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BOLIVIA: GAS BILL ADVANCES, PROTESTS PARALYZE COUNTRY

by Weekly News Update on the Americas

DEPUTIES PASS GAS BILL

On March 15, with virtually all of Bolivia’s cities shut down by road blockades on the first day of a 48-hour national strike, Bolivian president Carlos Mesa Gisbert announced he would present the legislature with a proposal calling new general elections for Aug. 28, 2005. Mesa complained that the growing wave of protests and roadblocks was making the country ungovernable. Nine days earlier, on March 6, Mesa had presented his resignation under similar circumstances, but Congress rejected it. (La Republica, Lima, March 17, 18; Los Tiempos de Cochabamba, March 16; Centro de Documentacion e Informacion de Bolivia [CEDIB], March 17; El Diario, La Paz, March 18; La Razon, La Paz, March 16)

On March 9, Mesa had asked the Bolivian attorney general’s office to order district prosecutors to arrest protesters; the prosecutors refused, saying in a joint statement that it is not their job to intervene in social conflicts. On March 17, the attorney general’s office ratified that decision, while at the same time agreeing to launch an investigation into the protest organizers. (CEDIB, March 17; ED, March 18; Servicio de Informacion Indigena [SERVINDI], March 15)

Mesa’s March 15 call for new elections came as Bolivia’s Chamber of Deputies was in the midst of a heated and lengthy final debate over a controversial new hydrocarbons law. The Chamber’s economic commission had recommended a version of the law backed by Bolivia’s social movements, which would grant the state 50% of royalties from all hydrocarbons production; Mesa had proposed an alternative under which the state would maintain its 18% share of royalties while imposing a 32% "complementary tax on hydrocarbons" (ICH). Mesa insisted his proposal would add up to the same 50%, but critics complain that the ICH tax would be imposed gradually over time, and could be offset by tax credits and deductions.

In the pre-dawn hours of March 16, after 12 hours of debate, the lower house voted 47-36 to approve a compromise version of the bill proposed by Chamber of Deputies president Mario Cossio. The new version would maintain the 18% royalties and create a 32% "direct tax on hydrocarbons production" (IDPH), to be imposed immediately and with no deductions or loopholes. The bill now goes to Bolivia’s Senate. (La Republica, March 17; LTdC, March 16; CEDIB, March 17; ED, March 18; La Razon, March 16)

Deputies from the Movement to Socialism (MAS) and the Indigenous Pachacuti Movement (MIP) voted against the compromise bill, along with a few legislators from the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) and the New Republican Force (NFR). The remaining MIR, MNR and NFR deputies voted for the bill. (LT, March 16) Still, MAS deputy and campesino leader Evo Morales Ayma said he was moderately satisfied with the legislation, although he insisted that "the struggle will continue in the National Senate" to achieve the 50% in royalties.

Mesa, on the other hand, immediately announced he would refuse to sign the version passed by the Chamber of Deputies unless it undergoes revisions. (La Republica, March 17) Two oil and gas companies with major investments in Bolivia–the Spanish-Argentine Repsol-YPF and the Brazilian state company Petrobras–also expressed their displeasure with the bill. On March 20, the Bolivian Chamber of Hydrocarbons, a petroleum industry business group, chimed in, calling the bill "regressive and counterproductive," and saying it would effectively constitute "a confiscation" of private investments. If the Senate makes changes to the bill, the revised version would go to a vote in a plenary session of the full legislature. (AFP, March 20; La Jornada, Mexico, March 19)

At a March 16 press conference, Evo Morales and Bolivian Workers Central (COB) executive secretary Jaime Solares announced that the country’s social, labor and political movements would temporarily suspend their protest blockades, but would resume mobilizations as soon as the Senate begins considering the new law. While criticizing the political coalition that passed the compromise version, Morales said the bill contains a number of strong points which must be defended in the Senate against Mesa’s attempts to remove them: it would guarantee state ownership of all hydrocarbons; force companies with existing contracts to submit to the new provisions; reestablish the state oil company, Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales de Bolivia (YPFB); and recognize the right of indigenous communities to decide about oil and gas projects in their territory. (ED, March 17)

On Mar. 17, after Congress rejected his proposal for early elections, Mesa announced that he would remain in his post for the remainder of his term, until August 2007. (ED, March 18)

Morales announced on March 19 that when the Senate convenes on March 22, hundreds of campesinos will start a vigil and pijcheo (ritual coca leaf chewing) outside the Senate building in La Paz to demand that the bill not be weakened. (Prensa Latina, March 20)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, March 20

PREZ MANEUVERS, PROTESTS BUILD

In a 45-minute televised speech on March 6, President Mesa complained that constant protests, strikes and blockades were making Bolivia ungovernable and that he would offer his resignation to Congress the following day. Mesa harshly criticized campesino leader Evo Morales and his MAS for having announced the start of stepped-up roadblocks around the country. The protests, underway since the previous week, demanded that Congress pass a hydrocarbons law instating 50% royalties on private companies, and also that elections be called for a constitutional assembly. Mesa dismissed the constitutional assembly proposal, and said the royalty increase was "not viable" because "the international community is against it" and the country depends on "foreign handouts." (Clarin, Argentina, March 6; Agencia Latinoamericano de Informacion [ALAI], March 7)

Morales said that with the resignation threat, Mesa was "resorting to blackmail, maneuvering, insults and divisiveness, showing that he has a racial gripe against indigenous people and campesinos who are the majority of this country, just because we are struggling to recover the territory, to defend our national resources like water and to obtain 50% royalties from the oil companies." According to Bolivia’s 2001 national census, 62% of Bolivians over 15 years old identify themselves as indigenous–31% Quechua, 25% Aymara and 6% from other ethnic groups. (ALAI, March 7, 9)

In his speech, Mesa also criticized Abel Mamani, leader of the Federation of Neighborhood Committees (FEJUVE) of the city of El Alto, for leading a movement which is demanding the departure of the Aguas del Illimani water company. Mesa said that if the government breaks its contract with Aguas del Illimani–a consortium partly owned by the French transnational Suez–then Bolivia would have to immediately pay $17 million to creditor organizations and might lose a $50 million lawsuit threatened by the company. Last Jan. 12, three days into a civic strike in El Alto organized by FEJUVE, the government signed a decree pledging to cancel the contract with Aguas del Illimani.

But since then the government had backtracked, and FEJUVE responded with a new civic strike beginning March 2 demanding the company’s expulsion. The strike also included demands for the 50% gas royalties, the constitutional assembly and a full trial of ex-president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada and his cabinet members for an October 2003 massacre of protesters in El Alto. Mamani had announced plans to step up the protests on March 7 and had called a march to La Paz for March 8. (Clarin, March 6)

Mesa also criticized the civic and business leaders of gas-rich Santa Cruz department who have been pushing for regional autonomy. (El Diario, La Paz, March 7) Mesa’s surprise resignation announcement came amid a flood of protests around the country, including El Alto and Cochabamba. In Sucre, Chuquisaca department, campesinos protested to demand the constitutional assembly be held before any referendum on regional autonomy; they were also demanding the trial of ex-president Sanchez de Lozada, and rejecting any immunity for US soldiers in Bolivia. (The US is pressuring Bolivia and many other countries to agree not to send any US soldiers to face charges before the International Criminal Court.)

In Santa Cruz department, residents of the city of Camiri blocked the highway to Yacuiba, on the Argentine border, in a protest demanding that their city be the headquarters for the state-owned oil company, YPFB, when it is reformed under the terms of a July 2004 referendum. In Yapacani, protesters demanded that oil-producing municipalities get 10% of oil royalties and non-oil-producing ones get 3%. In Pailon, residents blocked the highway to Trinidad to demand government attention to local needs.

