Colombia Seeks Russian Arms to Match Venezuela, Kommersant Says

Source: Bloomberg

Colombia Seeks Russian Arms to Match Venezuela, Kommersant Says

By Bradley Cook

May 27 (Bloomberg) -- Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos will visit Moscow next month to express concern about Russian arms sales to Venezuela and hold talks on buying similar weapons as a countermeasure, Kommersant reported.

Santos will use his 10-day visit, the first by a Colombian of his rank, to try to convince Russia to curtail arms shipments to President Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, which Colombia accuses of arming FARC rebels, the Moscow-based newspaper said, citing an interview with the vice president.

Venezuela in the last three years has bought Russian fighter jets, attack helicopters and air defense systems, as well as 100,000 machineguns, some of which may have gone to the rebels, Kommersant said. Colombia is interested in acquiring fighter jets, transport helicopters, armored vehicles, air-traffic control systems and night-vision equipment, the newspaper said.



Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=aHlPnMhO5.6A&refer=latin_america

20:00 | 27/ 05/ 2008

Russian weapons: Colombia wants to out-buy Venezuela

Francisco Santos, vice president of Colombia, is to visit Russia early in June. The subject matter of the first such call in the history of relations between the two countries will be military-technical cooperation.
Colombia, worried by the Hugo Chavez regime building up its military muscle, is determined to maintain the balance of strength. For this reason it is prepared to buy weapons from Russia. In exchange for contracts, Bogota will try to persuade Moscow to cut its arms supplies to Venezuela.

Analysts agree that Moscow stands to gain from Colombia's proposal. "Russia is interested in a multi-vectored and pragmatic policy in Latin America, and so Moscow is unlikely to focus on any one country," said Vladimir Davydov, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Latin American Studies. "I think Russia will readily respond to Colombia's bid."

Russia's current supplies to Colombia are insignificant. "Over the past five years we have only sent the Colombians a few Mi-17 helicopters. This does not even compare with a three-billion dollar bill for military deliveries to neighboring Venezuela, which also include 24 Su-30MK2V fighters," said Ivan Konovalov, deputy director of the Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.

In his view, the present situation is a paradoxical replay of the recent Cold War times when the Soviet penetration of the Latin American arms market was dictated by political considerations alone. The U.S. political establishment is sounding the alarm, citing the Latin American case as part of a general trend, of Russia's great-power revival and the Kremlin's wish to again oppose the U.S. in any part of the world.

"There are no political ulterior motives attached here," Konovalov said. "This is mere financial interest. The U.S. itself lost this lucrative market when it embargoed arms supplies to Venezuela in 2005."

More:
http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20080527/108608879.html

While Columbia will use drug money.

Russia will take both and come out the only winner.

Side note: I thought Colombia had the largest, most advanced military in SA already, compliments of * and co.

nt

the paramilitaries take from campesinos when they drive them out of their age-old homes and farms through acts of terror, as in torturing entire villages, deliberately terrorizing the survivors to the point the flee, creating the world's second largest humanitarian crisis only less grave than the Sudan's, then seize their property, much of which ends up in the government's hands.

Call me whatever you want, but it's funny to see you make a list of facts (as sloppy and two dimensional as you are presenting them, like your assumption that the government itself ends up with all the land from displacement...which is quite wrong) that totally avoid the main issue and just try to go for the "moral" punch, so to speak, not seeking actual logic or a real explanation.

All that you've explained is part of the truth, that is obvious and I could even agree with your showing moral outrage for it (it would be easier for me, in fact), but it's woefully incomplete and doesn't really explain much, when you think about the original point. Which is that drugs aren't Colombia's only source of wealth by any means.

But I guess that doesn't matter here.

Black and white pictures uber alles!

Other than foreign aid that is marked for specific purposes other than military purchases?

And the Columbian government's direct (and deep) ties to the narco trade is well documented.

If you really wanted to know, there are economic-related books and documents, several freely available online, in Spanish and also in English. Even Wikipedia at least has something. But I don't think you want to and I'm no Economics major.

And honestly, there are also serious books and documents that may help you to understand that the relationship between the government, the economy and narcotics isn't as simplistic and one-sided as that. Even in critical history books like "Colombia: Fragmented land, Divided society" for god's sake. Which isn't exactly full of praise for the government, but also not full of venom either.

