U.S. Military Bases in Latin America and the Caribbean
Bush will pay terrorists, specifically the AUC of Colombia, with our money to destroy democratically elected Chavez of Venezuela for oil. #msg-3967170
-Am
Volume 9, Number 3 August 2004
By John Lindsay-Poland Editor: John Gershman, Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)
Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org
Key Points Military bases in Latin America and the Caribbean are an interlocking web that supports U.S. objectives for securing access to markets, controlling narcotics flow, and obtaining natural resources, especially oil. Although the United States has closed bases in Panama and Puerto Rico, it has opened an array of smaller bases throughout the region, including several that support U.S. operations in Colombia. Base operations and maintenance are increasingly being contracted to private companies.
The United States maintains a complex web of military facilities and functions in Latin America and the Caribbean, what the U.S. Southern Command (known as SouthCom) calls its “theater architecture.” U.S. military facilities represent tangible commitments to an ineffective supply-side drug war and to underlying policy priorities, including ensuring access to strategic resources, especially oil.
Much of this web is being woven through Plan Colombia, a massive, primarily military program to eradicate coca plants and to combat armed groups (mostly leftist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). In the last five years, new U.S. bases and military access agreements have proliferated in Latin America, constituting a decentralization of the U.S. military presence in the region. This decentralization is Washington’s way of maintaining a broad military foothold while accommodating regional leaders’ reluctance to host large U.S. military bases or complexes.
After the U.S. military withdrawal from Panama in 1999, military troops and commands were reconcentrated in Puerto Rico, adding fuel to a nonviolent mass movement to throw the Navy out of its bombing range in Vieques, Puerto Rico. On May 1, 2003, the Navy vacated the Vieques range (though it remains in federal hands) and followed in March 2004 by closing the massive Roosevelt Roads Naval Station. Regional headquarters for the Army, Navy, and Special Forces have moved out of Puerto Rico to Texas and Florida; headquarters of SouthCom (the joint command) is located in Miami.
The Navy continues to operate an “outer range” of nearly 200,000 square miles to practice high-tech naval maneuvers, an underwater tracking range for submarines, and an electronic warfare range in waters near Vieques. The ranges are used by the Navy and by military contractors to test sophisticated ships and weapon systems. The Army also has access to a large National Guard firing range, Camp Santiago, in Salinas, Puerto Rico.
In addition, the Pentagon is investing in expanded infrastructure in the region, with four military bases in Manta, Ecuador; Aruba; Curacao; and Comalapa, El Salvador, known as “cooperative security locations,” or CSLs. These CSLs are leased facilities established to conduct counternarcotics monitoring and interdiction operations. Washington has signed ten-year agreements with Ecuador, the Netherlands (for Aruba and Curacao), and El Salvador and has funded the renovation of air facilities in Ecuador, Aruba, and Curacao. SouthCom also operates some 17 radar sites, mostly in Peru and Colombia, each typically staffed by about 35 personnel.
The CSL and radar facilities monitor the skies and waters of the region and are key to increased surveillance operations in Washington’s Andean drug war. “The majority of assets available to us are focused on the tactical fight in Colombia,” SouthCom chief General Hill said in March 2004. Approved by the short-lived government of Ecuadorean President Jamil Mahuad in November 1999, the base in Manta hosts up to 475 U.S. personnel.
All of the above is in addition to existing bases, including a missile tracking station on Ascension Island in the Caribbean, housing up to 200 U.S. personnel, and Soto Cano in Palmerola, Honduras, which since 1984 has provided support for training and helicopter sorties. Furthermore, the United States has small military presences and property in Antigua, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and on Andros Island in the Bahamas. The U.S. military had used offices in Venezuela for more than 50 years but was evicted from the site in May 2004.
Guantánamo Bay Naval Station, which enjoys a lease with no termination date, serves as a logistics base for counterdrug operations and, increasingly, as an off-shore detention center.