Residents of Entre Rios demanded that 40% of Tarija department’s oil royalties go to their municipality. In La Paz department, residents of Patacamaya demanded expansion of the local university, while Lahuachaca residents blockaded roads to demand the creation of a teacher training school. In Cochabamba department, residents of Ivigarzama blockaded roads over a border conflict with the neighboring municipality of Chimore. The Confederation of Bus Drivers postponed a 48-hour national strike demanding higher fares, saying their protest "would go unnoticed" amid so many others. (CEDIB, March 5)

Some protests were lifted on March 7 following Mesa’s resignation announcement, including the week-old blockades in Chuquisaca department, which had cut off the city of Sucre from supplies, and in Yapacani. But many protests continued, and some were intensified or renewed, including a blockade which shut down the road between Santa Cruz and Cochabamba on March 7. Leaders of Bolivia’s grassroots social movements ratified their protest plans and their unified demands at a meeting in El Alto on March 7. Oscar Olivera, president of the Coordinating Committee on Water, pointed out that the protests "did not demand and are not demanding the resignation of Carlos Mesa; in fact, their national demands, with the exception of [the departure of] Aguas del Illimani, are not even directed at the executive, but rather at the legislature." (La Razon, La Paz, March 8)

On March 8, Bolivia’s Congress unanimously rejected Mesa’s resignation and ratified his continuation as president for the term ending Aug. 6, 2007. A majority of deputies–not including those from the MAS or the MIP–then approved a vaguely-worded "national agenda," in which they committed the Congress and president to work together on the hydrocarbons law, regional autonomy and a constitutional assembly.

The agenda promises to "approve as quickly as possible a hydrocarbons law which respects the mandate of the July 18, 2004 referendum and within that framework guarantees the maximum benefit in favor of the Bolivian state, attention to the internal market, industrialization and the current and future export commitments of our hydrocarbons, preserving investments in strict respect and observance of national sovereignty." The agenda also pledges, "on the basis of regional consensus, to put forward a plan for approval of the legal instruments to guarantee the holding of elections for governor [a key demand of the autonomy movement], the referendum on departmental autonomy and the convoking of a constitutional assembly." Following the vote on the agenda, deputies from the MAS and MIP walked out in protest before Mesa addressed the Congress. (ED, March 9)

On Mar. 9 the Bolivian Workers Central (COB) joined with Bolivia’s main campesino, indigenous and neighborhood organizations in a "Pact for the Defense of Dignity and National Sovereignty," pledging to step up the nationwide protests on their united demands. (ALAI, Econoticiasbolivia.com, March 9) The same day, Mesa apologized publicly for his harsh words against Evo Morales and asked Morales to meet with him. Morales said he would participate in a meeting if it included the rest of the union and grassroots leaders included in the new pact.

The two sides met for four hours on March 10, without reaching any agreements. Mesa tried to convince the protest leaders that his proposal for 18% royalties and 32% taxes will add up to the same as 50% in royalties. Opponents say the government will find a way to manipulate the taxes so they don’t really add up to the full 50%, though Mesa promises the taxes will be charged on actual production, with no sneaky calculations involved. "The blockades are going to continue, they are going to radicalize until the parliament approves the 50% royalties," warned Morales. "We’re not demanding exclusion, or confiscation, or expropriation of the transnationals’ property. It’s important to have partners, but those partners should put in half, 50 [for them], and 50 in royalties for the Bolivian state." (ED, March 10, 11)

Morales said the 50% royalties would produce an extra $550 million a year in tax revenue–enough to eliminate Bolivia’s deficit. Mesa told foreign journalists on March 9 that the 50% royalty rate would invite massive lawsuits by foreign companies with gas contracts in Bolivia, but that his 32% tax and 18% royalty formula would bring "an explosion" of new investment, eliminating the country’s need for foreign aid. However, some oil industry analysts say even Mesa’s more moderate plan might provoke lawsuits by corporations because it would change their existing contracts. (Miami Herald, March 10)

Protests were back in force around the country on March 9. Members of Bolivia’s Landless Movement (MST), the Coordinating Committee of Indigenous Peoples of Santa Cruz and the National Council of Qullasuyo [Aymara] Communities (Conamaq) arrived in La Paz after traveling from the country’s lowlands and highlands, respectively, to demand the constitutional assembly and indigenous participation in democracy. They said they would not block roads, and were not part of the pact signed by the other social movements. The same day, chaos broke out in the city of Santa Cruz when bus drivers tried to raise fares to make up for fuel price increases and bus riders rebelled. Police used tear gas; at least 10 people were injured and 59 arrested. In Cochabamba, the road to Santa Cruz was completely blocked by protests organized by the Six Federations of the Tropics, an organization of campesino coca producers. The campesinos also set up vigils surrounding four oil wells, and campesino leader Feliciano Mamani said blockades were in effect on highways linking Cochabamba to Oruro and Chuquisaca. (ED, March 10)

On Mar. 10, marches called by President Mesa to oppose the grassroots roadblocks drew light crowds in Bolivia’s major cities. The same day, the FEJUVE of El Alto called for a suspension of its blockades in the city, saying the people were "tired" and that new pressure tactics would be taken up the next week on the demands against Aguas del Illimani. (ED, March 11)

Mesa’s resignation offer appeared to be aimed at dividing and weakening Bolivia’s grassroots movements, both by exerting counter-pressure on Congress, which is leaning toward popular demands on the gas law, and by empowering certain sectors of the public to actively oppose the protests. "The gamble is to get the people who tolerated these protests in the past to go out and say they won’t tolerate it," Jaime Aparicio, Bolivia’s ambassador in Washington, said in a phone interview with the New York Times. "It may be effective, but we’ll have to wait and see." (NYT, March 8)

Thousands of people did mobilize around the country in support of Mesa following his March 6 resignation announcement, and on March 7 dozens of counter-protesters waving white handkerchiefs broke windows at the FEJUVE offices in El Alto and tried to disrupt the meeting of grassroots leaders there. Mamani, the FEJUVE leader, said death threats were called in to his mobile phone. (LR, March 8) Bolivian media made much of the "white handkerchief" movement, citing counter-protesters’ chants urging Mesa to take a "heavy hand" against protesters and to send "Evo and Mamani to the firing squad." (ALAI, March 9)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, March 13

Weekly News Update on the Americas

For recent Bolivia coverage, see:

WW4 REPORT #107

WW4 REPORT #106

WW4 REPORT #104

WW4 REPORT #102

WW4 REPORT #101

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, April 10, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

http://ww4report.com

Continue ReadingBOLIVIA: GAS BILL ADVANCES, PROTESTS PARALYZE COUNTRY 

9-11’s LINGERING TOXIC MENACE

"Redevelopment" at Ground Zero Hits New Yorkers With Double-Whammy

by Wynde Priddy

More than three years after the historic attacks that ushered in a new global conflict and changed the Manhattan skyline forever, local residents still say that concerns about the health impacts of the disaster for New Yorkers have never been meaningfully addressed. Now many fear that the redevelopment effort underway in the area of Ground Zero will raise still more environmental risks.

Unanswered Questions

When the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, the disaster constituted an environmental hazard of unprecedented scope. As the towers burned and then collapsed, over 10,000 personal computers, hundreds of copy machines, thousands of fluorescent lights, five million square feet of painted surfaces, seven million square feet of flooring, and 600,000 square feet of window glass were vaporized and released into the air. Along with these more expected materials present in this uncontrolled demolition, there were also millions of rounds of lead ammunition used in a Secret Service shooting range, and materials such as arsenic, mercury, and chromium which were housed in a U.S. Customs laboratory in the complex. Concrete, asbestos, jet-fuel, and many other unknowable hazardous materials were incinerated at temperatures exceeding 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit; hot enough to produce toxic gas and ultra-fine particulates, or air-born dust, easily breathable and highly unsafe for humans. Fires continued to burn at the site until Dec. 19. Dr. Michael Weiden, a medical officer for the New York Fire Department, called it "the largest single acute exposure to high-volume particulate matter in a modern urban environment."

Yet the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a statement on Sept. 16, 2001 that said: "Our tests show that it is safe for New Yorkers to go back to work in New York’s Financial District." On Sept. 18, EPA administrator Christie Whitman declared to New Yorkers: "The air is safe to breathe." Public advocates are still asking why these seemingly premature determinations were made. And why were the first responders and Ground Zero recovery workers not informed of–much less adequately protected from–the hazards?