Notice I am not denying anything (drugs do contribute to the Colombian economy, and not insignificantly at all), just pointing out how incomplete and simplistic this is.

If we were to use that logic alone, then Colombia would have had no economy at all until the drugs came along and nothing to spend on anything of note, don't you think? Yet the facts prove otherwise.

It's extremely easy to write down that last sentence of yours, but you probably have no idea about how much you're missing out or how many incorrect assumptions you are making, from a selective set of facts and sloppy extrapolations of the above.

By not answering my question, you're the one avoiding the point.

You're the one who made the claim, back it up. I already mentioned the well-known and documented ties to the narco trade the government has.

And I'm willing to bet I know more about Columbia (and Judi Lynn knows more than both of us put together) than you do.

My point is that you seem to find it difficult to understand that ties between the government and drug cartels do not automatically explain how the entire Colombian economy works, has worked, and will work.

Here's part of "Illegal Drugs in Colombia: from illegal economic boom to
social crisis" by F. Thoumi.

The quoting is improper, but it should do. How much of this did you already know or are you even willing to consider, I wonder?


"There is no doubt that the impact of the industry on Colombia has been quite large. The private
sector capital formation during the 1980s averaged $2.8 billion a year (Thoumi, 1995).
Furthermore, any criminal organization exporting 50 or more tons of cocaine a year would have
profits that compete with those of the largest financial conglomerates of the country.<6> Any
estimate of the size and profits of the illegal drugs industry, no matter how conservative, highlights
the capacity of the illegal drugs industry to change the economic power structure of the country
(Thoumi, 1995).

The effects of illegal revenues and profits on the Colombian economy have evolved through time.
During the 1970s and 1980s they generated real estate booms in a few cities and regions,
revalued the Colombian peso, and encouraged contraband imports. The illegal export boom was
welcome by most Colombians for decades had confronted a tight foreign exchange constraint.
It can be argued that the drug industry has penetrated many economic activities, particularly rural
and urban real estate, however, a very large part of the Colombian economy, including its most
modern enterprises have been rather insulated from the illegal industry power. The modern
Colombian economy has been controlled by a number of financial conglomerates that include
financial, manufacturing, modern agricultural, marketing and media organizations. These groups
tend to be self-contained and have a lot to lose developing partnerships with illicit entrepreneurs.
Furthermore, the stock market is very thin and most companies traded are controlled by those
financial conglomerates. Not surprisingly, there are few activities in which large sums of illicit funds can be laundered in Colombia.

Indeed, the “Laundromat is quite small” (Thoumi, 1999).
While the illegal drug industry has been important, it cannot be argued that the performance of the
Colombian economy has improved because of the drug income. Indeed, the Colombian GNP's rate
of growth during the post-cocaine era (1980 on) though 1997 was about 3.2 percent, while it
averaged 5.5 percent during the 30 years before. This decline cannot be explained by the Latin
American foreign debt crisis of the 1980s, which Colombia avoided or by worse international terms
of trade or other external conditions during the 1980s than the three earlier decades (Thoumi,
1995). After 1995 the performance of the Colombian economy declined sharply and in 1999 it
registered a decline of about 5 percent of GDP. This was the first year since the end of World War
II in which income fell.

When the illegal industry began to grow its short run effects on the economy tended to be positive
but in the medium and long run its effects have been highly negative. The drug industry has acted
as a catalyst that accelerated a process of "delegitimation of the regime" that has contributed to the
country's stagnation (Thoumi, 1995). This process produced a sharp decline in trust that increased
transaction costs; contributed to increased violence and impunity that has induced "clean" capital
flight, and larger security costs; promoted expectations of very fast wealth accumulation that
produced highly speculative investments, and increases in bankruptcies, embezzlements, etc.
Increased criminality has had a significant declining effect on the country's income growth rate:
"the cost of crime in terms of lost growth exceeded 2 percent per year, without including its longer
term effects on factor productivity and capital formation" (Rubio, 1996: 32)

During the 1990s the negative effects became sharply noticeable when illegal drugs became a
main funding source for right and left wing guerrilla and right wing paramilitary movements. Today
a significant part of illicit revenues is used to buy weapons, pay warriors. It is ironic that when the illegal drug revenues are received by guerrilla and paramilitary groups and fund the ambiguous
war in progress and when they are received by government and military officers they go to private
pockets. In all cases they greatly undermine the State and the licit economy.

