Colombia | ukwatch.net

Lies, kidnapping and a mysterious laptop

JamieSW — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 23:19:17 +0000

Sometimes you hear a stray sentence on the news that makes you realise you have been lied to. Deliberately lied to; systematically lied to; lied to for a purpose. If you listened closely over the past few days, you could have heard one such sentence passing in the night-time of news.

As Ingrid Betancourt emerged after six-and-a-half years – sunken and shrivelled but radiant with courage – one of the first people she thanked was Hugo Chavez. What? If you follow the news coverage, you have been told that the Venezuelan President supports the Farc thugs who have been holding her hostage. He paid them $300m to keep killing and to buy uranium for a dirty bomb, in a rare break from dismantling democracy at home and dealing drugs. So how can this moment of dissonance be explained?

Yes: you have been lied to – about one of the most exciting and original experiments in economic redistribution and direct democracy anywhere on earth. And the reason is crude: crude oil. The ability of democracy and freedom to spread to poor countries may depend on whether we can unscramble these propaganda fictions.

Venezuela sits on one of the biggest pools of oil left anywhere. If you find yourself in this position, the rich governments of the world – the US and EU – ask one thing of you: pump the petrol and the profits our way, using our corporations. If you do that, we will whisk you up the Mall in a golden carriage, no matter what. The “King” of Saudi Arabia oversees a torturing tyranny where half the population – women – are placed under house arrest, and jihadis are pumped out by the dozen to attack us. It doesn’t matter. He gives us the oil, so we hold his hand and whisper sweet crude-nothings in his ear.

It has always been the same with Venezuela – until now. Back in 1908, the US government set up its ideal Venezuelan regime: a dictator who handed the oil over fast and so freely that he didn’t even bother to keep receipts, never mind ask for a cut. But in 1998 the Venezuelan people finally said “enough”. They elected Hugo Chavez. The President followed their democratic demands: he increased the share of oil profits taken by the state from a pitiful one per cent to 33 per cent. He used the money to build hospitals and schools and subsidised supermarkets in the tin-and-mud shanty towns where he grew up, and where most of his countrymen still live.

I can take you to any random barrio in the high hills that ring Caracas and show you the results. You will meet women like Francisca Moreno, a gap-toothed 76-year-old granny I found sitting in a tin shack, at the end of a long path across the mud made out of broken wooden planks. From her doorway she looked down on the shining white marble of Caracas’s rich district. “I went blind 15 years ago because of cataracts,” she explained, and in the old Venezuela people like her didn’t see doctors. “I am poor,” she said, “so that was that.” But she voted for Chavez. A free clinic appeared two years later in her barrio, and she was taken soon after for an operation that restored her sight. “Once I was blind, but now I see!” she said, laughing.

In 2003, two distinguished Wall Street consulting firms conducted the most detailed study so far of economic change under Chavez. They found that the poorest half of the country have seen their incomes soar by 130 per cent after inflation. Today, there are 19,571 primary care doctors – an increase by a factor of 10. When Chavez came to power, just 35 per cent of Venezuelans told Latinobarometro, the Gallup of Latin America, they were happy with how their democracy worked. Today it is 59 per cent, the second-highest in the hemisphere.

For the rich world’s governments – and especially for the oil companies, who pay for their political campaigns – this throws up a serious problem. We are addicted to oil. We need it. We crave it. And we want it on our terms. The last time I saw Chavez, he told me he would like to sell oil differently in the future: while poor countries should get it for $10 a barrel, rich countries should pay much more – perhaps towards $200. And he has said that if the rich countries keep intimidating the rest he will shift to selling to China instead. Start the sweating. But Western governments cannot simply say: “We want the oil, our corporations need the profits, so let’s smash the elected leaders standing in our way.” They know ordinary Americans and Europeans would gag.

So they had to invent lies. They come in waves, each one swelling as the last crashes into incredulity. First they announced Chavez was a dictator. This ignored that he came to power in a totally free and open election, the Venezuelan press remains uncensored and in total opposition to him, and he has just accepted losing a referendum to extend his term and will stand down in 2013.

