Colombia Is Americas' Worst Humanitarian Crisis -UN

Colombia Is Americas' Worst Humanitarian Crisis -UN
Mon May 10, 2004 07:51 PM ET

By Evelyn Leopold
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Colombia's drug wars have created the largest humanitarian crisis in the Americas, driving 2 million people from their homes and threatening Indian tribes with extinction, a U.N. official said on Monday.

Jan Egeland, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator, said the country was mired in debt and reluctant to divert military funds to an army of uprooted people escaping the fighting or forced off their land by the cocaine mafia.

"Colombia is therefore by far the biggest humanitarian catastrophe of the Western Hemisphere," Egeland, who just returned from the country, told a news conference.

"It has the biggest number of killings in the Western Hemisphere," Egeland said. "It's the biggest humanitarian problem, human rights problem, the biggest conflict in the Western hemisphere."
(snip/...)

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=5096813

my husband is there on business right now....and it scares me to death.

that make Iraq look mild.

What happened in Central America is now happening in Colombia and the press never reports about it. The only thing we hear is the manipulated propaganda pieces such as "the paras are surrendering their arms and don't want to be held accountable for the torture, murder, and disappearance of thousands". It's dispicable. Plan Colombia--Plan of Death!

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The Patriot Plan

12.000 Colombian troops led by US officers have begun a scorched earth campaign in the southern part of Colombia, Bogota weekly VOZ reports. Fears for the safety of dozens of rebel held prisoners in the area, including the three US soldiers Keith Stansell, Marc Gonsalves and Thomas Howes.

The front page story, headlined »Secret strategy: Operation Patriot underway against the FARC«, revealed what everybody already knew: at the behest of the Bush government the Armed Forces of Colombia have started a scorched earth campaign in the southern part of the country, with the participation of 12.000 Colombian soldiers.

They are led by almost a thousand troops from the United States Southern Command, even though these never obtained permission from the Senate of the Republic of Colombia to enter the country, as required by the Constitution.

Almost three months ago the weekly newspaper VOZ, on page nine of it’s edition number 2230 of February 4, 2004, denounced the planned operation under the headline »Uribe worse than Sharon«, even though the decisive US military participation, which now is beyond doubt, was not yet known. »This is a total abandonment of the national sovereignity on the part of the Uribe government«, a political analyst told VOZ.

At the same time another source, a university professor, did not hesitate in declaring that »Uribe’s lack of dignity now knows no bounds: it is the gringos who are governing the country, which is turning into a banana republic«. Many were embarrassed to see the President thus on his knees, desperately seeking another four year term, thinking himself a messiah, sent by the Planet of the Apes for the redemption of the Colombians.

http://www.anncol.org/side/505

The humanitarian crisis of the thugocrat-of-the-month in Haiti is never ending, and Haiti has the lowest per capita GDP of any country in the hemisphere.

and Colombia has the worst human rights record in the Western Hemisphere. After Israel and Egypt Colombia is the next largest recipient of US military aid.

Although the article doesn't say it, the land the forced displaced come from is oil-rich land that for centuries belonged to them--the indigenous people of Colombia. Your tax dollars at work..

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Control over Colombia´s lucrative oil reserves has long spurred the country's four decade long civil war and is currently driving U.S. foreign policy for the region. Though indigenous peoples reject war, the fight to control Colombia's natural resources is increasingly putting them directly in the crossfire. For indigenous communities, the militarization that accompanies oil exploitation has brought escalating human rights violations and forced displacement from their ancestral homelands. Evidence indicates that U.S. aid to the Colombian military, particularly for crop fumigation operations, is accelerating the disintegration of indigenous ways of life and fueling a cycle of violence that is killing thousands of innocent civilians every year.

http://www.amazonwatch.org/amazon/CO/

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In December 2000, U.S.-trained counternarcotics battalions, U.S.-supplied Blackhawk helicopters and U.S.-piloted spray planes descended on Putumayo department to conduct Plan Colombia’s initial aerial fumigation campaign. In the more than three years since the initial spraying of coca crops, Putumayo has been a repeat target, as have many of the country’s other southern departments. Although the U.S. government claims its fumigation prescriptions finally began decreasing coca cultivation in 2002 and 2003, there is still no evidence that Plan Colombia has achieved its principal goal of dramatically reducing the flow of cocaine to the United States. But while Plan Colombia has failed to affect the price, purity and availability of cocaine in U.S. cities, its militarization of Putumayo has contributed significantly to increased oil exploration by multinational companies in this resource-rich region. Neoliberal economic reforms that constitute the economic component of Plan Colombia have further sweetened the pot for foreign oil companies.