The illicit industry thus became a main immediate cause of the current Colombian social crises and also contribute to the destruction of productive activities and to capital flight."


http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http://lacc.fiu.edu/research_publications/working_papers/WPS_002.pdf

As for that bet...not applicable. That's the best answer I can give.

...Konovalov said... "The U.S. itself lost this lucrative market when it embargoed arms supplies to Venezuela in 2005."

In 2005 the Bush administration refused to sell Venezuela parts nessecary to keep their fleet of F-16s flying, and embargoed all military hardware, parts and technology. Venezuela then turned to Europe for their military supplies, ordering patrol boats and cargo planes from Spain. The Bush administration used the presence of US technology and parts in those items to kill that multi-billion dollar deal. Prevented from resupplying his military with either US or European hardware, Chavez turned to Russia.

Here's a reference to it from 2006:

From:
Last Updated: Monday, 15 May 2006, 22:24 GMT 23:24 UK
US bans arms sales to Venezuela

~snip~
The ban means Washington will not permit any military sales to Venezuela, the spokeswoman said. The re-sale of arms manufactured in other countries would also be prohibited.

Washington has already put pressure on Spain and Brazil to halt their plans to supply military equipment - including aircraft - to Venezuela which contains some US technology.

However, the US has been unable to block a purchase by Venezuela of some 100,000 rifles from Russia. The guns have not yet been delivered.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4774475.stm

~~~~~~~~
US threatens to block £890m Spanish arms sale to
Tremlett in Madrid and Jamie Wilson in Washington
The Guardian, Thursday November 24 2005

The US yesterday threatened to block a record-breaking arms deal under which Spain would sell ships and aircraft to Venezuela, in another sign of increasingly fraught relations between the Bush administration and the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez.
The US claimed that a €1.3bn (£890m) arms deal with Mr Chávez, who is a vocal supporter of Cuba's Fidel Castro and a fierce critic of the Bush administration, could destabilise the region. The deal, due to be signed in Caracas on Monday, includes four coastal patrol ships, four corvettes, 10 C-295 transport planes and two maritime surveillance planes. It would be a massive boost to Spain's ailing shipyard industry and to the rest of its defence industry.

In a further irritant to fractious US-Venezuelan relations, officials from the South American country signed a deal to ship 12m gallons of home heating oil to low-income Americans in Massachusetts, part of a plan by Mr Chávez to embarrass the Bush administration in the wake of its lacklustre response to Hurricane Katrina. The fuel will be sold at about 40% below market prices to thousands of homes during the winter.

Spain's Socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, gave the arms deal his personal backing earlier this year, saying it was "of benefit to the people" and would help Venezuela to fight drug-trafficking. But Washington has signalled that as some of the military hardware being sold contains US technology, it may prevent the sales.

"Those air or naval platforms include US technology," the American ambassador to Madrid, Eduardo Aguirre, said yesterday. "We have not yet decided whether to grant our permission for obtaining that technology." He made clear that Washington did not want the deal to proceed. "We hope, in the end, that the transaction will not be carried out," he said. "We're worried that the sale could be a destabilising factor in the region."More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/nov/24/usa.spain

~~~~~~~~
An earlier story, before _Bush blocked the sale:

World Briefing | Americas: Venezuela: Spain Agrees To Arms
By JUAN FORERO (NYT)
Published: March 31, 2005

Venezuela signed a pact to buy $1.7 billion worth of military transport planes and patrol boats from Spain, the latest in a series of arms deals by President Hugo Chávez's leftist government that have raised concerns from the Bush administration. The accord -- which was reached during a visit by the Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who also attended a summit conference on Tuesday with Mr. Chávez and the presidents of Colombia and Brazil -- signaled closer ties between Madrid and Caracas and underscored Spain's increasing independence from Washington.
Juan Forero

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B04EED9133FF932A05750C0A9639C8B63&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Subjects/I/International%20Relations

vast oil reserves using Columbia, a C-eye-a surrogate. Why Russia is getting involved is the real question. It would be just to obvious if they did it with U$A arms. Another Columbia Contra in the making. Venezuela poses no threat to any of its neighbors. fighter jets, transport helicopters, armored vehicles, air-traffic control systems and night-vision equipment....now there is a clue if ever I saw one.