The Pentagon is moving to shift much of the operation and maintenance of its military bases to private, for-profit contractors. For example, the Air Force contracted the operation of its Manta base to Dyncorp, and even “host-nation riders” who accompany military flights over Colombia are “outsourced” to a private U.S. military contractor.
In Panama, all U.S. military forces left the country, and bases were closed at the end of 1999 in accordance with the Panama Canal treaties. But the Pentagon continues to enjoy access for military flights into and out of Panama on a contract to transport cargo and passengers daily between Honduras, Panama, and dirt strips in Colombia. In June 2002 the United States signed an agreement with Costa Rica for an International Law Enforcement Academy, but popular movements have so far prevented the pact’s ratification.
Bases belonging to Latin American militaries but built or used by U.S. soldiers, such as the Joint Peruvian Riverine Training Center in Iquitos, Peru, are not considered U.S. bases but often serve similar purposes. The up to 800 U.S. military and contract personnel operating at any given time in Colombia are also housed at nominally Colombian bases. The Bush administration in March 2004 announced its intention to increase the cap for such personnel to 1,400.
Problems with Current U.S. Policy Key Problems Bases represent a commitment of resources that could otherwise be used for constructive social and environmental programs. U.S. military installations operate in a legal limbo; military personnel are not accountable to local law, and there is little transparency. The United States is using its base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to circumvent international law regarding prisoners of war. Military bases overseas often leave behind ecological damage, since there are no mechanisms to require environmental cleanup.
The soldiers and contract employees that the U.S. military deploys to bases in Latin America and the Caribbean far outnumber the staffs of U.S. civilian agencies in the region. The presence of more than 10,000 U.S. personnel on military missions abroad sends a message that the United States prefers force over diplomacy to settle the region’s problems, including problems that involve conflict with the United States. In addition to their role in facilitating military operations, U.S. bases are a symbol of Washington’s history of armed intervention and of its use of local armies to control the region’s people and resources. Several U.S. bases in the Caribbean were explicitly acquired, not by mutual agreement but through conquests in the 1898 Spanish-American-Cuban War.
Besides evoking the past, the bases are contracted into a future beyond any articulated military mission. Plan Colombia was originally envisioned as a two-year push into guerrilla-occupied southern territories, with vague plans for subsequent years. In contrast, the Pentagon has ten-year leases in Ecuador, Curacao, and Aruba and a presence in perpetuity at its naval base in Guantánamo. This permanent infrastructure generates inequitable relations and invites intervention instead of negotiation in a crisis situation, as it did in Panama and Puerto Rico (historically, the sites for other long-term U.S. bases in the region).
The cooperative security locations, purportedly created to monitor drug traffic, have no mechanism for transparency or monitoring by civil society in the host countries and are thus subject to other missions. This is especially disturbing in light of the expansion of U.S. objectives in Colombia to include “counterterrorism.” As early as 1999, a State Department official said that “the new counternarcotics bases located in Ecuador, Aruba and Curacao will be strategic points for closely following the steps of the [Colombian] guerrillas.” Aircraft from the Manta base were even used to locate and detain a fishing boat carrying Ecuadoreans who were suspected of planning to enter the United States.
Similarly, the mission for troops at Guantanamo Bay has morphed from orchestrating counterdrug operations to providing an off-shore jail for migrants and, since late 2001, prisoners of war. These operations have no accountability under U.S. or international law and undermine Cuba’s sovereignty.
The dramatically increased U.S. military involvement in Colombia and the spillover of conflict in the border region have generated alarm among broad sectors of Ecuadorean society—including the military—over the potentially destabilizing role of the Manta base. One Ecuadorean officer points out that the base’s electronic intelligence capability provides information that can be used by Colombian counterinsurgency units trained by the United States. Other opponents of the U.S. presence note that Ecuador’s Congress never considered or approved the base agreement, as the Ecuadorean Constitution requires. Many also object to provisions exempting U.S. on-duty military personnel from Ecuadorean criminal jurisdiction.
