Key witness in wiretapping scandal reports death threats (former Pres. Uribe scandal)

Source: Colombia Reports

Key witness in wiretapping scandal reports death threats
Thursday, 28 July 2011 13:50
Sarah Cast

A key witness in the wiretapping investigation against former President Alvaro Uribe reported threats on his life, the newspaper El Espectador announced Thursday.

The attorney of a former sub-director of the Colombian intelligence agency DAS, William Romero, informed the media that his client has been repeatedly followed and terrorized in recent days.

“My client is being wiretapped, followed and intimidated,” Romero’s lawyer said.

He did not disclose the source of the threats.

Read more: http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/17940-key-witness-in-wiretapping-scandal-reports-death-threats.html

Columbia is a "democracy."

:sarcasm:

Play Democracy and Hide the Corpses for Good Business in Colombia
by Jose David Torrenegra / July 29th, 2011

Not a week goes in Colombia without reports of assassinations and persecution of labor and political activists. Ana Fabricia Cordoba, gender activist and leader of displaced peasants, was shot dead on June 7th inside a street bus, after she foretold her own death due to constant threats and abuses against her family;1 Manuel Antonio Garces, community leader, afro-descendent activist and candidate for local office in southwestern Colombia received on July 18th a disturbing warning that read “we told you to drop the campaign, next time we’ll blow it in your house” next to an inactive hand grenade;2 Keyla Berrios, leader of Displaced Women’s League was murdered last July 22nd , after continuous intimidation of her organization and threats on behalf of death squads linked to Colombian authorities,3 a fact so publicly known after hundreds of former congressman, police and military personnel are either jailed or investigated for colluding with Paramilitaries to steal elections, murder and disappear dissidents, forcefully displace peasants and defraud public treasury, in a criminal network that extends all the way up to former president Alvaro Uribe and his closest aides.4

The official explanation to these crimes is also well known; Bacrim, an acronym which stands for “Criminal Gangs”, a term created from the Colombia establishment including its omnipresent corporate media apparatus to depoliticize the constant violence unleashed against union leaders, peasants and community activists, Human Rights defenders or anyone humane enough to point at the extremely unequal and unjust structures of power and wealth which rely heavily on repression. However, no matter how much effort is put into misleading public opinion about the nature of this violence, the crimes are so systematic and their effects always turning out for the benefit of the elite that a simple class analysis debunks the façade of these “gangs” supposedly acting on their own, and expose the mutual benefit relation between armed thugs and political power in Colombia, an acute representation of present-day fascism in Latin America.

In a country overwhelmed with unemployment and poverty — nearly 70% — and 8 million people living on less than U$2 a day who daily look for their subsistence in garbage among stray dogs or selling candies at street lights and city buses, is also shockingly common and surreal to see fancy cars — Hummers, Porsches — million dollar apartments, country clubs and a whole bubble of opulence just in front of over-exploited workers, ordinary people struggling merely to make ends meet, or at worst, children, single mothers, elderly, and people with disabilities, without social security and salaries, much less higher education and decent housing. For instance, in Cartagena, a Colombian Caribbean colonial city plagued with extreme poverty, beggars, child prostitution and U$400 a night resorts, you can pretend to feel in Miami Beach or a Mediterranean paradise, and in less than five minutes away you can also visit slums which would make devastated Haiti look like suburbia. The same shockingly contrast can be experienced in all major cities in Colombia. Thus, in order to keep vast privileges of a few amidst infrahuman conditions of the majority, the elite needs to have an iron grip on political power, and once its power is contested or mildly threatened by the collective action of social movements, democratic parties and conscious individuals, a selective burst of state violence is unleashed effectively dismantling any kind of peaceful organizing by fear and demoralization. The high levels of attrition suffered by activists raising moderate democratic banners such as the right to assembly, collective bargaining, freedom of expression and reparation from political violence, are the result of decentralized state repression carried out by death squads led by high state officers5 who supply them with intelligence and economic resources extracted from defrauding public treasury and money laundry in the narcotics chain, where social investigators claim that most of the profit accounts for institutional economy, the banks and the state.6

This elaborated repressive strategy differs from the one perpetrated by the military juntas the ruled Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, among others, where public forces exercised directly the political violence against dissidents without pretentious democratic credentials, such as the ones constantly regurgitated by the Colombian establishment, making it more difficult to expose its deep dictatorial mechanisms that have disappeared more than 30000 Colombians7 in the last years of US backed “counterinsurgency” policies, far surpassing Pinochet’s reign of terror.

More:
http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/07/play-democracy-and-hide-the-corpses-for-good-business-in-colombia/