From Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 31: In a 2-1 decision, a three-judge panel of the Oral Criminal Court in the Chilean city of Temuco acquitted six Mapuche rights activists in a retrial on charges of “terrorist illicit… Read moreChile: Mapuche acquitted of “terrorist” charges
from Weekly News Update on the Americas
On May 29 in Tocache province, in the Huallaga valley of San Martin in north central Peru, at least 3,500 campesino coca growers (cocaleros) armed with sticks surrounded a group of 230 police agents charged with carrying out coca leaf eradication operations. According to police, the resulting clash left 17 agents hurt–one by a bullet, the rest by beatings. Twenty cocaleros were injured; Tocache mayor Nancy Zagerra said three of them are in serious condition with bullet wounds. (La Jornada, Mexico, May 31, from DPA)
The 230 anti-drug police agents had arrived in the area on May 26, along with 50 workers from the Control and Reduction of Coca Crops in the Alto Huallaga (CORAH) project. On May 28, the anti-drug forces set up camp in the village of 5 de Diciembre, where according to cocalero leader Nancy Obregon they forced the campesinos from their homes and destroyed their crops, even after the campesinos showed them documents from the state-run National Coca Company (ENACO) demonstrating that the crops were legal. “They said those [documents] were no good and they threw everyone out. The people have had to sleep outside,” said Obregon. Outraged at the incident, Obregon organized nearly 4,000 cocaleros to confront the agents at their camp the next day. (La Republica, Lima, May 30)
On May 31 a representative of the Office of the Defender of the People, Manlio Alvarez Soto, traveled to Tocache from Tingo Maria, in neighboring Huanuco region, to meet with the cocaleros and gather information about the conflict. Alvarez also visited two of the wounded cocaleros in the Tingo Maria hospital, where they were taken for treatment. (LR, June 1) On June 3, some 6,000 cocaleros from Monzon and Alto Huallaga marched in Tingo Maria in support of the Tocache cocaleros. (LR, June 4) Obregon said the cocaleros will start an open-ended strike on June 27. (LR, May 30)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, June 5
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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, July 10, 2005
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Another escalation is reported in the persecution of the Mapuche indigenous people of Chile: the imprisonment of the editor of a Mapuche magazine on six-year-old charges related to a land occupation, effectively preventing him from travelling to Canada for a… Read moreChile: Mapuche editor imprisoned
from Weekly News Update on the Americas
AMNESTY LAW PASSES
On June 20, the last day of ordinary sessions for the Colombian Congress, the Senate approved the “Justice and Peace” law, which paves the way for a “demobilization” and amnesty process under negotiation with the country’s right-wing paramilitaries since last July. The law grants the paramilitaries political status, allowing them to potentially benefit from pardons. Under the demobilization program, paramilitary commanders are supposed to confess all their crimes in order to benefit from reduced sentences of 4-8 years in prison. The Chamber of Representatives approved the law on June 21 in an extraordinary session. Colombia’s right-wing paramilitaries have historically been strongly supported by the state. (El Nuevo Herald, Miami, June 21 from AP; Inter Press Service, June 22)
Under the “Justice and Peace” law, which President Alvaro Uribe Velez signed on June 22, a group of 20 prosecutors will investigate within a maximum period of 60 days the crimes of each of the 10,000 paramilitary members who are eligible to demobilize from now through December.
Congressional representative Gustavo Petro of the leftist Independent Democratic Pole (PDI) party accuses Uribe of pushing through the “Justice and Peace” law in order to benefit relatives linked to paramilitary groups in Antioquia, where Uribe served as governor from 1995 to 1997. Petro said that Santiago Uribe Velez, the president’s brother, formed and financed a paramilitary group called “The 12 Apostles” around 1993-1994. The group, based out of the Uribe family’s La Carolina ranch in Yarumal, Antioquia, killed at least 50 people. Santiago Uribe was interrogated in 1997 about the group but the case was archived in 1999 for lack of evidence. Relatives of the victims of the June 1990 Campamento massacre, in which four people were killed and two disappeared by “The 12 Apostles,” have brought the case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Petro also said two first cousins and an uncle of President Uribe led a paramilitary group known as “Los Erre,” linked to the killings of another 50 or more people in Titiribi and Armenia-Mantequilla municipalities in Antioquia. Carlos Alberto Velez Ochoa, Juan Diego Velez Ochoa and Mario Velez Ochoa were initially sentenced in the case but were released from prison after a year for lack of evidence. President Uribe and his family also apparently had close ties to Antioquia drug lords Pablo Escobar Gaviria and Fabio Ochoa Vasquez, who is related to the Velez Ochoa family.
(ENH, June 23 from correspondent; IPS, June 22)
On June 20, Colombia’s Congress approved two other laws pushed by Uribe’s government: a pension reform law which will take effect in 2010, and a law providing foreign investors with legal guarantees protecting their contracts from any changes in law or policy. But Congress rejected four legislative proposals presented by Defense Minister Jorge Alberto Uribe, including one which would have unified the state’s intelligence services and another which would have increased the length of obligatory military service from 18 to 24 months. The defense minister narrowly avoided being fired the previous week when the Chamber of Representatives–but not the Senate–passed a vote of censure against him. (ENH, June 21 from AP)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, June 26
U.S. HOUSE OK’S NEW MILITARY AID
On June 28, the US House of Representatives voted 189-234 to defeat an amendment which would have cut $100 million in military aid for Colombia from a $734 million “Andean Counterdrug Initiative” in the 2006 foreign operations appropriations bill (HR 3057). The amendment to cut funding for the US-sponsored “Plan Colombia” military program was introduced by Reps. James McGovern (D-MA), Betty McCollum (D-MN) and Dennis Moore (D-KS). The Washington-based Latin America Working Group (LAWG) described the Colombia amendment as “the single most hotly-debated issue on the foreign operations bill.” Congress members who spoke out against it included Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), who noted how Afro-Colombians and indigenous peoples are disproportionately affected by Colombia’s ongoing internal violence, and amendment co-sponsor McCollum, who pointed out that in Colombia, “90% of violent crimes…go unpunished, and human rights abuses among Colombia’s military are all too common.”