The cooperative security location in Comalapa, El Salvador, operated by the Navy since 2000, has no limit on the number of U.S. personnel, who have access to ports, air space, and unspecified government installations considered pertinent. In 2001, the opposition FMLN party argued that the agreement affects Salvadoran sovereignty and thus requires more than a simple majority vote by the legislature for ratification, but this claim was rejected by Salvadoran courts.
In Puerto Rico, the remaining military bases have additional political functions. On an island where the FBI has compiled 1.8 million documents based on surveillance of independence proponents and other political activists, the presence of U.S. military bases plays a significant role in enforcing Puerto Rican identification with Washington, thus contributing to continued colonialism.
Similar problems of sovereignty dog the proposed International Law Enforcement Academy, which—despite its name—is designed to be completely under U.S. control. Costa Rica would have to give diplomatic immunity to academy staff at a time when the United States is aggressively opting out of the International Criminal Court. As Gustavo Cabrera Vega of Service for Peace and Justice, a Costa Rican human rights group, asks, “If the United States doesn’t recognize the universal human rights conventions, with what authority will it train and give skills [to others] to combat international crime?” With Costa Ricans balking at agreement, Washington is considering other sites, including El Salvador and the Dominican Republic.
The outsourcing to private companies of air transport, base construction and maintenance, the host-nation rider program, and other military activities overseas diminishes the information available to those who would monitor such activities and decreases the accountability for U.S.-sponsored actions abroad. Only after an enterprising reporter discovered an Internet-posted request for proposals did Panamanian civil society learn that the Pentagon had been using airstrips in Panama for “transportation services” into and out of Colombia, even after U.S. troops had left Panama. The 1997 contract tapped Evergreen Helicopters, a company with clandestine experience in the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama.
Many military bases in Latin America—like those in the United States and elsewhere—are leaving a devastating environmental legacy. In Vieques, studies have found high rates of cadmium, lead, mercury, uranium, and other contaminants in the soil, food chain, and human bodies of the island’s inhabitants. These toxins have lead to elevated rates of disease among Vieques residents, who have a 26.9 percent higher incidence of cancer than other Puerto Ricans. Despite Superfund designation, Vieques remains a very contaminated island. In Panama, the military left behind more than 100,000 rounds of unexploded ordnance on firing ranges in the canal area, despite a Canal Treaty provision for removing such dangers. Nearby construction of a new bridge and road will bring an influx of workers and occupants, who will be exposed to these hazards.
Yet U.S. bases abroad present special problems for environmental cleanup, because sovereignty is always at issue. Once the Pentagon is gone, the United States abandons jurisdiction, thereby shirking responsibility for the contamination its military has caused.
Toward a New Foreign Policy Key Recommendations The United States should adopt a doctrine of hemispheric relations that redirects resources from military installations toward social programs. Short of such a foundational shift, base agreements should require specific missions, fixed periods, discussion by civil society, and approval by U.S. and host-nation legislatures. Environmental justice requires assuming responsibility and dedicating funding for cleanup of contamination on U.S. bases abroad.
To live up to its democratic ideals, the United States should adopt a new security doctrine for relations with Latin America and the Caribbean. Such a doctrine would value ties with civilians more than ties with the military and would promote civil society as the sphere where democratic decisionmaking must occur. This approach would dedicate more resources to addressing the economic causes of conflict rather than building installations designed for the use of force. It would also commit the United States to transparency about the purposes, activities, and effects of existing U.S. military bases in the region.
U.S. military facilities represent tangible commitments to underlying policies that are either outmoded, as in the case of Cuba, or perniciously expansionist. According to SouthCom, the command briefing guiding the Army’s military presence in the region highlights access to strategic resources in South America—especially oil—as well as other issues with social and political roots, such as immigration and narcotics. A rational U.S. security doctrine would redirect resources invested in military bases to civilian agencies whose mandate is to address such social and political problems, including nongovernmental organizations, local and regional agencies of the hemisphere’s governments, and programs of the United Nations. Such a focus shift would imply changes in U.S. drug policy and would redirect military and police assistance both toward alternative crop and other development projects in the Andes and toward drug treatment and health programs in the United States.
