Category: Colombia War

Because I never even try to understand anything by myself, I asked one of my trusted Colombian friends to explain the events in Guaitarilla to me. My friend replied: “Guaitarilla? SURE!!!”

Here is my friend’s explanation, complete with an unsolicited and very nice comment. And this story ain’t over, either…

The news in Colombia, everywhere, all media had only one thing to talk about: Guaitarilla. Initially the story is that accidentally at dawn, an army patrol unexpectedly met with a GAULA police team (special forces) and confused them with FARC terrorists and shot them, killing all of them. The Police commander gave this very version on all media. 4 civilans were killed with the 7 policemen. According to this high officer, the 4 were either narcotraficantes or insurgents captured by the police. The army gave a different version and contradicted the police. According to army officers, the GAULA had nothing to do in that area, they did not inform the army about this and that lack of coordination led to the problem. The initial report from the attorney general’s office comes out and the forensic report shows that the victims were shot inside their vehicles, at short distance and that their bodies were moved out of the cars to make them look as though they had been shot outside!

In other words, they were massacred at point-blank range.

Then, a witness shows up, seeking protection. He is an active policeman from the same GAULA unit who was not on duty that day, but who “decided” to accompany the group’s rounds from his own vehicle and was keeping contact with them through his car radio. He was the brother of one of the civilians killed (allegedly criminals according to the National Police Comander).

His brother, he said, was not a criminal, neither were the other civilians, but paid informants of the more than 1 million that Uribe has called the “million friends”. [[NOTE from Justin: this is the network of civilian informers Uribe promised in his election]]

In fact, locals have informed that GAULA does regular rounds with support from informantes in the area because there are drug laboratories in the region. The rounds are to “vaccinate” (get money from, extort from) the drug processing operation. The army intercepted them knowing they had money (and cocaine, as this is better payment) and attempted to have these goods transfered to the soldiers from the Police. The witness said (it was everywhere in the news) that his brother called him to say, we are being stopped by an armed group, stay behind til I tell you what is happening. The next communication was, it’s OK, come over, it’s just army people. We are alright. The man says he was scared and decided no to come closer and then he heard the shots, round after round and ran away only to discover later that his brother and the entire group had been massacred.

This caused a scandal. Even fairly right wing columnists and liberals (Maria Jimena Duzan) commented on their editorials (El Tiempo) that the corruption within the armed forces had gone beyond the wildest nightmare. Everyone wanted the truth. Too many cases of accidents, massacres, confessions, corruption etc. This had to be clarified. The truth had to come out.

Uribe moved swiftly to promise a full report and resolution “punishing those responsible” within a week. The fact is the cover-up is evolving and now “evidence” will point at a “mistake”. A specific commander or two might be destituted for mis-communicating and end of story…..OR IS IT?

Nobody swallows the lies now. The army is irreparably discredited, not because they are corrupt assasins, crooks connected to drug trade and theft of all types, but mostly because they have done things in a way such that everyone knows the truth AND THAT IS UNACCEPTABLE. They have to learn to lie better, especially if they are to win the US’s dirty war and advance not only in controlling the whole country through a paramilitary regime lead by a paramilitary president, but because Colombia and the Colombian army of paras and soldiers and policemen are to lead (under the command of General Hill), the attack on Venezuela. So, a clean up is required so that private deals are not tolerated, institutional corruption is well administered and dirty war managed through official lies only.

THERE YOU HAVE IT. tHE FUTURE OF THIS CONTINENT IS BEING WRITTEN IN COLOMBIA AND FEW GIVE A DAMN ABOUT IT. ESTABLISHED LIES, A FASCIST DRUG RELATED PARAMILTARY-CORPORATE GOVERNMENT REGIME AND FULL GUIDANCE FROM us GOVERNMENT, SOUTHCOM AND STATE DEPT. Freedom or free trade through horror. Want a cut on the deal? Easy, write in favour of Uribe, Bush, Plan Colombia, the armed forces and against Venezuela and you are in!!! They need people desperately, especially since types like you keep telling the truth!!!

You can read on ZNet about how the Colombian invasion of Venezuela just got a bit closer, thanks to a pronouncement by the Colombian senate. I wrote a year ago that this would be a disaster for Colombia, but of course Colombia’s not calling the shots here — the US is. And since when did the US care if a course of action would be disastrous for Colombia before embarking on it?

