Colombia This Week

23/03/2007

Fri 16- Threatened journalist leaves Colombia; UN human rights report blames government.

• In a statement appeared in its website, Caracol radio reports that journalist Dario Arizmendi ‘has left the country for security reasons’. According to the Agency France press, the FARC claimed the director of the daily radio programme was ‘partial in favour of the government’ in his reporting of the exchange of prisoners between the Colombian government and this armed group, El Tiempo reports.
• The UN report on human rights blames the Colombian government for an increase in forced displacement of civilians last year. The internally displaced population in Colombia, at close to 3 million people, is one of the largest in the world. Colombia also has one of the largest populations of child combatants in the world; a majority of those children are recruited by the FARC. The report blames this armed group for the regular use of landmines and other indiscriminate weapons. Both the FARC and the ELN continue to engage in hostage-taking. The report says the paramilitary process presents serious problems and could easily result in widespread impunity for crimes against humanity and the legitimization of paramilitaries’ mafia-like power. The report says that serious questions surround the Colombian government’s implementation of the Justice and Peace Law, including whether paramilitary commanders will serve their dramatically reduced sentences in prisons or under house arrest and whether paramilitaries will be pressed to tell the full truth about their activities. Several victims’ representatives and potential witnesses against the paramilitaries have been killed in recent months, and the government has established no meaningful witness protection plan, the report concludes, Relief web reports.
• Four officials from the Medellin-based Army’s Fourth Brigade have been sentenced to 50 years in prison after being found guilty of the forced disappearance of a business man in the municipality of Bello, (Antioquia), in June last year. The military men belonged to the elite GAULA group - the anti-kidnapping unit of the Colombian Army, Caracol radio reports.

Sat 17- Journalists meet in Cartagena; UN food programme welcome donors for IDPs in borders.

• At the start of its annual conference, celebrated this year in Cartagena, the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) reported on press freedoms from members across the Americas. In the past decade, Colombia has been the third most dangerous country for journalists after Iraq and Russia, with 72 journalists killed, according to the Brussels-based International News Safety Institute. However, no journalist has been killed in Colombia in the past six months, the Washington Post reports.
• The UN World Food Programme (WFP) announced a contribution of US$ 395,000 by the Government of Spain that will allow the UN agency to continue providing humanitarian assistance to almost 8,000 Colombians who have fled the conflict in their home country to Ecuador. Refugees entering Ecuador are concentrated in the border provinces of Esmeraldas, Sucumbíos, Carchi, Imbabura and Pichincha, Reuters reports.

Sun 18 – US names new Ambassador in Colombia; Colombia may request extraditions form US;

·         US President George Bush nominated William R. Brownfield, of Texas, to be the new US Ambassador to Colombia. Ambassador Brownfield, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, currently serves as US Ambassador to Venezuela. Prior to this he served as Ambassador in Chile. Earlier in his career, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the Department of State, The US Embassy in Bogota reports.

·         President Uribe says he favours the extradition to Colombia of executives of US banana producer Chiquita after the company's admission that it paid Colombian right-wing death squads more than $1.7 million. "That would be normal. Extradition should be from here to there and from there to here," Uribe said, according to Associated Press.

Mon 19 – Bill Gates promotes PCs in Colombia; Chiquita’s scandal repercussions widens.

• While visiting Cartagena, Microsoft boss Bill Gates is helping to set up computer learning centres in areas where demobilised paramilitaries are in need of job training. The company said it was donating US $1million over three years to set up nine training centres in some of the Colombia's most conflictive regions. The Colombia training centres, first announced last October, have yet to open. The government and Microsoft also signed two agreements stressing Uribe's strong commitment to Microsoft products at a time other countries in the region are promoting the non-proprietary Linux operating system, Associated Press reports.
• New information has been disclosed in the US press related to Chiquita’s involvement in Colombia’s conflict.  In November 2001, Israeli arms dealers illegally shipped 3,000 AK-47 assault rifles and 2.5 million rounds of ammunition into Colombia for the AUC through a port facility operated by Banadex, a Chiquita subsidiary. Chiquita was not charged in that incident. In a statement sent to CNN on Friday, Chiquita said: "The issues [of the payments to the AUC and the contraband weapons] are unrelated." The AUC and affiliated death squads have killed thousands of union activists, leftist politicians and civilians suspected of being leftist sympathizers in and around the banana-growing regions where Chiquita operated. Chiquita sold Banadex in 2004. But according to the main Colombian banana workers' union SINTRAINAGRO, Chiquita still buys more than 3 million 45-pound boxes of bananas each week from plantations in the Uraba and Magdalena regions, Associated Press reports.
• The Colombian peso reached its strongest level against the dollar in more than six years. The strong local currency has hurt major exporters including flower and coffee growers; new finance minister Oscar Zuluaga said after being sworn in this month that Colombian businesses and consumers would have to "learn to live with a strong peso", Associated Press reports.