When that tactic failed, the oil industry and the politicians they lubricate shifted strategy. They announced that Chavez was a supporter of Terrorism (it definitely has a capital T). The Farc is a Colombian guerrilla group that started in the 1960s as a peasant defence network, but soon the pigs began to look like farmers and they became a foul, kidnapping mafia. Where is the evidence Chavez funded them?

On 1 March, the Colombian government invaded Ecuador and blew up a Farc training camp. A few hours later, it announced it had found a pristine laptop in the rubble, and had already rummaged through the 39.5 million pages of Microsoft Word documents it contained to find cast-iron “proof” that Chavez was backing the Farc. Ingrid’s sister, Astrid Betancourt, says it is plainly fake. The camp had been totally burned to pieces and the computers had clearly, she says, been “in the hands of the Colombian government for a very long time”. Far from fuelling the guerrillas, Chavez has repeatedly pleaded with the Farc to disarm. He managed to negotiate the release of two high-profile hostages – hence Betancourt’s swift thanks. He said: “The time of guns has passed. Guerilla warfare is history.”

So what now? Now they claim he is a drug dealer, he funds Hezbollah, he is insane. Sometimes they even stumble on some of the real non-fiction reasons to criticise Chavez and use them as propaganda tools. (See our Open House blog later today for a discussion of this). As the world’s oil supplies dry up, the desire to control Venezuela’s pools will only increase. The US government is already funding separatist movements in Zulia province, along the border with Colombia, where Venezuela’s largest oilfields lie. They hope they can break away this whiter-skinned, anti-Chavez province and then drink deep of the petrol there.

Until we break our addiction to oil, our governments will always try to snatch petro-profits away from women like Francisca Moreno. And we – oil addicts all – will be tempted to ignore the strange, dissonant sentences we sometimes hear on the news and lie, blissed-out, in the lies.

The Guardian Covers (Up) Colombia’s Reality

tim — Wed, 14 May 2008 19:44:14 +0000

Colombia received more detailed attention than usual from the daily Guardian of the UK during the months of March and April of this year for many reasons:

1) On March 1 Colombia’s military violated Ecuadorian sovereignty to kill Raul Reyes, a leftist (FARC) guerrilla leader, and thereby provoked a regional crisis.
2) In mid March a minor scandal erupted due to UK Foreign Minister Kim Howells’ aggressive support for UK arms exports to Colombia
3) Rumors were reported in late March that a high profile hostage of the FARC rebels, Ingrid Betancourt, was gravely ill.
4) Mark Penn resigned on April 6 from Hillary Clinton’s campaign because of his lobbying work on behalf of Colombia in support of a trade agreement with the US.

During these two months the Guardian published 38 articles that discussed Colombia in significant detail. It is a very revealing exercise to scan these articles for information that is readily available on the website of Human Rights Watch (HRW). 

HRW is a prominent organization with a track record of being disproportionately hard on US enemies (Hizbullah, Hamas, Venezuela) and soft on the US allies (Israel, Haiti under Gerard Latortue). [1] It is not a group likely to exaggerate the crimes of a US and UK ally.

One might expect that a supposedly left leaning newspaper like the Guardian would, at the very least, tell readers what HRW has been reporting.

In February of 2008, in an article for the Progressive magazine, two senior HRW officials wrote:

“For years, the Bush administration in the United States has stood by the government of President Álvaro Uribe in Colombia unconditionally, turning a blind eye to Colombia’s serious human rights problems. The Blair government in the UK, for the most part, quietly followed suit, providing substantial assistance to Colombia’s military with no strings attached. Colombia presents one of the worst human rights records in the world. At nearly three million, Colombia’s population of internally displaced persons is second only to that of Sudan.”[2]

In the 38 articles examined, not a single word (out of roughly 25,000) appeared about Colombia’s internally displaced people. No doubt, unconditional support for Colombia is easier to maintain when the magnitude of its human rights disaster is completely hidden by the Liberal media, but the Guardian did not just bury the scale of the crimes. It kept the leading perpetrators mostly out of sight.