In the weeks following September 11, all EPA press releases were filtered through the White House. In a 2003 report entitled "EPA’s Response to the World Trade Center Collapse," the EPA’s own Office of Inspector General found: "It appeared that EPA’s best professional advice was overruled when relaying information to the public in the weeks immediately following the disaster. Politics, it appears, trumped science in the communication of risks to the public."

There have been numerous independent studies and tests that reveal the true nature of the dust that blanketed much of Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn. One dust sample tested by the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project (NYELJP) showed five percent asbestos, towering above the EPA’s own 1 percent threshold for human risk. An indoor sample of WTC dust taken at 80 John Street five months after September 11 found levels of fibrous glass–a potent carcinogen–ranging from 10 to 15 percent. Meanwhile, New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection told Downtown residents and business owners to just clean up the WTC dust with a wet rag–exposing thousands to life-threatening toxins.

EPA officials contend that they didn’t want to cause mass panic, and that their tests showed only "low levels of asbestos." Critics respond that the conditions around Ground Zero did, in fact, call for extreme caution if not panic, and that even "low levels" of asbestos are still dangerous. They also point to the EPA’s use of outdated testing methods that apparently underestimated the risks; testing methods that were not good enough for their own building at 290 Broadway, which was tested and cleaned using the most advanced methods. An asbestos-removal contractor was brought in to decontaminate the EPA offices, at the same time that local residents were being told to use wet rags.

In the years since the Twin Towers fell, there has been no comprehensive cleanup, no health care program for those who were affected, and no accurate federally-issued statement of the true risks that people living or working near Ground Zero were exposed to in the weeks and months following September 11, according to a new study by the Sierra Club, "Pollution and Deception at Ground Zero." In fact, many first responders are having trouble with their workman’s compensation, and even workers and residents with health insurance are experiencing trouble getting the kind of medical services they need.

Brooklyn stands out as the most neglected community impacted by the disaster. The notion that the East River protected Brooklyn from the massive air-born dust cloud released by the collapse of the towers is easily dismissed by anyone who saw aerial photos of that day. The wind blew a huge plume of WTC dust directly into Brooklyn–yet there were no clean-up services provided to residents of Brooklyn, and virtually no attention paid to the suffering of Brooklynites living with the long-term health effects.

The federally-funded clean-up program was insufficient and poorly implemented all around, critics charge. Cleaning of local residences finally got underway in September 2002–a full year after the contamination. Those outside the small zone of Lower Manhattan covered by the program continued to get the same instructions: clean up the WTC dust with a wet rag. Some could afford professional cleanup, but many couldn’t. And with the EPA downplaying the risks, thousands had unknowingly exposed themselves by cleaning up the dust themselves, even within the zone covered by the program. Chinatown residents, who live in overcrowded conditions and frequently lack facility with the English language, were hit particularly hard by this disaster of judgment. Small businesses also suffered by being excluded from the clean-up. Predictably, most insurance companies refused to pay for testing or clean-up.

Money for Contamination, Not for Clean-Up

Organizations like New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH), 9/11 Environmental Action and NYELJP, with U.S. Representatives Carol Maloney and Jerrold Nadler, are advocating on behalf of the thousands who were exposed to WTC toxins. They are also demanding adequate safety measures to be taken in the redevelopment of Ground Zero and the impacted zone now being overseen by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), an authority jointly created by the city and state of New York in 2002.

The LMDC has bought two buildings in the area from the Deutsche Bank–one several blocks away from Ground Zero at 4 Albany Street, and one directly across from Ground Zero at 130 Liberty Street which was severely damaged and highly contaminated by the toxic dust and debris. The 40-story building on Liberty Street is the most heavily damaged building to remain standing after September 11, and must be demolished to make way for Freedom Tower, the $11 billion skyscraper, memorial, and transit hub that is slated to stand on the WTC site by 2015.

Plans for this potentially dangerous demolition are being drawn up by the LMDC. Activists and community members are demanding that the EPA carefully oversee the demolition to ensure the safety of both the workers and the area residents. For now, the EPA is only acting as an advisor to the LMDC, which is developing deconstruction plans to submit for EPA approval. In January 2005, the EPA rejected one LMDC submission, saying the plan lacked sufficient protections.

Though the LMDC will continue to submit revised plans, activists continue to demand more direct oversight of the demolition. David Newman, an industrial hygienist with NYCOSH says, "The EPA is the only agency with the experience, expertise, and resources to ensure that such demolition operations are conducted in a manner that protects public health."

More than half of the $2.7 billion of the September 11 recovery money pledged by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has already been spent by the LMDC. While community groups demand that at least a chunk of the remaining $850 million be directed towards addressing health and environmental concerns, and building affordable housing. Meanwhile, the LMDC plans on asking for more money–for the ambitious redevelopment scheme centered around the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower.

"The LMDC keeps going for more funds," says Joel Kupferman, senior attorney at NYELJP and environmental counsel to the Firefighters Union. But he’s not confident that the endowment will bring about a safer redevelopment. "They’d rather send out glossy press releases than test the air," he says, adding that the LMDC’s quasi-private nature has resulted in "a lack of accountability and no elections to worry about."

"I would expect a private landlord to act in a self-serving way," Kupferman concludes. "But the LMDC is publicly funded and we’re alarmed that they’re not meeting a higher standard."

RESOURCES:

"Pollution and Deception at Ground Zero," Sierra Club, August 2004

NYCOSH

NYELJP

9/11 Environmental Action

LMDC

For more on 9-11’s health impacts, see WW4 REPORT #50

For more on the Ground Zero redevelopment effort, see WW4 REPORT #88

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, April. 10, 2005

Reprinting permissible with attribution

http://ww4report.com

Continue Reading9-11’s LINGERING TOXIC MENACE 

JOHN NEGROPONTE & THE DEATH-SQUAD CONNECTION

Bush Nominates Terrorist for National Intelligence Director

by Frank Morales

"He will be a key figure in US counter-terror operations." —BBC News, Feb. 17, 2005

"I think he could have stopped all these assassinations and torture… We’re against this nomination. If he didn’t see human rights violations in Honduras, it’s possible he won’t see human rights violations anywhere in the world." —Leo Valladares Lanza, former head, Honduran Human Rights Commission, quoted in New York Times, March 29, 2005

On February 17, 2005, President George W. Bush nominated John Negroponte, 65, to be the United States’ first National Intelligence Director." According to various published reports, Negroponte will be the president’s "primary briefer" in the area of global and domestic intelligence and counter-terror operations, coordinating and overseeing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other agencies.

His upcoming Senate confirmation seems assured, and that is a scary prospect. Why? Because Negroponte has a long and bloody criminal history, dating back to the early 1960s, of overseeing the training and arming of death squads, schooled in the techniques of torture, "forced interrogation," assassination and, as we shall see, even genocide. He has been described as an "old-fashioned imperialist," active for nearly four decades in Vietnam, Central America, the Philippines, Mexico and most recently Iraq. He got his start back in the days of the CIA’s Phoenix program, which assassinated some 40,000 Vietnamese "subversives."

According to Bush, the ultra-rightist Negroponte has a real grip on today’s "global intelligence needs." Indeed he does. Negroponte’s long career in the "foreign service" has equipped him well to fulfill the requirements of global and domestic counterinsurgency. So while newly-installed Attorney General Gonzales supplies the legal basis for torture (as he did as a Bush White House counsel), and recently-installed Homeland Security czar Michael Chertoff acquiesces (as he did as a Justice Department pointman on the post-9-11 sweeps), Negroponte is now in a position to ratchet up the repression domestically, and further the dissolution of democracy at home.