Later on June 28, the House voted 393-32 to approve the full bill, officially titled the Foreign Operations, Export Financing and Related Programs Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2006. In addition to the $734 million Andean Counterdrug Initiative, the bill will provide military aid of $2.3 billion for Israel and $1.3 billion for Egypt. In order for the bill to become law, a final version must be passed by both the House and Senate and then signed by the president. A subcommittee met June 29 to begin work on the Senate version. (LAWG Update, June 30; News from Lutheran World Relief, July 1; US Department of State Press Release, June 29 via allAfrica.com; Press Release from House Speaker Dennis Hastert, June 28 via US Newswire)
Weekly New Update on the Americas, July 3
SOLDIERS CHARGED IN MASSACRE
The Colombian attorney general’s office has ordered the arrest of six soldiers to face homicide charges for the killing of five civilians on April 10, 2004, in the village of Potosi, Cajamarca municipality, Tolima department. The army claimed the five villagers were killed in crossfire as a military patrol was pursuing a group of leftist guerrillas; the soldiers argued that they hadn’t been able to distinguish the victims as civilians because dense fog limited their visibility. The attorney general’s office ordered the arrests after an autopsy on 17-year old campesino Albeiro Mendoza showed he was shot at a distance of between 30 and 60 centimeters–practically point blank. The other victims were Mendoza’s son, six-month old Cristian Albeiro Mendoza Uruena; the baby’s mother, 17-year old Yamile Uruena Arango; 14-year old Julio Cesar Santana; and 24-year old Norberto Mendoza. The family was taking the baby to the doctor for an ear infection when they were killed. (El Tiempo, Bogota, July 1 via Servicio Prensa Rural)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 3
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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, July 10, 2005
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Continue ReadingCOLOMBIA: PARAMILITARY AMNESTY PASSES, NEW AID PENDINGfrom Weekly News Update on the Americas
On May 21, residents of the northern Ecuadoran provinces of Sucumbios and Orellana began an open-ended civic strike to demand improvements to roads, schools, housing and health care in the region, which borders on Colombia and Peru. The protesters seized 114 oil wells on nine fields operated by the state-run oil company Petroecuador and blocked access roads to oil facilities, forcing a shutdown of drilling and repair work.
As the strike continued on May 25, President Alfredo Palacio declared a 60-day state of emergency in Sucumbios and Orellana, deeming the oil region a “security territory.” The state of emergency allows the restriction of certain civil rights. (La Jornada, Mexico, May 25; AP, May 26)
Late on May 25, after the government signed an agreement promising to address their demands, the protesters ended their strike and left the oil fields. Under the terms of the agreement, Petroecuador and other state agencies must finance roads and electricification projects in the region. The state of emergency remains in effect. (AP, Reuters, May 26)
On May 24, Palacio outlined a six-point plan for restoring stability in Ecuador over the next 18 months with a call for “a great national accord.” The proposed steps include calling a “People’s Assembly” to define an agenda of change; the assembly’s proposals would then be put to a referendum, and in the same election, representatives would be chosen for a constitutional assembly. Palacio became president on April 20 after mass protests forced the ouster of Lucio Gutierrez from office. (LJ, May 25, 26, from wire services)
The National Federation of Campesino, Indigenous and Black Organizations (FENOCIN) and other grassroots organizations in Ecuador are planning protests during the 10th round of negotiations over a free trade treaty (TLC) with the US, Colombia and Peru, scheduled for June 6-19 in Guayaquil. Grassroots groups are demanding that Palacio suspend the TLC negotiations and instead call a referendum on the trade pact. (El Comercio, Peru, May 28, from EFE)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, May 29
Weekly News Update on the Americas
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See also WW4 REPORT #109
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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, June 10, 2005
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Continue ReadingECUADOR: STRIKERS SEIZE OIL WELLSfrom Weekly News Update on the Americas
HUALLAGA VALLEY: COCALEROS CLASH WITH COPS
On May 29 in Tocache province, in the Huallaga valley of San Martin in north central Peru, at least 3,500 campesino coca growers (cocaleros) armed with sticks surrounded a group of 230 police agents charged with carrying out coca leaf eradication operations. According to police, the resulting clash left 17 agents hurt–one by a bullet, the rest by beatings. Twenty cocaleros were injured; Tocache mayor Nancy Zagerra said three of them are in serious condition with bullet wounds. (La Jornada, Mexico, May 31 from DPA)
The 230 anti-drug police agents had arrived in the area on May 26, along with 50 workers from the Control and Reduction of Coca Crops in the Alto Huallaga (CORAH) project. On May 28, the anti-drug forces set up camp in the village of 5 de Diciembre, where according to cocalero leader Nancy Obregon they forced the campesinos from their homes and destroyed their crops, even after the campesinos showed them documents from the state-run National Coca Company (ENACO) demonstrating that the crops were legal. “They said those [documents] were no good and they threw everyone out. The people have had to sleep outside,” said Obregon Outraged at the incident, Obregon organized nearly 4,000 cocaleros to confront the agents at their camp the next day. (La Republica, Lima, May 30)
On May 31 a representative of the Office of the Defender of the People, Manlio Alvarez Soto, traveled to Tocache from Tingo Maria, in neighboring Huanuco region, to meet with the cocaleros and gather information about the conflict. Alvarez also visited two of the wounded cocaleros in the Tingo Maria hospital, where they were taken for treatment. [LR 6/1/05] On June 3, some 6,000 cocaleros from Monzon and Alto Huallaga marched in Tingo Maria in support of the Tocache cocaleros. (LR, May 6) Obregon said the cocaleros will start an open-ended strike on June 27. (LR, May 30)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, June 5
CUSCO: RESIDENTS SEIZE MINE
On May 24, some 2,000 residents of Espinar province in the southern Peruvian region of Cusco seized a copper mining camp run by the British-Australian corporation BHP Billiton-Tintaya. The protesters looted and burned camp facilities, and police used tear gas to try to remove them; dozens of people were injured. Residents are demanding that the mining company provide $20 million a year in funding for social programs in the region and that it take measures to improve infrastructure and protect the environment. BHP Billiton-Tintaya is the third largest copper mine in Peru, producing 80,000 tons a year, 12.1% of national production.
As the number of residents surrounding the camp swelled to 4,000 on May 25, BHP Billiton-Tintaya pulled its personnel out and shut down operations at the camp. The same day, the protesters beat the mayor of Espinar when he asked them to dialogue with the mining company.
On May 26, a government delegation headed by Energy and Mines deputy minister Romulo Mucho arrived to negotiate with the protesters, who now numbered some 6,000 and were gathered in the plaza in Yauri, the provincial capital of Espinar. The crowd was furious to see that the Energy and Mines minister had not come with the delegation, but eventually agreed to a dialogue.
The company is not participating, saying it will not negotiate under pressure, and that it will not contribute more than what it agreed to in an 2003 contract: 3% of utilities, with a minimum payment set at $1.5 million a year. In the first year of the contract the company paid $2 million. (LJ, May 25 from Reuters; Reuters May 26)
Police in Yauri say that early on May 26 they found pamphlets of the Maoist rebel group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) scattered in the streets, calling on residents to “rid our land of the traitor dogs and those miserable gringos who loot our resources.” The news led some media to suggest that the Espinar protests were organized by “subversives,” but legislator Jose Taco, a member of the government negotiating team, rejected the theory. “I’m from the zone, I know the people, and I deny the subversive character, they’re not criminals, [though] there are groups which take advantage,” he said.
