{"id":15217,"date":"2012-11-03T11:28:21","date_gmt":"2012-11-03T15:28:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theredphoenixapl.org\/?p=15217"},"modified":"2012-11-03T11:28:21","modified_gmt":"2012-11-03T15:28:21","slug":"death-squads-murder-and-u-s-corruption-in-colombia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/2012\/11\/death-squads-murder-and-u-s-corruption-in-colombia\/","title":{"rendered":"Death Squads, Murder and U.S. Corruption in Colombia"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

News broke this week, though not very widely here, that Francisco Santos, who served as Colombia\u2019s Vice-President under President Alvaro Uribe from 2002 to 2010, met three times with leaders of the right-wing paramilitary organization known as the AUC.\u00a0 Present at Santos\u2019 meetings with the AUC \u2013 an organization designated by the U.S. State Department as a \u201cterrorist organization\u201d since September 10, 2001 \u2013 was the infamous founder of the AUC, Carlos Casta\u00f1o.\u00a0\u00a0 The news of these meetings was originally broke by Colombia\u2019s Caracol Radio, and was picked up by very few U.S. news outlets, including Fox News (Latino), citing the EFE news service, and Colombia Reports.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to EFE and Fox News (Latino), Santos met with the AUC during the 1990\u2019s, before becoming Vice-President, but during his tenure as editor-in-chief of Colombia\u2019s main newspaper \u2013\u00a0El Tiempo<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 During one of these meetings, Santos told the AUC to kill \u201call those SOBs that are taking this country.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 However, at the same time, Santos made it clear that the AUC should not \u201cdisappear\u201d these targets as this would cause problems with the foundation he created to fight kidnapping and to provide aid to the families of kidnapping victims.\u00a0 (And you thought Lance Armstrong had troubling issues with his charity?!)<\/span><\/p>\n

EFE and Fox News (Latino), without proper attribution to CounterPunch I might add, relate what I had first revealed on these pages months ago \u2013 i.e., that \u201cAUC fighters killed more than 250,000 people over the course of two decades, according to a cable disseminated by Wikileaks.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

There are a number of notable issues which these new revelations about Santos raise.\u00a0 First of all, Santos, as Vice-President, acted as one of Colombia\u2019s chief lobbyists on Capitol Hill for the Colombia Free Trade Agreement \u2013 an Agreement introduced to Congress by President Obama (despite his 2008 campaign promises not to seek passage of the FTA) and passed by the U.S. Congress in the fall of 2011.\u00a0\u00a0 I know this fact well, for I personally met with Santos at the U.S. Embassy in Washington D.C. back in 2007\u00a0 when he was pushing hard for FTA passage.\u00a0\u00a0 Santos had invited members of the U.S. labor community to talk to him at the Embassy in a futile attempt to win our support for the FTA.\u00a0 At this meeting, Santos tried to assure us that the Colombian government was doing everything it could to stem the violence against Colombian trade unionists, and that this violence should not be viewed as an impediment to the FTA.\u00a0\u00a0 Santos seemed like an affable enough guy, but we agreed to disagree on this issue.\u00a0\u00a0 As it turns out, we in the U.S. labor movement were right to stand our ground, Santos\u2019 pleas notwithstanding.\u00a0 Of course, it was Santos who ultimately won out, obtaining passage not under George W. Bush, but under Obama.<\/span><\/p>\n

That Santos, who openly urged AUC death squads to carry out killings, was the standard bearer for Colombia\u2019s FTA lobbying efforts is emblematic of what the FTA is all about.\u00a0\u00a0 In short, the FTA is indeed about death, for it will accelerate the continued displacement of Colombians (in particular, indigenous and Afro-Colombians) from their land in order to make way for multi-national exploitation.\u00a0\u00a0 In addition, the FTA \u2014 as NAFTA before it which led to the displacement of 1.3 million small farmers, and as \u201cfree trade\u201d with Haiti which, as Clinton himself admitted, destroyed the ability of Haitian farmers to grow food \u2013 will undermine the livelihood of small farmers in Colombia who will be unable to compete with the U.S.\u2019s cheap, subsidized food dumped tariff-free into Colombia under the FTA\u2019s agricultural provisions.\u00a0\u00a0 This, in turn, will lead to the displacement of small farmers in Colombia.\u00a0 And, all of this displacement will only add to Colombia\u2019s internally displaced population which is now at over 5 million persons \u2013 the world\u2019s largest.<\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, as NACLA reported on October 10, 2011, just before FTA passage, \u201cThe alarms are already sounding among many sectors in Colombia, especially the producers of rice, corn, wheat, and dairy products. Colombia\u2019s Minister of Agriculture, Juan Camilo Restrepo,\u00a0 said that about 350,000 small farmers are expected to be among the first to be hit by the loss of protection to the import of cheap U.S. agricultural products. \u2018We are not prepared for the FTA,\u2019 said Restrepo.\u201d\u00a0 Ready or not, the FTA has come to Colombia, thanks to advocates like Francisco Santos.<\/span><\/p>\n

What is most notable and disturbing about the substance of Santos\u2019 meetings with the AUC is his ready acknowledgement of the AUC\u2019s preferred method of eliminating perceived enemies of the state \u2013 disappearance.\u00a0\u00a0 Santos had to qualify his exhortation to kill to exclude disappearances because he knew very well that the AUC would naturally resort to such\u00a0 crimes as a first resort.\u00a0 Of course, many of us in the human rights field know this to be true, given Colombia status as the Hemisphere\u2019s leader in disappearances at anywhere between 50,000 and 250,000 disappeared in the last 2 decades.\u00a0\u00a0 However, that the man who would hold the second highest office in Colombia so openly accepted this fact shows how integral this crime is to the Colombian government\u2019s maintenance of power.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, what is also true is how readily Colombia\u2019s chief patron, the United States, not only accepts, but indeed encourages disappearances as a tactic of rule throughout this Hemisphere.\u00a0 On this note, I leave you with a quote from COFADHES, Honduras\u2019 chief advocacy group for the families of the disappeared in that country.\u00a0\u00a0 COFADHES explains on its website that disappearances, along with torture and murder, are the \u201cemblematic,\u201d \u201csystematic and selective forms of human rights violations\u201d carried out by U.S.-backed states in Latin America \u201cfollowing the instructions of the U.S.\u201d in the pursuit of the U.S.\u2019s\u00a0 \u201cdoctrine of NATIONAL SECURITY.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 As COFADHES notes correctly, it was this National Security doctrine, and the crimes which go with it, which were first carried out in South America, most famously in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Chile, and then in Central American countries like Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.\u00a0\u00a0 Sadly, it is in Colombia where this doctrine has been carried out now continuously, as we learn best from Noam Chomsky, since 1962.<\/span><\/p>\n

And, this doctrine, and such crimes as disappearances and torture which go hand in hand with it, will not stop in this Hemisphere until the people of the U.S. recognize that they are being carried out at the behest of our own government, and until the people of the U.S. then say \u201cbasta<\/em>,\u201d or \u201cno more\u201d to such crimes against humanity being carried out in our name.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fuente<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

News broke this week, though not very widely here, that Francisco Santos, who served as Colombia\u2019s Vice-President under President Alvaro Uribe from 2002 to 2010,..<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38302,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[166,18,21],"tags":[317,228,229,197,345,351],"class_list":["post-15217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-government","category-history","category-international","tag-colombia","tag-colonialism","tag-economic-exploitation","tag-imperialism","tag-reactionary-watch","tag-world-history"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redphoenix.news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/AUC_15217_9af4e.gif?fit=696%2C480&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15217\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}