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Colombia. Texaco, BP hired cocaine-funded paramilitary death squads for security
Colombia report. "Paramilitary death squads are tearing apart Columbian families and culture as they defend U.S. oil interests. ... Texaco and BP have hired local paramilitary groups for 'security,' ... paramilitary gets seventy percent of its money from cocaine."
The quotes above are from the article below.
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The following message was found at Global IndyMedia.
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=38460
The Columbia Deception.
by Fred P 6:05am Fri May 4 \'01
Paramilitary death squads are tearing apart Columbian families and culture as they defend U.S. oil interests. Monsanto produced defoliant is sickening thousands. Bush is asking for an increase in military aid to Columbia, up from 1.3 billion dollars this year.
I attended a disturbing lecture last night. A human rights worker came to speak about her visit to Columbia. She works with Columbia Support Network. She traveled with a high level delegation that included U.N. representatives and people trying to stop School of the Americas. They visited several villages in war torn areas, as well as meeting top officials in Bogota.
She showed us pictures that she took of devastated crop fields where banana trees were lying dead, an plantains rotting. Monsanto Roundup is being sprayed indiscriminately on everything. Four planes fly overhead, spraying the herbicide, flanked by fighter jets or black hawk helicopters. They spray very high and the spray drifts everywhere. They spray Roundup at a strength five times what Monsanto recommends for U.S. crop spraying.
In one village, three hundred people were hospitalized after they were sprayed. Children are suffering nausea and dying of diarrhea. But that is not the worst of it.
Paramilitary death squads are gaining strength. They travel from town to small city in the coca and oil producing regions, terrorizing the inhabitants and forcing them off their farms and out of their homes. They kill human rights leaders and farming leaders. Our presenter described how she had to meet with many human rights leaders in secret because if they talk to Americans they can be killed. During one meeting, the leader of a woman\'s shelter that takes in refugee women and children, received a telephone threat from the paramilitary death squad while the American delegation was meeting with her.
We saw pictures of the homeless encampments in Bogota where the refugees forced from their villages take refuge in the lower levels of parking structures and under bridges. Many are women with children whose husbands were killed by the paras.
The area where paramilitary activity is highest is near the center of Columbia. Strangely enough this is not a big coca producing area. Rather it is where the majority of Columbia\'s oil is produced for U.S. companies. The paramilitary comes in to town, driving in jeeps and announcing they will kill everyone. Then they come back and chop up the town leaders in front of everyone. They say they will return in one week. Mostly everyone leaves town. Property is then available for drilling, at no cost. Texaco and BP have hired local paramilitary groups for \"security,\" as the left-wing guerillas from the FARC often target the oil pipelines.
The whole thing is very disturbing. We saw pictures of one small town in the Putamayo region where the mayor is constantly surrounded by bodyguards carrying Uzis. He has been in office one year and is proud that he has lasted longer than any mayor in recent years. The others were killed by the paramilitary groups.
A local refugee from Columbia spoke about how he and his family were forced to flee because of his father\'s connections with the FARC. His father was a farmer and social activist, and received death threats. The man had been a policeman and described how the police were paid to go to refugee encampments in villages and kick over their cooking pots and throw away their food. He was crying as he spoke, but so happy that people here are learning about the problems.
Poverty is intense in Columbia. The land is very rich, and farming could be very profitable, but food distribution is not set up. Many farmers do not have trucks and even if they do the roads are bad. So they grow a lot of food, but they cannot get it to market. They grow great chocolate, but none of it goes direct to the U.S. market. The distribution channels are not set up, so they cannot make very much money off their crops.
When FARC rebels offer to help them grow cocaine and pay them one hundred times what they make off food crops it is very enticing. They can send their children to be educated. They can buy different foods for their family.
Then the FARC says they will pay more if they will fight with the guerillas. Then the paramilitary groups come in and offer even higher pay if they will fight with the paras. The paramilitary even offers health insurance - and how can they do that without total state complicity.
The woman named Kate, who presented the slides an photographs showed pictures of the delegation\'s meeting with Columbia\'s attorney general. The attorney general showed copies of warrants for the leader of the paramilitary (AUG) forces, and many of his top killers, but neither the military nor the state police will take action on the warrants. These military and police received 1.3 billion in aid from the U.S. this year.
President Bush, Dick Cheney and their friends are heavily invested in companies that do business in Columbian oil and military supply. Bush is asking for an increase in the military aid we are providing to Columbia. An increase from the current 1.3 billion dollars.
Please try to write to your Congresspersons and tell them to oppose military aid. Out of the 1.3 billion dollars, 80% goes to the military. 20 % is designated for social programs, but these social programs have not materiliazed. We should demand that any aid package be designated for social programs, not military activity.
The fumigation program is sickening thousands at the profit of Monsanto corporation. You might want to divest from investment funds that own Monsanto, and write an e-mail to Monsanto describing why you have done so. Or write CEO Hendrik A. Verfaille at 800 N. Lindberg Blvd., Creve Coeur, MO 63167.
Thousands have disappeared in Columbia, similar to past situations in Nicaragua and El Salvador. It is time that we act to stop these atrocities. Families are being torn apart and poverty is increasing as Columbians are forced off their family farms and out of their villages. Strangely enough, cocaine acreage has increased over the last five years by five times! The paramilitary leader, in an interview on national television, said that the paramilitary gets seventy percent of its money from cocaine. So are we winning the war on drugs?