On May 27, after a 12-hour meeting with the government delegation, Espinar residents agreed to suspend their protests while local leaders consult with their bases about whether or not to accept a June 2 meeting to renew dialogue with the company. BHP Billiton-Tintaya has not yet agreed to the dialogue, and says it will keep its operations shut down for security reasons. Economy minister Pedro Pablo Kuczynski told the media on May 26 that the company will leave Peru if the protests are not resolved quickly. (Reuters, May 26, 27)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, May 29
AYACUCHO TO AMAZONIA: CAMPESINOS STRIKE
On May 23, thousands of campesinos in seven Peruvian regions began blocking highways in an agrarian strike to demand fair prices for their produce, protest unfair competition from imports and reject a free trade treaty being negotiated with the US, Ecuador and Colombia which they say will exacerbate their current crisis. In addition, the campesinos were demanding that sales tax be reduced from 19% to 4% for the agricultural sector, and that the state agrarian bank, Agrobanco, open up branches in rural areas to grant low-interest credits to campesinos. The strikers mainly produce rice, cotton and bananas in Peru’s northern regions, and potatoes in the south.
The protest was initially called as a 48-hour strike in Tumbes, Piura, Cajamarca, Loreto and Ayacucho departments, and as an open-ended strike in Lambayeque and San Martin. In Tumbes, on the northern coast bordering Ecuador, some 5,000 rice and banana producers blocked several kilometers of the Panamerican highway. In the northern coastal city of Chiclayo, in Lambayeque, police arrested some 20 people who were watching campesinos blockade the Panamerican highway. Strike actions also took place in Piura, also on the northern coast, and in Cajamarca, just inland in the northern Andes.
Further east, on the edge of the Peruvian Amazon, more than 10,000 rice growers from San Martin and Loreto departments blocked the road linking the towns of Yurimaguas (Loreto) and Tarapoto (San Martin) and shut down activities in the zone. Campesino leader Luis Zuniga, president of the National Convention of Peruvian Farmers (CONVEAGRO), noted that Peruvian authorities had encouraged farmers to grow more rice, causing a production glut which has forced prices down.
In Ayacucho, in the south-central Andean highlands, more than 8,000 campesino potato growers began their strike on May 23 by occupying the offices of the Regional Department of Agriculture and blocking the main access highways into the city of Huamanga.
Agriculture Minister Manuel Manrique said late on May 23 that he had reached a pre-accord with the Ayacucho producers, and that they had agreed to lift their strike once negotiations with campesino representatives from the other regions were successful. Under the terms of the accord, the government agreed to purchase 4,100 tons of potatoes from the Ayacucho producers. (Telam, AP, May 23, 24; Prensa Latina, May 24; ANSA, May 23; La Jornada, Mexico, May 26) The strikes ended May 26 after the government signed an accord with the northern producers, in which it pledged to buy this year’s entire crop of rice in order to stabilize prices. (LJ, May 27 from DPA)
President Alejandro Toledo left Peru on May 24 to begin a 17-day trip in which he is to visit China, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian city of Ramallah in the Occupied Territories. Manrique, the agriculture minister, was also scheduled to take part in the trip. (AP, May 24)
The agrarian strike came in a conflictive week in Peru. On May 24, some 7,000 nurses employed by the state-run Social Security agency began an open-ended national strike to demand a wage increase. In the northern city of Trujillo, state workers burned tires and threw paint at offices of the Chilean airline Lan-Peru in a protest to demand a series of labor laws. On May 23, Aymara indigenous residents of the Uros islands in Lake Titicaca began a 48-hour strike to demand that the National Institute of Natural Resources stop barring them from using the lake’s flora and fauna. On May 24, the Aymara announced that their strike would be open-ended. (LJ, May 26 from DPA, AFP, Reuters; AP, May 24)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, May 29
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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, June 10, 2005
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Ecologists Warn of Disaster as U.S. Sprays Glyphosate in Threatened National Parks
by Daniel Leal and combined sources
In the past few months, the people of Quibdo, capital city of the Colombian Pacific coast department of Choco, have observed daily the landing at their local airport of helicopters and small aircraft, packed with “gringos” from Plan Colombia and their Colombian associates.
They have come with one objective: to spray the illicit crops located in the huge territory of Choco. In the Feb. 11 edition of the Colombian news magazine Semana, Choco journalist Alejo Restrepo, writes that biodiversity and watersheds of the region are threatened by this chemical assault.
For centuries, indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombians have preserved the natural environment of Choco, one of the richest areas in flora and fauna of the country. Their way of life, based on fishing and small-scale cultivation of yucca and banana, is now threatened. Restrepo especially protests the decision to approve the spraying of glyphosate without an environmental impact study.
Bismarck Chaverra, director of the Choco-based Institute for Environmental Studies of the Pacific, interviewed in that same issue of Semana, reported 347 documented cases of people with acute respiratory and dermatological diseases in Choco, with 70% of the affected children under three years old.
Chaverra’s group is part of a coalition of Colombian and international environmental and human rights groups that oppose the spraying. A February petition against the spraying in Choco has been signed by Friends of the Earth Latin America, the Open Society Institute, Washington Office on Latin America and the biodiversity protection organization Grupo Semillas, as well as several Colombian groups.
Also of special concern is potential damage to Colombia’s 50 national parks, which cover 10 million hectares, according to Ecolombia, a network of Colombian environmental groups. Ecolombia also notes the irony that this threat comes just as the parks are increasingly being opened to “eco-tourism” interests. Ecolombia protests this policy as a “privatization” of the nation’s parks. The group writes that “the national parks are the genetic bank of Colombia. To privatize them or bombard them with poison would be much more grave than to put the National Library to the flame.”
In late March 2004, Senator Jorge Enrique Robledo of Independent Workers Revolutionary Movement (MOIR) led a significant number of Colombian legislators in issuing a formal statement of protest against the spraying. The Transnational Institute, a global group of activist scholars, notes that spraying in the national parks would constitute a violation of several treaties to which Colombia is signatory, including the Biodiversity Convention, ILO Convention 169 on the rights of indigenous peoples, the Ramsar Convention on wetlands, and articles 97 and 80 of the Colombian constitution, which protect natural resources.
Under such pressures, the administration of President Alvaro Uribe agreed to suspend spraying in the parks last March pending further study. In the 2003 Colombia aid package approved by the US Congress under the Andean Counterdrug Initiative, conditions were also imposed mandating protection of water sources and protected areas, and restitution for damaged property and legal crops. The measure required that funds for the aerial eradication only be made available if the Department of State certified to Congress that certain condition are being met. In December 2003, the Deparment of State issued a study to Congress, “Report on Issues Related to the Aerial Eradication of Illicit Coca in Colombia,” officially certifying that the conditions were being met. In February 2004, the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA), a hemispheric alliance of environmental law professionals, issued a statement contesting the certification and urging Congress to “withhold funding for the chemical eradication program until DoS demonstrates full compliance with the conditions.” AIDA stated: “A thorough look at the DoS report demonstrates that the…conditions have not been satisfied. For example, DoS fails to demonstrate that the spraying does not pose unreasonable risks of adverse effects on the environment, or that complaints of harm to health or legal crops are appropriately evaluated and fair compensation provided.”
