FUBAR in Colombia and the antics of Mr. Chavez

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Ah, of course! I even saw marines playing (American) football in the street a couple times in a good neighborhood in Bogotá a few years back.

I can tell you that the US is involved in the conflict and that one of the better tools used in combat is loaned by the US (is called the 'phantom plane' by the guerrillas) whenever the US likes. That is the one thing from the aid that actually works (most of the aid is roundup for the coca fields, and old choppers without parts which are kindly sold... by the US ).

But specifically on this operation I don't know what was the US involvement (if at all).

[Sibling Chatty]

More FUBAR.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/30/7973/

...under intense pressure from Colombian military commanders to register combat kills, the army has in recent years also increasingly been killing poor farmers and passing them off as rebels slain in combat, government officials and human rights groups say. The tactic has touched off a fierce debate in the Defense Ministry between tradition-bound generals who favor an aggressive campaign that centers on body counts and reformers who say the army needs to develop other yardsticks to measure battlefield success.

The killings, carried out by combat units under the orders of regional commanders, have always been a problem in the shadowy, 44-year-old conflict here — one that pits the army against a peasant-based rebel movement.

Hmmm, given the Bushista pattern of learning the worst every story has to offer...don't be alone anywhere. You might become a "rebel" that needed killin'.

...a report by a coalition of 187 human rights groups said there are allegations that between mid-2002 and mid-2007, 955 civilians were killed and classified as guerrillas fallen in combat — a 65 percent increase over the previous five years, when 577 civilians were reported killed by troops.

"We used to see this as isolated, as a military patrol that lost control," said Bayron Gongora of the Judicial Freedom Corp., a Medellin lawyers group representing the families of 110 people killed in murky circumstances. "But what we're now seeing is systematic."

The victims are the marginalized in Colombia's highly stratified society. Most, like Robeiro Valencia, are subsistence farmers. Others are poor Colombians kidnapped off the streets of bustling Medellin, the capital of this state, Antioquia, which has registered the most killings.

And here's the US, funding it! Maybe it's a lab experiment, to find out how loud the proles will cry, and how to shut them up...

The trend has prompted concern among some members of the U.S. Congress. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations foreign operations subcommittee, said he is holding up $23 million in military aid until he sees progress in the fight against impunity and state-sponsored violence.

"We've had six years, $5 billion in U.S. aid. More than half of it has gone to the Colombian military, and we find the army is killing more civilians, not less," Leahy said in an interview. "And by all accounts, all independent accounts, we find that civilians are just being taken out, executed and then dressed up in uniforms so they can claim body counts of guerrillas killed."

Makes ya proud to be...human.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Certainly not the first time I heard it. Not many cases are publicized and when they are the military quickly and clumsily starts the denial-contradiction-investigation-bs cycle.

The trends are certainly quite worrysome. To get a better (albeit incomplete) picture you need to understand that the paramilitary squads are a mixture of landowners and drug traffickers with the former being the foundation of the organization and the latter the main engine nowadays. Originally medium ranks sympathized with the paramilitary because the goverment wasn't doing much in the field. As drugs started to pour in the money also got in and now a number of military ranks are in the payroll of the narcs; that partially explains the hike in civilians death by the military. The other is simply that the army is significantly more active now than it used to be and there is a tendency to shot first and ask questions later.

If you really want to hear all the nuances let me know, because is a long, complicated and painful thing. 
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Now, don't think that this is one of Dubya's wars; The so called 'Plan Colombia' that increased US funding started under president Clinton. As I've said before, US' policies in the area aren't partisan.

[Sibling Chatty]

I hear about Colombia regularly. My friend in Sugar Land, Patrizia, was the daughter of a huge landowner in Colombia...youngest daughter, sent to Chicago to school at age 15 to get her away from the 'bad times'. Her oldest brother (half-brother/half cousin, her Dad married his first wife's sister 4 years after the first wife died, and had 2 more children) went into the military, then married off his oldest sister to another military guy. The two of them worked together to make sure that THEY got control of the family lands and money, and then got Patri's twin brother into harm's way when he went into the military...

End result? All the other sisters (total of 7 kids, 5 girls, and the two boys, the youngest one having been disposed of) cling to Older Brother for the money. But, they gossip, whenever they come to the US to visit their kids at school. (College, med school, grad school, you name it, they'll go to school for it to stay away from their uncles.)

Of course, it's all interestingly filtered, but it's quite an earful! She calls at least twice a week, more when there's fresh news from her sisters or nieces.

(I will NOT repeat her comments about Colombian men...of course they're based on her 'brothers' and nephews, not on normal people. )

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Colombia is a big and quite diverse country in its own way; you can get some very patriarchal and chauvinist behaviors in certain groups of the population and the very opposite in other groups even within the same class and region but with different backgrounds, and full of contrasts (ie: abortion is illegal but prostitution is legal, go figure that one).

You'll find educated sensible men, the same kind of barbarians that can be barely considered human, and all in between, so I'm sorry for your friend if the ones she has to deal with are closer to the barbarian kind.

The urban areas are already 3 different things clumped in the same area (huge sub normal settlements of poor people, large areas of lower middle class and sectors of wealth that rival the 1st world in many aspects) but the contrast with the countryside is enormous, mostly because the absence of the state for the most part of the last 2 centuries. In consequence you may find the most despicable attitudes on the part of some landowners* who have been taking advantage of poor farmers for centuries. Now the state is trying to be present in the countryside but mainly on the side of force and not on the side of justice with the consequences of the mentioned article.

*Not all landowners are feudal princes fond of brutality and even some brutal ones expressed left leaning ideologies even when their actions seemed to imply the opposite.

[Sibling Chatty]

The BIL is evidently a Big Shot in the Colombian Navy. (His son refers to him as The Admiral and nobody ever says his name...)

From what I've figured out, there's enormous wealth, considerable power, and a total disregard for the rights of anyone not "one of our kind" that rivals the Boston Brahmins...

Pat's so unimpressed by ALL of it that when her BIL was invited to Crawford to Duh Preznit's Ranch, she declined an invitation to join them. She said she'd "seen scrub weekender ranches in Central Texas before, and just didn't like mesquite that much." The local Republican Women's group almost cried. Evidently, he's somebody pretty high up in government there.

Pat was working for me when we did the Christmas decorating at the Carlyle Group offices in Houston. We had to be cleared by the Secret Service (I barely made it, but because I had met GHWB several times before, I cleared.) When they checked into her background, they were about to reject her out-of-hand, but then she gave her BIL's name. Cleared. Higher than me, in fact!

She's wanted to take me home with her for a month. I'm not sure I should go. My mouth tends to go off too often.