Short of such a re-examination of the policy foundations for military bases in the region, the United States should review existing agreements for foreign bases using democratic criteria. Bases should not be maintained or established without broad consultation with and agreement of the civil societies and legislatures of the countries in which the bases are located. Without such consultation and agreement, these bases represent a usurpation of democratic control within the host society. Objectionable contract provisions, such as broad U.S. military access to the host-nation’s ports and air space, diplomatic immunity for U.S. military personnel, and prohibitions against access or inspections by local authorities, should be deleted. Bases should only be established for fixed periods of time, should have clearly defined missions, and should require renewal by both U.S. and host congresses.
The United States should also not attempt either to establish military access or to conduct controversial military missions through private contract outsourcing. In Panama, the United States should honor the substance of the Neutrality Treaty, which forbids stationing U.S. soldiers and bases in Panama, and should refrain from using local airstrips for military sorties by either U.S. military or contract aircraft.
To ensure transparency and accountability to host countries, base agreements should be amended to give both the public health and environmental officials of host nations and representatives of communities affected by U.S. bases the authority to inspect all base facilities on short notice.
To address environmental problems generated at U.S. military bases in Latin America as well as in other regions, the United States should recognize its responsibility, and Congress should establish an Overseas Defense Environmental Restoration Account. The account should provide for cleanup of both existing and former U.S. bases abroad—to at least the same standards established for domestic U.S. military bases—and should fund adequate study of contaminated lands and waters.
Regarding Vieques, Congress should appropriate enough funds for a complete cleanup. The Navy and the Environmental Protection Agency should implement a thorough cleanup of Vieques and of the former bombing range in neighboring Culebra, since both sites have been approved for inclusion on the Superfund National Priorities List. The Navy should also settle claims by island residents seeking compensation for damages to their health and environment. Similarly, policy-makers ought to heed the repeated appeals by Panama to remove the thousands of explosives left in firing ranges in the canal area. Such measures of environmental responsibility would demonstrate leadership that is sorely needed.
John Lindsay-Poland is coordinator of the Fellowship of Reconciliation Task Force on Latin America & the Caribbean.
Resources for More Information Organizations Acción Andina Casilla 5471 Cochabamba, Bolivia Voice: 011 591-42-52401 Email: andina@albatros.cnb.net
Center for International Policy 1717 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Suite 801 Washington, DC 20036 Voice: (202) 232-3317 Fax: (202) 232-3440 Email: cip@ciponline.org Website: http://www.ciponline.org/
Fellowship of Reconciliation 2017 Mission St. #305 San Francisco, CA 94110 Voice: (415) 495-6334 Fax: (415) 495-5628 Email: forlatam@igc.org Website: http://www.forusa.org/
Websites Drugs & Democracy http://www.tni.org/drugs/ This news list focuses on drugs and militarization in Latin America and frequently includes information on the U.S. military presence.
Puerto Rico/Colombia Update The Fellowship of Reconciliation’s newsletters and reports offer news and analysis on U.S. bases in Panama and Puerto Rico at: <http://www.forusa.org/programs/tflac/tflac.html>.
Transnational Institute, “Forward Operating Locations in Latin America: Transcending Drug Control,” Drugs and Conflict Debate Papers, no. 8, September 2003 at: <http://www.tni.org/reports/drugs/debate8.pdf>.
Bush is considering how to support the government of Colombia's efforts to demobilize the AUC with taxpayer money even though Colin Powell declared the AUC a terrorist organization on September 10, 2001, and in spite of the fact that Castaño, former leader of the AUC, now in Israel is wanted for extradition to the US on charges of cocaine trafficking.