But Congress did not act, and the Uribe administration has just announced its intention to resume spraying in three national parks: Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a northern park declared a biosphere reserve in 1986 by UNESCO; and Catatumbo and La Macarena, both in the cloud forests of the eastern Andean slopes.
Colombia’s deputy interior minister Mario Iguarán told reporter Yadira Ferrer of Tierramérica, a Mexico-based trans-American environmental journal, that the renewed spraying is permitted by Resolution No. 0013, issued in 20003 by the Colombian National Narcotics Council (CNE). The Resolution allows fumigation of nature reserves where there is evidence of illicit crops and little possibility of eradicating the drug plants by hand.
Colombian environmental groups have filed a motion to annul the resolution before the Council of State, the highest juridical body for administrative decisions, but Iguarán argued that it does not have the power to suspend the operations. In Ferrer’s May 14 account, Iguarán also noted the March study by the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD), an OAS body, finding that glyphosate does not have significant environmental impacts.
The report, requested by the US, Colombia and the United Kingdom, investigated the human health and environmental effects of the glyphosate mixture used for drug eradication in Colombia. The report concluded that human health risks from exposure to the spray mixture–glyphosate mixed with a surfactant, Cosmo-Flux–were “minimal,” while the risk of direct effects for wildlife were judged to be “negligible.” But the US Office on Colombia, a coalition of NGOs, notes that buried deep in the 121-page report are concerns about the impact of the spraying on aquatic organisms and amphibians. The report points out that the environmental “toxicity of the mixture of glyphosate and Cosmo-Flux was greater than that reported for formulated glyphosate itself.” (This contrasts with the toxicity of the mixture for humans, which was found to be consistent with the levels reported for glyphosate alone.) The report states that “aquatic animals and algae in some shallow water bodies may be at risk” from “direct overspray of surface waters.” The report recommends the eradication program “identify mixtures of glyphosate and adjuvants that are less toxic to aquatic organisms than the currently used mixture.” There was no immediate response from US or Colombian governments to this recommendation. Colombia praised the report. “This scientific study shows us the way. We are doing the right thing and we are going to continue the spraying program,” said Colombian Interior Minister Sabas Pretelt.
Ferrer’s story questioned the report’s findings that the herbicide’s risk for the environment “is not significant.” Santiago Salazar Córdova, coordinator of a commission of Ecuador’s Environment Ministry that advises the Foreign Ministry on drug fumigation policy, protested to Ferrer that the report failed to define what would constitute a “significant” threat. Spraying in Colombian areas near the Ecuador border has been a source of tension with Quito, which has formally protested to the Uribe government.
Salazar also said the study was conducted between September and March, “too little time to talk in terms of cancer-causing effects, for example…”
Iguarán admitted the ideal option would be manual eradication of drug crops, a method the government hopes to use on some 3,000 hectares of protected areas. But he insisted that it is necessary to fumigate some 75,000 hectares, which include areas of the national parks where the presence of armed groups impedes access by land.
The decision to fumigate in the parks may cost Colombia development aid from EU countries. The Colombian daily El Espectador reported April 28 that the Netherlands asked the national parks director, Julia Miranda, to confirm the decision to fumigate in the protected areas, because the measure “could be motive to request the suspension of activities financed by this Embassy.”
Juan Mayr, a former environment minister, told Ferrer the 2003 CEN resolution has created “one of the gravest situations that can happen in regards to the environment in Colombia” and is “an attack against the collective heritage of the Colombian people.”
Peasants and Bari indigenous peoples who inhabit the threatened areas are also protesting the planned fumigations. The Bogota daily El Tiempo reported May 16 that 11 peasant organizations from the Rio Guayabero region and La Macarena National Park issued a statement calling for manual eradication rather than spraying. Gustavo del Rio, spokesman for the Association of Peasant Environmentalists of the Ariari and Guayabero Rivers (ACARIGUA) said that spraying will only cause the peasants to start planting coca in other areas, destroying more forest. He said that the peasants would be willing to eradicate the crops manually if the government were to provide them with alternatives for survival and eventual relocation outside the park area, where farming is officially forbidden.
Spraying has apparently already begun in Sierra Nevada National Park. Elber Dimas, a community leader from the corregimiento of Guachaca, located on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada, told El Tiempo that that children are suffering from diarrhea and skin problems as a result of exposure, and that some Kogui and Wiwa Indians have been forced to abandon their communities due to the spraying. Col. Oscar Atehortua, commander of the Counternarcotics Police North Region, assured that the spraying is taking place outside the national park and the indigenous reserves.
There are two opposite international perspectives on what has to be done in Colombia to address the roots of the coca phenomenon. The first, dictated by the US, calls for simple eradication of the crops, by force and by chemical spraying. The second, promoted by the European Community, is to address the injustice of the Colombian social structure, and investing in the needs that drive peasants to plant coca. But Uribe is now jeopardizing relations with the EU to pursue a national agenda that calls for privatization and free trade as well as forcible eradication of illicit crops. Free trade and the eradication program were said to be the top items on the agenda in Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s five-hour meeting with Uribe in Bogota April 26.
RESOURCES:
Alejo Restrepo Mosquera in Semana, Feb. 11
http://semana2.terra.com.co/archivo/articulosView.jsp?id=84740
Bismark Chaverra interview in Semana, Feb. 11
http://semana2.terra.com.co/archivo/articulosView.jsp?id=84735
“El Choco Tambien es Colombia,” petition online at Rebelion
http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=11667
Ecolombia page on threat to national parks
http://www.ecolombia.org/parques.htm
TNI Drugs and Democracy program page on Colombia
http://www.tni.org/drugscolombia-docs/thedebate-e.htm
Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA) statement
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:Z8z58__oJ40J:www.aida-americas.org/template
s/aida/uploads/docs/AIDA_on_DOS_2003_certification.pdf+Resolution+No.+0013+colom
bia&hl=en
AIDA homepage
http://www.aida-americas.org/aida.php
Yadira Ferrer in Tierramerica, May 14
http://www.tierramerica.net/2005/0514/iarticulo.shtml
US Office on Colombia Info-Brief on the CICAD report
http://usofficeoncolombia.org/InfoBrief/042505.htm
CountryWatch summary of article from El Tiempo, May 16
http://aol.countrywatch.com/aol_wire.asp?vCOUNTRY=54&UID=1521182
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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, June 10, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution
A Father Waits for Justice as Deadly Accident Reveals Air-Interception Exercises
A tragic air accident on Peru’s northern coastline in August of 2001 cost the lives of two exemplary pilots, one Peruvian and one American. It received little notice at the time. But a WW4 REPORT investigation into the incident has exposed a series of blunders, mysterious official silence from both Lima and Washington, and finally a trail of corruption extending from the hand of Peru’s former intelligence czar Vladimir Montesinos–now convicted on multiple corruption charges–to the U.S. State Department. The regime of Peru’s authoritarian President Alberto Fujimori, ousted in November 2000, is now widely recognized to have allowed drug flights to get through, and the U.S.-coordinated program to shoot the flights down was officially suspended after the embarrassing downing of an innocent missionary plane in April 2001. But training for the program apparently continued at least through 2003 and the State Department won’t talk. The father of the Peruvian pilot killed in the 2001 accident wants to know why. And since your tax-dollars may be funding a clandestine military operation in South America that violates official policy–you should too.
