International - Colombia: A convenient war for Uribe and Bush

[Heretic.Ape.]

Colombia: A convenient war for Uribe and Bush
Posted: 11/29
From: Mathaba



Caracas, Nov 28 (ABN).- It does not matter how many Colombian brothers are killed, millions of displaced people, dozens of kidnapped people, that is not what really matters. Uribe turned his back on and with any excuse he cut out any hope of his fellow countrymen.

He put an end to a mediation that was threatening to be successful. President Chávez and Piedad Córdoba were getting dangerously closer to achieve the humanitarian exchange.

That, of course, will have its political cost, but can not be compared with the political and economic interests of the United States and the great trans-national capital represented by the Colombian leader.

Many people were not surprised about the sudden turn of the Colombian foreign policy. In contrast, what did surprise experts on the subject was that apparent opening of Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who is well known to be linked to paramilitary groups, boosted the Plan Colombia, and created the so-called Democratic Security.

Colombia is the strategic center of United States' hegemonic policy for Latin America. The country was chosen for this objective due to its historical characteristics of its political class. No in vain Héctor Mondragón, Colombian researcher and economist, stated in a lecture offered in Mexico on May 2003, regarding Plan Colombia:

'Why is Colombia chosen to carry out such a terrible task? Why is it chosen to be the Judas of Latin America? Because there is a historic terror and killing machine that has exterminated and destroyed the political opposition and it has displaced indigenous people from their lands for decades'.

This military terror machine has been the thread of Colombian governments of XX and XXI centuries.

According to Horacio Duque Giraldo, Colombian journalist and analyst, the Plan Ties designed in 1964 to reach the country's 'pacification'; the Plan Andes that in 1968 established three stages for the contra-guerrilla war; the Provisional Manual for National Security Planning (1974); the national strategy against violence of César Gaviria (1991); and the Plan Colombia of Andrés Pastrana (1999), are samples of the internal confrontation that has been maintained by the Colombian right-wing.

Therefore, Uribe's logic, as well as predecessor presidents, is not for peace, but confrontation. Sergio Rodríguez, Venezuelan internationalist, assures: 'war is as necessary for Uribe as Iraq's war is for Bush'.

According to Rodríguez, the Colombian President went to Piedad Córdoba and to President Chávez in order to have the perfect argument to say: 'Do not ask me to do it (to achieve the humanitarian exchange), when even them could not do it'.

Rodríguez, who is also professor at the Instituto de Altos Estudios Diplomáticos Pedro Gual, adds that such request was a movement to defeat an internal adversary: Piedad Córdoba and President Chávez, an international adversary, not only against his politics, but against the United States, which found in the Colombian drug trafficking and guerrilla the perfect excuse to military meddle in the region through the so-called Plan Colombia.

'A peace scenery would stop the Plan Colombia. It means that they would have to withdraw the military forces (United States) from there, because the speech of fight against the drug trafficking falls down; and besides, because the figures of the struggle against drug trafficking have not showed that the Plan is efficient concerning volumes of export and distribution of drugs in the world,'
affirms Rodriguez.

Plan Colombia: strategy of intervention. Under the mask of a 'Plan for the peace, prosperity and Strengthening of the State' as was presented by Andrés Pastrana, was born in 1999 the Plan Colombia with the support of the president of the United States at the moment, the democrat Bill Clinton.

His objective, in accordance with the original document published by the Colombian presidency in 1999, was to generate an economic and social strengthening of the country and create an anti drug strategy.

Pastrana sold it as “the new Marshall Plan for Colombia”, the original version did not referred about the increase of the military forces, nor about the eradication of coca plants through spray of chemicals. It just proposed the eradication by hand of the crops.

The final version was quite different. Wrote in English, it focused its attention on fighting against drug trafficking and strengthening the military forces. In fact, Pastrana admitted that 68% of the support given by the United States at the moment was oriented to strengthen the military forces.

Between 2000 and 2003, the United States allocated 2,440 million dollars to the Plan Colombia and other 1,970 million for the assistance of Colombian police officers and soldiers; 16 companies from the United States arrived to Colombia in order to offer security services at a cost of 150.38 million dollars and the US government donated 22 helicopters UH-Blackhawk.