...then Venezuela's purchases also would, because that's in fact a closer description of what Venezuela has already bought from Russia. What's good for one should, theoretically, apply to the other as well.

Still, I think there are other reasons to oppose such a purchase (or at least to limit it to the kind of equipment which Colombia has already bought from Russia in the past), from a Colombian point of view, as indicated elsewhere.

it would NOT be politically expedient to sell arms to Venezuela and Columbia at the same time, the two countries are almost at war with each other. It would be expedient to the capitalists but the Russians should be more intelligent than that. It makes sense from a capitalist standpoint but Russia probably isn't going to risk the negative repurcusions of such arms sales.

Columbia has traditionally been the receipient of the largest US military aid, behind Israel. There is simply no need for Russia to give more arms to Columbia.

...(as well as other nations, not just the U.S.) with Colombia's own non-negligible defense budget, so I wouldn't be surprised if more of certain helicopters, for example, continued to be bought.

Still, I have my doubts about the way this article is presenting things, as if any possible Colombian purchases could match Venezuela's...or even tried to do so. Btw, there has been an official denial of the information in this article already, for that matter, and any such purchases wouldn't be easy to hide if and when they actually happened.

On the other hand...The idea alone is not something I would consider good for Colombia either, for the record, just because an arms race with Venezuela makes little sense and wastes resources that are needed not just for the actual military struggle against FARC (which may overlap conventional weapons but needs to be far more specialized) but also for non-military matters (is a list of those needed?).

(through _Bush's largesse) Colombia ALSO is raking in a huge amount of support from the E.U.!

It sounds as if Santos hopes to persuade Russia to simply stop doing business with Venezuela, as well.

Colombia is armed to the teeth. Colombia should know when to say "no." Makes you wonder if _Bush-puppet Uribe has been sent by his master to pull some really sneaky stuff _Bush can't get by with on his own!

nt

which may help DU'ers who are interested in looking further in case they were clueless about US foreign aid to Colombia:

Another shining example of how the United States fosters 'freedom' in other countries can be had by investigating the results of the 'War o­n Drugs'. It is reported that the president of Colombia is proud of the fact that the killing of union activists is down to o­nly 30 this year as opposed to the 90 that were killed last year according to the Central Workers' Union. Prosecutors in Colombia have ordered that three Colombia Army soldiers (one officer) and o­ne civilian be arrested while the recent death of three union activists is being investigated. The arrest comes after a call for an investigation was made by the Colombian office of U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and Amnesty International.

The New York Times has reported that Colin Powell has warned Colombia that it's aid might be cut off:

"It's clear that we were never wrong, saying that they were assassinated by members of the Colombian Army," said Domingo Tovar, who coordinates human rights activities for the Central Workers Union, largest Colombian labor confederation.

The attorney general's announcement came days after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell warned the Colombian government that it must curtail rights abuses or risk losing aid. o­n Tuesday, Vice President Francisco Santos acknowledged that the government had erred in its initial characterization of the killings, saying, "Yes, we were wrong."

The problem is that Colin Powell has been aware of the problem for quite a long time. Here is an excerpt from an article by Nina Englander that appears o­n Representative Jan Schakowsky's website. The article is almost a year old and the killings continue.

A September 22 letter from Representative Jan Schakowsky to Secretary of State Colin Powell (signed by nineteen members of the House) condemns Uribe's statements and urges Powell to make a "strong public statement dissociating the United States from President Uribe's remarks, indicating strong US concern with these statements, and asking him to protect, by his words and actions, human rights defenders and the broader non-governmental community in Colombia." Senators Dodd, Feingold, Leahy and Kerry sent a similar letter to the Secretary of State asking for a public statement from the US ambassador to Colombia and calling for a meeting between Powell and Colombian human rights groups. Neither the State Department nor the US Embassy in Colombia has made any public denouncement.

The Foreign Office of the UK recently considered cutting off military aid to Colombia according to an article in The Guardian:

The Foreign Office has examined the possibility of cutting off military aid to Colombia in response to mounting political opposition among trade unions and backbench MPs.