by Peter Gorman
“If you want to talk about corruption, the United States is continuing to sacrifice youth such as my son in the name of stopping cocaine. But this is not what they are doing. This is a charade.”
So says Carlos Lama Borges, a retired Peruvian Air Force captain whose pilot son’s body was found washed up on a desert beach four years ago. Despite evidence of faulty equipment in his son’s plane, a Peruvian government investigation blamed the pilot in the accident, prompting Lama to file a lawsuit against the Peruvian armed forces and U.S. military contractors to discover the truth. For his effort, his home was burglarized, and materials related to the case stolen. The ongoing case, ignored by both the U.S. and Peruvian media, may reveal that a controversial air-interception program launched under Plan Colombia continued well after its official suspension.
In 1990, Washington and Peru entered into an agreement–formalized as a bilateral treaty in 1993–whereby the U.S. would aid Peru’s armed forces in the location, identification, interception and/or neutralization of small aircraft suspected of carrying coca base from Peruvian territory to finishing laboratories in Colombia. The Airbridge Denial Program, as it was known, defined the role of U.S.-contracted planes and pilots (and later, radar operators) as one of location and identification, with the Peruvian Air Force (FAP) calling the shots on which planes were to be intercepted or shot down. The actual shooting was also to be the responsibility of the Peruvians. A similar program with the same name was also utilized in Colombia with the same public protocol.
That either the Peruvians or Colombians were actually given the green light to call the shots on shootdowns has been disputed by former DEA agent Celerino Castillo, who was one of the US men involved in a precursor program to Airbridge Denial in Peru in the 1980s. Castillo, in conversation with this reporter, claimed that despite the Peruvians being given the final word on paper, the shootdown orders “always originated with the U.S. That was not something we were going to trust to anyone else.”
Castillo, a Bronze Star winner in Vietnam who served with the DEA in Peru in 1984 and ’85, said the real authority was with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, whose men accompanied the DEA flights that in turn accompanied the FAP flights. “I flew on those shoot-down missions. Nobody, I mean nobody, shoots down anything unless the CIA says so. n those days we flew on helicopters and the Peruvian soldiers would lean out the window with FN rifles and blast holes from above drug smugglers’ planes. I was on those flights. Yes, the Peruvians did the shooting but it was always the U.S. who gave the OK.” Several Peruvian pilots involved with the program, speaking on condition of anonymity, concurred with Castillo’s assessment.
Between the years 1990 and 2001, official FAP reports claim to have intercepted and forced down or shot down a total of 101 drug-carrying planes. Whether that number is accurate has long been open to debate, as it omits all reference to planes that were forced or shot down which were not found to be carrying drugs. If those are included the total would probably be considerably higher. But the program probably never would have come under public scrutiny if not for some deadly incidents which cost innocent lives. The first actually resulted in the program’s suspension, following an investigation and demands for justice from the survivors.
BUNGLE IN THE JUNGLE
On April 20, 2001, at roughly 10:35 AM, a Cessna 185 pontoon plane carrying three missionaries and an infant was misidentified as a suspected drug-carrying plane by US pilots contracted by the CIA as part of the Airbridge Program and shot out of the sky outside of Pevas, in the Peruvian Amazon. The pilot, Kevin Donaldson, had his leg shattered by a gunshot fired by a Peruvian fighter jet, a Cessna A-37B Dragonfly, but managed to bring the plane down into the Amazon safely. James Bowers, like Donaldson a missionary with the Association for Baptist World Evangelism, as well as Bower’s son Cory, escaped unharmed–but his wife, Veronica Bowers, and their infant adopted daughter Chastity, were both killed by a single bullet that passed through the mother’s head and then killed the baby. Donaldson believes the same shot set the engine alight and ricocheted into his leg.
The shootdown occurred on the eve of newly elected President George Bush’s first appearance at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec. In the weeks leading up to the summit, the president of Uruguay, Jorge Battle Ibanez, had announced his intention to call for an end to the failed War on Drugs. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Vicente Fox of Mexico had announced their intentions to second Ibanez’ call. If they proceeded with their plan, George Bush–who had inherited Bill Clinton’s Plan Colombia and intended to expand it–would have not only been upstaged, but the entire Plan Colombia could have been thrown into a political tailspin. The shootdown, therefore, was either tragic serendipity–or carried out on orders that a drug plane be encountered and shot down that day to give Bush a “victory” to trumpet in Quebec.
If it was the former, the shootdown involved absolute stupidity on the part of the two CIA-contracted pilots who identified the plane as a possible drug flight, as the Cessna was known throughout the region and had filed a flight plan and was following it to the letter. If it was the latter–if an order was given take down a drug flight to undermine Ibanez’ position at Quebec–then any plane would have served the purpose, and it was simply bad luck that Donaldson and the Bowers happened to be in the sky that morning.
As both Donaldson and his wife later maintained, the plane was repeatedly strafed while listing upside down in the river. A photographer in Iquitos, the Amazon port city where the plane was brought, reported that only one bullet out of over 60 came from anywhere other than the bottom of the plane.
Did the CIA contractors know the plane was not carrying drugs? Was the strafing was intended to ignite the plane’s remaining fuel, causing an explosion which would have erased all trace of its occupants and identification number, allowing Washington to claim the plane was a drug flight? In any event, the plane did not explode–but the shoot-down did upstage the call for an end to the Drug War by the three South American presidents.
The shoot-down also caused Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) to call for Congressional hearings into the Airbridge Denial Programs in both Peru and Colombia. The programs were suspended immediately. At the subsequent hearings it was decided that both programs would be revamped–with better procedures in place to protect innocent planes–before the suspensions would be lifted.
A U.S. investigation into the shoot-down placed the blame on the Peruvian pilots and poor communications; the Peruvian investigation exonerated the Peruvian pilots, while blaming the U.S. personnel and, again, poor communications. Both countries agreed to financial settlements with survivors. (See postcript below.)