Although Negroponte’s office will be in its own projected $200 million headquarters, Bush has said that Negroponte "will have access on a daily basis." Negroponte has actually had close presidential access for awhile. Not quite four years ago, on Sept. 18, 2001, as the embers were still smoking at Lower Manhattan’s Ground Zero, Negroponte was appointed U.S. Representative to the United Nations. His mission was to work the floor and backrooms in preparation for Colin Powell’s infamous February 2003 presentation to the UN making the case for war on Iraq–which even Powell now admits was based on falsehoods. Then in April 2004, with a counter-insurgency war in Iraq rapidly spreading, Bush nominated Negroponte to be U.S. Ambassador to that occupied nation following the June 2004 hand-over of "sovereignty" to as-yet "undetermined Iraqi authorities."

RAP SHEET

Negroponte was born in London in 1939, the son of a Greek-American shipping magnate. A graduate of Yale University, raised on New York’s Park Avenue, he was a "career diplomat" between 1960 and 1997, serving in eight countries in Asia, Europe and Latin America, as well as holding positions in the State Department and White House. From 1971 to 1973, Negroponte was the officer-in-charge for Vietnam at the National Security Council (NSC) under Henry Kissinger, having worked as a "political affairs officer" (read: CIA) at the US Embassy in Saigon starting as early as 1964. At that time, he shared a room with Richard Holbrooke, then an official for the Agency for International Development, later US ambassador to the UN under Clinton. Negroponte and Holbrooke both became members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the oldest and most prestigious of US foreign policy think-tanks. Following Vietnam, Negroponte went on to "serve" for a number of years as an "economics officer" working out of the US Embassy in Ecuador.

Negroponte was appointed in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan to head up the US Embassy in Honduras, where he stayed quite busy through 1985. From 1987-1989, he was deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs, reporting to Colin Powell. From 1989-1993, he was ambassador to Mexico. Following a stint as ambassador to the Philippines from 1993-1997, he "retired" from the diplomatic corps and took a well-paid position as vice president for global markets at McGraw-Hill, the big publishing company.

In 1981 President Reagan authorized paramilitary operations against the leftist government of Nicaragua. As ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte played a key role in establishing that country as a base of operations for the CIA’s "Contra" guerilla army then attempting to destabilize Nicaragua, with a 450-square-kilometer stretch along the border virtually turned over to the US-backed Nicaraguan rebels. He was also instrumental in the reign of terror then being overseen in Honduras by security chief Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, his good friend. Between 1980 and 1984, US military aid to Honduras jumped from $3.9 million to $77.4 million. Much of this went to facilitate the crushing of popular movements through a covert "low intensity" war.

Although the high-level planning, money and arms for this repression flowed from Washington, much of the on-the-ground logistics was run out of the Embassy in Tegucigalpa. So crammed was the tiny country with US military troops and bases at this time, that it was dubbed the "USS Honduras." The captain of this ship, Negroponte, was in charge of the US Embassy when–according to a 1995 four-part series in the Baltimore Sun–hundreds of Hondurans deemed "subversives" were kidnapped, raped, tortured and killed by Battalion 316, a secret Honduran army intelligence unit trained and supported by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency.

BATTALION 316

In addition to internal repression in Honduras, Battalion 316 also participated in the CIA’s covert war against Nicaragua. Members of the Battalion were conscripted by the CIA for such sensitive missions as training the Contra terrorists and even mining Nicaragua’s harbors. Negroponte worked closely with Gen. Alvarez in overseeing the training Honduran soldiers in psychological warfare, sabotage, torture and kidnapping. Honduras was the second largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the hemisphere at this time after neighboring El Salvador. Increasing numbers of both Honduran and Salvadoran soldiers were sent to the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas to receive training. In El Salvador, the death squads were headed up by Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, a 1972 graduate of the School of the Americas. General Luis Alonso Discua Elvir, one of his classmates at the US "torture academy," was a founder and commander of Battalion 316.

Through his support of Battalion 316, Negroponte is directly complicit in the murder of at least 184 Honduran civilians officially found to have been killed by the death squad by a 1994 Honduran truth commission. The unit used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations, kept prisoners naked–and, when no longer useful, killed them brutally, and buried them in unmarked clandestine graves. Women were raped, often in front of their families.

Negroponte was likely involved in a number of other like paramilitary formations throughout Central America, as compliant and "stable" Honduras served as a base for U.S. operations throughout the region. Recently, the New York Times (March 8, 2005) reported that the Organization of American States (OAS) has reopened an investigation, "based on new forensic evidence," into the massacre of "hundreds of peasants" at El Mozote, El Salvador in 1981–when 800 unarmed men, women and children were murdered by Salvadoran soldiers "from a battalion trained and equipped by the United States." Reports of the massacre were published at the time in the New York Times and the Washington Post–reports that were "dismissed" by Negroponte and other "officials of the Reagan administration."

Covert operations in Central America were paid for in part through the sale of cocaine. "CIA officials," according to the New York Times (July 17, 1998), "involved in the Contra program gave relatively low priority to collecting information about the possible drug involvement of Contra rebels"–while of course giving high priority to covering it all up. Ambassador Negroponte acquiesced in shutting down the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) office in Tegucigalpa, just as Honduras was emerging as an important base for CIA-facilitated cocaine trans-shipments to the United States, with profits going to the Contras. According to a 1989 Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigative report, "elements of the Honduran military were involved in the protection of the drug traffickers."

In 1982, the US negotiated access to airfields in Honduras and established a regional military training centers there for Central American forces, principally directed at improving the lethal effectiveness of the Salvadoran military–at a time when the Salvadoran army was carrying out massacres such as the one at El Mozote, and army-linked death squads ratcheted up a death toll of at least 800, according to El Salvador’s UN-backed Truth Commission. Much of the training in these "anti-subversive" techniques–i.e., kidnapping, torture and murder–was done at El Aguacate air base in eastern Honduras. Established in 1984, the base was also used as a secret detention and torture center. In August 2001, excavations at the base uncovered 185 corpses, including those of two U.S. citizens–church workers involved in aiding the Honduran peasant movement–thought to have been killed and buried at the site.

In 1994, when the Honduran Human Rights Commission documented the torture and disappearance of at least 184 political opponents in the previous decade, it specifically accused John Negroponte of complicity in a number of human rights violations. The Baltimore Sun reporters found that in 1982 alone, during Negroponte’s first full year as ambassador, the Honduran press carried at least 318 stories of extra-judicial attacks by the military. The US Embassy, however, certified the country’s record on human rights in such glowing terms that aides to Negroponte joked that they were writing about Norway, not Honduras. Rick Chidester, a former aide to Negroponte, revealed to the Sun that his supervisors had ordered him to remove allegations of torture and executions from his draft of the 1982 human rights report.

Jack Binns, who served under president Jimmy Carter as the ambassador to Honduras prior to Negroponte, made numerous complaints about human rights abuses by the Honduran military. Recently, he stated regarding Negroponte, "I think he was complicit in abuses, I think he tried to put a lid on reporting abuses and I think he was untruthful to Congress about those activities." (NYT, March 29, 2005) In one early ’80s cable, Binns reported that Gen. Alvarez was modeling his campaign against suspected subversives, on Argentina’s "dirty war" of the 1970s, which, in turn, had been modeled on the techniques of European fascism in the 1930s and 40s–perhaps after having received some pointers from certain elements who fled there with US support after World War II. Recall that Adolf Eichmann, overseer of the apparatus of Jewish extermination during the Nazi era, was captured in Bueno Aires in 1960.

In May 1982, Sister Laetitia Bordes, a nun who had worked for ten years in El Salvador, went on a fact-finding delegation to Honduras to investigate the whereabouts of thirty Salvadoran nuns and women of faith who fled to Honduras in 1981 after the death-squad assassination of El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero the previous year. Negroponte claimed that the Embassy knew nothing. But in a 1996 interview with the Baltimore Sun, Jack Binns said that a group of Salvadorans–including the women Bordes had been looking for–were abducted on April 22, 1981, and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran secret police. They were later thrown out of helicopters while still alive. The Sun’s investigation found that the CIA and US embassy knew of these crimes, but continued to support Battalion 3-16 and ensure that the Embassy’s annual human rights report did not contain the full story. According to a 1996 BBC report, Negroponte "knew about the CIA-trained Honduran army unit that tortured and killed alleged subversives." According to the Baltimore Sun report, Negroponte "was ambassador when the worst of the abuses were taking place. He knew everything that was going on."