We are being deceived.
---- end of Global IndyMedia message ----
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http://www.colombiasupport.net
globalization at its worst. i do beleive that networking the info is the most powerful tool against this BS.
think about it. they (greedy folks who will victimize anyone for profit, generally with the full legal aid of government and legal institutions) are just like any other scoundrel when the light is let in.
they run!
(thanks you again for the heads-up! i will get the word out to my friends...)
Revolutionary struggles in Columbia led to a severe right and left political split in the country. Rightists and leftists killed each other in attempts to take over the government.
From sometime around 1920 until 1950, the left controlled the government. They went after conservatives. After that the conservatives controlled the government. The conservative party controlled the military and used it to kill leftist leaders through assassinations and massacres.
A young child saw his leftist parents chopped apart by military soldiers. When he grew up, he became leader of the FARC, a guerilla organization that lives in the hills and jungles of Columbia, mainly in the Southern region. Liberals who were forced to flee the military formed guerilla groups in the hills and jungle.
The FARC used terror to control small villages, but in their politics, they support the poor and indigenous peoples. The FARC encouraged the growing of cocaine for profit.
Cocaine traders have threatened Columbia's government and assassinated many government officials. Definitely, we should not think the FARC are any kind of angels. The coca business is a bloody business, and FARC is heavily interconnected with that business.
ELN is another guerilla leftist group that currently battles the Columbian military. ELN claims control over large areas of Columbian jungle. They claim that they promote indigenous people's rights, and the rights of the poor. But they have also been blamed for attacks on villages.
AUC, Autodefensas Unidas Columbia, is considered a paramilitary group because they carry out government policies, but ignore civil laws. The AUC was supposedly formed to stop cocaine trafficking. The military may have supplied them with weapons. The AUC assassinated cocaine producers at first.
Every year the AUC grew bigger and bigger. Most recently it has been active in miltarily opposing the ELN. AUC destroys villages that are said to support the ELN or FARC. As the Columbian military is also fighting FARC and the ELN, the AUC is considered to be a paramilitary organization, and many believe that it is funded by the Columbian military, although this has not been fully proven. The AUC is not bound by civil law, so they can massacre villagers, loot their belongings and live in their abandoned towns.
The AUC send jeeps in to threaten towns. They yell such chants as, "We are coming in a week to kill you all." Then they arrive a week later, capture town leaders and chop them apart. 40 were killed with chainsaws in Naya over the Easter weekend, and 60 more disappeared. The AUC now claims control over many villages and towns in the Central and Southern regions.
The Columbian government is considering a peace settlement with the ELN, but the paramilitaries of the AUC threaten the negotiations saying they will kill anyone who makes such a peace deal. By massacring villagers repeatedly in recent months, the AUC shows that it can be a serious threat to any peace negotiations.
The leader of the AUC, who has a warrant out for his arrest, appeared on Columbian TV in an interview. One thing he said was that the majority of the AUC's funding comes from the cocaine trade. It seems obvious that the AUC is simply taking over the cocaine trade that was previously managed by the FARC.
The question for the U.S: Is our 1.3 billion dollar aid package to Columbia being channeled into the growth of the AUC paramilitaries? Every month they have more fighters and more weapons. The AUC provides health insurance to its fighters. Where are they getting the money?
You can see that none of the military groups in Columbia are noble or worthy of support. But there are hundreds of human rights organizations in Columbia that do deserve our support. Also we need to find ways that small Columbian farms can market their goods. Resolving the poverty issues is crucial to solving the conflict in Columbia.
PBS did a really great interview with Dick Gregorie on the subject. PBS says of him:
"Over the past 20 years as Ass't U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of Florida, he's prosecuted many drug cases including the Medellin cartel and Gen. Manuel Noriega. He describes how Miami was the "Wild West," awash in cocaine money in the 1980s; how legitimate businesses play a major role in laundering drug money and the problems this poses for law enforcement. He also explains Manuel Noriega's role in narcotics trafficking."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/interviews/gregorie.html
Another article at fromthewilderness.com summarizes the situation excellently:
"In every news report about the "disintegration" of Colombia we see the following phrases: "The Colombian military, reportedly allied with the cartels," "The Colombian rebels, reportedly allied with the cartels," and, "The right-wing Colombian death squads, reportedly aligned with the cartels."
Question: What's the common denominator here? OK, youíre right. It's the cartels.
Another question: "If the nation of Colombia is disintegrating so quickly, and is so close to complete anarchy after years of bad government, blah, blah, blah, then why have the cartels been systematically able to increase production and their share of the U.S. and world drug markets without so much as a hiccup?
The plain truth of the matter is that if we go to war in Colombia it is because the drug cartels of that country have become economically powerful enough to threaten U.S. hegemony and colonial-style exploitation of the Western Hemisphere. And the saddest part is that our elites have become so corrupted by drug money and drug politics, they are so far out of the loop of the real world, that they have let our political campaigns, our economy, and our military decisions become dependent upon who has access to how much drug money. It is that simple.
Is there a historical parallel? You bet there is. In the seventies the only time we ever heard the word cartel was as it referred to oil. Then, that was the commodity that could threaten, our standard of living, our economy, or the control of the dysfunctional corporate elites on Wall Street."
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/regional/war_in_columbia.html