DEATH PLUNGE ON THE PACIFIC
On August 19, 2003, more than two years after the suspensions began, the White House announced that President Bush had approved resumption of the Colombian Airbridge Denial Program within three days. Among the changes to the program was that the State Department, through Plan Colombia, would take over the training of Colombian pilots and the flying of the identification planes, effectively taking it out of the hands of the CIA. The subcontractor DynCorp, which had been assigned the mission of identifying the drug flights for the CIA, lost that contract. (The company continues to carry out aerial fumigation flights in Colombia.)
However, a new State Department contract went to ARINC, a Maryland-based aviation company that regularly contracted with the U.S. Department of Defense–particularly in the areas of providing communications, electronics and night-vision capacity to fighter craft. According to an ARINC press release dated April 24, 2002, over a year before the program was resumed in Colombia, the company was “awarded a competitive contract by the U.S. Army Communications and Electronics Command to act as contractor for the U.S. Airbridge Denial Program in Colombia and Peru.” The release said the contract was to run “through July 28, 2003.” Yet the Airbridge Program has never been officially resumed in Peru.
In fact, ARINC was working with the Airbridge Denial Program long before the missionary plane shoot-down. A contract between the FAP and ARINC dated June 2, 2000, secured by WW4 REPORT, has ARINC in charge of upgrading Peru’s fleet of Cessna A-37B Dragonfly jets and training FAP pilots in interception techniques and tactics. Calls to ARINC and Flight Test Associates, an Oklahoma company subcontracted by ARINC to run the pilot training program, verifies that the contract was ongoing even prior to 2000. No White House announcement of the continued training after the Amazon shoot-down was made, however, and no one outside a small group of people involved it was aware of its existence.
Nonetheless, the training did continue after the shoot-down, and on August 23, 2001, several months after the Airbridge Program was suspended, FAP pilot Lieutenant Miguel Angel Lama Barreto, 28, and USAF Lt. Col. (r) Arnold Balthazar, 47, plunged into the Pacific Ocean just north of Piura, on Peru’s northern Pacific coast, while executing drug-plane interception practice maneuvers in a Dragonfly. Both Lama and Balthazar died in the crash, caused when their jet stalled and their ejection equipment failed. Lama’s body, still strapped into his seat in the ejection position, was recovered two days later. Balthazar’s body has never been recovered. A team of U.S. Navy divers brought in from Hawaii searched for more than eight days before search was called off.
Lt. Miguel Angel Lama was one of Peru’s brightest pilots, specializing in flight maneuvers in the Dragonfly. A drug-plane interdiction instructor, he was the son of FAP Captain Carlos Lama, a highly respected pilot in the Peruvian Air Force. Miguel is referred to in official Peruvian materials as “an instructor’s instructor.”
Arnold Balthazar’s resume reads like an induction speech at the Air Force Hall of Fame. A cum laude graduate of the University of Portland, OR, which he attended on an Air Force ROTC scholarship, he graduated from USAF Pilot Training in 1978, became an Air Combat Maneuvering Instructor the same year, training in basic interceptions. He became a Flight Commander in 1982 and an F-15 instructor pilot the same year, a position he held, with increasing responsibilities, until 1988. Between 1988-1991 he was Chief of Weapons and Tactics at Hickam AFB in Hawaii, during which time he was selected by the USAF Chief of Staff Gen. Merrill McPeak to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff Chariman Gen. Colin Powell, Secretary of the Air Force Donald Rice and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney on the F-15’s capability and employment during Operation Desert Storm.
Balthazar retired from the Air Force in 1991, joining the Air National Guard and working out of the Air Force Reserve Test Center in Tucson, AZ, from 1991-1998. He retired as a lieutenant colonel USAF.
Awards he earned during his career included the Wing Top Gun F-15 Award in 1988, the Pacific Air Force’s Outstanding Performer of the Year Award in 1991; and the Lt. Gen. Claire Lee Channault Award as the USAF’s Outstanding Aerial Tactician of the Year in 1995–the only time the award has been presented to someone not on active duty in the Air Force. He also developed no-cabin-light night-flying systems currently in use in the Air Force, and developed an F-15 Training Plan that was included in USAF manuals “in its entirety”.
In short, both Lama and Balthazar were superior pilots who should not have crashed and died while performing an exercise. But they did. And they did it while exercising for a program that was supposed to be suspended. Unraveling their deaths leads to a web of corruption as well as an abyss of incompetence.
THE TRAIL
Following his retirement Balthazar became an owner/operator of Lead Turn Enterprises, a flight-test, navigational training, air-to-air engagement and aviation systems consulting firm. He contracted with Flight Test Associates of Tucson, AZ, to install his night-vision system in FAP interceptor planes in 1999, and had a second contract with Flight Test Associates as a counter-drug intercept instructor for Colombian and Peruvian instructor pilots that ran from 1999-2000. Flight Test Associates was itself subcontracted by ARINC, already established as a contractor for both aircraft upgrades and intercept training for the Defense Department. Balthazar’s partner in the intercept training, USAF Captain (r) Neville Sonner, was employed directly by Flight Test Associates.
After the missionary shoot-down, someone–though neither the State Department, DoD, ARINC or Flight Test Associates will admit it was them–decided that one of the key ingredients to maximize the safety of non-drug flights was to have Peruvian pilots pull up alongside all planes suspected of carrying drugs and make eye contact with the pilots. Eye contact would theoretically allow the pilots to make a judgement as to whether the suspect plane was being piloted by someone who looked like a drug-smuggler or a missionary and respond accordingly. For some aircraft–those capable of flying at speeds the A-37B is capable of–this was a wacky but physically possible maneuver. For others–like the single-engine Cessna that Kevin Donaldson was flying when it was hit–eye contact with the pilot of an A-37B was impossible: Donaldson’s plane had a top speed of 137 mph when empty; with five passengers it couldn’t hit 125 mph. The A-37B, on the other hand, with a top speed of over 500 mph, stalls at under 140 except when the flaps are in a take-off or landing position.
On the flight in question, FAP pilot Miquel Lama and Balthazar were practicing exactly this intercept maneuver with a second plane piloted by FAP Lt. Nilton Lopez Zuniga and Sonner. They had already practiced three maneuvers; the fourth called for the planes to drop in altitude to under 3,000 feet, slow to 140, intersect, and then for one of them to try an evasive maneuver. Lopez and Sonner did just that; when Lama and Balthazar turned to chase, their plane stalled. Moments later Sonner claimed he saw the cockpit roof fly off the stalled plane; he expected to see both pilots eject and parachute to the sea. He and Lopez took their plane up to 9,000 feet to be able to identify the exact points where the parachutes landed, but there were no parachutes. The ejection seats failed and both pilots crashed into the Pacific still strapped into the plane.