NEGROPONTE’S REVISIONISM

When Bush announced Negroponte’s nomination as ambassador to the UN shortly after coming to office, the move was met with widespread protest. Questioned at the time about whether he had turned a blind eye to human rights abuses in Honduras, Negroponte rejected the suggestion. "I do not believe then [sic], nor do I believe now, that these abuses were part of a deliberate government policy. To this day, I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras."

Despite the protests, the Bush administration did not back down–and even went so far as to silence potential witnesses who might have shed some light on Negroponte’s criminal history. On March 25, 2001, the Los Angeles Times reported on the sudden deportation from the United States of several former Honduran death squad members who could have provided damaging testimony against Negroponte in his then upcoming Senate confirmation hearings. One of the deported Hondurans was none other than Gen. Luis Alonso Discua, the former commander of Battalion 3-16, then serving as Honduras’ deputy ambassador to the UN!

Upon learning of Negroponte’s 2001 UN nomination, Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch commented that "he looked the other way when serious atrocities were committed" and that "one would have to wonder what kind of message the Bush administration is sending about human rights by this appointment." Answer: What human rights? When queried about these "serious atrocities," Negroponte told CNN, "to the contrary, I think we bent over backwards to press for elections and for democratic reform…. Frankly, I think that some of the retrospective efforts to try and suggest that we were supportive of or condoned the actions of human rights violators is really revisionistic."

In 1987, during the administration of George HW Bush, Negroponte returned to the National Security Council (NSC) to work under Colin Powell as deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs. Within two years, he was back in Latin America; appointed as ambassador to Mexico, where he served from July 1989 to September 1993. There, he officiated at the block-long, fortified embassy and helped facilitate Mexico’s passage of the NAFTA treaty–as well as likely U.S. intelligence operations that anticipated a popular reaction to the treaty. Negroponte left Mexico just ahead of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas.

APPOINTMENT TO THE UNITED NATIONS

Negroponte was sworn in as U.S. Representative to the United Nations on Sept. 18, 2001. By November 2002, he was strong-arming a resolution through the UN Security Council which called for the "disarming" of Iraq. Standing in front of the Security Council with CIA director George Tenet, Negroponte stated that "the Resolution makes clear that any Iraqi failure to comply is unacceptable and that Iraq must be disarmed. One way or another…Iraq will be disarmed." The New York Times would later report (March 29, 2005) that "Mr. Negroponte pressed on foreign colleagues American intelligence on Iraqi weapons that turned out to be profoundly flawed. If he was miffed, Mr. Negroponte never spoke out."

Negroponte also delivered a warning to other less hawkish members of the Security Council, stating that, "if the Security Council fails to act decisively in the event of a further Iraqi violation, this resolution does not constrain any member state from acting to defend itself against the threat posed by Iraq, or to enforce relevant UN resolutions and protect world peace and security." As Stephen Kinzer, writing in the New York Review of Books (September 2001), put it, "giving him this job is a way of telling the UN: ‘We hate you’."

When faced with contention over US intentions during the UN debate leading up to the war in Iraq, Negroponte turned to grandstanding. In March 2003, Negroponte walked out of the General Assembly after Iraq’s UN envoy, Mohammed Al-Douri, accused the U.S. of preparing a war of aggression. "Britain and the United States are about to start a real war of extermination" he said, "that will kill everything and destroy everything."

NEGROPONTE IN BAGHDAD

On April 20, 2004, Bush nominated Negroponte as ambassador to Iraq, stating that, "he has done a really good job of speaking for the United States to the world about our intentions to spread freedom and peace." Calling him "a man of enormous experience and skill" was all that our courageous Senators required in order to vote him in by 95-3 on May 6. He was sworn in on June 23.

Negroponte’s US Embassy in Baghdad, housed in a palace that once belonged to Saddam Hussein, was and remains the largest embassy in the world, with a "diplomatic staff" of over 3,000. Opting for the kind of diplomacy he’s most familiar with, he immediately "shifted more than a $1 billion to build up the Iraqi Army," diverting the funds "from reconstruction projects" to military and intelligence projects associated with "what intelligence officials describe as the largest C.I.A. station in the world." (NYT , March 29, 2005)

On Jan. 2, 2004, the Washington Post stated that a "major challenge" facing the diplomatic mission "will be sorting out the terms of the US military presence, which is expected to exceed 100,000 troops even after the occupation ends…" An un-named U.S. "official" stated that "we have to determine what command American troops will be under: Will it be part of some kind of multinational force, under the United Nations, under NATO? Or will they be relatively independent in an agreement with the Iraqi government? These are huge questions to be answered in a very short amount of time." We can rest assured that John Negroponte, the enforcer, made the Iraqi government an offer they couldn’t refuse in favor of the "relatively independent" option.

Shortly after taking up the position, Negroponte was asked about eyewitness statements that in late June 2004, Iraq’s interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi had, in a gesture of steadfast loyalty, personally executed up to six suspected insurgents in front of his US military bodyguards. While Allawi denies the accusation, Negroponte did not. In an e-mail to the Sydney Morning Herald, July 2004, he stated that "if we attempted to refute each [rumor], we would have no time for other business. As far as this embassy’s press office is concerned, this case is closed."

Sydney Morning Herald columnist Alan Ramsey wrote of Negroponte’s arrogant side-stepping. "Of course. One only has to consider Negroponte’s record as US ambassador in Honduras to know he is a loyal servant of Republican Washington who sees and knows nothing… This same man, with an embassy regime of more than 1,000 American foreign service officers, plus American advisers salted throughout Iraqi ministries, as well as 140,000 US military personnel, now has absolute covert power in Iraq. Of course, ‘the case is closed’."

By the first weeks of January 2005, Negroponte was said to be overseeing the formation of death squads in Iraq, prompting media reports about a "Salvador option." MSNBC reported on Jan. 8, 2005 that the Pentagon was "intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the US government funded or supported ‘nationalist’ forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually, the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success, despite the deaths of innocent civilians…"

One Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi death squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers–even across the border into Syria, carrying out assassinations or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation.

Major General Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service, was quoted in a Jan. 8, 2005 Newsweek story on the "Salvador Option," warning that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, "are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them." He said most Iraqis do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source suggested that "new offensive operations" are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."

Threatening everyone in a village with torture and death, if the village is deemed a potential base insurgent operations can be a very effective technique, whether the perpetrators are the Nazi SS in occupied Czechoslovakia, the death squads in El Salvador, or whatever new force is invented in Iraq. This strategy of tactical terror aims to sever an insurgency from it’s potential base of support.

At least one pro-occupation death squad is already in operation. On Jan. 11, 2004, just days after the Pentagon plans regarding possible "new offensive operations" were revealed, a new militant group, "Saraya Iraqna," began offering big wads of American cash for insurgent scalps–up to $50,000, the Iraqi paper Al Ittihad reported. "Our activity will not be selective," the group promised.

CIA COUNTERINSURGENCY: PROJECT X

During Negroponte’s Honduran ambassadorship, he worked closely with Duane R. Clarridge, aka "Mr. Marone", a high-ranking CIA officer based in Honduras, who was, according to a recent New York Times report (March 29, 2005), "running the covert war against communism in Central America." According to Clarridge, "Negroponte was a big supporter of the agency’s covert action mission" there.

At the time, the CIA utilized it’s "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual" to teach young Honduran soldiers and others the methodology of torture. Dated 1983, the manual, one in a series of recently "declassified" documents, addresses, among other subjects, "coercive interrogation" techniques utilized in "the torture situation," which is, according to the manual, "a contest between the subject and his tormentor."