More than 210 MPs, predominantly Labour members but many from the other main parties, have signed an early day motion put down by the former Labour Foreign Office minister Tony Lloyd, condemning Britain's involvement and calling for security assistance to be frozen.

The motion claims that many of the 184 trade unionists killed in Colombia in 2002 died at the hands of rightwing paramilitary groups "which have documented links to the state security forces".

In a stunning example of the nature of the Colombian government The Guardian also reports that their commitments to Human rights are mere words:

Last year, the US gave Colombia $99m to protect the pipeline, to be split between the 18th Brigade and a new mobile unit. President Bush also sent 60 US special forces personnel to Arauca to train the brigade. Given this involvement of the oil companies and the US government in the brigade's activities, perhaps they can explain something the Colombian government does not care to: how does it enhance the security of the people of Arauca when the army, directly or through its collaboration with paramilitary groups, targets health workers, trade unionists, teachers, journalists and human rights defenders and forcibly displaces indigenous and peasant communities who lived near the pipeline?

A year ago, in a meeting in London, Colombia's vice-president signed a commitment to implement a long list of recommendations from the UN Human Rights Commission. Twelve months o­n, the UN reports that there has been almost no progress o­n most of the recommendations, and o­n others Colombia has moved backwards. The Colombian government claims that the vice-president's signature did not commit the country to anything - an approach to commitments that Colombia's partners might care to bear in mind in future dealings with the Uribe government. (emphasis added)

http://www.foreignaidwatch.org/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Detailed report on foreign aid to Colombia, 1997 to 2008:

http://www.ciponline.org/colombia/aidtable.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So silly of you to claim the vast outpouring of US taxpayers' hard earned money never is handed over to Colombia, which receives the THIRD LARGEST FOREIGN AID IN THE WORLD. That would make one ill from immoderate laughter.

No one's going to buy that. Who do you think you're addressing here?

You just keep quoting aid amounts as if they were all just cash handouts and ignore the point I'm trying to make, which goes beyond the amounts alone.

The issue is not aid amounts, but thinking it's entirely a matter of handing out cash (even if that is part of it), as if there were no specific channels through which those amounts are spent and programs they were assigned to, even by the U.S. Congress or SecState/SectDef itself in the cases of the equipment, services and training that are provided, either directly or through contractors.

You just keep quoting that CIP table, as if that was an answer to the point.

Well, I'm going to quote some stuff from elsewhere on that website. Stuff you keep ignoring.

Report: half of U.S. military aid goes through private contractors

The State and Defense Departments have issued their annual report to Congress on private U.S. contractors’ activities in Colombia. (It is available here as a 10-megabyte PDF file.) The report, covering 2006, is a very important document - and has often been difficult to obtain. The last edition we had seen covered 2002.

Here are some highlights:

* The State and Defense Departments spent $309.6 million on private contractors carrying out military and police assistance programs in Colombia last year. That is roughly half of the $632 million in military and police aid that we estimate Colombia received in 2006.

* Funding for contractors in Colombia has doubled in four years. In 2002, aid through contractors totaled just over $150 million, about three-eighths of the $400 million in military and police aid Colombia received that year.

* One company - Dyncorp, which carries out the aerial herbicide fumigation program - accounted for fully one-quarter of all U.S. military and police aid to Colombia last year, with $164.3 million. That is roughly double the $85.6 million that DynCorp was reported to be earning in 2002.

http://www.cipcol.org/?p=416

Are those contractors and companies Colombian, by any chance? Overwhelmingly not.

And let's look at what CIP's Adam Isacson has to say about what U.S. assistance is actually spent on, criticizing another report which gives U.S. aid too much credit for improved security conditions:


Why does the report give U.S. assistance so much credit for Colombia’s improved security conditions?

Let’s take a moment to get a rough idea of how much U.S. assistance has gone toward protecting Colombian citizens. The United States gives Colombia about $600 million in military and police assistance in a typical year.

* Nearly half of that amount goes to the aerial eradication program, in one way or another. (Fumigation planes, pilots, mechanics, herbicide, surveillance, police escort helicopters and their maintenance, the Army Counter-Narcotics Brigade’s efforts to guarantee security for spray operations, with the resulting use of helicopters.)