Such military and financial display, increased during the George W. Bush administration, far from reducing violence and drug trafficking, rose it.

In April 2002, Mary Robinson, high commissioner of the United Nations Organization (UNO) for Human Rights, declared to have proved in 2001 the expansion and consolidation of paramilitary groups in Colombia that, as she said, “are among the most infringer of human rights” and she remarked “their persistent ties to officials and security forces.”

“I am especially concerned about the paramilitaries' statements regarding that a relevant number of people recently chosen for the Parliament represent paramilitary groups,” she declared at the presentation of her report about Colombia before the UN Human Rights Committee, at Geneva.

Neither the Plan has contributed to reduce the illegal drug crops. The White House admitted in 2006 that the Colombian crops of coca had increased despite the high spraying of the Plan Colombia, which were denounced to damage the health in Ecuador.

On the 2006 report, the Office of National Drug Control Policy of the United States “measured 8% of increase of the crops, around 13,000 hectares more than in 2005.

These results show that the Plan Colombia has another objective, which, in accordance to professor Sergio Rodriguez, is to restructure the military presence on the United States on the region.

“After the Torrijos-Carter accord, when the United States had to go out from Panama in 1999, its military presence remained completely broken up, because the head office of the Command South was at the Channel of Panama. They needed to restructure its presence on the continent through the creation of an enemy which in that moment was drug trafficking.”

He explained that under the excuse of an alleged fight against drug trafficking, they moved the Command South first to Miami and the main forces of occupation to Puerto Rico, and they establish to set air bases in Curacao, Salvador, Honduras, Manta (Ecuador) and in the Brazilian Amazon.

Mondragón does not put aside the objective of the Plan Colombia, and he affirms that “Senator (republican) Paul Coverdell writes at the Washington Post something that will draw up the later destiny of the Plan Colombia the senator says that it is necessary because Venezuela has to be controlled, because there are the biggest oil fields of the western hemisphere.”

Uribe's war Alvaro Uribe Velez has literally carried out the order of the United States: to avoid to all costs the achievement of peace in Colombia.

Mary Robinson declared on April 22nd 2002, in Geneva, to be worried about the suggestion of one of the main presidential candidates in Colombia, Alvaro Uribe Velez, of arming a million civilians in order to reestablish the security in the country.

That was one of the campaign offers of the then candidate, which later on became the strategy of the denominated “Democratic Security”, one of the bases of the Development Plan of his administration and one of the reasons put forward due to take Chávez out of the mediation for the humanitarian swap.

Such plan does not envisages not a single negotiated solution to the Colombian conflict. On the contrary, as Horacio Duque Giraldo says, it is a military strategy of war impossible to hide, which is sweet and euphemistically called “Democratic Security.”

This strategy, applied parallel to the Plan Colombia, comprises among other aspects, the creation of a net of a million participants in charge of spying the citizens, Rehabilitation Areas, the new four mobile brigade, the high mountain battalions, peasant soldiers, the twelve anti urban terrorism groups and the sophisticated military equipments as the satellite detectors and trackers.

“In fact, the heart of what is already known as defense policy and democratic security of the current administration is a war plan against the guerrilla insurgency, which intends to bend and subdue through the economy of war and the military strengthening with high tech,” wrote Duque on an article published in March 2003.

Concerning the Colombian economist, the governmental plan envisages the use of small autonomous units, provided with great power of fire, a good training and real time information. A complete war strategy which does not question the objectives of the Uribe administration.

In conclusion, just as requires it the Department of State, so does it Uribe. What was devised and executed, under the mask of the denominated “Democratic Security”, is another chapter of the never-ending war that bleeds Colombia.

Translated by Felitza Nava

http://www.mathaba.net/news/venezuela

Original article is at: http://www.mathaba.net/news/?x=572605

Reputation Comments on this post:

	Good info
	Interesting.

[enquirewithin]

This above tells what is obvious to people in Venezuela and many analysts in the west.

Chavez is right to call Uribe 'horrible'. Uribe is deeply corrupt and so is his government. Colombia's elections, unlike Venezuela's, have not been declared clean by outside observers because they are not. Chavez's is demonised by the the western press, whilst Uribe's far greater sins get little attention, because Uribe is on 'our' the (US's) side.