HRW’s summary reports about Colombia from 1989-2002 frequently pointed out that the vast majority of political murders have been perpetrated by the military and rightwing paramilitary groups that operate with the tolerance and even direct support of the military. In 2002, HRW reported that the largest paramilitary death squad (AUC) was responsible for 50% of political killings compared to 8% for the FARC, the largest of the leftist rebel groups.[3]

In more recent years, HRW has shied away from identifying the leading perpetrators of political murders. Instead it has reported qualitative conclusions regarding a limited subset of crimes. For example, it has reported that leftist rebels are responsible for most recruitment of child soldiers while paramilitaries are usually responsible for murdering trade unionists.[4]

However, according to the Jesuit-run Center for Research and Popular Education (CINEP), whom HRW has cited in past reports, as of 2006 the majority of human rights abuses continued to be perpetrated by the Colombian military and the paramilitaries. [5]

HRW’s recent reports give no reason to doubt CINEP’s conclusions. In 2005 HRW produced an extensive report exposing the fraudulence of the Colombian government’s “demobilization” of the paramilitaries. The report, entitled “Smoke and Mirrors: Colombia’s demobilization of paramilitary groups” summarized the situation of the paramilitaries as follows:

“Colombia’s right-wing paramilitary groups are immeasurably powerful. Through drug trafficking and other illegal businesses, they have amassed enormous wealth. They have taken over vast expanses of the country’s territory to use for coca cultivation or as strategic corridors through which they can move drugs and weapons. In recent years, they have succeeded in expelling left-wing guerrillas and strengthening their own control of many parts of the country. And thanks to this power, they now exert a very high degree of political influence, both locally and nationally…..paramilitaries have historically enjoyed the collaboration, support, and toleration of units of the Colombian security forces, a fact that has led many to refer to the paramilitaries as a ‘sixth division’ of the army. Today, paramilitaries have made major gains in consolidating this impunity, along with their economic and political power, with the collusion of the Colombian government.” [6]

To what extent did the Guardian convey any of this during the months of increased attention on Colombia?

In the 38 Guardian articles the word “FARC” appears 135 times; only 17 times do the words “paramilitary” or “paramilitaries” appear. There were 13 articles that mentioned Colombia’s baseless allegations of Venezuelan collaboration with the FARC [7] – only five articles that mentioned the well documented collaboration between the Colombian government and the paramilitaries. But even these lopsided numbers understate the extent to which the Guardian covered up Colombia’s human rights record.

On March 26, HRW, along with 22 other international human rights organizations that included Amnesty International, signed an open letter to Colombian President Alvaro Uribe after four unionists were murdered who were involved with protests against paramilitary violence that took place on March 6. Many other protest organizers were attacked and received death threats. The open letter stated:

“Shortly before the attacks, presidential adviser José Obdulio Gaviria made a series of statements on national radio linking renowned victims’ representative Ivan Cepeda and other organizers of the March 6 protest to the notoriously abusive guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). On February 11, one day after Gaviria first made the statements, the supposedly demobilized United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) paramilitary group released a statement echoing Gaviria’s allegations.” [8]

The letter called on Uribe to denounce the baseless allegations and break the links between the paramilitaries and his government. Neither the open letter nor the March 6 protests were reported by the Guardian.

It is worth looking closely at one of the five Guardian articles that did actually mention collaboration between the government and rightwing paramilitaries. The article, “Colombia’s ‘parapolitics’ scandal casts shadow over president”, by Sibylla Brodzinsky was published April 23. Brodzinsky wrote:

“Mario Uribe was the latest in a string of more than 30 politicians elected to Congress in 2006 who have been arrested on charges related to conspiracy with the paramilitary death squads that controlled huge swathes of the nation before they began demobilizing in 2003.”

This neglects to mention that most of the politicians are from Uribe’s coalition and that the paramilitary power has been left untouched by the “demobilization”. A week before Brodzinsky’s article appeared HRW had reported:

“Nearly all the 30,000 ‘demobilized’ paramilitaries are free and have never been investigated” and that “scores of ‘new’ groups closely linked to the paramilitaries are operating all over the country, engaging in extortion, killings, forced displacement, and drug trafficking. “ [9]

Brodzinsky also wrote:

“President Uribe has said that it is thanks to his policies that Colombia has been able to go through the collective catharsis.”