We know that the fumigation program has failed to reduce the amount of coca grown in Colombia since Plan Colombia began. So this half of U.S. security assistance cannot be said to have contributed to improved security conditions in Colombia.

In fact, it may have worsened security conditions by encouraging coca-growing in many new areas, and by leaving coca-growing farmers angrier at their government after fumigation leaves them with no way to feed themselves.

* About another quarter of that aid has gone to drug interdiction efforts. (Aerial, ground, riverine and maritime, plus efforts to capture drug cartel leaders.)

This has brought a significant increase in the number of tons of cocaine that the Colombian authorities have seized before it can go to the United States. This number peaked in 2005 at just over 200 tons, roughly one-quarter of Colombia’s estimated production, and has since been unable to recover that level.

Interdiction has made life somewhat harder for traffickers, but since the U.S. Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) says it has seen no change in the amount of cocaine leaving Colombia, it has not contributed significantly to Colombia’s improved security measures.

* The remaining quarter of military and police aid - $150 million or so per year, $200 million if we’re feeling especially generous - can be said to have contributed in some way to public security in Colombia. (Building police stations, training rapid-reaction forces in the military and police , infrastructure-protection, “Plan Patriota” and other military offensives, the minority of time the helicopters have been used for non-drug purposes.)

Even without evaluating the effectiveness of all of these programs, we can say that the United States has given $150-200m per year for programs oriented in some way toward improving public security in Colombia. That sounds like a lot, but it pales next to Colombia’s own defense (military and police) budget, which will total about $7 billion this year. The U.S. contribution is mere crumbs - one thirty-fifth or one-fortieth - compared to Colombia’s own security effort.

Despite the claims in the CSIS report, the U.S. contribution to Colombian security has been rather marginal. Imagine how much greater the U.S. impact could have been had we devoted most of our resources to something other than ineffective, militarized counter-drug programs.


http://www.cipcol.org/?p=499

At the very least, that shows there's someone who thinks it's not just throwing cash into someone's pocket or giving Colombia a credit line with no limits. And several of those specific services can only/mostly be provided by U.S. personnel, trainers or technicians, contractors or military, not Colombians, so why would Colombia handle all the money directly?

Yes, there are amounts of money over which Colombia may have direct control or which may even qualify as "cash", but the picture is not anywhere near close to being what you say or imply it is.

Or how about comparing Colombia's defense budget for 2007 with total (military and otherwise) U.S. aid for that year?

Defense budget in 2007: $5.1 billion

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/03/04/news/Colombia-Military-Glance.php

2007, estimate

Grand Total: 756.5

http://ciponline.org/colombia/aidtable.htm

U.S. aid (including non-military) is less than 15% of what Colombia spends on defense *alone* in a single year, and all aid to date over several years barely approaches what Colombia spends on defense in two years (let alone all U.S. aid over a decade vs. Colombia's own defense budget over a decade).

Whether spending so much money on defense is bad is another matter, of course. But you probably don't want to hear that right now either.

And, yes, it's a sizable amount of U.S. aid, surely, and some of it may in fact be directly handed over to Colombia, but it's just ***not*** limited to being what you are saying it is: a bunch of cash handouts from U.S. taxpayers. Not by a long shot.

Colombian citizens they slaughter, as they present their dead bodies as "enemy:"

Colombian Troops Kill Farmers, Pass Off Bodies as Rebels'

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 30, 2008; A12



SAN FRANCISCO, Colombia -- All Cruz Elena González saw when the soldiers came past her house was a corpse, wrapped in a tarp and strapped to a mule. A guerrilla killed in combat, soldiers muttered, as they trudged past her meek home in this town in northwestern Colombia.

She soon learned that the body belonged to her 16-year-old son, Robeiro Valencia, and that soldiers had classified him as a guerrilla killed in combat, a claim later discredited by the local government human rights ombudsman. "Imagine what I felt when my other son told me it was Robeiro," González said in recounting the August killing. "He was my boy."

Funded in part by the Bush administration, a six-year military offensive has helped the government here wrest back territory once controlled by guerrillas and kill hundreds of rebels in recent months, including two top commanders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

But 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.
(snip)

Human rights groups see a disturbing trend, saying the tactics used by some army units are similar to those that death squads used to terrorize civilians. A top U.N. investigator said some army units went as far as to carry "kits," which included grenades and pistols that could be planted next to bodies.

More:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/29/AR2008032901118_pf.html

March 31, 2008

Propagandizing Human Rights in Colombia

by Garry Leech

It happens time and time again. Following the killing of Colombian peasants, the government immediately blames guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the mainstream media in both Colombia and the United States dutifully report the allegations. In most cases, evidence later emerges showing that the Colombian military or its right-wing paramilitary allies were the actual perpetrators of the crime. The media, however, rarely reports the new evidence with the same vigor with which it reported the original claims holding the FARC responsible—if they report the new findings at all. Consequently, the Colombian government’s propaganda campaign has successfully created the impression in many people’s minds that the FARC are responsible for a majority of Colombia’s human rights abuses despite the fact that statistics released by human rights organizations year after year contradict popular sentiment.

The disconnect between what people believe and the human rights reality in Colombia has again been made evident by the recent issuance of arrest warrants for Colombian soldiers responsible for the February 2005 massacre of eight peasants in the peace community of San José de Apartadó. Immediately following the massacre, community members had claimed that the Colombian army was operating in the area at the time. The Colombian Defense Ministry immediately denied these claims, stating that the army was not involved in the killings and that “no army troops were closer than two days’ distance” from where the massacre occurred.

Vice-President Francisco Santos then quickly sought to shift blame for the massacre to the guerrillas by stating, “The Government has evidence that leads to the FARC as authors of this horrible crime.” According to this alleged evidence, the victims were FARC collaborators who were killed for trying to leave the guerrilla group. And then, several weeks after the massacre, President Alvaro Uribe accused leaders of the peace community of San José de Apartadó of “helping the FARC” and “wanting to use the community to protect this terrorist organization.” By publicly aligning the victims with the guerrillas—a common strategy of the Colombian government—the president sought to redirect attention away from the possible perpetrators and onto the victims by holding them responsible for their own deaths.

While the mainstream media dutifully reported all of the government’s accusations, the fact that the massacre occurred in San José de Apartadó posed a problem for the Uribe administration. The peace community has achieved a relatively high profile with international solidarity and human rights organizations over the past decade, which led to the mainstream media in this particular case also reporting claims by community members that the Colombian army was involved in the massacre.

Finally, last week—more than three years after the massacre—Colombia’s attorney general’s office issued arrest warrants for 15 soldiers accused of perpetrating the killings. The warrants were issued following testimony given by a demobilized paramilitary fighter named Jorge Luis Salgado. According to Salgado, he and other paramilitaries acted as guides for the Colombian army patrol that committed the massacre in the hamlet of Mulatos in San José de Apartadó.

In his testimony, Salgado described the massacre: “The children were under the bed. The girl, about five or six years old, was very nice and the boy was smart as well. We suggested to the officers that they be left in a nearby house, but they said they were a threat, that they would become guerrillas in the future.” Salgado then claimed that an army officer, who went by the nickname Cobra, “grabbed the girl by the hair and cut her throat with a machete.”

More:
http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia280.htm

...or maybe he doesn't consider anything BUT kidnappings to be a human rights violation on the guerrillas side.

Seems even he doesn't read the human rights reports he mentions in passing.

And his case would actually be stronger if he dared to back up each of his accusations with statistical data of what is and isn't reported or corrected, and if he mentioned what Colombian sources are more or less likely to report them.

But I guess that's too much to ask, when generalizations about all the "corporate or mainstream media" are so easy to produce, without even trying to confirm them firsthand or present any exceptions.

pieces.

They cut entire villages into pieces.

Google: paramilitaries chainsaws Colombia
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-37,GGLD:en&q=paramilitaries+chainsaws+Colombia

I have never uttered a syllable suggesting those horrors aren't real as well.

But apparently it's only a matter of what people OTHER than FARC do.

Those poor guerrillas...incapable of murder, displacement or torture, I'm sure.

------------
RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Indigenous People Flee Homes After FARC Killings
By Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Apr 7 (IPS) - Wounaan Indians have been fleeing the jungles of the northwestern Colombian province of Chocó en masse since Sunday, after the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) killed two indigenous teachers.

