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-Caveat Lector- The document lists 104 of the "most important Colombian narcoterrorists
contracted by the Colombian narcotics cartels for security, transportation,
distribution, collection and enforcement of narcotics operations in both the
US and Colombia." Uribe appears as number 82 in this list of assassins and
drug smugglers.http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/aug2004/urib-a05.shtml
Colombia's Uribe: US ally in "war on terror" named as drug trafficker
By Bill Van Auken
5 August 2004
The release of a 13-year-old previously classified military intelligence
document linking Colombia's right-wing president Alvaro Uribe to drug
traffickers has intensified the crisis of Washington's most slavish
supporter in Latin America.
A virtual "who's who" of the Colombian cocaine trade, the report was issued
by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in 1991. It was obtained under the
Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archives, a
non-governmental research group based at George Washington University.
The document lists 104 of the "most important Colombian narcoterrorists
contracted by the Colombian narcotics cartels for security, transportation,
distribution, collection and enforcement of narcotics operations in both the
US and Colombia." Uribe appears as number 82 in this list of assassins and
drug smugglers.
The confidential DIA report described Uribe in the following terms: "A
Colombian politician and senator dedicated to collaboration with the
Medellín Cartel at high government levels. Uribe was linked to a business
involved in narcotics activities in the US. His father was murdered in
Colombia for his connection with the narcotics traffickers. Uribe has worked
for the Medellín Cartel and is a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar
Gaviría." It added that Uribe had "attacked all forms of the extradition
treaty" that Washington had sought to bring Colombian drug traffickers to
trial in the US.
Uribe and his spokesmen rushed to deny the veracity of the document,
pointing to factual errors in its findings. The Colombian president's father
was killed by elements of the Colombian guerrilla movement, the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, not drug traffickers, for
example.
They failed, however, to dispute what many have charged is the key
allegation in the document: that Uribe enjoyed a close personal association
with Escobar and the Medellín Cartel.
Escobar was reputedly the most powerful drug trafficker in Colombia until he
was shot to death in 1993 following a manhunt that united Colombian security
forces, US special operations troops and a paramilitary death squad
sponsored by Escobar's principal rival, the Cali Cartel.
In Washington, officials also repudiated the report. "We completely disavow
these allegations about President Uribe," said State Department spokesman
Robert Zimmerman. "We have no credible information that substantiates or
corroborates the allegations in an unevaluated 1991 report." Another
spokesman attempted to dismiss the report as "raw information" from an
"uncorroborated source."
In releasing the report, however, the National Security Archive countered
these claims. It pointed out that its authors felt the information was
important and valid enough to send on to Washington and that they asserted
that their findings had been checked "via interfaces with other agencies."
The report included detailed information such as identification card
numbers, birth dates and photographs, indicating that it could have been
intended for use by both criminal justice agencies as well as immigration
agents.
Moreover, these are hardly the first allegations linking Uribe to the drug
cartels. Numerous reporters in Colombia established extensive connections
between the Colombian president and the Ochoa family, one of the most
prominent forces in drug trafficking. He first took public office in 1980 as
civil aviation director, a post he used to issue hundreds of pilot licenses
and scores of permits for private airstrips that were used for the transport
of cocaine. He was named mayor of Medellín in 1983, but was removed after
just four months as part of a government crackdown on officials linked to
the cocaine cartel.
In the 1990s, as a senator and then governor for the province of Antioquia,
he was instrumental in organizing private paramilitary vigilante groups
linked to the landowners and cocaine traffickers and dedicated to the
killing of left-wing and union activists.
Why embarrass Uribe?
There can be no doubt that the US government decision to release the DIA
document was taken with full cognizance that its publication would create
fresh ammunition for Uribe's critics and intensify his political problems.
Perhaps even more significant was the decision by major media
outlets-Newsweek, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times-to make it a
prominent story.
The Colombian government, it should be recalled, stood alone in South
America in backing the US war in Iraq, and, after Israel and Egypt, is the
largest recipient of US military aid in the world. Uribe has embraced Bush's
declaration of a worldwide "war on terror."
Uribe's government has been among the most amenable to the Free Trade
Agreement of the Americas pushed by Washington. It is also closest in its
extreme-right ideology to the social agenda of the Bush administration. It
has ruthlessly pursued free market and privatization programs while
presiding over the steady transfer of wealth from the poorest Colombians to
foreign banks and corporations as well as to the country's wealthy
oligarchy. Colombia is one of the most socially polarized countries in the
world, with the wealthiest 10 percent of the population taking in 60 times
the income of the poorest 10 percent.
Why would the US political and media establishment deliberately embarrass
such a close and faithful client state?
The answer appears to be bound up with tactical differences over how to
pursue the "war on terror" and the "war on drugs," which in Colombia have
merged into one counterrevolutionary enterprise.
Inaugurated in 2000 under the Clinton administration as "Plan Colombia," the
US military intervention in the country has escalated continuously since.
Initially, the effort was portrayed as a drug eradication effort, training
and supplying the Colombian army to target the country's coca fields and
processing laboratories.
In 2002, Congress voted to allow military funding that had been ostensibly
restricted to anti-narcotics efforts to be funneled into counterinsurgency
operations against the country's main left-wing guerrilla movements, the
FARC and the ELN (National Liberation Army), thus sealing the direct US
involvement in Colombia's four-decade-old civil war. Since then, the number
of Colombian troops undergoing military training has more than doubled to
nearly 13,000. Meanwhile, US military commanders routinely lump together
narcotics trafficking, terrorism and "radical populism" as threats to US
security in the region.
