Reply #6: Carlos Castaño has been discussed recently, bringing his name to attention [View All]

for many of us for the first time. Here's more on this psychopath/terrorist/right-wing tool:

Reinventing Carlos Castaño

by Garry Leech

The U.S. Justice Department timed its request for the arrest and extradition of Colombian paramilitary chief Carlos Castaño on drug trafficking charges to coincide with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's arrival in Washington. Undoubtedly, the White House wanted to use the issuing of the extradition request and the "anti-terrorism" pow-wow between President Bush and Uribe as evidence that Washington and Bogotá are combating right-wing paramilitaries as well as leftist guerrillas in Colombia. But while this charade was clearly a public relations ploy, what's not so obvious is the reasoning behind Castaño's announcement that he is willing to cooperate with the extradition request and face justice in the United States. One possible explanation is that the Bush administration has entered into some kind of Faustian deal with Colombia's notorious death squad leader.

Castaño, a former army scout and associate of drug lord Pablo Escobar, took over the reins of Colombia's largest paramilitary force, the Self-Defense Forces of Córdoba and Urabá (ACCU), in 1994 after his older brother Fidel disappeared. The ACCU and other regional paramilitary groups in Colombia worked hand in glove with the U.S.-backed Colombian military, which routinely provided them with intelligence, weapons and transportation so they could effectively target suspected rebel sympathizers including labor leaders, community organizers and human rights activists. With funding from drug traffickers, wealthy landowners, and the business community, Colombia's paramilitaries grew dramatically during the 1990s from an estimated 850 paramilitary fighters at the beginning of the decade to approximately 12,000 today. In 1997, Castaño oversaw the merging of the regional paramilitary forces into one national organization, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC).

AUC fighters routinely induced fear in the rural population by entering villages and rounding up the residents in the town plaza. They would then brutally kill a handful of villagers, often dismembering them with machetes and chainsaws, before ordering the rest of the people to leave the region. By forcibly displacing the rural population in this manner, the paramilitaries hoped to eliminate local support for the guerrillas. This strategy has aggravated the already grossly inequitable distribution of arable lands as large landowners, as well as multinational corporations interested in oil, coal and natural gas resources, have taken over much of the abandoned land. More than 2.5 million rural Colombians have been displaced by the conflict in the past 15 years, many of them fleeing to the impoverished shantytowns that are rapidly encircling many of Colombia's cities.
(snip/...)

http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia133.htm



Thanks for posting that article.