The US has covertly supported the overthrow of Hugo Chavez to that end it is expected that Colombia will send troops at US insistence, possibly alongside US marines or Special Forces, or AUC units replete with Colombian soldiers.
Bush wants Chavez out, the AUC is one of the means mentioned to take Chavez out and Bush would like the AUC, terrorist organization par excellence, to be supported by US taxpayers. #msg-3967170
Now in a very curious announcement it appears the AUC who last week adamantly opposed the idea of joining the Colombian army will not join the army in battles against the nation's left-wing rebels according to an AUC proposal, but instead the paramilitary negotiators suggested they perform patrol duties and intelligence gathering.
Since the AUC was originally targeted by the US to assist in the downfall of Chavez the patrol duties and intelligence gathering will most probably be directed against Chavez and Venezuela.
Its no wonder Venezuela is loading up on military hardware. #msg-4374949
-Am
Colombia: Paramilitaries to join army?
Bogota, Colombia, Oct. 27 (UPI) -- Colombia's largest paramilitary group suggested their demobilized troops join the nation's army, El Tiempo newspaper reported Wednesday.
The right-wing United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, is set to demobilize 3,000 of its 20,000 troops by the end of the year.
The demobilized AUC troops would not join the Colombian army in battles against the nation's left-wing rebels, according to an AUC proposal. Instead the paramilitary negotiators suggested they perform patrol duties and intelligence gathering.
Last week AUC troops adamantly opposed the idea of joining the army, making Wednesday's announcement appear somewhat curious to Colombian officials.
The ongoing peace negotiations between President Alvaro Uribe and the AUC have experienced their share of snags in recent months -- such as repeated cease-fire violations -- but reached a surprising agreement earlier this month regarding the decommissioning of 3,000 troops.
Many, however, express doubt the AUC will actually lay down their arms. In exchange for peace, the paramilitaries are demanding amnesty and immunity from extradition to the United States, where many AUC leaders are wanted on drug charges.
The problem, say human rights organizations, is that Uribe is not fighting the AUC - his government is negotiating with them, while refusing to talk with the guerillas. Rights advocates cite reports of collaboration between the AUC and Colombia's military, although they have been officially denied. Targets of AUC's terror have included not only guerillas, but union oil workers opposing Uribe's privatization plan, Indians demanding their constitutional right to local autonomy and non-involvement in the war, and - as in the recent Putumayo massacre - peasants simply trying to survive.
Bush will pay terrorists, specifically the AUC, with our taxpayer money to destroy democratically elected Chavez of Venezuela for oil and those who oppose privatization of Colombia’s oil. #msg-4239182 #msg-4550062 #msg-3967170
This is why Bush so loves democracy. It’s the best of all ways to rape a country and steal its assets. #msg-1197170
Leaks from the state department's "future of Iraq" office show Washington plans to privatize the Iraqi economy and particularly the state-owned national oil company. Experts on its energy panel want to start with "downstream" assets like retail petrol stations. This would be a quick way to gouge money from Iraqi consumers. Later they would privatize exploration and development.
Iraq’s oil industry is a government-run monopoly, the State Oil Marketing Organization, controls the production, processing and sale of Iraqi crude. Some U.S. officials want to dismantle the monopoly and privatize Iraq's oil industry. They argue this would boost efficiency and ensure investment opportunities for private businesses, including multinational companies from the United States.
Even if majority ownership were restricted to Iraqis, Russia's grim experience of energy privatization shows how a new class of oil magnates quickly send their profits to offshore banks. If the interests of all Iraqis are to be protected, it would be better to keep state control. http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0331-08.htm
-Am
Oil Makes U.S. Raise Military Stakes in Colombia
by Bill Weinberg Friday, November 26, 2004 by the Long Island, NY Newsday
President George W. Bush's quick stop in Colombia on his return from the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Chile on Monday brought this forgotten front in Washington's war on terrorism briefly into the headlines. Bush promised Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe - his closest South American ally - to boost aid for his military campaign against leftist guerillas.