This argument stood unchallenged even though HRW had recently provided a strong counter argument:

“....these investigations are the result of an initiative by the Colombian Supreme Court – not the Uribe Administration. While Uribe has funded the court, he has often taken steps that could undermine the investigations, lashing out against Supreme Court Justices and even, at one point, floating a proposal to let the politicians avoid prison.” [10]

Brodzinsky then made the following outlandish claim:

“Despite repeated journalistic and judicial investigations into alleged links between the president and paramilitary groups, no evidence has ever come forth.”

There is, of course, overwhelming evidence of very strong links between the Colombian government (which has been run by Uribe for several years) and the paramilitaries. Some of the evidence is even reported in Brodzinsky’s article. The Guardian appears to employ an unique definition of the word “evidence” for politicians supported by Washington.

Brodzinsky’s article also cited Urine’s 84% approval rating, but failed to convey the risks that journalists, activists and politicians take with their lives if they challenge Uribe. It would be wrong to deny that Uribe has significant popular support, but it would also be wrong to deny that his government makes eroding that support through peaceful means is a very dangerous task.

Moreover, there is good reason to believe Urine’s approval rating exaggerates his level of support. In presidential elections Uribe has captured the vote of roughly 25 percent of the eligible voters. In 2003, Uribe campaigned very aggressively for the passage of a “yes” vote on a referendum that made fifteen sweeping proposals. He failed to convince 25 percent of the electorate to turn out for it – the minimum turnout required for it to pass – despite having a 75 percent approval rating at the time.[11]

The Guardian’s coverage of Colombia explains why UK Foreign Minister Kim Howells dared to be photographed with Colombian soldiers (in fact, with a unit accused of murdering trade unionists), and why Howells had the audacity to lash out maliciously at Justice For Colombia, a UK based solidarity group. [12] If newspapers like the Guardian do not even report much of what establishment friendly groups like HRW have to say then it should come as no surprise that backing Colombia’s worst criminals comes with negligible consequences.

SUGGESTED ACTION

Write to the Guardian readers editor Siobhain Butterworth
reader@guardian.co.uk
Siobhain.Butterworth@guardian.co.uk

Write to Guardian Journalists Sibylla Brodzinsky and Rory Carroll (Latin America Correspondent)
sibylla.brodzinsky@guardian.co.uk
rory.carroll@guardian.co.uk

NOTES

[1] http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/emersberger240208.html
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/4131
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold/Herman_Peterson_Szmaely2007.pdf
http://www.counterpunch.org/cook09252006.html
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=705

[2] http://hrw.org/english/docs/2008/02/01/colomb17975.htm

[3] http://www.hrw.org/doc?t=americas&c=colomb&document_limit=120,20

[4] http://hrw.org/englishwr2k7/docs/2007/01/11/colomb14884.htm
http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2008/04/15/colomb18551.htm

[5] http://www.cipcol.org/?p=580

[6] http://www.hrw.org/reports/2005/colombia0805/

[7] http://hrw.org/english/docs/2008/04/16/colomb18630.htm

[8] http://hrw.org/english/docs/2008/04/16/colomb18630.htm

[9] see note 8

[10] http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2008/04/16/colomb18630.htm
Also, for a great summary of the “parapolitics” scandal see: http://www.cipcol.org/?p=542

[11] The referendum results are here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/mar/17/foreignpolicy.tradeunions

[12] http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/mar/17/foreignpolicy.tradeunions

Why is Britain arming far-right militias?

Tim Holmes — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 05:16:37 +0000

On the website of the British Foreign Office, a small photograph recently appeared. It shows Kim Howells, our Foreign Office minister, looking into the camera, smiling, as he is surrounded by gun-yielding men accused of murder. He had not been taken hostage. No: he was there to represent a government that gives these men money and military aid.

By tracing the story of this photograph, we can trace the worst aspects of British foreign policy – and find clues to why the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have crashed into their current bloody dead-end.

Howells was in Colombia, a country locked in one of the worst civil wars of the past century. It began over forty years ago, when parts of the hungry, mixed-race majority began to fight against the fact that a tiny white land-owning elite held virtually all the country’s wealth. Since then, it has hardened into a conflict between two gnarled human rights-abusing wings.

To the left, there is a slew of guerrilla groups – most prominently the FARC and the ELN – who fund themselves by kidnapping, extortion, recruiting child soldiers and ‘taxing’ drug-producers.