In other Colombia news, El Tiempo reported on April 14 that the head of a murderous gang of sicarios (assassins who work for paramilitaries or drug traffickers) was captured in a Colombian Army Officers’ Club. This gangster, called Jaime Londono, was captured with 20 cellular phones, 2 guns, 4 cars, and the equivalent of $10 000 USD. A retired military officer was detained with him, and another man. The gang is responsible for about 140 killings according to authorities.

Anyone wonder what he was doing there?

There’s more.

A report to the Colombian Ministry of Defense in March, according to El Tiempo, reported the shocking news that the police are linked to the paramilitaries extensively in various regions, including Cauca, Valle, Putumayo, Narino, Casanare, Meta, Guaviare, Bucaramanga…

And there is still more. Two police officers, killed in ‘fighting with guerrillas’ in Guaitarilla, had cocaine in their car. I need to look into this more — and will report once I’ve sorted it out.

Just got this from an important human rights group in Colombia, the ‘Jose Alvear Restrepo Lawyer’s Collective’. Apparently on March 30, a ‘technical commission’ from the Attorney General’s office made what amounts to a raid on the Colombian Senate’s Human Rights offices. The ‘technical commission’ looked up information on individuals — basically activists, unionists, human rights defenders, very sensitive information about people under threat that you’d find in a government human rights office; and took the information on them away…

Remember that this is in a context where, under Uribe, thousands of people have been rounded up all over Colombia, most on quite bogus charges of ‘terrorism’. Remember too that this is a context where the government and paramilitary death squads work hand-in-hand; the real danger is that this information will fall into the hands of killers.

This is all doubly ironic for another reason. An article in the Colombian magazine CAMBIO presented a transcription of a recording of a Colombian general named Jaime Alberto Uscategui who reveals links between the army and paramilitaries and talks about the Mapiripan massacre. The recording talks about an archive of 300 documents that are in the general’s possession. He says that the pamphlets taken by the paramilitaries to Mapiripan, where they murdered peasants, were created on a computer at the Paris Battalion of the Colombian army. That same computer had documents on the paramilitary organization (AUC) pay schedules, the names of the entire Guaviare front of AUC…

Small wonder that very battalion, posted 8 kilometers from the massacre’s site, ‘failed to act’ when the massacre was underway.

THAT archive of documents is safely sealed away from public view. Meanwhile information on human rights defenders that could get them killed is raided by ‘technical commissions’ of the Fiscalia…

One odd thing about some parts of Colombia’s social movement is that while they are being savagely repressed, they also win various international prizes from mainstream institutions. The Nasa of Northern Cauca, for example (described in the ‘indigenous autonomy’ post in the ‘goodbye maggie’ zblog), particularly in Toribio, are experiencing the occupation of the national security forces who have detained some members of their community arbitrarily and, at the end of 2003, shot others, and were in the same situation in February when I visited. They also won a UNDP prize for sustainable development on February 19…

Luz Perly Cordoba, president of Accion Campesina de Arauca, was arbitrarily detained and has been since February 18 of this year, in Bogota — imprisoning social leaders is part of Colombian President Uribe’s noble struggle against ‘terrorism’ — and on March 31, she won a Peace Prize in Denmark. The prize was awarded in Copenhagen by the mayor Per Bregengaard. She was selected for her defense of human rights in the country — for both the award and the repression, no doubt.

Luz Perly could not be at the ceremony, of course.

Colombia’s paramilitary killers were dramatically ‘pardoned’ on national television in late November, and are now in ‘negotiations’ with the government to ‘demobilize’. The Colombian army, meanwhile, no longer having to worry about the paramilitaries, is now able to focus on ambitious plans for destroying the guerrillas. Indeed, Colombia’s army commander, General Martin Orlando Carreno told the Associated Press (reported Dec. 20) that he will catch FARC’s leaders by the end of the year or resign: “They found Saddam in a hole, like a rat’ These guys are rats too, hidden away in the jungle. And we can find them’ Everything is in our favor to win this war’ We must win. There is no alternative’ It is either now or never.”

Or so the story goes. In reality, the army-backed paramilitaries have not let the phony ‘demobilization’ or ‘negotiations’ impede their work of assassination and massacre. And the government’s ‘successful’ war against the guerrillas looks more like a war against the population itself.