A Peruvian military investigation into the accident quickly blamed it on “pilot error”–blaming Lama and Balthazar for their own deaths. But Lama’s father, retired FAP pilot Carlos Lama, demanded a Peruvian congressional investigation and launched a lawsuit against both the FAP and ARINC. His legal demands unleashed a mountain of official paperwork–nearly 1,000 pages, including the contracts between the FAP and ARINC, Balthazar’s training logs in Peru, US Embassy and DoD paperwork, and a host of other materials.
Initially, Lama was trying to ascertain whether ARINC’s “aircraft modernization” contract held them responsible for modernizing the ejection equipment and parachutes in his son’s plane–equipment that was more than 29 years old. Some of that remains unclear: the paperwork suggests that the FAP was responsible for changing the equipment, but that GRUCAM, the U.S. Defense Department military liaison program in Peru–which had contracted ARINC–was to provide that equipment with monies from Plan Colombia. ARINC’s Bob Warner, who heads up the corporation’s Oklahoma City office, claims that the modernization contract “had us there to install night vision cockpits but nothing in our contract called for us looking into the ejection seat apparatus.” When asked about the accident, Warner said “The flight that went down was not one of the modernized aircraft,” then quickly added that “I cannot speak to the accident in which the pilots died. There’s a lawsuit going on related to that and my lawyers have told us not to talk about it.”
But Carlos Lama’s investigation turned up more than he’d anticipated. Shortly after his investigation into his son’s death began his home in Lima was subject to a robbery in which all of his initial notes and nearly everything he owned pertaining to his son was looted. “They took pictures, his military things, paperwork, his letters telling me about the intercept program–everything. I was supposed to stop looking. No one wants anyone looking too deeply into this.”
There were reasons for his feelings. One of the names that comes up on three separate contracts that connect the U.S. Embassy in Lima to GRUCAM and the DoD as well as to ARINC, Flight Test Associates and the FAP is a retired Peruvian Air Force major, Jose Luis Gamboa Burgos, listed as the official representative of ARINC and FTA in Peru. The address he lists as the official address of both ARINC and FTA in Peru is that of his brother, Luis Felipe Gamboa Burgos–today recognized as a major player in Peru’s cocaine mafia.
While there has never been any proof that the lawyer Jose Luis Gamboa is dirty, his brother Luis Felipe is another story–and the use of his address as the official location in Peru of a DoD subcontractor raises eyebrows. A former security officer in the FAP, Luis Felipe left the military (and his five brothers who were still in it at the time) in 1989 to become an aide to Vladimiro Montesinos, a former Peruvian army captain with School of the Americas training who was then working on the presidential campaign of Alberto Fujimori. The following year, Fujimori was elected to his first term as Peru’s president and Montesinos became the power behind the Fujimori throne as well as the CIA’s man in Peru, earning $1 million a year from the Agency for ostensibly helping Peru eliminate the coca trade. Montesinos actually used that money to create a secret police force–the National Intelligence Service (SIN)–that helped coordinate all of the coca base shipments moving from Peru to Colombia for finishing and export. Between 1990 and 2000, Montesinos became the jefe to whom all those who wanted their shipments protected paid protection money. Those who didn’t pay, with few exceptions, found their shipments being discovered and confiscated by the Peruvian narcotics police with the help of the DEA–or their planes shot out of the sky by the FAP with the help of the CIA. Montesino’s SIN rarely missed anything.
To help him coordinate his efforts, after Fujimori’s election, Montesinos hired Luis Felipe Gamboa to work with CORPAC–the Peruvian corporation that runs all commercial aviation in the country, including security. Rumors began to spread almost instantly that Gamboa was helping cocaine leave the country by circumventing security, through his work with CORPAC. It wasn’t until several years had passed, however, that he was indicted for security fraud, a charge that appears to have disappeared as quickly as it came up. He nonetheless left CORPAC and went to work as a liaison between the FAP and Montesinos.
Not long after he began working with Montesinos, Luis Filipe Gamboa suggested that his wife, Maria del Carmen Lozada Rendon de Gamboa would make a good congresswoman, and in 1995 she was elected to Peru’s Congress. She had a reputation for strong-arming her colleagues, but nothing came of it until July, 27, 2001, when she was impeached after it was revealed that she had received the monies used in her 1995 election campaign from Montesinos. She was removed from Congress on August 18, 2001 and remains under investigation for influence peddling and spying for Montesinos in Congress.
During the investigation of Carmen Lozada Gamboa, it became public record in the notorious “vladi-videos”–secret videos of Vladimir Montesinos meeting with top Peruvian politicians whose relase were instrumental in the downfall of the Fujimori regime–that her husband had been receiving between $3,000 and $5,000 monthly from Montesinos for more than 10 years from 1990 to spy on CORPAC and later the FAP for the SIN. He became a fugitive shortly after his indictment and remains in hiding.
When questioned by WW4 REPORT on the propriety of using the address of a man who was (at that time) a suspected cocaine mafioso and spy, ARINC’s Bob Warner responded: “He [Jose Luis Gamboa] was a fellow vetted and recommended to us by the US embassy. He was a former officer in the Peruvian Air Force. I think this ends this conversation.”
More than two-dozen calls to the State Department over a three-month period asking about Luis Felipe’s connection to ARINC and their having cleared the use of his address as ARINC’s Peruvian location–as well as inquiring as to why there continued to be Airbridge Denial exercises when the program had been shut down indefinitely–went unreturned.
Calls to the former GRUCAM commandant who signed off on at least one contract between ARINC and the FAP that named the indicted Luis Felipe Gamboa’s address as ARINC’s official Peruvian address, were met with a genteel response from his spokesman, Lee Rials. “Col. Perez doesn’t remember that contract. He probably signed off on thousands of things while he was Group Commander down in Lima and he just doesn’t remember it.”
Rials is probably telling the truth for Col. Gilberto Perez, who is now the Commandant of the Western Hemisphere Institite for Security Cooperation (formerly known as the School of Americas) at Fort Benning, Georgia.
The question of who signed off on the vetting of Jose Luis Gamboa as ARINC’s representative is a valid one, and that of ARINC’s official Peruvian headquarters being in the home of his brother Luis Felipe, a man who was spying for Montesinos, even more so. Luis Felipe would be privy to flight schedules and missions, the number of U.S. planes in the air on a given day, even what pilots were working in Peru at a given time as well as a host of other information that would be invaluable to someone moving drugs through the air.
That the State Department refuses to return calls addressing the issue after several months of calling would appear inexcusable.
IN THE END
What began as a father’s concern that his son was being wrongfully blamed for pilot error in the accident that cost his life, is certainly more than that. How much more is difficult to ascertain given that no one will answer the questions. And there are several.
First: Who authorized the Airbridge Denial Program practice exercises to continue after the program was suspended indefinitely?
Second: Who decided it was in the interests of the pilots to look into the eyes of the pilots they were intercepting, potentially requiring them to fly at stall-speed?