Now the Colombian military, backed by US "advisers" and extensive
US-supplied arms and equipment, is waging "Operation Patriot." This
counterinsurgency offensive involves some 17,000 troops concentrated in the
area of southern Colombia that previously served as a recognized safe haven
for the FARC, before talks between the guerrillas and the government
collapsed in February 2002.
In conjunction with the launching of this offensive, the Pentagon pushed for
raising the limit placed on the number of US military personnel deployed in
the country from 400 to 800 and for a similar increase in the number of
civilian military contractors, from 400 to 600.
Meanwhile, the Uribe government has simultaneously conducted negotiations
directed at the demobilization of Colombia's right-wing death squads.
Enjoying intimate links with both the military and drug traffickers, these
paramilitary organizations are organized primarily into the AUC (the United
Self Defense Forces of Colombia). They have been responsible for the lion's
share of massacres and assassinations that have forced nearly 3 million
rural Colombians to flee their homes.
Among the AUC's signature methods are dismembering suspected guerrilla
sympathizers with chainsaws and beating opponents to death with
sledgehammers.
Initially, Washington welcomed the talks and even appropriated some $3
million for the effort. US officials even held secret talks with AUC
representatives, despite the Bush administration's official designation of
the group as a terrorist organization.
The seemingly explosive news that Bush's envoys were negotiating with
terrorists found no response in the US media. But then, this is a kind of
terrorism with which Washington has a long familiarity. The tactics employed
by the AUC are entirely consistent with counterinsurgency methods developed
by the CIA in the 1960s, and there have been extensive indications of ties
between the agency and the right-wing death squads.
As part of the negotiations, the Uribe regime designated a 144-square-mile
swath of Colombia's northern Cordoba province as a safe haven for the AUC,
allowing its leaders immunity from arrest there. Government critics have
charged that leaders of cocaine-trafficking gangs have flocked to the area
and are participating in the talks with the aim of gaining amnesty as well.
Out of ten negotiators for the AUC, five had outstanding extradition
warrants against them when the talks began. Then, on July 22, a New York
federal court handed down indictments against two of the most prominent
figures in the talks: Diego Fernando Murillo and Vicente Castaño. The former
was a long-time assassin for the drug cartels, while the later is part of
the family that originally founded the AUC.
A US bid to sabotage talks
The latest indictments, together with heated criticism by the US ambassador
to Colombia, William Wood, appear to be part of a deliberate effort by
Washington to sink the talks. While the Uribe government has lifted arrest
warrants against the paramilitary leaders, US officials have refused to drop
its request for the extradition of AUC leaders accused of drug trafficking.
Lifting the threat of extradition has been a key demand of the
paramilitaries.
On July 27, Uribe and his supporters brought three of the paramilitary
leaders before the Colombian Congress to call for "peace." One of
them-Salvatore Mancuso-is the subject of a US extradition order on cocaine
smuggling charges. The names of the other two figure on a Treasury
Department watch list for "significant" drug traffickers.
Demonstrators, including families of death squad victims, demonstrated
outside the Congress, while Ivan Cepeda, the son of leftist Senator Manuel
Cepeda, who was assassinated by rightists, raised a portrait of his father
from the gallery. He was quickly hustled out by police.
US Ambassador Wood responded caustically to the congressional appearance:
"It's a bit strange that in Congress, where they write the laws, approve the
laws and defend the laws, you would also find those who break the laws."
Earlier, Wood dismissed the peace pretensions of the AUC leaders, declaring,
"they have only one program: narcoterror."
US opposition to the process has provoked unusual tensions between Bogota
and Washington. The Uribe government's High Commissioner for Peace, a key
negotiator with the AUC, erupted with anger in a speech to the Congress
Tuesday, contrasting the international participation in the aborted talks
with the FARC to the disdain shown for the negotiations with the rightist
paramilitaries. In particular, he denounced the "distance of the Anglo-Saxon
countries."
The shift in the US position and the hard line taken by the administration
against drug-trafficking right-wing terrorists raises a number of questions.
After all, this is a US administration whose Latin American policy is
directed almost entirely by veterans of the Reagan administration's illegal
war against Nicaragua, in which they supported the "contras," a group of
right-wing terrorists who derived significant funding from drug trafficking.
Gary Leech, editor of Colombia Report, suggests a possible answer to this
political riddle in an August 2 article, "Washington's Paramilitary Game in
Colombia." Leech writes that Washington's position may be rooted in concern
over a "military stalemate" between the Colombian army and the FARC
guerrillas.
"While the increased strength of the Colombian military has allowed it to
expand its presence in many regions, it is still the paramilitaries that are
keeping the guerrillas at bay in many parts of the country," he writes.
"Should these forces demobilize, it is the FARC that will likely seize
control of much of the vacated territory."
For years, Leech points out, Washington turned a blind eye to the atrocities
and drug links of the right-wing death squads because they were an essential
component of the Colombian counterinsurgency campaign. "In a switch of
tactics," he writes, "it may now be raising these same issues for the very
same reason."
In other words, the Bush administration may be deliberately sabotaging the
talks between Uribe and the AUC to assure that the rightist death squads
continue their grisly work.
The release of previously classified documents linking Uribe to the drug
trade only further complicates his talks with a movement that is riddled
with narcotics traffickers.
Whatever the outcome of the present negotiations, there is no question that
the US intervention in Colombia will continue to escalate. For Washington,
the inclusion of Colombia's civil war in its "global war on terror" has
become the means to expand its military presence throughout the Latin
American continent and to tighten its grip over what is one of the world's
major oil-exporting regions.
Please let us stay on topic and be civil.-Home Page- www.cia-drugs.org
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Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at:
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