Pardoning the Paramilitaries

A leader in Colombia’s women’s movement organization the Organizacion Feminina Popular (OFP), Esperanza Amaris Miranda, was killed on October 16, 2003, in the city of Barrancabermeja, by paramilitaries. The OFP counted 120 assassinated in Barrancabermeja in 2003 (to November), 13 of whom were women of their own organization.

The paramilitaries have been attacking the social movements savagely since the referendum of October 25 (1) went against the government. The Human Rights Department of Colombia’s union central, the Centro Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT, who counted 58 assassinations of unionists to November), reported on October 31:

“Domingo Tovar Arrieta, member of the National Executive and Director of the Human Rights Department in the afternoon of 30 October received a telephone call to his mobile in which they said:

“YOU WILL PAY WITH YOUR LIFE FOR THE LOSS OF THE REFERENDUM”.

Over the next two weeks, the paramilitaries assassinated teacher’s unionists Pacheco Everto Fiholl (November 3) and Nubia Estela Castro (November 5), Health worker’s unionist Zuly Esther Colina Perez (November 12), unionist Mario Sierra (November 16), and severely wounded teacher’s unionist Berta Lucy Davila (November 13).

There are reports of a massacre of 5 people on November 2 in Cajamarca in the department of Tolima, by men in army uniforms. Paramilitary roadblocks were taking people off buses at the peace community of San Jose de Apartado in late October, while at the same time army and paramilitary units were raiding houses in Arauqita. The Embera indigenous reported paramilitary incursions of men armed to the teeth and threatening their people in mid-November.

Shortly afterwards, on November 25, the beginning of the paramilitary ‘demobilization’ took place. Colombians are told that the paramilitaries are in ‘negotiations’ with the government, giving the government the chance to focus on destroying the guerrillas. At the ceremony, a paramilitary unit in Medellin called the Cacique Nutibara Bloc, consisting of 850 members, turned in some 112 weapons. The paramilitary foot soldiers were sent off to ‘readjustment training’ and will be given government stipends. The leaders remain at large, however, and used the occasion of the ‘demobilization’ to broadcast video messages to the nation. Carlos Castano, for example, who has been convicted of arranging assassinations and massacres, who has admitted to drug trafficking and assassinations (the latter in his published biography), went on television. So did paramilitary leaders Salvatore Mancuso and Diego Murillo Bejarano.

Human Rights Watch was unimpressed. Jose Miguel Vivanco of the Americas division of HRW said: “The broadcast is a travesty. Instead of handing these criminals a microphone, the government should be concentrating on arresting them and bringing them to justice.” Legislator Gustavo Petro called it “the biggest whitewash in history,” asking: “Is pardoning crimes against humanity the way to peace?” Claudia Martinez, a writer from Medellin, wondered: “We are in the difficult position of not knowing whether to laugh, cry, or be filled with indignation.” She wondered about the equipment the paramilitaries turned over: “One doesn’t have to be very intelligent to notice that the weapons turned over are a tiny fraction of the thousands of guns the BCN had in Medellin, to say nothing of the communication equipment they had. Where is all that?”

The dramatic gesture of paramilitary ‘demobilization’ has not stopped the murderous campaign against the social movements, however.

The UK Colombia Solidarity Campaign reported “34-year old JOSE DE JESUS ROJAS CASTANEDA was assassinated at 9pm on 3 December in the Bosque neighborhood in the southeast part of Barrancabermeja. Mr. Rojas Castaneda was killed in front of his wife, who was in her ninth month of pregnancy. He worked in the Instituto Tecnico Superior de Comercio and was a member of the municipal educators’ union ASEM. He was the brother of Jacqueline Rojas Castaneda, who is a leader of the Women’s organization OFP and the brother-in-law of Juan Carlos Galvis (president of the CUT in Barrancabermeja and a Sinaltrainal union leader).”

The ‘demobilized’ BCN itself assassinated a councillor of the municipality of San Carlos in Antioquia on December 14. Paramilitaries killed unionist Severo Bastos on the same day, in Villa del Rosario near Cucuta.

Renewing the Offensive

If it failed to stop the paramilitary killings, ‘demobilization’ did manage to embolden Colombia’s President and Army to talk, and act, even tougher against their perceived enemies.

The Colombian Army was so offended by Human Rights Watch’s comments that they put a poll on their website. The question? “How would you describe Jose Miguel Vivanco, who called the demobilization of paramilitaries a ‘spectacle of impunity’, knowing that there are now 850 less weapons killing Colombians?” Possible answers: “1. He should support the process. 2. He should not express an opinion. 3. He’s right. 4. He is supporting terrorism.”