Tue 20- Witness unravels government-paramilitary ties; Attorney seeks 8 in Chiquita payments.

• In an interview from the La Picota jail in Bogota where he is serving a sentence, Rafael Garcia, the star witness for prosecutors investigating the links between paramilitaries and government officials, predicts that he’ll soon be murdered. "As long as I'm in a Colombian jail, my death is only a matter of time". He recently wrote to the Attorney General saying that “he would withhold further testimony unless the state offers him, his wife and their son more protection. US authorities are also interested in hearing from Garcia. His cooperation is considered important to understanding drug trafficking through Venezuela and alleged support from US corporations for paramilitary groups. In 2002, Garcia was among those who helped orchestrate what he calls a "massive electoral fraud" that enabled paramilitary groups to put handpicked candidates into Congress. Those congressmen, close allies of the Uribe administration, helped approve a law that the United Nations criticized as overly generous to paramilitary commanders. Last May, the country's Constitutional Court struck down several articles of the law, ending some concessions shielding the warlords, the Washington Post reports.
• Colombia's attorney general announces he will demand the extradition of eight people allegedly involved with Chiquita's payments to right-wing paramilitaries and leftist rebels in a region where it had profitable banana-growing operations. He is also looking for full disclosure about the case and would investigate possible links to another case from 2001, in which weapons and ammunition were smuggled into Colombia.

Weds 21 – Trade unionist murders soar to 84 last year; US Congressmen against aid to Colombia

• Eighty four trade unionists were murdered in Colombia last year, making it the most dangerous country in the world for union activists, according to a report published yesterday. Teachers and agricultural workers were most at risk, said the report, which also found a 20% increase in such murders compared with 2005. Few culprits have been prosecuted according to the reports by the UK-based Justice for Colombia campaign group. Rightwing paramilitaries are alleged to be responsible for the majority of the killings, which are used to intimidate union activists and opponents of privatisation, The Guardian reports.
• US Congressman and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Ike Skelton urges the Bush administration to rethink US financial support for Colombia's fight against drug trafficking, which he said has yielded few dividends. “We have spent over four billion dollars since 1999 to stem the flow of illegal drugs into our country and aid the Colombians in their fight against home-grown terrorists, but according to the latest figures from the Justice Department, the supply and purity of illicit narcotics on our streets has not changed much in the last years," the Democratic lawmaker said during a hearing of top US military commanders from around the globe. Skelton added that the US administration should also be troubled by a raging scandal linking Colombia's top officials with the paramilitary movement. "The administration of President Uribe is currently embroiled in a criminal investigation into a widespread conspiracy between government officials and leaders of the terrorist paramilitaries" Skelton said, according to France Press
• The Colombian Supreme Court of Justice has condemned an army official to nine years in jail for colluding with paramilitary groups. In the sentence the Court said Mayor Alvaro Cortez Murillo, who was in command of the Army’s Fourth Brigade operating in Antioquia in 1998, coordinated its activities with the paramilitary group that killed trade unionists, suspected guerrillas, indigents, drug addicts and prostitutes in La Ceja and other municipalities of Antioquia, Caracol Radio reports.

Thurs 22- Ombudsman reports robbery;  fresh threats in San Jose de Apartado.

• Arturo Zea, Regional Ombudsman from the department of Bolivar reported that a burglary had occurred in the premises of the Ombudsman office in Cartagena. According to the report items taken included the CPUs of the computers holding the testimonies of a group of 70 victims of paramilitary violence. This information was gathered from the victims last January in the audiences organised by the authorities as part of the Justice and Peace process against the AUC commanders in this department. Some other 10,000 denunciations of abuses committed by the armed groups, and of human rights violations, have also disappeared from the computers, El Tiempo reports.
• Requesting immediate action Jesuit priest Javier Giraldo has alerted the Colombian authorities of the existence of a group of active paramilitaries in the region of Uraba that are reportedly planning a massacre in the peace community of San Jose de Apartado. According to the information, a group of former demobilised militia members from the FARC are patrolling the area in Apartado under the name of the Black Eagles battalion, Caracol radio reports.
• The Attorney General Mario Iguaran announced that his office had opened an investigation into allegations that US-based coal producer Drummond. collaborated with paramilitaries to kill union members. A civil lawsuit in the US makes similar allegations, which the company has denied. A Colombian union, Sintramienergetica, sued Drummond in 2002 in the US with help from the United Steelworkers of America, blaming the company for the paramilitary killings of three union leaders at the company's mine in northern Colombia in 2001. "What we're seeing is some private businesses that recruit the [paramilitaries], aware of their conduct, to kill," said Iguaran, RCN radio reports.

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