Investigations into Uribe’s ties to bloody 1997 massacre begin
Source: Colombia Reports
Investigations into Uribe’s ties to bloody 1997 massacre begin
Posted by Claire Dennis on Nov 10, 2015
Colombia’s Supreme Court will move forward with investigations into the October 1997 massacre of El Aro — a paramilitary killing spree that appears strongly tied to the governorship of former president Alvaro Uribe.
Three prosecutors, one of them the vice-Prosecutor General, have been delegated to advance investigations into the 1997 slaughter of at least 14 farmers in the municipality of Ituango, Antioquia known in the country as the El Aro Massacre.
The new investigative direction established by Prosecutor General Eduardo Montealegre will seek to identify the link between five specific crimes related to the El Aro massacre, and to identify if the main authorities of Antioquia had knowledge of or participated in their execution.
. . .
In the hands of these three prosecutors, allegations indicating Uribe’s participation in the assassinations, who throughout the past two decades has been stained by various testimonies involving him in the El Aro massacre, will be further deepened.
Read more: http://colombiareports.com/investigations-into-uribes-ties-to-bloody-1997-massacre-begin/
= new reply since forum marked as read
The El Aro massacre (Spanish: Masacre del Aro) was a massacre in Colombia which occurred on October 22, 1997 in the municipality of Ituango, Department of Antioquia. 15 individuals accused of being leftist supporters of the FARC were massacred by paramilitary groups with support from members of the Colombian Army. Perpetrators also raped women, burned down 43 houses, stole cattle and forcibly displaced 900 people.[1][2]
In 2007, the Third Section of the Council of State ordered the Colombian state to pay damages to the victims' families.[3]
Controversy[edit]
On April 23, 2008, Colombian President, Álvaro Uribe publicly announced that a former paramilitary fighter, Francisco Enrique Villalba Hernández, had accused him of planning the massacre, along with General Ospina, General Rosso and paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso, among other individuals. Uribe had been Governor of Antioquia between 1995 and 1997. According to Uribe, Villalba had said that he (Uribe) had thanked the perpetrators of the massacre for freeing 6 hostages, allegedly including one of his cousins, that Uribe's brother had provided 20 paramilitary members for the crime, and that they had met in the town of La Cuacana to plan the massacre.[4][5][6]
Uribe answered that he had never been to La Caucana and that these declarations showed inconsistencies because they mentioned the participation of a General in the supposed meeting who had died months prior to the events. Uribe also said that since 1988, Colombian authorities would know "where I've been, where I have slept and with whom I have met".[7][8] The Colombian newsweekly Revista Semana reported that the paramilitary in question, Francisco Enrique Villalba Hernández, had not mentioned Uribe nor the rescue of any hostages during previous declarations made more than five years ago, when he was sentenced for his own role in the massacre. The magazine also listed a number of possible inconsistencies in his most recent testimony, including the alleged presence of General Manosalva, who had died months before the date of the meeting where the massacre was planned.[9]
Opposition Senator Gustavo Petro had questioned Uribe about the use of a Department of Antioquia government owned helicopter that was allegedly employed to transport the paramilitaries to the region of El Aro to perpetrate the massacre. During a press conference, Uribe denied these claims saying that all the helicopters had a recorded flight history. He was also questioned a beeper message intercepted to one of the paramilitaries involved in the massacre that said "Te recuerdo llamar al Gobernador. Preséntame y que yo lo visito en la tarde" (I remind you to call the governor. Introduce me and I will visit him in the afternoon). Uribe defended himself from these claims saying that the criminals could have used the term "governor" as slang to refer to anything and denied having met any of the perpetrators of the massacre.[10]
More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Aro_Massacre
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The wake of El Aro Massacre. [/center]
More images:
https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GUEA_enUS652US657&q=El+Aro+Massacre+colombia&tbm=isch&gws_rd=ssl#gws_rd=ssl&imgrc=_
Anyone who has actually kept track of his actions, his administration, his military, his relatives, his cabinet, his scandals knows something very, very strange has happened, considering the U.S. Defense Department even knew he was a close ally of Pablo Escobar, when they covered him in a report during Bill Clinton's Presidency, 1999.
According to everything the US corporate media every published, this little creep has never done anything wrong, although there are people living in nightmares in Colombia now due to the massacres, public torturing with chainsaws, etc., voter REAL intimidation (paramilitaries going into the voting booths with the voters) conducted in Colombia during his terms there.
All this information has been confirmed by testimony in court, with people like Francisco Villalba getting murdered after their testimonies.
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The Assassination of Francisco Villalba, Alvaro Uribe and the massacre of El Aro
Posted on April 30, 2011 by csn
His name was Francisco Enrique Villalba Hernández, alias “Christian Barreto.” He was
condemned along with two of the biggest paramilitary bosses, Carlos Castaño and Salvator
Mancuso, for the massacre of El Aro; the last two [men] for 40 years in prison and Villalba for
33 years and 4 months. Alias Christian Barreto surrendered himself up to justice February 13,
1998, three months after the said massacre, in order to relieve his conscience. After from the
testimonies he offered last year before the General District Attorney of the Nation and Congress
of the Republic, he was assassinated April 23, 2009.
The massacre of El Aro has been one of the cruelest committed by the paramilitaries: during
one week they fought freely in the zone, committing outrages against its inhabitants and their
possessions: “With all the parsimony of the case, how they knew full well that no one would
stop their calculated carnage, they caught, tortured and humiliated 17 victims, burned 42 of the
60 homes, robbed 1,200 animals and forced 702 people to flee in order to save their lives. The
accounts of the acts are horrific: Dismemberment, rape, looting. Marco Aurelio Areiza (64 years
old), the shopkeeper of the town, was tied up, tortured, and his eyes, heart, and testicles were
removed.”
The initial testimony of Villalba and others corroborated more with the sentence of the
Interamerican Court of Human Rights, which condemned the Colombian State for the facts,
in a rebellion that summarized the horror of the paramilitary violence in the country. Even
this sentence signals that “Colombia renounced its international responsibility…in view of the
participation of their agents and their actions”.
The cited texts that reconstructed the events talk about how the government of Antioquia lost
support, as well as the military and the police, but the authorities don’t help the poor, and
even “Members of the army have been driving cattle,” robbing the peasants. That fact formed
part of the bloody paramilitary strategy in order to combat the guerilla, to divest goods and land
to peasants, to protect the landowners and take control of regions full of drug trafficking. The
massacres of the townships of El Aro and La Granja, municipals of Ituango, were committed
in development of Antioquia and the regions that were under the influence of the guerilla,
according to the renounced paramilitary leader Salvator Mancuso. He also admitted that the
paramilitary fighters are sons of the Colombian state, and that they received training and
weapons by part of the general forces of the State. This strategy found a fertile plot of land
for the development in the private cooperatives named Coexist, legalized and supported in the
department of Antioquia and the 1990’s, during the government of Alvaro Uribe.
More:
http://colombiasupport.net/2011/04/the-assassination-of-francisco-villalba-alvaro-uribe-and-the-massacre-of-el-aro/
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Francisco Villalba, on the left.[/center]
i am surprised at the political accomplishments of Santos over the years. he definitely appealed to our better angels and worked a cultural magic over the years in Colombia. i never would have imagined this sort of investigation in my lifetime, especially in a country where we, the US, has been so heavily invested in disrupting for generations now.