The manual discusses inflicting pain or threatening pain, depriving prisoners of food and sleep, making them maintain rigid positions for long periods, stripping them naked, and keeping them blindfolded or in prolonged solitary confinement. Disseminated throughout Latin America during the early 1980s, the manual appears to have been compiled from training courses given to members of the Honduran military. The manual can be assumed to have been sanctioned by higher-ups, including Negroponte, given, for example, its statement that, "illegal detention always requires prior [headquarters] approval."

This secret manual was compiled from sections of an earlier 1963 training manual entitled, "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation." This was a U.S. Military Intelligence field manual written as part of the Army’s Foreign Intelligence Assistance Program. According to the manual, "all coercive techniques of interrogation are designed to induce regression" to a state of abject submission. The tormentor’s "principal coercive techniques" are "arrest, detention, deprivation of sensory stimuli through solitary confinement or similar methods, threats and fear, debility, pain, heightened suggestibility, hypnosis, narcosis, and induced regression."

In a March 1992 internal "report of investigation," which was sent to then-Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, seven such interrogation manuals used for years by the Pentagon’s Southern Command throughout Latin America were said to contain "objectionable" and "prohibited material." Army investigators traced the origins of the instructions on use of beatings, false imprisonment, executions and truth serums back to a top-secret program run by the Army Foreign Intelligence unit in the 1960s code-named "Project X." Written by US Army counterinsurgency experts starting in 1965, the Joint Foreign Intelligence Assistance Program used Project X to train U.S. allies in Vietnam, Iran, Latin America, and elsewhere around the world.

The report to Cheney noted that the "offensive and objectionable material" in the Project X manuals "undermines US credibility, and could result in significant embarrassment." Cheney of course, immediately embarked on a course of "corrective action," namely, to "recall" and destroy as many of the manuals as possible, shredding the "embarrassing" history–though some copies have survived, or perhaps were meant to.

Meanwhile, a July 1991 U.S. Southern Command "confidential" document records a phone conversation with a Captain Victor Tise, who served in 1982 as a counterinsurgency instructor at the School of the Americas (SOA). In it, Tise relates the history of the "objectionable material" in the manuals and the training courses that he assembled for use at the School. According to Tise, in 1976, following a decade of SOA tutoring, use of the Project X material was suspended by Congress and the Carter administration "for fear the training would contribute to Human Rights violations in other countries." But the program was restored by the Reagan administration in 1982, shortly after Negroponte arrived in Honduras.

Tise described Project X as a "training package to provide counterinsurgency techniques learned in Vietnam to Latin American countries." These "techniques" were undoubtedly derived from the Phoenix Program, the CIA’s assassination campaign which liquidated 40,000 Vietnamese "subversives." The course materials Tise put together, including the manuals that became the subject of the investigations, were sent to Defense Department headquarters "for clearance" in 1982. They "came back approved" and "UNCHANGED," despite the fact that Tise sought to remove–or so he said–the "objectionable" parts. Subsequently, hundreds of the unaltered manuals, "objectionable material" and all, were disseminated for use throughout US-militarized Latin America over the next nine years. Negroponte’s role in this particular bit of "objectionable" history remains shrouded, and shredded.

It appears that by 1965, the US intelligence community had seen fit to formalize the hard-learned lessons of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam by commissioning the top-secret Project X. Based at the U.S. Army Intelligence Center & School at Fort Holabird, Maryland, the project drew from "field experience" to "provide intelligence training to friendly foreign countries," according to a Pentagon history prepared in 1991 and released in 1997. According to the Washington Post (March 6, 1997), the Project X materials even suggested that "militaries infiltrate and suppress even democratic political dissident movements and hunt down opponents in every segment of society in the name of fighting Communism…"

In the early 1970s, the U.S. Army Intelligence Center moved to Fort Huachuca in Arizona and began exporting Project X material to foreign U.S. "military assistance groups." By the mid-1970s, the Project X material was going to armies all over the world, in effect, a textbook for global counterinsurgency and terror warfare.

In its 1992 review, the Pentagon also acknowledged that Project X was the source for some of the "objectionable" lessons taught at the School of the Americas where Latin American officers were trained in blackmail, kidnapping, murder and spying on non-violent political opponents. But disclosure of the full story was blocked when Defense Secretary Cheney ordered the destruction of most Project X records. Nearly simultaneously, President George HW Bush pardoned six Reagan-Bush administration figures of any wrongdoing in the Nicaragua operations. These included former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, and Duane Clarridge, by then named as intellectual author of another sinister murder manual, "Psychological Operations in Guerilla Warfare." Produced by the CIA, this booklet openly instructed in the assassination of public officials, and was distributed to the Nicaraguan Contras.

That George W Bush’s war on terrorism is really a global war of terror directed against the entire world becomes inescapably clear with the appointment of a man linked to this grisly history to head the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus. Perhaps there is still time to apply pressure on the Senate and halt this next step in the legitimization of torture and state terrorism–if the citizenry, human rights community, clergy and responsible voices in the media can join in a single cry: STOP NEGROPONTE!

DEDICATED TO ARCHBISHOP OSCAR ROMERO, BORN 1917, ASSASSINATED MARCH 25, 1980.

Adopted from an article in The Shadow, New York City, Spring 2005

http://www.shadow.autono.net/

RESOURCES:

Center for Media and Democracy, SourceWatch, John Negroponte

Media for Social Change dossier on Negroponte

"In From the Cold War", Terry Allen, In These Times

Religious Task Force on Central America & Mexico report on El Aguacate air base

National Security Archive, "Prisoner Abuse: Patterns from the Past"

"The Hidden History of CIA Torture," Alfred W. McCoy

"Lost History: Project X, Drugs & Death Squads," Robert Parry

Peter Dale Scott on Project X in Southeast Asia

Virtual Truth Commission on US Army torture manuals

KUBARK, Counterintelligence Interrogation manual, July 1963

US Army Field Manual 30-31B
——————-

Adopted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, April. 10, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

http://WW4Report.com

Continue ReadingJOHN NEGROPONTE & THE DEATH-SQUAD CONNECTION 

COLOMBIA: ANTI-FTAA PROTESTS, INDIGENOUS UNDER ATTACK

by Weekly News Update on the Americas

FREE TRADE PACT PROTESTED

The seventh round of negotiations for a "free trade treaty" (TLC) between the US, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador began on Feb. 7 in the Colombian Caribbean port city of Cartagena. Opponents of the TLC held a nationwide day of protest in Colombia on Feb. 10. Thousands of workers, campesinos, indigenous people and students marched in Cartagena to protest the TLC. Police reported no incidents. The demonstrators were barred from approaching the convention center where the talks were taking place. At least 1,000 students and unionists marched in Bogota, surrounded by riot police. At least 400 demonstrators marched in Cali. A protest was also held in the city of Pereira.

In Medellin, students began their anti-TLC protest at the University of Antioquia, then moved out to the street, where three armored vehicles of the Mobile Anti-Riot Squad (ESMAD) police unit were waiting. As demonstrators clashed with police outside, and police sprayed the students with water cannons, an explosion injured 18 students in the university’s pharmaceutical chemistry department. According to university vice rector Martiniano Jaimes Contreras, the accident was caused by homemade explosives which the students were assembling to throw at police. Three of the injured students were in critical condition with burns over 80% of their bodies, said Jaimes. (AP, AFPO, Notimex, Feb. 10; El Universal, Caracas, Feb. 11)

The nearly 1,500 TLC negotiators meeting in Cartagena were meanwhile having their own problems: by the time the talks ended on Feb. 12, no agreement had been reached on any of the 23 areas being discussed. The biggest sticking points include agricultural policy–Andean farmers are concerned about being forced to compete against heavily subsidized US agribusiness–and intellectual property, since the Andean countries are concerned that the TLC will make it impossible for them to produce generic medicines. Other touchy issues are the mobile phone market and used clothing imports from the US. (AP, Feb. 10, 12; AFP, Feb. 13)