"The FARC announced that they are going to kill six or seven more teachers," Luis Evelis Andrade, president of the Indigenous Organisation of Colombia (ONIC), told IPS. "Can you believe that? What does an indigenous teacher have to do with the war?"

In the municipal seat, Istmina, a town of 12,000 in southern Chocó, the displaced persons already number 1,750, while the entire Wounaan community - one of Colombia's 90 indigenous groups - is made up of less than 8,000 people.

According to a communiqué issued by ONIC, 120 of the displaced persons are from the Unión Wanaan village in the neighbouring municipality of Medio San Juan, where the two teachers were killed on Mar. 30 and 31. The rest fled three villages in the municipality of Istmina.

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=32817


More, all from one link but specifying for emphasis.

Killing to Order: Summary Executions in the FARC-EP and the UC-ELN

http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/colombia0903/14.htm

Street Corner Justice: Killings by the Militias

http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/colombia0903/14.htm


Torture in the FARC-EP

http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/colombia0903/14.htm

...with emotion (which I could, again, even share, if this was the time for it), nevermind that such incidents have been reported in the Colombian media as well.

But why...that would never happen! Everything has to follow black and white logic.

would face street by street, building by building, fighting, like the Nazis faced in Stalingrad. Presumably, the population would be equipped with rifles, etc, in much greater numbers, and bombing would be reciprocated.

when an opposing force is willing to take casualties and inflict them in an open war with pretty no roe surrounding civilians the things are not good. Stalingrad was a massacre for the Russians, even though they won.

Wake up to yourself, for goodness sake.
Yes, many millions of Russians, military and civilians died in that monstrous war, but many more survived as the victors; and Stalin being Stalin, Russia was able to expand its empire.

The Russians began to break the back of the German army at Stalingrad, concluding it at Kursk and Komarovka, ultimately destroying Hitler and all his works. As a result, Europe was freed, and the German people, themselves, became exemplars of decency to a Europe, compromised and soon to yet again degenerate, refusing to this day to acknowledge its complicity in the rise of Hitler and Mussolini and their vile regimes.

Indeed, the corporatists have risen again both in Europe and the US, and until the awesome incompetence of the Neocons wrought its bizarre spell, increasingly dominated the world. Brown still looks forward the population of the UK being obliged to purchase ID cards, crammed with all manner of data, presumably no business of the Government. Unfortunately, already they have proved themselves unbelievably incompetent custodians of such data, actually losing the records. What is more, they have, it seems, been selling some of it to US companies.

Any successful retaliatory foray to bomb the US mainland by the Venezuelans would incur the boundless wrath of the American people against their Government. Don't forget Barabra Tuchman's wisest of saws: "war is the unfolding of miscalculations."

that this money is not being funneled to general dynamics MCDD and Boeing. Why buy russian trash, the f15 has a great career of killing soviet and russian airframes in many conflicts.

Our defense contractors should be getting up this business.

I bet that would really piss chavez off. F15E or variants that can carry everything from bunker busters to the b61. Bet that was expensive for him to have to replace all the f16's he had.

Pretty sure the f15 is the only aircraft to score an air to air kill with a 2000lb bomb.

They were not much of a match for the Sukhoi, only in greater numbers which is more expensive.

Chile bought F-16 Block 50, but are now looking for Eurofighters to match the Sukhois.

Taiwan bought block 20 F16s. Very different plane. However quite capable of killing anything sold by russia now or in the past.

We will see if Europe sells its top tier aircraft to mainland china.

It is important to note we spent trillions on designing systems to destroy russian stuff. We still build to that standard. an order of magnitude better than what is coming out of russia. Jets, subs, tanks, that is the business. Every time it has been tested, it works.

..not exactly crumbs, you know.

And that's not even counting whatever is spent on buying helicopters and whatnot that directly gives those and other companies work, plus any other purchases that Colombia may make directly and not through U.S. aid, even if it doesn't include renovating the conventional aircraft fleet so far.

See the "numbers" post I made above for that and some perspective on a few things.

to influence sales to a nation that may be passing weapons on to a terrorist group. Those are small numbers when compared to deals that are made for strike fighters.

I would be surprised if they bought russian systems.
Stranger things have happened.

nt