In the event, the Army may not have gotten the result it wanted: 62% of 358 people who checked the site said Vivanco was right at the time El Tiempo reported it on December 7.

Meanwhile Uribe was giving a speech urging the “extermination” of the guerrillas “by good ways or bad,” and that “we need to calculate less and risk more.” (Reported by El Tiempo Dec. 6, 2003) The speech was followed by the passage of a new ‘anti-terror’ law (enabling arrests without warrants, phone taps, and more), and claims of a major combat between the army and the paramilitaries, in which 24 paramilitaries were killed and 39 captured.

On December 22, the ‘Casa de Mujeres Trabajadoras’ (House of Working Class Women), a part of the ‘Ruta Pacifica de Mujeres’, an important women’s peace group in Colombia, released a communique. Their office was raided by four armed men, who forced the workers there to kneel on the ground with weapons pointed at them, went directly for the computers, and made off with five of them. The women are unsure who the raiders were, but their communique states clearly that they “believe this action is an effect of the politics of ‘Democratic Security’ and the ‘Counterterrorism Statute’, which place under suspicion and harrassment all organizations that work for human rights and in this case women’s rights.”

Another front of the offensive was the aerial fumigation program. Colombia’s daily, El Tiempo, reported on December 5 that the US Congress has approved aerial fumigation of National Parks and Nature Reserves in Colombia. In the same article, it was noted that “Colombia’s national parks occupy some 10 million hectares and are considered the second richest part of the world in terms of biodiversity after Brazil.” An anonymous source “close to the government” was quoted saying that the fumigations “persist in acting as if reducing coca cultivation was weakening narcotrafficking. But reducing cultivation is not the same as reducing the global drug supply.” The report ended with a discussion of the Colombian laws and international environmental agreements that would be violated by such fumigation, followed by quotes from the Vice-Minister of Justice arguing for it.

Reverses

Uribe is talking about ‘extermination’, the army is accusing Human Rights Watch of ‘supporting terrorism’, the pardoned paramilitaries are still killing, and the fumigation program continues. But not everything is going Uribe’s way.

The FARC, in a gruesome way, continue to demonstrate that Uribe’s ‘Democratic Security’ policy isn’t stopping them. A bombing in Barranquilla on December 16 killed a woman and injured 20 others. A captain of the police force was killed in fighting with the guerrillas in Cauca on December 21.

More hopeful are the political reverses Uribe has faced. The referendum of October 25, in which the government’s program was defeated (1), was the first such reverse. The departmental and municipal elections, which brought democratic left candidates to power all over the country, was another.

In Cauca itself, the government has tried to exploit the indigenous movement for autonomy as part of its counterinsurgency campaign. But on December 15, the Indigenous Regional Council of Cauca (CRIC) sent a letter to Uribe clearing this issue up. CRIC’s position was reported in the Colombian media, and the letter said: “we arrive at the conclusion that, sadly, this war is not one between armies fighting for state power, but of armies against the civilian population, especially against the population living in territories with strategic importance, economic or military in nature. Here we see the strengthening of war-like confrontation, a condition that maintains anxiety and a high risk of forced disappearances among our indigenous communities of Cauca as well as those in other parts of the country. We have told you that the establishment of military or police bases in various communities has not proven to be the solution. On the contrary, their existence has proven that there are imminent risks for the population, since their presence only serves to encourage armed confrontations.”

Uribe’s privatizations have been contested as well. In October, a coalition of trade unions called for a campaign against the World Bank’s restructuring of Colombia’s Mining Code, the liquidation of the state mining corporation MINERCOL, and the removal of the ‘restructured’ mining sector from even a semblance of social control.

Right now, there is a battle going on in the Colombian Congress. Legislator Alexander Lopez, from Valle del Cauca, has brought a case against Uribe for violating the Constitution, the agreement on public services, the penal code, and the disciplinary code by liquidating Colombia’s state telephone company, Telecom, by presidential decree without following proper legal procedure. In his statement to the Congressional Committee dealing with the case, Uribe, instead of answering the charges, accused Lopez of engaging in “parliamentary subversion”, attempting to link Lopez’s defense of Colombia’s public telephone company to terrorism. Communiques from Lopez’s office on December 17 and 18 asked Uribe to answer the charges rather than make insinuations.