Just two weeks earlier, 100 unarmed peasants were killed in a massacre reportedly by rightist paramilitary troops in Colombia's southern jungle province of Putumayo. Unlike the Bush visit, this failed to make headlines here.
Colombia has received $3.3 billion in U.S. aid since 2000 - making it the top recipient after the Middle East. In October, Congress approved doubling the Pentagon's troop presence in Colombia to 800 - although they are officially barred from combat.
The Iraq war may have knocked Colombia off the front page, but Mideast chaos has made South America's energy resources more strategic to the United States. Colombia itself is among the top 15 global suppliers to the United States, and Uribe hopes to privatize the country's oil industry as part of his push to join President Bush's Free Trade Area of the Americas. Venezuela, bordering Colombia, is the fourth-largest U.S. supplier after Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Canada. Venezuela's populist leader Hugo Chavez is himself a White House target for Western hemisphere "regime change" - as seen by the current push for sanctions.
Meanwhile, the oil industry has charted a new thrust into the Amazon regions of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia - countries all now receiving U.S. military aid under the Andean Regional Initiative, the Bush administration's expansion of President Bill Clinton's "Plan Colombia."
The White House has now dropped the fiction that Plan Colombia is an anti-drug operation. A post-9/11 $28.9 billion supplemental anti-terrorism package allowed U.S. military aid to be targeted against groups on the State Department's terrorist list - including both Colombia's two leftist rebel groups, as well as the rightist paramilitary network known as the United Colombian Self-Defense Forces (AUC), which is responsible for the vast majority of massacres and atrocities, according to groups like Amnesty International.
The problem, say human rights organizations, is that Uribe is not fighting the AUC - his government is negotiating with them, while refusing to talk with the guerillas. Rights advocates cite reports of collaboration between the AUC and Colombia's military, although they have been officially denied. Targets of AUC's terror have included not only guerillas, but union oil workers opposing Uribe's privatization plan, Indians demanding their constitutional right to local autonomy and non-involvement in the war, and - as in the recent Putumayo massacre - peasants simply trying to survive.
One beneficiary of the increasing troop presence in Colombia is Occidental Petroleum, known colloquially as "Oxy." The United States is training and equipping a Colombian army brigade to protect Oxy's 480-mile pipeline linking the oil fields of Arauca province with the Caribbean. Arauca, the heart of Oxy's operations, hosts the greatest concentration of U.S. military advisers and has Colombia's worst human rights situation.
Oxy is also building a new pipeline over the Andes to get oil from Ecuador's Amazon to Pacific ports, while in Peru, Hunt Oil and Halliburton have launched a massive natural gas project in the Amazon, with a new pipeline to the Pacific. And in Bolivia, a consortium including Shell hopes to build a pipeline linking natural gas fields to a terminal on the Chilean coast. In each case, the protests by peasants and Indians charging illegal land grabs and pollution have been violently broken by security forces. Last November, Bolivia's government was brought down following weeks of protests over the gas pipeline plan.
With leftist governments in power in Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, securing the oil and gas resources of the region is more critical than ever for Washington. But the United States may be on a proverbial slippery slope to a second counter-insurgency quagmire - this one in our own hemisphere.
Bill Weinberg, author of "Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Movements in Mexico" (Verso, 2000), is currently working on a book on Plan Colombia.
Venezuela seizes Colombian missile parts heading for Israel
Note: (narconews.com, eltiempo.com) suggest that Colombian war criminal Carlos Castaño, former leader of the AUC, is in Israel. He may have been aided in his escape by the US government, even though Colin Powell declared the AUC a terrorist organization on September 10, 2001, and in spite of the fact that Castaño is wanted for extradition to the US on charges of cocaine trafficking.
The AUC is a terrorist army.
