Colombia's President slams US Congress over trade pact

[Judi Lynn]

Source: International Herald Tribune/Associated Press

Colombia's President slams US Congress over trade pact
The Associated Press
Published: May 18, 2007

BOGOTA, Colombia: President Alvaro Uribe lashed out at U.S. lawmakers for treating Colombia like a "pariah" by refusing to pass a trade agreement amid a scandal linking his government to murderous right-wing paramilitaries.

"We cannot accept that free trade agreements with Panama and Peru are approved while Colombia is punished in this battle, treated like a pariah," an angry Uribe, Washington's staunchest ally in Latin America, said at a military ceremony Friday. "This is unacceptable."

Democratic leaders in Congress and the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush agreed last week to more stringent labor conditions to push forward passage of two bilateral trade agreements with Peru and Panama.

But an almost identical accord with Colombia remains stalled due to concerns over the government's human rights record and allegations of ties between Uribe allies and the illegal militias, which are accused of some of the worst atrocities in a half-century of civil conflict.

More than 800 trade unionists were killed in Colombia in the past six years — more than any other country in the world — and human rights groups say the government's slow investigation of the killings has fostered impunity.


Read more: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/05/19/america/LA-GEN-Colombia-US-Trade.php

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Alvaro Uribe and his American friend in happier days.

[Kagemusha]

1. Too bad he doesn't understand that little democracy thing

Damn those US lawmakers for exerting independent thought. Damn them all, eh?

[Mosaic]

2. Not quite...

Colombia is a democracy and has been for a very long time. The conflict there is complicated but if Uribe is indeed connected in anyway to the violent rightwing groups, that is a big question that needs to be answered. Our Congress can not be sure of what the truth is as they are unproven allegations.

[Peace Patriot]

3. Colombia is about as much of a democracy as Iraq is. Mass slaughters of

union organizers, community organizers, peasants and leftists, perpetrated by rightwing paramilitaries tied to the top echelons of the Uribe government, including the chief of the military and the former chief of intelligence, and many others; major drug trafficking by same; and the country is flooded with $4 billion of Bush (our taxpayer dollars) military lard--weapons, helicopters, U.S. military "advisers" and anti-drug troops and mercenaries. You think it's safe to vote against the rightwing establishment in such a country? You think it's safe for leftists to organize politically? Furthermore, the country is in civil war, and it has been established that most of the atrocities in that civil war have been committed/are being committed by the Colombian military and associated rightwing paramilitaries. A democracy? I don't think so.

As for unproven allegations against Uribe, his government is rife with murderers, thieves and drug traffickers. You don't think the president is responsible for that? You think his "aides" and political allies have just run amok without his complicity? What's a president for, anyway, except to uphold the law, lead his followers and the country, and set an example? Bush and Uribe are cut of the same cloth. They think that as long as they have "deniability," and as long as they don't personally get caught in a crime, that everything is just hunky-dory, even with massive crime beneath them on every front. That is not democracy. That is a criminal gang.

[Judi Lynn]

4. You've buzzed the wrong message board with your claims. There are many DU'ers who have

made a point of trying to find out what the hell is going on there. Here's a very easy grab which addresses your claim of Colombian "democracy."

Origins of the Conflict
excerpted from the book
Colombia and the United States
War, Unrest and Destabilization
by Mario A. Murillo
Seven Stories Press, 2004, paper

Colombian officials often boast about having the "longest standing democracy in Latin America, " but throughout its recent history the spoils of that democracy have gone to a very small, privileged sector of society, what journalist and writer Apolinar Diaz Callejo described as "hereditary power without monarchy." In Colombia, the Constitution and its laws are often ignored and rarely enforced, either because of a lack of bureaucratic capacity on the part of the state to do so, or because of an absence of political will on the part of the ruling elite to execute those laws that are designed to protect the public.

The statistic that most dramatically illustrates this is that of all the political crimes committed in Colombia every year- including assassinations, forced disappearances, extrajudicial executions, and torture-97 percent end up in complete impunity. On average, anywhere between 2,100 and 3,000 people are killed each year for political reasons in Colombia. This occurs despite the fact that, during the past sixty years, Colombia has been ruled only once by a military dictatorship, from 1953 to 1957. The country avoided the "national security dictatorships" that emerged in the southern cone of South America in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Colombia has presidential elections every four years, as well as elections for other national, departmental, and local offices where political parties openly compete for votes using the communications media as their primary vehicle for democratic discourse. It has witnessed dozens of "peaceful" transitions of political power on every occasion since 1957, something not every country in the region could easily claim. Today, talk of political reform is openly debated in the news media, all in an effort to strengthen Colombian "democracy."
(snip)

The fact of the matter is that the level of politically motivated violence generated by the state and its paramilitary apparatus, ostensibly in response to increasingly high levels of guerrilla-generated violence, has in many respects surpassed the brutality witnessed anywhere else in the region. Notwithstanding the existence of at least the superficial trappings of a democratic political culture, what exists in Colombia are two parallel spheres that negate the existence of a genuine democracy, as Father Javier Giraldo of the Colombian human rights group Justicia y Paz wrote in 1996. The first is the bureaucratic/ administrative sphere, where traditional political parties, run predominantly by elites, compete for the spoils that "serve as an incentive for cycles of generalized corruption," all the while neglecting the needs of the majority of the people. The second is the country's social conflict, whose origins lie in the collective attempts at resistance to the first sphere, and which over the years has been turned over to the armed forces and its auxiliaries for management, with dramatic levels of repression.