The lack of progress forced a new schedule for the remaining talks. The eighth round is still scheduled for March 14 in Washington to discuss investment, textiles, intellectual property, rules of origin, and revision of annexes on service measures. But during March, Washington will also host separate bilateral talks on agriculture: March 9-10 with Peru; March 16-17 with Ecuador; and March 21-22 with Colombia. The Andean TLC’s ninth round has been set to start April 18 in Lima, focused on pharmaceutical patents. (Article from Americaeconomica.com posted Feb. 13 on Colombia Indymedia; Prensa Latina, Feb. 12; AFP, Feb. 13)

On Feb. 10 in Peru, some 7,000 cotton growers protested the TLC with a 24-hour strike, including blockades on the Panamerican highway in Santa province, Ancash department (north of Lima) and marches in the cities of Ica and Chincha, in Ica department (south of Lima). The strike was called by the Association of Small-scale Agrarian Farmers. (La Republica, Lima, Feb. 11)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Feb. 13

MORE INDIGENOUS KILLED

On Feb. 3, members of the rightwing paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) murdered two young Wayuu indigenous men, Jose Eduardo Boscan Epinayu and Manuel Salvador Lopez Fernandez, in the village of Santa Cruz, Maicao municipality, in the northern Colombian department of La Guajira. Boscan and Lopez were members of the indigenous leadership of the Epinayu clan, and like many members of the community, they made a living peddling gasoline. The bodies of the two were found in the village of La Esperanza near the Venezuelan border; the killers had put AUC insignia on the victims’ clothing in order to sow doubts about the authors of the crime. On Feb. 2, the day before the killing, three AUC members known by the names "Zacarias," "Genito" and "Samir" had entered the home of Francia Boscan, the traditional matriarch of the community and mother of Jose Eduardo Boscan, and had threatened her and her family.

The Communities of the Wayuu People in Civil Resistence, based in the indigenous territory of Media and Alta Guajira, charge that the paramilitaries use violence to exert control over the region and establish a monopoly on gasoline sales and other economic activity. Community members say they even informed President Alvaro Uribe Velez on his recent trip to La Guajira that paramilitary groups were controlling the flow of contraband gasoline from Venezuela. In a statement, the communities ask why the government is seeking funds from the international community to give to "demobilized" paramilitaries, when the paramilitary groups "have accumulated enormous fortunes" and have given up none of the land or properties they control. (Comunidades del Pueblo Wayuu en Resistencia Civil, Feb. 3; National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC) Press Bulletin #15, Feb. 3)

The latest killings followed a Feb. 1 communique from the Communities of the Wayuu People in Civil Resistence which marked the first anniversary of the killing of Wayuu youths Roland Ever Fince and Alberto Ever Fince, shot to death on Feb. 1, 2004, by the AUC’s "Wayuu Counterinsurgency Bloc." The communities’ statement decried the impunity enjoyed by the killers, who followed up the double murder with a massacre in Bahia Portete in April. (Comunidades del Pueblo Wayuu en Resistencia Civil, Feb. 1)

In Cauca department, southern Colombia, members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) murdered Nasa indigenous leader Ever Cunda on Jan. 29 at his home in the hamlet of El Cabildo, Miranda municipality. Cunda worked as a prosecutor for the La Cilia Miranda indigenous reserve, and in 2003 he served as president of El Cabildo’s Community Action Board. The FARC had recently threatened Cunda, accusing him of being an informer for the army and paramilitaries. The FARC have also threatened two other Nasa leaders, Unidad Paez coordinator Jairo Lasso and Ernesto Cunda, a council member of the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (ACIN). (ONIC Press Bulletin #14, Jan. 31)

PARAMILITARY MASSACRE IN ANTIOQUIA

On Jan. 29, rightwing paramilitaries apparently murdered seven people in a rural area of San Carlos municipality in Antioquia department, Colombia. The victims were sisters Luz Adriana and Flor Maria Garcia Ramirez; Jose Eugenio Garcia Quintero and his daughters Omaira and Gisela, who were 16 and 15 years old, respectively; and Hector Eduardo Giraldo and Giovanni Gallego. The mother of the Garcia Ramirez sisters survived and made her way with two of her children to the neighboring municipality of San Luis, where she reported the massacre to army troops. The killers had apparently accused the victims of being rebel sympathizers. (Message posted on Colombia Indymedia, Feb. 1)

ARMY KILLS CAMPESINO IN CHOCO

On Jan. 29, campesino leader Pedro Murillo was shot to death by members of the Colombian army’s 17th Brigade in the village of Cano Seco, Jiguamiando municipality, Choco department. The soldiers accused Murillo of being a guerrilla; he was hit with three bullets as he tried to flee, and the soldiers shot him three more times after he was wounded and on the ground. Shortly afterwards, some 500 soldiers from the 17th Brigade entered the town and over the course of Jan. 29 and 30, threatened and mistreated numerous residents of the Afro-Colombian community, accusing them of being leftist guerrillas or guerrilla supporters. The soldiers also detained a local resident for five hours, beating and threatening him and harassing his wife–who was giving birth at that moment–and his children.

The Interreligious Justice and Peace Commission urges human rights supporters to contact Vice President Francisco Santos to demand that a verification team including national and international non-governmental organizations be sent to the area immediately, and that the government respond to community demands for an end to the sowing of oil palm within the Collective Territory of Curvarado and Jiguamiando. Santos can be reached at fax #571-566-2387 or fsantos@presidencia.gov.co. The Commission also recommends asking Attorney General Edgardo Maya Villazon (fax #571-342-9723, reygon@procuraduria.gov.co) to investigate abuses by the 17th Brigade, and asking National Defender of the People (ombudsperson) Volmar Antonio Ortiz Perez (fax #571-640-0491, info@defensoria.org.co) to send a protective presence to the zone. (Comision Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz, Jan. 30)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Feb. 6

INDIGENOUS PROTESTS IN BOGOTA

On Jan. 20, more than 400 Embera Katio indigenous people from the Sinu and Verde rivers area of Cordoba department in northern Colombia marched with dozens of supporters in Bogota to press the government to resume talks over their demands. The Embera protesters had been camped out in Bogota since Dec. 20, demanding compliance with an April 2000 agreement on compensation for damages caused by the Urra hydroelectric dam. The government insists it won’t negotiate under pressure. Indigenous people from at least 11 different ethnic groups took part in the march, including a delegation of members of the Indigenous Guard of Cauca department, a civilian self-defense group armed only with traditional staffs.

Earlier the same day, a group of Nasa (Paez) leaders from the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC), led by the Indigenous Guard and accompanied by other indigenous leaders, held a ceremony in Bogota’s Plaza de Bolivar to honor Colombia’s Constitutional Court for its rulings favoring indigenous rights. Inside the court building, Constitutional Court president Jaime Araujo Renteria accepted the Indigenous Guard’s flag, given to him as a symbol of support. (ONIC, Jan. 18, 20 via Colombia Indymedia; El Pais, CaliJan. 21)

The National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC) organized the Jan. 20 march to support the Embera Katio protesters and also to denounce the murders of at least seven indigenous people since Jan. 6. Also on Jan. 20, the Colombia office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNCHR) issued a statement condemning the "bloody beginning of the new year" for Colombia’s indigenous communities and urging the Colombian government "to take effective measures to protect indigenous people." (EP, Jan. 21; AFP, Jan. 20)

The UN office specifically condemned the Jan. 18 murders of Wiwa community leader Angel Loperena Montero and his brother Dario Loperena in the town of San Juan del Cesar, La Guajira department. (EP, Jan. 21) Loperena was the general treasurer of the Wiwa Yugumaiun Bukuanarua Tayrona organization, based in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains, which straddle the border of Cesar, La Guajira and Magdalena departments in northern Colombia. His brother was a teacher in the community. (ONIC, Jan. 19)

Authorities believe the murders were carried out by rightwing paramilitaries of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) under the command of AUC leader "Jorge 40"; the UN office urged AUC "to make a public statement about the killings, to require its members to fully comply with humanitarian norms that demand absolute respect for the civilian population, and to fully observe the declared ceasefire." (EP, Jan. 21)

