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Colombia and FARC ready for peace talks with support from Cuba and Norway

NNN-MERCOPRESS | August 28, 2012

BOGOTA – Colombia’s government will soon begin talks that could lead to formal negotiations for peace with the country’s biggest guerrilla group, known as the FARC, according to a Colombian intelligence source.

As part of the deal to hold talks, the government has agreed that leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia would not be extradited to another country to stand trial, he said.

One aide at President Juan Manuel Santos’ office has flatly denied that any talks are taking place, but a second aide said only that any official word on peace dealings would come from Santos himself.

Details of the accord are still being worked out, but the negotiations could take place in Cuba and in Norway, the source said.

However from Caracas the editor in chief of Telesur, the Venezuelan television news channel, Jorge Botero said that secret talks date back to May in Havana with the attendance of unofficial delegates from Colombia, plus representatives from Venezuela, Cuba and Norway.

“Formal dialogue is anticipated for next October in Oslo”, said Botero. He added that from Norway representatives from the Colombian government and FARC will then travel to Havana where “they will sit to negotiate and won’t leave the table until a peace deal is reached”.

A year ago the head of FARC Alfonso Cano announced that the guerrilla was ready for talks to end the half a century Colombian internal war.

News of the peace talks is likely to anger Santos’ predecessor Alvaro Uribe who has criticised any idea of talks with the rebels and has slammed Santos for wanting “peace at any cost.”

The originally Marxist oriented FARC but now financed by drugs and which calls itself “the people’s army” defending peasant rights, has battled about a dozen administrations since surfacing in 1964, when its founder Manuel Marulanda and 48 rebels took to jungle hide-outs triggering an internal conflict involving Colombian forces and thousands of recruited guerrillas.

The group has faced its toughest defeats in recent years as US-trained special forces use sophisticated technology and spy networks to track the leaders.

The FARC string of defeats began in 2008 with a cross-border military raid into Ecuador that killed Raul Reyes its second in command. Marulanda died of a heart attack weeks later and was replaced by Alfonso Cano, who was later killed too.

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August 28, 2012 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , | Leave a comment

COLOMBIA ANALYSIS: Mirage and Reality in Southern Bolivar

By Isaias Rodriguez Arango | CPTnet | 5 May 2012

“Colombia is a social state under rule of law, organized in the form of a unitary, decentralized Republic, autonomous from its territorial subdivisions, democratic, participatory and pluralistic, founded on respect for human dignity and on the work and solidarity of the people who belong to it, and on the prevailing value of the general interest.” –Title I, Article 1, Political Constitution of Colombia (1991) (unofficial translation).

Colombians increasingly see our 1991 Constitution as a mirage. The illusion is evident when seen from areas as hard-hit by armed conflict as southern Bolívar province’s San Lucas mountains—a mining area at the epicenter of a complex war that at times leaves it unclear who pulled the trigger. The only thing always clear is that the peasant miner, farmer, or ordinary resident of the region generally is the one who ends up worse off. But in spite of these odds, the locals continue to claim a willingness to pay the ultimate price to remain on these lands that and their Guamoco and Zenu ancestors have long inhabited.

Small-scale gold mining provides a livelihood to hundreds of families in southern Bolivar. But the region is now in the sights of AngloGold Ashanti, one of the world’s most aggressive international mining companies. Communities therefore face threats from the state ranging from industrial regulation to paramilitary activity designed to force them off the land.

Without public or private aid, the small-scale miners cannot meet new environmental and safety standards supposedly aimed at sustainable exploitation. At the same time, government agencies overlook deliberate violations by industry giants. High prices of essential goods and services increase the likelihood of economic displacement. Taken together, these practices expose a mining policy that intentionally excludes small-scale miners.

Colombia’s gold-mining industry also faces serious public safety problems. The previous administration’s “Democratic Security” policy did not achieve its purported aims. Residents say that paramilitaries, guerrillas, Army, and police are all active in the region. Threats against community leaders and spokespeople persist, as does impunity for crimes against them.

