years of civil war and assassinations have torn families apart
Mike Power
The Guardian,
Saturday 23 April 2011

Sitting in a shack that totters on stilts in a slum overlooking Bogotá, Colombia's capital city, Gloria Torres gasps as she looks at the creased and faded photograph of her son. He is smiling slightly, dressed in his best, thumbs in pockets, his dark eyes soft.

Torres holds it to her chest, crumples, seems to shrink by half in less than a second, then remembers she has guests. She composes herself, and lays the photo carefully back in a shoebox and strokes the face, brushes down her apron and pulls her youngest daughter closer. In a gentle, determined voice, she begins to tell her family's story.

Torres will remember 7 June 2007 for the rest of her life. She can even pinpoint the hour she knew that her son, 17-year-old Aurelio, was dead. "It was 3am. I felt something, like he'd come home, come to my bedside. I awoke and spoke to him, but he wasn't there. Then a feeling, a pain came over me, which to this day I still can't shake off."

~snip~
"Later, I found out that at that very moment the army were assassinating him," she says.


More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/apr/23/colombia-farc-killed-mothers-justice

[ReggieVeggie]

1. might want to edit

Our government's continuing support of the Colombian government, on both sides of the aisle, is mystifying.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Yikes. I just saw it, couldn't edit, too late. Embarrassing. Was too hurried the 1st time.Sorry. nt

[Old and In the Way]

2. My sister-in-law is from Cali.

My brother was telling me that she's very concerned about her family done there. They are considered middle-class and their neighborhood has seen an escalation of crime of the past 10 years. Her mother was robbed at gunpoint a year ago and it's really economic conditions and not safe to travel at night, alone. I guess there's a huge population influx from the countryside due to the ongoing drug wars between the various crime lords and the government. As usual, the ones that try to live peacefully and get along are the ones that suffer.

[Peace Patriot]

4. This was OFFICIAL Colombian military policy--funded by $7 BILLION from U.S. taxpayers!

Thousands of people have been murdered by the Colombian military on our dime. This part of it was official policy--bonuses and perks for murdering mostly boys and young men, and dressing their bodies up like FARC guerrillas, to up the "body count"--to impress U.S. senators, among other things, to keep those billions flowing from our pockets to murderers and war profiteers.

The less official but equally murderous policy was slaughtering trade unionists, human rights workers, teachers, community activists, journalists, peasant farmers and others, in a bloody political "purge" that sought to decapitate the grass roots leadership in rural areas, where FIVE MILLION peasant farmers were being forced from their land by state terror.

Amnesty International attributes almost HALF of the murders of trade unionists in Colombia to the Colombian military itself, and the other half to their closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads.

The President of the country, Bush pal, Alvaro Uribe, was illegally spying on everybody--trade unionists, judges, prosecutors, human rights groups--very likely with U.S. assistance, and very likely to draw up hits lists (and death threat phone call lists) for the Colombian military and its death squads. Uribe was meanwhile stating publicly that everyone who opposed him is a "terrorist."

This lawless, murderous regime was enthusiastically encouraged and massively funded by the U.S. government.

All this murder and mayhem were in part intended to prepare Colombia for U.S. "free trade for the rich."

The U.S. funded and encouraged the torture of an entire country, to create a compliant slave labor force for U.S. multinationals (millions of small farmers driven into urban squalor) and unfettered access to Colombian resources (oil, gas, minerals, water, corporate ag land), as well as a "forward operating location" for the Pentagon in South America (adjacent to Venezuela and all that oil).

And that is not to mention the trillion dollar-plus cocaine revenue stream, consolidated into fewer hands, and directed to U.S. banksters, the CIA and Bush Cartel--a vile motive that is harder to see, but that I can feel in my bones, if you know what I mean. There is a reason why the cocaine never stops flowing out of Colombia, despite decades of the alleged U.S. "war on drugs" and, over the last decade, multi-billions in U.S. funding. And it is no accident that, among the crimes of some 70 of Uribe's closest political cohorts--who are under investigation, or already in jail--is drug trafficking; also illegal spying, ties to the death squads, bribery and other corruption.

But even if my guess about this is wrong--that a major Bush Junta interest in Colombia was the huge cocaine profits--the bloody prep for U.S. "free trade for the rich" and Pentagon war gaming are equally bad and have been equally ruinous to Colombian society.

The Obama administration is now helping us to forget all this. They are "laundering" Colombia for the U.S./Colombia "free trade for the rich" agreement, which Obama pretended to oppose during the '08 campaign but now supports and is pushing hard (though he doesn't really need to, considering the scumbag, fascist ES&S/Diebold Congress he now has, with its big cadre of Miami mafia operatives). CIA Director Panetta (I believe) personally ousted Uribe and vetted and approved Manuel Santos, Uribe's former Defense Minister, who is doing a pretty good act of appearing to be better than Uribe (not difficult), but meanwhile Obama/Panetta have been actively protecting Uribe from prosecution--by removing death squad and spying witnesses from Colombia--and have coddled him with cushy academic sinecures at Harvard and Georgetown, and appointment to a prestigious international legal commission. They are wiping his bloody trail, probably because it leads right to Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, and Obama seems obliged to protect and launder our mass murderers, torturers and thieves.

Early this year, the U.S. State Department "fined" Blackwater for "unauthorized" "trainings" of "foreign persons" IN COLOMBIA "for use in Iraq and Afghanistan." Tip of the iceberg, I fear. The "turkey shoots" of civilians in Colombia may not have been just the Colombian military and its death squads. In fact, La Macarena is a region where an Afghanistan-like USAID/Pentagon "pacification" program was in progress--the region where 500 to 2,000 bodies have been found in a mass grave. The grave was discovered because local children got sickened by the water. There were so many decaying bodies, they were poisoning the local water supply. One of those murders is mentioned in this article--Claudia Ortega's mother (whose body was found in the La Macarena grave).

Should we "look forward not backward" as our President advised on U.S. war crimes? Or should we pause, over these horrors in Colombia that our money and our government have aided and abetted and inflicted? Pause just for a few moments, maybe, between all the colorful "Tea Party" distractions, and our efforts to get our tone-deaf government to save labor unions, Social Security and Medicare? Pause to consider "free trade for the rich" here--and there? Pause to consider militarism and corpo-fascist here--and there? Pause to connect the dots?