In the wake of the paramilitary pardon, respected journalist Fernando Garavito wrote in his regular column, ‘The Lord of the Flies’, that:

” what’s at stake is more than just the reinsertion of a group of common criminals’ much more than pardon and erasing from memory of the atrocities of Castano and Mancuso’ this peace is an ethical impossibility. With it the slightest possibility of justice is eliminated’ If things continue on this road, it will be no surprise if in a little while the minimal necessary elements for the existence of even this cardboard democracy of ours begin to disappear'”

While Uribe tries to tear it up, Colombia’s movements are fighting hard for more than just a ‘cardboard democracy’.

Notes:

The sources for this article are communiques of the various organizations quoted and the Colombian and North American press. If you want a specific reference, write to encamino@tools4change.org

For a note from the beginning of the paramilitary negotiations, see my ‘Paramilitary Negotiations’, ZNet November 27 2003:

1) See my ‘Colombia’s Referendum’, ZNet October 27, 2003:

On October 25, 2003 Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez placed before the people of Colombia a referendum of questions that he hoped would endorse his leadership and increase his power. Presented as an ‘anti-corruption’ initiative, most of the questions sought to gut the public sector of the country and facilitate further privatizations. Conveniently, one question would have made it possible for a president to be re-elected after one term, opening the way for Uribe’s own re-election in 2006.

Continue reading “Colombia’s Referendum”

On September 8, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez said “when terrorists start feeling weak, they immediately send their spokesmen to talk about human rights.” He said while some human rights groups were “respectable”, others were “political agitators in the service of terrorism, cowards who wrap themselves in the banner of human rights, in order to win back for Colombian terrorism the space which the armed forces and the public have taken from it.”

Continue reading “When Terrorists Talk of Human Rights”

At the end of May, the ‘Rio Group’ of Latin American countries discussed how to handle Colombia’s civil war. Colombia’s president, Alvaro Uribe Velez, was seeking a declaration from the group that asked Kofi Annan to give the FARC– the main Colombian guerrilla group-an ultimatum. The ultimatum was that the FARC come to the negotiating table, or else. Or else what, wasn’t specified. President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela registered his dissent with the ultimatum. He said such a declaration could only have the effect of preparing the way for a multilateral intervention in Colombia. Uribe said whether an ultimatum was given or not, the future of Latin America was in fighting terrorism and the drug trade.

Uribe then proceeded to preside over a month of extraordinary violence of all kinds, at every stage making decisions to escalate that violence.

One of the first decisions was to change the terribly inadequate system in place since 1998 for protecting unionists. Thousands of unionists have been killed by paramilitary violence over the course of Colombia’s war. This year alone 35 activists have been killed. In 2002 the number was over 150. In the scheme Uribe decided to replace, unionists were allowed to have bodyguards. In the new plan, the bodyguards are to be appointed by the government. Given that the strength of the paramilitary comes from its connections to the army and police, having the government appoint bodyguards for unionists is like letting the fox guard the henhouse.

Whatever the current state of protection for unionists, the system certainly failed two weeks after Uribe’s announcement when on June 16, Luis H. Rolon from the Union of Lottery Vendors was killed in Cucuta, Morelly Guillen of the health worker’s union was killed in Tame, and on June 17, Orlando Fernandez of the public sector union in Valledupar was killed.

Another inventive program for punishing unionists developed by Uribe’s government is the “Program of Improvement and Competencies”. In this program, unionists are sent into isolation to ‘work’ with a ‘tutor’. The tutor assigns them work, evaluates them weekly, and prohibits them from returning to their work site.

After testing the ‘privatization by bombing’ strategy in May (http://www.en-camino.org/may202003podur.htm), Uribe’s government escalated the liquidation of state enterprises massively. On June 14 (days before three unionists were killed) the government announced the privatization of TELECOM, Colombia’s phone network. The union estimates job losses of 10,000. A UK-Colombia Solidarity Campaign Communique provides background for the TELECOM liquidation:

‘Decisive pressure came from Washington. As Miguel Caro CUT’s Director for the public sector points out: “the US has insisted as a condition for including Colombia in the Free Trade Area of the Americas negotiations that one-sided ‘shared risk’ contracts signed with US companies be implemented”.