In July 2002, the Bush administration convinced Congress to lift conditions restricting Colombia’s U.S. military aid to counternarcotics operations, allowing it to be used to fight the country’s illegal armed groups as part of the global war on terror. The lifting of the conditions led to the direct use of U.S. military aid to target the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas responsible for attacking the oil operations of multinational corporations. Shortly after September 11, 2001, U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson made clear the importance of finding alternative sources of oil in the context of the war on terror. She said that Colombia, already the third-largest exporter of oil in Latin America and one of the top ten foreign suppliers to the United States, “has the potential to export more oil to the United States, and now more than ever, it’s important for us to diversify our sources of oil.”

The escalation of the civil conflict in Putumayo over the past decade, however, has made foreign oil companies hesitant to exploit the vast oil reserves that exist mostly in rebel-controlled regions. That is, until the arrival of right-wing paramilitaries in the late-1990s and the implementation of Plan Colombia, both of which have resulted in greater security for oil operations. At the outset of Plan Colombia, oil production in this remote Amazon region had been declining for 20 years after reaching a high of some 80,000 barrels a day in 1980. And while production still remained at the relatively anemic level of 9,626 barrels a day in 2003, a slew of new contracts signed between multinational companies and the Colombian government over the past two years promise dramatic increases.

The remote municipality of Orito, where four oil pipelines interconnect, is the hub of Putumayo’s oil operations. Two pipelines carry oil from nearby fields currently being exploited by the state oil company Ecopetrol, U.S.-based Argosy Energy and Petrominerales, a subsidiary of Canada’s Petrobank. Another pipeline brings oil from the Ecuadoran Amazon where U.S.-based Occidental Petroleum and Canada’s EnCana have operations. The fourth is the Transandino pipeline, which transports oil from the other pipelines across the Andes to the port of Tumaco on Colombia’s Pacific coast.


http://www.nacla.org/art_display.php?art=2404

in Columbia. So sad. America of course, continues to fuel the violence in the name the drug war.

Human remains found at farm
More Anti-Government Paramilitaries Captured in Venezuela

Tuesday, May 11, 2004



....Six hundred bulletproof vests found

Six hundred bulletproof vests were found inside the house of National Guard Capitan Douglas Perez Perez in the wealthy eastern Caracas neighborhood of Prados del Este. According to Rodriguez, the vests are part of a lot that was supposed to be incinerated. Authorities will investigate why Capitan Perez was storing the vests in his house. Perez was under house arrest since May of 2003 after he was found guilty of smuggling Chinese immigrants into the country. Rodriguez said the vests were to be used by the paramilitaries.

According to the DISIP Director, the raids continue through the night and there will be important announcements made today. He said that there are several cells of this paramilitary group, "but all of those will be dismantled using the tools given to us by the Constitution."

A house belonging to former President Carlos Andres Perez, a fierce opponent of the Chavez government, was also searched. The house located in the wealthy neighborhood of Oripoto, is currently occupied by his former wife. "We were expecting this because we know that there rule of law does not prevail in Venezuela," said ex-president Perez in an interview from Miami with the opposition-aligned Union Radio network. Perez reiterated is belief that all peaceful means to oust Hugo Chavez have been exhausted, and that violence is necessary to achieve that goal. Perez declared to several media outlets that the capture of the paramilitaries was a hoax designed by Chavez to distract the people's attention from other issues facing his presidency.
(snip)

The remains of a dead man were found near the farm where the paramilitaries were concentrated. The body was not completely buried. Authorities believe that the man was forced to dig his own grave, as a pick was found buried.
(snip/)

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=1268

With more than 4,000 unionists killed during the past 15 years, Colombia is by far the most dangerous country in which to fight for workers' rights. In fact, three out of every five union leaders killed in 2000 were Colombian. The latest victim, Aury Sara, was killed by the AUC in northern Colombia after the right-wing death squad claimed he was affiliated with the rebel National Liberation Army (ELN). In February 2001, the AUC declared 104 unionists to be military targets for being "puppets of the guerrilla forces and traitors to the country." With Sara's killing, the paramilitaries have far exceeded the number on their announced death list.

Earlier this year, a Human Rights Watch report claimed that half of the Colombian army's active units are linked to right-wing death squads. It is these links that have caused the president of the United Steel Workers union, Leo Gerard, to openly criticize Washington's support for the Colombian Armed Forces, "We are strongly opposed to the amount of military aid being sent to the Colombian army when unionists and innocent people are being killed by the very military forces we are financing."