Colombia scandals cloud trade deal - US senator

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Reuters

Colombia scandals cloud trade deal - US senator
03 May 2007 21:29:56 GMT
Source: Reuters

By Doug Palmer

WASHINGTON, May 3 (Reuters) - Colombia must resolve U.S. concerns about a paramilitary scandal and the unsolved murders of trade unionists if it wants Congress to approve a free trade agreement, a spokesman for the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on Thursday.

"Until those issues are resolved, we're not going to get into whether the FTA is going to be approved or not. Those are two areas of concern for us and for other members of Congress," Federico de Jesus, a spokesman for Reid, told Reuters.
(snip)

U.S. labor and human rights groups object to the free trade pact with Colombia.

The AFL-CIO labor federation says more than 400 unionists have been murdered since Uribe took office in 2002, with only seven convictions. Of the 236 murdered from 2004 to 2006, there has been only one conviction, the AFL-CIO said.

Reid and other lawmakers want an end to impunity for the murderers of trade unionists and strong steps to prevent further killings, de Jesus said.


Read more: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N03444638.htm

[Judi Lynn]

1. Washington Should Shun Colombia

Washington Should Shun Colombia
By Matthew Rothschild
May 1, 2007

This week, the president of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe, is coming to Washington to meet with Bush and Congress.

He doesn’t deserve to be welcomed there.

The rightwing Colombian has intimate ties with the paramilitaries, who killed thousands of trade unionists, human rights activists, scholars, and leftists over the last couple of decades. Paramilitaries murdered dozens of labor leaders last year alone.

“Colombia is currently the murder capital of the world for trade unionists,” testified Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, Human Rights Watch’s specialist on Colombia, at a House Foreign Affairs hearing on April 24. “Those who are not killed are often threatened, attacked, or kidnapped.”

Sánchez-Moreno underscored the scale of the human rights problem in Colombia. “Today,” she testified, “Colombia presents the worst human rights and humanitarian crisis in the Western Hemisphere.”

More:
http://www.progressive.org/mag_wx050107

[Peace Patriot]

2. This huge scandal is going to boil over for the Bush Junta, which has been larding Colombia

with billions of our tax dollars in military aid, while the top echelons of the Uribe government--the chief of the military, the former head of intelligence and many Uribe-connected politicians--were embroiled in drug trafficking and mass murder, and also plotting against the democratic governments of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. You just know that the Bushites had fingers in these crimes. The Bolivian fascists are trying to split off the oil/gas rich provinces from the central government (now headed by leftist Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia and an advocate of the poor), and they have formed a 12,000 troop army, no doubt trained by the Colombian conspirators. The Bush Cartel is rumored to have purchased a couple of hundred thousand acres in Paraguay (near a US air base, also built with our tax dollars) on the border with Bolivia. The Bushites and their fascist operatives in South America want to destroy the Andean democracies. Their plans to destabilize these countries would likely begin with Bolivia. I don't think they will succeed. Leftist governments are now in charge in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, and there are big leftist movements in Peru and Paraguay. The "centrist" government of Paraguay--likely responding to pressure from the left--recently joined the Bank of the South, started by Venezuela to help these countries get out from under World Bank/IMF debt, and to provide them with the financial wherewithal to resist unfair "free trade" deals and other global corporate predation. This overwhelming leftist (majorityist) tide is transforming South American (and also Central American) politics. There is a consensus against US/Bushite interference. Bush felt the sting of it on his recent tour of Latin America, during which he got publicly lectured by Latin American leaders, from Brazil to Mexico, on the SOVEREIGNTY of Latin American countries. (And I was astounded when I heard this out of Calderon's mouth in Mexico--he even mentioned Venezuela as an example!)

All of this is WHY the Colombian scandal is being exposed, I believe. Prosecutors, the courts and the leftist opposition in Colombia are emboldened because they have support throughout the continent, to STOP these rightwing paramilitary plots. They are doing so at peril of their lives, to be sure. But they could not be doing it without a very changed South American political climate. And the message to Bush about Latin American sovereignty could not have been clearer. Something is up. I think Latin American leaders are aware of Bushite connections to these top ranking Colombian criminals, and I think it's only a matter of time before their activities are tracked to US embassies, to John ("death squad") Negroponte (Bush's appointee as Undersecretary of State for Latin America), and to the Bush White House.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Paramilitary leader charged in 2 mine killings in Colombia

May 3, 2007, 7:29PM
Paramilitary leader charged in 2 mine killings in Colombia
Associated Press

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA — A feared paramilitary boss has been charged with ordering the murders of two union leaders at a coal mine owned by Drummond Co. Inc., an Alabama company being sued in a U.S. court for alleged complicity in the killings.

Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, better known as "Jorge 40," is accused of ordering hit men to kill the two men, the federal prosecutor's office said Thursday.

Former Colombian federal intelligence official Rafael Garcia has said he witnessed the president of Drummond's Colombian subsidiary deliver a briefcase full of money to paramilitaries led by Tovar to pay for the murders.
(snip)

A U.S. congressman has pledged to hold hearings into the alleged involvement of U.S. multinationals in the murder of labor activists in Colombia. And Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, on Capitol Hill this week to lobby for passage of a free-trade agreement, has faced sharp criticism from congressional Democrats over attacks on union activists.

More than 800 trade unionists have been killed in Colombia in the last six years, according to government figures.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/world/4773867.html

[arcos]

4. You go Reid!! Now, do something about CAFTA!

:P