This repression is part of Colombia's long history, although one would be hard pressed to find even a mention of it in any of the hundreds of contemporary news reports about the conflict, in either the U.S. or the Colombian media. Indeed/ the failure of Colombia's "democratic" institutions to respond to the public's legitimate, constitutionally protected demands regarding the right to life, employment, land, political participation, economic opportunity, and justice, and the tendency of the state to respond to these demands through the use of force, has led some sectors of Colombian society to take up arms to achieve their political and social objectives. It is a complex picture that can be summed up with several general observations, the first of which has already been made: Colombia on paper is a liberal democracy, but in reality it is far from satisfying a democracy's basic prerequisites, precisely because, as Colombian sociologist and journalist Alfredo Molano has pointed out, the power monopoly of the two traditional parties, "which have an aura almost of religious trappings, " has prevented social changes "unleashed by development from finding suitable avenues of political action.
(snip/...)

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/South_America/Origins_CUS.html

[Kagemusha]

5. You know, I was actually referring to his understanding of American democracy

Or maybe you weren't aware of that.

His reaction speaks to a failure to comprehend how a congress could possibly defy a president. Over anything. Ever. Certainly over anything important.

[Judi Lynn]

6. Colombia warlord fingers US banana firms over militias

Colombia warlord fingers US banana firms over militias

Saturday, May 19, 2007

A paramilitary warlord said that US multinationals who buy Colombia's bananas financed right-wing militias that killed thousands of people in a more than decade-long reign of terror.
In testimony to investigators, jailed warlord Salvatore Mancuso named Chiquita, Dole and Del Monte as having made regular payments to the militias, according to Jesus Vargas, a lawyer for victims of paramilitary violence who was present at the hearing, to which the press was barred.
(snip)

Mancuso did not specify why the companies paid the illegal militias, but paramilitaries commonly exacted "war taxes" from businesses and ranchers in areas where they operated.

Across the country, the paramilitaries countered leftist rebel extortion. They also served as union busters and killed hundreds of labor rights activists.
(snip)

Labor and human rights activists say Colombia companies and multinationals routinely paid paramilitaries to act as union busters, including killing organizers, and so making Colombia the most dangerous country in the world for unions.
(snip/...)

http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?pp_cat=17&art_id=44789&sid=13678672&con_type=1

[Judi Lynn]

7. Colombia’s President Uribe and the Para Scandal

Colombia’s President Uribe and the Para Scandal
Tuesday, 22 May 2007, 10:48 am
Opinion: Council on Hemispheric Affairs


Council On Hemispheric Affairs
MONITORING POLITICAL, ECONOMIC AND DIPLOMATIC
ISSUES AFFECTING THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE
Tuesday, May 15th, 2007
Press Releases, Colombia, Front Page

Colombia’s President Uribe and the Para Scandal: Those Mother’s Day Bouquets, Imported from My Country, are a Noxious Bloom

Just months after Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Vélez’s landslide re-election in May 2006, some critics began pointing to ‘cracks in the pedestal’ of his popularity. The ongoing brouhaha surrounding the evident connections between the Uribe government and the paramilitary organizations, however, make that claim seem like so much wishful thinking. Uribe’s millions of supporters have long been aware of his ties to the paramilitaries but have chosen to ignore them, though they realize that they made a deal with the Devil. Without question, a majority of voting Colombians want to stay the course.
(snip)

As governor of Antioquia between 1995 and 1997, Uribe was the bell cow in the legalization of paramilitary Convivir groups, the so-called ‘Rural Vigilance Cooperatives,’ that recalled the Colombia’s government-backed death squads of the 1940s and 50s. These largely served to legalize the paramilitary militias that had emerged in the early 1980s. These latter units were enthusiastically supported by General Harold Bedoya, head of the Colombian Armed Forces from 1994-97. The army worked closely with the Convivirs in their anti-guerrilla deployments. Before being outlawed in 1999 due to their egregious excesses, the Convivirs helped displace over 200,000 campesinos, mostly from the Urabá region. In particular, the organizations that Uribe nurtured so lovingly, presided over one of Colombia’s most gory massacres. In July 1997, two chartered flights of paramilitary gunmen flew from Urabá into the military-controlled airport at San José de Guaviare, Department of Meta, where Army soldiers helped transport their weapons and gear. After being reinforced by 180 local paramilitary brethren, the paras were waved through various military checkpoints as they made their way up the Guaiviare River to Mapiripán. Once there, they spent five days hunting specific ‘subversives’ that they had earlier been identified as guerrilla supporters. These individuals were taken to the local slaughterhouse and murdered. Their bodies were disemboweled (so as not to float) and dumped in the river.
(snip)

Finally, Colombia remains one of the most dangerous places on the planet for human rights activists, community leaders, and labor organizers. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch condemned the killing of Yolanda Izquierdo in the city of Montería, Department of Córdoba. Izquierdo, the leader of ‘The People’s Housing Organization,’ was murdered on January 31, 2007, after receiving repeated death threats. Izquierdo had represented hundreds of survivors of paramilitary attacks led by Salvatore Mancuso. Human rights’ bodies claim that the killing was meant to silence anyone having the temerity of speaking out against war crimes committed by the paramilitaries, as well as to the assassination of rights activist Freddy Abel Espitia in Córdoba on January 29. Both organizations insist that these killings raise, yet again, serious doubts about the authenticity entire demobilization route.

In fact, Colombia’s specialists argue that Uribe’s stratagem has utterly failed to dismantle the paramilitary units. The best evidence for this claim can be found in the numbers of union leaders and activists assassinated in Colombia over the last six years, more than 800 by the government’s own count. Tellingly, the number of murders that have been solved can literally be counted on one hand. As reported by Sergio De Leon of the Associated Press, the number of murdered union members rose last year, despite a purported drop in the over all homicide rate, from 43 in 2005, to 58 in 2006.
(snip/...)

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0705/S00336.htm