To the right, there is the Colombian government and the right-wing paramilitary death-squads it has unleashed against any community of civilians suspected of leftish sympathies, or of challenging the elite. That’s why to be a trade unionist in Colombia – organising for better wages and working conditions for your colleagues – is to carry a tombstone on your back: more than 3000 have been assassinated since 1986, more than in the rest of the world combined.

Between them, these violent wings have killed more than 30,000 people and driven three million people from their homes.

And Howells – our representative – was posing with some of the worst abusers. He was huddled with the High Mountain Brigades, who Amnesty International says have been involved in hunting down and murdering trade unionists. Standing next to him was General Mario Montoya, who is so densely linked to paramilitary death-squads that even the US Congress has cut off chunks of his funding.

Here’s what our taxes and support deliver to ordinary Colombians. On January 10th, at 10.30am, Colombian soldiers wearing balaclavas burst into the house of Rosa Maria Zapata house, a 56 year old indigenous woman. When the soldiers pointed their guns at her and barked that they wanted to know where the guerrillas were, she screamed back that she didn’t know; she doesn’t know any guerrillas. They told her she was hiding weapons for the FARC. They told her they knew. She howled and protested. So they started searching – and a moment later she heard gunfire. The police announced they had killed the guerrilla. She went running – and found her severely disabled 22-year old son dead.

The British pro-peace group ‘Justice for Colombia’ believes these soldiers received British training. They have documented 36 other civilians murdered by British-trained forces in a six-month period, and they are asking the Foreign Office to finally outline exactly where our money goes – rather than hiding behind the shroud of National Security.

Worse, we are funding a military that is so densely enmeshed with the union-slaying paramilitaries that they are known as the “sixth brigade” of the Colombian armed forces. The relationship was symbolised in a famous football game in the 1990s. The local community in Cacarica were made to gather at the local football field to watch a match. It sounds touching. But the head of the local left-leaning community leader, Marino Lopez, was used as the ball, after being hacked from his body with a chainsaw. Uribe is now offering a ‘peace deal’ to the right-wing paras like this that allows them to escape proportionate punishment, but offers no such deal to the left.

So how has Howells responded? Easily: he has called his critics supporters of terrorism. Last week, in the House of Commons, he declared, “This has all been created by the organisation ‘Justice for Colombia’, which supports FARC, a band of gangsters and drug smugglers.” He also announced that the FARC is responsible for “most” of the murders in Colombia.

Both were straightforward repetitions of the Colombian far right propaganda line. In reality, ‘Justice For Colombia’ – which is supported by more than half of all Labour MPs – is opposed to all violence within Colombia. And the FARC – while unequivocally disgusting – are responsible for far fewer murders than the government and right-wing death-squads, according to every major study.

So how did this happen? How did a minister in a Labour government end up defending a hard-right Colombian regime?

The British government says they have become the second biggest military donor to Colombia (after the US) because they want to promote human rights there. But if you had a few million pounds to support human rights in that country, the idea you would give it to the High Mountain Brigades is simply surreal. Sure, the government claims to be giving “human rights training” along with their weapons licenses and cash, to “iron out” abuses. But as the historian Mark Curtis explains: “The Colombian military is responsible for its violations not by accident… It is part of a concerted and active policy to nullify the opposition and terrify the general population into further submission.”

No – the explanations for British backing lie elsewhere. The first is a desire to support the United States, because we project our power in the world largely by being a loyal adjunct to American military might. If Britain wasn’t offering these funds, the Bush administration would be alone in the world in backing Uribe, against a Latin America tipping towards the left and urging peace talks with the FARC.

And we are doing it to support the global, unwinnable ‘war on drugs.’ Since Bill Clinton’s Presidency, the US has been spraying hundreds of thousands of tonnes of chemical poisons onto the vast tracts of Colombia where the coca leaves essential for cocaine production are grown. All plants and trees die in their wake. Birth defects and cancer rates are rising. Some of the most precious biodiversity on earth is destroyed. And the effect on drug production? It simply moves to another area.

(It is only the drug-producing areas controlled by the FARC that have been fumigated. The areas in the North, controlled by the right, remain untouched.)