If there’s another attempt to overthrow Venezuela’s Chavez it is expected that Colombia will send troops at US insistence, possibly alongside US marines or Special Forces, or AUC units replete with Colombian soldiers. #msg-3967170
-Am
Venezuela seizes Colombian missile parts Reuters Jun 8, 2005, 10:05
CARACAS, Venezuela: Venezuelan police seized a cargo of Colombian warplane missile components being transported to Israel and detained a warehouse manager employed by the German air freight company Lufthansa Cargo, officials said Tuesday.
"Some of these missile parts contained nitrogen which make their transport dangerous," Venezuelan Information Minister Andres Izarra said.
The seizure comes at a time when relations between Venezuela and Colombia, which share a long common frontier, have been strained in the past years by border disputes and rows over security.
Venezuelan authorities were investigating the cargo which was intercepted in transit at the weekend at Caracas' Simon Bolivar airport.
Colombia's air force, which had sent the parts, said they were non-explosive missile electrical components which it was delivering to a company in Israel for maintenance.
Izarra corrected an earlier public announcement by the office of Venezuela's attorney general, which had reported that five warplane "missiles" had been found late Saturday in a container at Lufthansa Cargo's warehouse at the airport.
In a statement, Lufthansa Cargo confirmed that one of its Venezuelan employees had been detained.
"This seems to have happened due to transportation of sensitive pieces of freight. Lufthansa Cargo only transports freight respecting IATA (International Air Transport Association) and government regulations," the statement said.
The Colombian air force said in its statement released by Colombia's embassy in Caracas that the seized items "were not dangerous for transport by air because they were electrical parts which do not contain any explosive component."
Lufthansa representatives said they were cooperating with the Venezuelan authorities in the investigation.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez often complains that Colombia's government does not do enough to stop a four-decades-old war against leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitaries from spilling over the border.
Colombia and the United States have accused left-winger Chavez of sheltering the rebels, a charge he denies.
Investigation called for Bush’s AUC terrorist group
Bush is considering how to support the government of Colombia's efforts to demobilize the AUC with taxpayer money even though Colin Powell declared the AUC a terrorist organization on September 10, 2001, and in spite of the fact that Castaño, former leader of the AUC, now in Israel is wanted for extradition to the US on charges of cocaine trafficking.
The US has covertly supported the overthrow of Hugo Chavez to that end it is expected that Colombia will send troops at US insistence, possibly alongside US marines or Special Forces, or AUC units replete with Colombian soldiers.
Bush wants Chavez out, the AUC is one of the means mentioned to take Chavez out and Bush would like the AUC, terrorist organization par excellence, to be supported by US taxpayers. #msg-3967170
The Police Commandos are in large part the brainchild of another US counter-insurgency veteran, Steven Casteel, a former top DEA man who has been acting as the senior advisor in the Ministry of the Interior. Casteel was involved in the hunt for Colombia’s notorious cocaine baron Pablo Escobar, during which the DEA collaborated with a paramilitary organization known as Los Pepes, which later transformed itself into the AUC, an umbrella organization covering all of Colombia’s paramilitary death squads. (http://cocaine.org/colombia/pablo-escobar.html ; http://www.ciponline.org/colombia/040105isac.htm ).
-Am
Colombia: Group wants AUC investigation By UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL Published June 29, 2005
BOGOTA, Colombia -- Human rights activists are calling for an investigation into alleged abuses by Colombia's paramilitaries.
The right-wing soldiers committed 2,000 individual human rights violations since 2002, asserts the International Federation of Human Rights, EL Tiempo reported Wednesday in its online edition.
The IFHR wants the International Criminal Court to investigate the abuse charges.
Colombian civilians are often caught in battles between leftist rebels the right-wing United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, a war that leaves an estimated 3,500 dead a year.
The Colombian government is currently negotiating a disarmament treaty with the AUC that critics say is too lenient and lets those who have committed countless killings and rights violations go free.
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