A look at the numbers

According to the regionally-based Comprehensive Peace Observatory (Observatorio de Paz Integral, OPI), seven paramilitary groups are active in the Middle Magdalena region. Their primary criminal activities are drug trafficking and extortion. Their larger aim is to maintain social, political, economic, and military control of the area. In 2006, 6,000 paramilitary members demobilized in the Magdalena Medio region, but during that same year twenty-six new groups emerged. These criminal organizations have been accused of committing 1,051 targeted killings between 2006 and 2011. In 2008, FARC guerrillas and the Águilas Negras paramilitary group in southern Bolivar formed an unusual alliance, complicating identification of the perpetrators of violent actions.

Contrasting with the OPI’s findings, media references to the alleged demobilization of 31,000 AUC paramilitaries in 2006 tend to imply that the paramilitary structures have been eradicated. But the real objective of demobilizations may have to gain the benefits of the Justice and Peace Law, including a maximum jail sentence of eight years for demobilized paramilitaries. But in many cases clause 11.4 of the same law—which requires incorporation into civilian life and the cessation of all illegal activity in order to receive those benefits—went unenforced.

Given these facts, we must not be lulled into believing that Southern Bolivar province and the Middle Magdalena region are no longer ravaged by internal conflict, or that the armed entities have abandoned these lands so coveted for their wealth of natural resources and minerals.

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May 5, 2012 Posted by | Corruption, Environmentalism, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Colombia’s Patriotic March

By CHRIS GILBERT | CounterPunch | May 4, 2012

Colombia’s highly restricted democracy got a good slap in the face two weeks ago when 100,000 protesters entered the capital city and filled to overflowing the giant plaza that spreads out before the Congress and the Palace of Justice. In fact, just looking at the hurried reactions of president Juan Manuel Santos – new cabinet appointments, launching a populist housing project, and buying more arms from the US – one would know something serious is afoot.

But what, precisely, is it? The protesters call themselves the Patriotic March and were born with a more or less spontaneous celebration of the Colombian bicentennial two years ago. At that moment, in 2010, there was an earlier and likewise massive march to Bogotá plus the formation of cabildos (open councils) to treat questions of urgency in Colombian politics and life (such as human rights).

Today the marchers’ two principal slogans are innocuous enough: one the one hand, the effort to bring about a second and definitive independence and on the other hand peace; that is, a political and negotiated solution to the country’s 50-year conflict, a peace with of social justice. So what is all the fuss?

In fact, only in Colombia are the search for peace and sovereignty themes to which the state generally responds with massive repression, even approaching genocide. Some twenty-five years ago Colombia’s longest lasting guerrilla, the FARC-EP, opted for a peaceful rather than armed expression of its non-conformity. This led to the systematic assassination of something like 4,000 of the unfortunate cadres of the Patriotic Union who thought there might be a space for a strictly political opposition in Colombia’s much touted democracy, which seems to have durability rather than authenticity as its principal characteristic.

Though strictly speaking it may not be a world that has lived 100 years of solitude, Colombia’s politics has its very specific and even archaic qualities. For example, one of the principal struggles still seems to be that which takes place between city and country. Superficially at least, most of the patriotic marchers are people of rural origin: small or displaced farmers. Likewise there is an obvious racial or color element; the marchers tend toward brown and black while Power in Colombia tends to be white – except of course for the sepoy police and armed forces.

The marchers are clearly that group or class which Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano called “the nobodies… who don’t speak language but dialects… who don’t have culture but folklore” (and “cost less than the bullet that kills them”). But that doesn’t keep them from being very clear about what they want and need. “We’re being displaced by transnationals and the national government,” said one small-scale miner from the Bolivar department, “and participating in the march is the only way we will be heard”. Almost to a man, they are clear that their government is a puppet, militarist regimen in which the White House, if it doesn’t call all the shots, is at least consulted on most of them.

The march, patriotic and gutsy given the conditions in which it must operate, is one of those events that show that class struggle cannot be eliminated from any context, even by the most aggressive and totalitarian state tactics. There comes a point in which – as Martin Luther King said – one cannot not go on. The marchers have reached that point. They cannot be willed or dispelled away by even the most powerful mediatic wands (the mass media seems to insist contradictorily both that they don’t really exist and that they are very dangerous).