"This year began very badly for us," ONIC president Luis Evelis Andrade Casama told AFP, "and we predict that the violations of indigenous people’s rights by illegal armed groups and, on some occasions, by government forces, will continue to rise." (AFP, Jan. 20)

On Jan. 6, indigenous leader Saul Marquez Tovar disappeared in Leticia, Amazonas department; his body was found the next day across the border in Brazil (see below). On Jan. 17, four members of an indigenous family from Bolivar municipality in the south of Cauca department were found shot to death. The victims were Hermes Cordoba Samboni, vice president of the Communal Action Board of the Las Cruces neighborhood of the San Juan indigenous community, and his family members John Fredy Samboni, Edgar Samboni and Cesar Samboni. The four went fishing on Jan. 11 and never returned; two of their bodies were found in a rural area of Bolivar municipality, and the other two were found in San Pablo municipality in neighboring Narino department. All had been shot in the head, and two of them appeared to have been tied up before being killed. (Colprensa, Jan. 19 via Colombia Indymedia)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 23

AMAZON INDIGENOUS LEADER KILLED

Saul Marquez Tovar, an indigenous Uitoto leader from Colombia’s Amazonas department and president of the Zonal Indigenous Association of Arica, disappeared on Jan. 6 in the Colombian city of Leticia, which is the capital of Amazonas department and borders on Peru and Brazil. On Jan. 7 Marquez’s body was found in the Brazilian town of Tabatinga; his tongue had been removed, his teeth and fingernails were pulled out and he had five bullet wounds. Marquez had gone to Leticia to carry out financial transactions on behalf of his community. (ONIC, Jan. 12)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 16

GUERILLA ATTACKS ESCALATE

On Feb. 8 or 9, rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) attacked a patrol unit of the Boltigeros Battalion, part of the Colombian army’s 17th Brigade, killing 19 of the unit’s 28 soldiers and wounding at least five others. The attack took place in the area of Porrozo, on the border between the municipalities of Chigorodo and Mutata, in the Uraba region of Antioquia department. In a Feb. 9 communique, the FARC’s Jose Maria Cordoba bloc reported that it also killed nine soldiers and wounded an undetermined number of others in a Feb. 7 attack on the Bombona Battalion in the hamlet of La Sombra in Anori municipality, in eastern Antioquia. The FARC said no rebels were killed in the Porrozo attack, but two died in the Anori attack. Colombian government sources said 11 rebels were killed in the Porrozo clash. (Communique from FARC-EP Estado Mayor Bloque Jose Maria Cordoba, Feb. 29; El Tiempo, Bogota, Feb. 11)

On Feb. 11, the Bogota daily El Tiempo also reported that four soldiers and 18 alleged rebels were killed in combat in Vistahermosa municipality, in the southern department of Meta; a noncommissioned officer and six rebels were killed and five soldiers wounded in Urrao municipality, western Antioquia; and the FARC burned 10 vehicles on a highway in southern Narino department. (ET, Feb. 11) The latest attack came only a week after the FARC killed 14 marines in a surprise attack on Feb. 1 at the Iscuande naval base in Narino (see below). The wave of rebel attacks has led to much public and press speculation about the success of President Alvaro Uribe Velez’s "Patriot Plan" military offensive against the FARC. [AFP 2/12/05]

On Feb. 10, following the army’s humiliating defeat in Porrozo, Gen. Hector Jaime Fandino Rincon was dismissed as commander of the 17th Brigade and replaced by Gen. Luis Alfonso Zapata Uribe, head of the Military Forces Operations Directorate in Bogota. Fandino will remain in the army while the incident is investigated. (ET, Feb. 11) Fandino and Zapata studied together at the US Army School of the Americas, graduating from the same "small unit infantry tactics C-7" course in February 1976, while they were second lieutenants. (SOA Graduates List) The 17th Brigade, based in Carepa–just north of Chigorodo–was recently accused of brutalizing an Afro-Colombian community in Jiguamiando municipality, in neighboring Choco department. (See above)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Feb. 13

Early on Feb. 1, some 200 members of the FARC launched a surprise attack on a Colombian navy base in the southern department of Narino, killing 14 marines, including the lieutenant who commanded the unit, and wounding 25 others, most of them seriously. The rebels used assault rifles and homemade mortars fashioned from cooking gas canisters in their attack on the Iscuande naval base, located on the Iscuande river near where it empties into the Pacific, in Iscuande municipality. The attack lasted four hours; the rebels retreated when artilleried helicopters and planes of the Colombian Air Force arrived. A Navy communique said the attack was carried out by the FARC’s 29th Front.

Most of the dead and wounded were participants in the government’s "campesino soldier" program, whose members do permanent military service in the areas where they live. Colombian Navy commander Adm. Mauricio Soto said at a Bogota press conference that government forces–consisting of 60 marines and 40 police agents stationed in the town–"repelled this attack, prevented the taking of Iscuande municipality…"

While the government of President Alvaro Uribe Velez has launched a major offensive against rebel forces, especially in southern Colombia, a recent study by the Security and Democracy Foundation, headed by analyst Alfredo Rangel, showed that the FARC launched 900 attacks on government troops in the first two years of Uribe’s administration, compared to 907 over the previous four years. The previous president, Andres Pastrana Arango, pursued a policy of peace negotiations with the FARC. (Miami Herald, Feb. 2; AP, Feb. 1)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Feb. 6

BUSH REQUESTS MORE AID

On Feb. 7, US president George W. Bush sent the US Congress his fiscal year 2006 budget request, including $550 in "anti-drug" money for Colombia, of which more than $393 million is direct aid to the Colombian military and police forces. The total amount is about $10 million less than in fiscal year 2005, a State Department official said. The US has spent over $3 billion on mostly military aid for "Plan Colombia" since 2000, but that program is due to expire at the end of the current fiscal year on Sept. 30. The State Department official, who requested anonymity, dismissed the idea that some of the coming year’s military aid could be shifted to social programs: "The intent is indeed to change the focus as the military phase achieves success. We are achieving success, but we’re not there yet." The new Colombia aid proposal comes as part of a $735 million request for the Andean Counterdrug Initiative in fiscal 2006, $4 million more than 2005. Unlike Plan Colombia, the Andean Counterdrug Initiative has no expiration date. (Miami Herald, Feb. 8)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Feb. 13

VENEZUELA: KIDNAPPING CONFLICT RESOLVED?

Tens of thousands of supporters of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez Frias marched in Caracas on Jan. 23 to protest the violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty by neighboring Colombia. The march came in response to the Colombian government’s Jan. 12 admission that it paid bounty hunters to kidnap FARC representative Rodrigo Granda Escobar in Caracas on Dec. 13. The marchers also carried banners reading "Bush: Venezuela Is Not Iraq!" Speaking on Jan. 23, Chavez accused the US government of being behind the Granda incident: "This provocation came from Washington, it is the latest attempt by the imperialists…to ruin our relations with Colombia," he said. The US had offered its "100% support" for Colombia’s actions. Anti-Chavez forces tried to organize a march the same day, Jan. 23, but only managed to draw a few dozen people. (Reuters, AFP, BBC, Jan. 24)

The Granda incident sparked a freeze in trade and diplomatic relations between Colombia and Venezuela. Colombian president Alvaro Uribe Velez announced on Jan. 29 that the conflict had been resolved; in a tour of the border department of Arauca, Uribe sent his greetings to Chavez and the Venezuelan people, and thanked the countries which intervened to negotiate a solution. Those countries reportedly included Brazil, Peru, Spain, Mexico and most notably Cuba, whose president Fidel Castro Ruz apparently played a key role. Speaking on Jan. 30 from Porto Alegre, Brazil, where he was attending the World Social Forum, Chavez said the crisis with Colombia was not yet resolved and that its resolution would depend on the results of a meeting planned between Uribe and him in Caracas on Feb. 3. (AP, AFP, DPA, Jan. 30)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 30

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, March 7, 2005

Reprinting permissible with attribution

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