Drug production is so profitable and so popular it cannot be fumigated off the face of the real world. Drug prohibition hands great swathes of the Colombian economy to armed criminal gangs, from the FARC to the right. It ensures they will always have enough money to buy enough guns to outshoot the government and preserve their patches of territory.

There is another way. More and more Colombians believe it is only by brining drugs into the legal economy – where they can be controlled and taxed – that the guerrillas and paramilitaries can be stripped of their cash-flow, and the Colombian state slowly unified. The people arguing for this are wildly diverse: from the current Conservative Interior Minister, Carlos Holguin, to the former Attorney General Gustavo de Greiff who busted the notorious Medelin drug cartel, to the coutnry’s most popular singer, Juan Esteban Aristizabal. They all believe an end to drug prohibition is the only long-term solution to the civil war. Yet Britain demands the opposite.

There is one more crucial reason why we are supporting the Colombian military. The British oil firm BP controls half of Columbia’s petrol output. The historian Mark Curtis argues the UK is keen to ensure resources “remain in the correct hands” – that is, “our” hands. In a highly unequal country angry at seeing its resources siphoned off by foreigners, that means supporting an elite who are willing to use violence to keep the majority in their place.

These three factors can help us to understand why the military actions thousands of miles away from the jungles of Colombia – in Afghanistan and Iraq – have gone so wrong. As in Colombia, we got in, in large part, out of loyalty to the US: Tony Blair bragged he had “not disagreed with the US on a major issue” in his whole time in office.

We have misgoverned Afghanistan so badly because we are inflicting on the country the same ‘war on drugs’ we have wished on Colombia. If we turned up in any country on earth and announced we were there to destroy 40 percent of their economy, the people would fight back. The fact that the 40 percent consists of opium fields makes no difference to dirt-poor farmers. This is why we are losing Southern Afghanistan even to the hated Taliban.

And the US-UK government has misgoverned Iraq so catastrophically because – as in Colombia – it was primarily driven by a desire to ensure that control of the country’s resources went to The Right People. The protection of the Oil Ministry, while Baghdad’s museums and hospitals and universities were looted and burned all around it, is only the most bleak symbol of this.

The image of Kim Howells squatting with a unit who have tortured and butchered trade unionists can be seen as a Rosetta Stone for the dark side of our foreign policy. It is a reminder that, if we want to turn Britain into a force for human rights in the world, we have to campaign long and hard to turn much of it around. If we don’t, it will end with more women like Rosa Maria Zapata, clutching her dead disabled son and asking why.

Colombia: vicious friend of the West

JamieSW — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 19:54:47 +0000

Colombia’s government is not just a vicious regime that targets trade unionists and civil activists. It is also George Bush’s key ally in Latin America and on the front line of his intervention in that region.

Bush recently declared uncritical support for Colombian president Alvaro Uribe.

He sees Uribe as a bulwark against the radical anti-US governments of Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez and Bolivian president Evo Morales.

The US has been channelling huge amounts of money and military assistance to Colombia for years – first under the cover of the “war on drugs”, then under the “war on terror”.

Britain is the second biggest donor of aid to Colombia. New Labour refuses to say exactly how much military aid and assistance it has given to Colombia, but it is thought to be over £1 million a year.

This comes in addition to military training and granting export licences for the sale of arms to Colombia.

Bush and his defence secretary Robert Gates are trying to push a controversial free trade agreement through the US Congress.

Bush says this agreement is “pivotal” to countering the influence of Chavez in Latin America.

Meanwhile the Colombian national army and right wing paramilitaries that operate with the collusion of the state are waging a brutal war on the poor and left wing activists in the country.

Colombia is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a trade unionist. More than 4,000 union activists have been murdered in the last 15 years, as have thousands of human rights campaigners, journalists, students and opposition politicians. Torture and “disappearances” are common.

The links between the Colombian state and paramilitary death squads are widely documented. In 2003 Uribe’s government claimed it was “dismantling” the paramilitary groups. But an investigation by Amnesty International found that “paramilitarism has not been dismantled – it has simply been re-engineered”.

Amnesty pointed out that many paramilitaries were encouraged to join “civilian informer networks” to provide military intelligence to the security forces, or to become “civic guards”. It concluded that “many paramilitary structures remain virtually intact and that paramilitaries continue to kill, often in collusion with the security forces”.