One of their repeated claims – that passes from the mouth of the inimitable ex-senator Piedad Córdoba to almost every spokesperson – is that the March, come what may, will go forward. That means that it will and has taken the form of a political movement and that it will try to take state power, as every responsible political movement tries to do. That claim, when it comes from the mouth of someone with Córdoba’s mettle, and when backed up by such conscious and committed social bases, is enough to make even the most ruthless politician of the establishment tremble. And some of us, one must say, tremble with delight.

Chris Gilbert, professor of Political Science in the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela, formed part of the international delegation that accompanied the Patriotic March, between April 21 and 23, in the formation of the National Patriotic Council.

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May 4, 2012 Posted by | Economics, Solidarity and Activism | , , , , | Leave a comment

U.S.’s Post-Afghanistan Counterinsurgency War: Colombia

By Rick Rozoff | Stop NATO | April 23, 2012

The Pentagon announced on April 23 that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has begun a trip to South America, arriving in Colombia as part of a three-nation tour that will also take him to Brazil and Chile.

It is his first visit to the continent as Pentagon chief, though he has visited often in other capacities, including as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Panetta’s meetings with top government and military officials in the three nations will follow those of America’s top military officer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, to Colombia and Brazil late last month.

Panetta’s mission also occurs two weeks after U.S. and Brazilian presidents Barack Obama and Dilma Rousseff met in the White House on April 9 and agreed on the establishment of the U.S.-Brazil Defense Cooperation Dialogue, announcing that Defense Secretary Panetta and Brazil’s Defence Minister Celso Amorim will hold the first meeting in that format on April 24.

Colombia is the largest recipient of U.S. military aid in Latin America, though its population is less than a quarter of Brazil’s, and the third largest in the world after Israel and Egypt.

After the passage by Congress of the Clinton administration’s Plan Colombia in 2000, the military in Bogota has received approximately $7 billion in U.S. assistance, up from $50 million in 1998 when it was already the biggest beneficiary of American military aid in Latin America.

On October 30, 2009 the Obama administration and that of then-Colombian President Alvaro Uribe agreed on the U.S.-Colombia Defense Cooperation Agreement, which opened up three Colombian air bases, two naval bases, two army installations “and other Colombian military facilities if mutually agreed” to the Pentagon.

One of the bases obtained by the United States, the Larandia Military Fort in Florencia, is within easy striking distance of Ecuador, as the Alberto Pawells Rodriguez Air Base in Malambo is of Venezuela.

Colombia launched a deadly attack against rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) inside neighboring Ecuador in 2008, which the Ecuadorian government accused U.S. special forces personnel inside its country of having assisted. The following year the Colombian armed forces conducted an incursion inside Venezuela, seizing four border guards.

Panetta is in Colombia to coordinate a final offensive against FARC fighters, who have been battling the country’s narco-autocracy and its political minions in Bogota since 1964.

According to Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs and Pentagon Press Secretary George Little, the defense secretary is to meet with Colombian Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzon Bueno and General Alejandro Navas, General Commander of the Military Forces of Colombia.

On April 23 Panetta praised his military ally, stating, “Colombia, to its credit, has done a tremendous job in going after the FARC.” He failed to mention with, in addition to $7 billion dollars of Washington aid, U.S. helicopter gunships, planes, trainers and special forces troops.

Pentagon spokesman Little added, “Clearly we still have plenty to talk about in continuing to support the Colombians in their efforts against [the FARC]…”

When chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dempsey was in Colombia on March 27-28, the Defense Department website reported that he visited Joint Task Force Vulcano, “a new interagency force aimed at defeating the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia…The strategy calls for Colombia to cut the FARC forces in half in two years.”

In Dempsey’s words, “They selected 2014 as a key moment for them, They want to accelerate their effects against the FARC.” With the Pentagon’s active connivance and assistance, which why is Dempsey was and Panetta is in the country.

