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Pastimes : Plan Colombia
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To: Tom Clarke who wrote (16)3/10/2003 2:13:30 PM
From: Thomas M.   of 49
 
<<< ... The collusion between the Colombian military and these private armies has led the Colombia Commission for Justice and Peace to label Colombian military and paramilitary forces "parastate" forces so as to diminish the alleged separation between these armed actors. This in turn is largely to counter the 'triangulation' of Colombian violence that is regularly portrayed in mainstream international media. This portrays the Colombian military as a neutral arbiter between the armed left (the FARC) and the armed right (the AUC), when in fact the Colombian military and paramilitaries are two sides of the same counterinsurgency coin.

These parastate forces are responsible for over 80 percent of all human rights abuses in Colombia. In the last fifteen years, an entire democratic leftist political party was eliminated by right-wing paramilitaries; 4000 activists were murdered in the 1980s; in 2002 over 8000 political assassinations were committed in Colombia with 80 percent of these murders committed by paramilitary groups; three out of four trade union activists murdered worldwide are killed by the Colombian paramilitaries whilst 2.7 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes. According to the UN, lecturers and teachers are "among the workers most often affected by killings, threats and violence-related displacement." Paramilitary groups also regularly target human rights activists, indigenous leaders, and community activists. This repression serves to criminalize any form of civil society resistance to US-led neo-liberal restructuring of Colombia's economy and stifle political and economic challenges to the Colombian status quo with Castano arguing that his paramilitaries "have always proclaimed that we are the defenders of business freedom and of the national and international industrial sectors". Amidst this repression over half of Colombia's population live in poverty according to the World Bank, with those most vulnerable being "children of all ages" ... >>>

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