‘The misnamed ‘shared-risk’ contracts were of course nothing of the sort, merely a mechanism for foreign multinationals to rip off the state sector. Back in 1993 TELECOM signed contracts with six multinationals to provide 2 million telephone lines. They put 1.8 million lines in place, but only 1.15 million were sold. While the investment came from state funds, the ‘shared risk’ meant that the multinationals were guaranteed an income irrespective of the number of lines sold. NORTEL and the other companies demanded a US $2 billion contract settlement. The previous Colombian government offered $600 million, but this was not enough for NORTEL who lobbied the US Congress to block any general trade and investment agreements until its demands are met. Uribe has accepted, hence the liquidation and sell off which, according to Miguel Caro “shows once again the submission of the Colombian government to the dictates of US imperialist power”.’

But TELECOM was just the beginning. Also slated for privatization are-among hundreds of others– Social Security, and ECOPETROL, the national oil company. ECOPETROL was created in 1948, itself the outcome of a struggle by workers. It has assets of more than $8 billion and brings in revenues of $2 billion annually. The oil worker’s union, USO, is one of the most combative and organized unions in Colombia and also one of the hardest-hit. ECOPETROL’s installations have been militarized in advance of the privatization.

The war against the indigenous, afro-Colombians, and peasants in the countryside continued as well. On June 8, in Riosucio, Caldas, 4 indigenous activists were murdered and 4 others severely wounded in a paramilitary attack. Like most paramilitary massacres, this one had been preceded by death threats well in advance, followed by pleas to the government for protection. The government offered, as help, a cellular phone and help with transportation, before the massacre came.

In the Afro-Colombian community of Zabaletas, Buenaventura, paramilitaries killed 5 people on June 14. The PCN (Black People’s Process), reported that this was one of many massacres in their communities-waves of massacres occurred in 1996, 2000, and 2001. The intent, then as now, was the get people to flee, to ‘clear’ the territory for the development of natural resources and megaprojects.

It amounts to a country-wide, violent assault on every front.

And at every point, Colombians are resisting, heroically. On June 19th, some 600,000 state sector workers went on strike to stop the privatizations. They marched in Bogota and in Barrancabermeja (where ECOPETROL has its installations), where government security forces broke up demonstrations with water cannons and tear gas. The fate of tens of thousands of workers, of Colombia’s public infrastructure, could be decided by the outcome of this strike. In the UK-Colombia Solidarity Campaign’s words, “It will take enormous pressure from within and without to halt the march of fascism in Colombia. The CUT Human Rights Department has called for solidarity, highlighting the need for mobilisation of protest internationally and physical accompaniment in Colombia.”

On July 22, 2003, a boycott against Coca Cola will begin. SINALTRAINAL, the Colombian Food and Drinks Workers Union, has better reason reason than most to want such a boycott. Eight of its members have been assassinated by paramilitaries financed by Coca Cola bottling companies. Hundreds of their workers have been sacked and detained, even kidnapped, tortured, and disappeared, as part of the dirty war in Colombia that kills members of the social opposition so that multinational corporations can make profits.

SINALTRAINAL tried a legal route, with help from the United Steelworkers Union. The judge ruled that Coca Cola’s bottlers have a case to answer, but Coca Cola decided not to play. The demands are for reparations, a change in policy, and a commitment to respect the human rights of workers and the population. In a public tribunal against impunity, SINALTRAINAL found Coca Cola guilty of violating human rights of its workers; benefiting from attacks on unionists in Colombia, Guatemala, Peru, Brazil, the US, Venezuela, Palestine, Turkey, Iran and elsewhere; contamination of water sources by pollution from bottling plants; racial discrimination; the irrational use of water in the world and robbery of water from communities in India; support for the Venezuelan oligarchy. The boycott is to last, in its initial phrase, for one year. It “does not solely consist of not consuming the products of the transnational corporation Coca Cola, but is also a permanent and sustained campaign of denouncement, organization, and struggle against the policies of the company.”

Uribe ended the month with a 53-page document outlining his new strategy. It’s called ‘democratic security’, and it speaks for itself. It is part of the US’s wider, accelerating project of plundering the resources and the public sectors of every country in the world by terror, warfare, and capitalist globalization.

Years ago, the Zapatistas in Mexico also faced a President who was outlining a ‘new strategy’ against them. They commented that it was not new, nor was it a strategy, just the same stupid pounding that assumes that a people who have resisted for five hundred years will suddenly forget how.

Colombians are not going to forget how. But will they have to face the onslaught alone?

JUSTIN PODUR maintains ZNet’s Colombia Watch pages