Dempsey was explicit about the American role in the “final solution” of the Colombian civil war: “We’re getting ready to send some brigade commanders who have been in Iraq and Afghanistan down here to partner with their Joint Task Force commanders in a leader developmental function. The challenges they face are not unlike the challenges we’ve faced in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The Pentagon’s website reported the following on March 27, worth quoting in detail.

Dempsey “joined virtually the entire Colombian defense leadership to visit Joint Task Force Vulcano,” just outside the town of Tibu, only three kilometers from the Venezuela border.

“The Colombian government established the task force in December. It is the latest effort to defeat the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia…

“Dempsey arrived at the base in a Colombian Air Force Mi-17 helicopter along with Colombian Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzon Bueno and Gen. Alejandro Navas, commander of the Colombian Armed Forces.

“Following his comments, Dempsey discussed strategy with the minister and the chief of defense and also Army chief Maj. Gen. Sergio Mantilla Sanmiguel, Navy chief Vice Adm. Roberto Garcia Marquez and Air Force chief Maj. Gen. Tito Saul Pinilla-Pinilla.

“Before Joint Task Force Vulcano stood up, there were a small number of troops in the region. Now there are more than 10,000, [spokesman for the task force, Colombian army Captain Jose Mojica] said. The forces are composed of three mobile brigades and a geographic brigade. A fourth brigade is getting ready to deploy to the area.

“This is all part of an ambitious Colombian strategy to cut the FARC by half in two years. U.S. Embassy officials said there are about 8,000 FARC members now. Colombian officials spoke of the plan as the end game for the rebellion against the government after 48 years of intermittent war.”

Immediately before Dempsey’s visit to Colombia, U.S. Army South held talks with the Colombian armed forces in Bogota from March 19-23.

Three years ago CBS News quoted an unnamed Pentagon official stating, “The more Afghanistan can look like Colombia, the better.” The equation is now being reversed.

Other top U.S. defense and military officials have for years spoken of “coming back home” to the Western Hemisphere as the war in Afghanistan winds down.

Panetta’s and Dempsey’s visits to Colombia and their statements regarding the purpose of them leave no doubt as to where America’s new, at any rate expanded, counterinsurgency war is occurring.

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April 24, 2012 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

DOD pushing more forces into South America

By Carlo Munoz – The Hill – 03/30/12

The U.S. military is pushing more troops into Colombia to assist in that country’s war with insurgent groups and narcotraffickers, the Pentagon’s top military officer said Friday.

“It’s certainly in our interest to do what we can to help the nations of this region to break [these] networks,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey told reporters while on travel in the country this week.

That effort will include U.S. assistance to a handful of new, Colombian-led joint task forces in the country, according to Pentagon spokesman Col. David Lapan.

At those outposts, American combat commanders will help train their Colombian counterparts on the finer points of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations.

Those lessons will be based on nearly 10 years of combat experience dealing with insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Pentagon has similar U.S.- run task forces operating in the Horn of Africa, the Trans-Sahara, Southern Philippines and elsewhere around the world.

Colombian forces have been waging a counterinsurgency against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Marxist separatist group bent on overthrowing the government in Bogota, since the 1960s.

“The challenges they face are not unlike, to be sure, the challenges we’ve faced in the passed 10 years in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Gen. Dempsey told reporters.

The new influx of U.S. troops could be in Colombia as early as June and conduct two-week rotations to help assist with the new joint task forces in the country, Lapan said.

However, Dempsey stressed, those troops will only advise and assist local military forces. They will not actively participate in any combat operations against FARC rebels.

One base, Joint Task Force-Vulcano, has already been built by Colombian forces and is situated along the country’s border with Venezuela.

Venezuela has been a key regional ally to Iran. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has made multiple diplomatic visits to Caracas in recent years.

Tehran has also expanded its network of embassies and cultural centers in Venezuela, as well as in Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua over the past six years, Southern Command chief Gen. Douglas Fraser told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 12.

Moving more of the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency and counterterrorism specialists into South America and Africa was a key piece of the White House’s new national security strategy released in February.

While focused mainly on the Pacific region, the new DOD strategy introduced “innovative methods” to support local counterterrorism forces and expand American influence in those two continents, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said at the time.

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April 12, 2012 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | , , , , | 1 Comment

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