State repression is often carried out under the pretence of stopping the “terrorism” of left wing guerrilla groups.

Colombia recently launched a raid into neighbouring Ecuador and murdered several members of the left wing Farc guerrilla organisation.

Guerillas

This is just the latest in a 40 year war that the Colombian state has waged against leftist guerrilla groups such as Farc and the smaller ELN group.

These groups emerged in the 1960s in response to state violence against the poor and political opposition. They have been fighting corrupt and elitist governments for decades.

Chavez has called on Colombia to recognise Farc as a legitimate political force and enter peace negotiations. Any serious peace process in Colombia must involve negotiations with both Farc and the ELN.

But Uribe is desperate not to give credit to Chavez or make any concessions to Farc. Instead he continues to attempt to defeat the opposition groups by brute force.

Farc and the ELN offer some protection for farmers in the areas they control. These farmers face chemical crop spraying and violence from US-backed “counter-insurgency” programmes.

However, the guerilla groups are not based on mass democratic movements. Nor are the social and economic conditions in areas they control significantly better for the poor.

Farc and the ELN have been locked into a bloody war for decades against a highly armed state that is backed, financially and militarily, by the US and Britain.

Their guerilla strategy will not offer the political progress ordinary Colombians need so badly.

But against all the odds – and in the face of brutal repression – Colombian trade unions, students and social movements are resisting and fighting for fundamental change.

Kim Howells helps clarify the British government’s “values”

Tim Holmes — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 13:10:32 +0000

Say what you like about Kim Howells, the man’s got some nerve. A few months ago the Foreign Office minister was calling “for Britain and the Saudi monarchy to work more closely together on a basis of “shared values”” – which, while it is not entirely clear which values he was thinking of, might well include such time-honoured principles as “paying little regard to international law” and “pervasive discrimination” against women; or, alternatively, “systematic and multiple violations of due process and fair trial rights”, “[s]trictly enforced gender segregation”, and “arbitrary detention, mistreatment and torture of detainees”.

Mr Howells has now helpfully clarified what he meant by arranging this neat little photo opportunity in Colombia, posted on the Foreign Office website, in which he gets rather chummy with the High Mountain Battalion of the Colombian Army. According to the Guardian,

“Surrounding the smiling face of the Foreign Office minister Kim Howells in a picture taken in the Colombian region of Sumapaz are a general linked to paramilitary death squads and soldiers of a notorious unit of the Colombian army accused, including by Amnesty International, of torturing and killing trade unionists. …

“Howells is pictured with the High Mountain Brigades, a unit held responsible for the killing of trade union activists, peasants and anti-narcotics police during the past three years.

“Behind him stand the Colombian defence minister, Juan Santos, and General Mario Montoya, head of the Colombian army, reports of whose collaboration with paramilitary death squads and drug traffickers and links with disappearances and killings – including leaked CIA reports – were cited last year by US congressional leaders as part of the reason for the suspension of tens of millions of dollars of US military aid to the south American regime.”

It’s fascinating, if more than a little frightening, to watch the Labour Party quite so shamefacedly shredding the very principles it’s supposed to stand for. George Monbiot wrote last week about how Peter Hain “trampled … into the mud” the last of his reputation as an anti-Apartheid campaigner, through his receiving funds from a man, Isaac Kaye, who seems to have provided some help in propping up the South African National Party. Now, although British complicity in Colombia’s widespread human rights abuses has been going on for rather a long time, a Foreign Office minister is prepared to stage happy, smiling photo-shoots with some of the soldiers directly responsible. What’s next? Should we expect to see something like this from Howells in the near future?

Most interesting will be the response of British trade unions. The Guardian cites two prominent union-linked spokespeople, both of whom express their disbelief. But what exactly are they going to do about it? If the cheery collaboration with people who torture and kill trade unionists is not enough to warrant at least the threat of divestment from the Labour Party, then what is? And if it isn’t, should British unions’ professions of “solidarity” be considered anything but platitudes?

There is, then, a simple, effective demand that can be made to Labour by the unions: halt the flow of military support to the Colombian government, or see the flow of union funding dry up. At the very least, it might persuade the government to sit up and take notice.