Third: Who was actually supposed to modernize the ejection systems? A second stall occurred over Piura on Feb. 10, 2004 while the pilots performed the same maneuver as Lama and Balthazar, but in that crash both pilots ejected successfully. ARINC’s Warner says his company’s contract ran out at the end of 2003, and so denies any knowledge of it. In a second suit, Carlos Lama brought a civil action against the Peruvian government for continuing to perform the dangerous maneuver; Peruvian authorities claimed they were no longer carrying out such maneuvers, and dismissed the case.
Fourth: Who allowed Luis Filipe Gamboa’s address to be utilized as the official Peruvian address of ARINC and FTA–and why didn’t anyone notice that that would be the equivalent of putting the fox in charge of the henhouse?
No one is liable to take the responsibility for any of those decisions. Carlos Lama has already been offered a settlement by the Peruvian FAP for the loss of his son’s life, but he has turned it down, preferring to find out who was responsible rather than taking the money to shut up. His lawsuit against ARINC is proceeding but may not get far: ARINC has apparently never officially registered as a company in Peru and therefor not only has avoided paying taxes, but has avoided having any assets to lose either. And it is doubtful that the DoD will permit any lawsuit to be pursued in the U.S. that would require the release of classified documents–which involve much of ARINC’s work in Peru.
“My Angel is gone,” says Carlos Lama. “I just want to find out who is responsible, but I don’t know if they will let me. They have too much to protect and don’t want light in those dark corners.”
POSTSCRIPT: The Missionary Plane Shootdown Settlement
The April 20, 2001 shoot-down of a plane carrying American missionaries over the Peruvian Amazon by the Peruvain Air Force (FAP) after it was identified by CIA-contractors as possibly carrying drugs continues to have ramifications in both Peru and the US.
US Payment for the Shoot-down:
In 2002, the US, which maintained that the wrongful shoot-down was the result of a problem with Peruvian communications, nonetheless agreed to pay the survivors and their families a total of $8 million dollars. The monies were paid out in this way:
James Bowers: $3,270,000.
Cory Bowers (James and Veronica’s son): $1,000,000.
Kevin Donaldson (surviving pilot of plane): $1,000,000.
Barbara Donaldson (Kevin’s wife): $1,000,000.
Garnett Luttig, Sr (Veronica’s father): $ 575,000.
Charlotte Luttig (Veronica’s mother): $ 575,000.
Garnett Luttig, Jr.(Veronica’s brother): $ 290,000.
Patrick Luttig (Veronica’s brother) : $ 290,000.
In addition, Peru agreed to reimburse the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism $100,000, for medical expenses incurred as a result of Kevin Donaldson’s wounds, and $43,561 in reimbursement for expenses incurred in the funerals of Veronica and Charity Bowers. The Peruvian government also agreed to refurbish or replace the plane that was shot down and to contribute to the building of a recreation center for the association in Iquitos, to be open to the public.
The final decree ordering and accepting the above payments, which was signed in Peru on March 21, 2002, also included a gag order, which effectively prevents Kevin and Barbara Donaldson–who initially stated that the downed plane continued to be strafed while upside down in the Amazon–from repeating that claim.
RESOURCES:
Peter Gorman’s October 2001 story on the Iquitos shoot-down from Narco News
http://www.narconews.com/Issue15/junglebungle.html
Peter Gorman’s wesbite
http://www.pgorman.com/
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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, June 10, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution
from Weekly News Update on the Americas
CAUCA: FARC SEIZE INDIGENOUS TOWNS
Around 5 AM on April 14, hundreds of rebels from the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) simultaneously attacked the neighboring municipalities of Jambalo and Toribio in southern Cauca department and fired homemade rockets and other weapons at police. About 98% of the residents of the two municipalities are Nasa indigenous people; their communities have always been clear in rejecting the presence of armed groups in their territory. Toribio is an important town for the Nasa: the Nasa Project, an autonomous indigenous development program, is based there, and Toribio mayor Arquimedes Vitonas is a respected Nasa leader. Vitonas headed a delegation that was held captive for two weeks by the FARC last year.
The government responded to the FARC attack by sending a bomber and helicopters to the area until ground troops could arrive. The assault on Toribio, carried out by the Jacobo Arenas column of the FARC, left a nine-year old child dead, 20 people wounded and 22 homes destroyed. Two police agents–three according to some sources–were also apparently killed, and as many as eight of those wounded may have been police agents.
Hundreds of residents fled for the nearby village of San Francisco, while those unable to leave set up a “permanent assembly” in the local hospital and the offices of the Nasa-run Center of Education, Training and Research for Integral Community Development (CECIDIC). By April 15, members of the Indigenous Guard, an autonomous body which operates under the command of indigenous councils, were handling cleanup and aid duties in the two towns, with support coordinated jointly by the Traditional Authorities of Cauca Department, the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC) and the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (ACIN). (ONIC Communiques, April 14, 15; La Republica, Lima, April 15 from EFE; News 24, South Africa, April 15) Combat broke out again in Toribio on April 16. (El Tiempo, Bogota, website, April 17; El Diario-La Prensa, NY, April 17)
On April 15, two unidentified individuals murdered Zenu indigenous leader Hernando Vergara, who served on the leadership council in 2004 of the community of Achiote, in Sampues municipality, in the northern department of Sucre. (ONIC Communique, April 16)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, April 17
See also WW4 REPORT #103
CORDOBA: INDIGENOUS WIN DAM REPARATIONS
On April 9, a group of 320 Embera Katio protesters–including 60 children–left Bogota and returned to their communities in the Upper Sinu river valley of the northeastern Colombian department of Cordoba, a day after signing an agreement with the government and the company which operates the Urra hydroelectric dam in their territory. The Embera Katio communities declared themselves in permanent assembly on Oct. 31 and seized the Urra company’s offices in Monteria, the departmental capital, to demand that the company repair the damage done to their land and livelihood since the dam flooded the area in 1994. After failing to reach an agreement, they took their fight to Bogota, where they arrived on Dec. 22. Early on Dec. 23 government security forces ejected them from the Ministry of Environment, Housing and Territorial Development, and they spent the next 108 days camped out at the offices of the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC). Negotiations between the sides finally resumed on March 14.
Under the terms of the new agreement, the Urra company will provide 6.8 billion pesos (about $3 million) for a series of measures to be designed and implemented by the communities with the goal of restoring their self-sufficiency and way of life. The first payment of 4.5 billion pesos was to be paid on April 15, with the installment of 2.3 billion pesos due on April 30. In addition, the company will provide logistical resources for the cleanup and repair effort, and will finance a study to be carried out between May and December of this year to allow the communities to develop a sustainable longterm livelihood strategy. The government committed itself to providing adequate health and education resources for the Embera Katio communities, and also paid for seven buses to take the protesters home and provided food for their trip. An ONIC commission accompanied the Embera on their return. (La Hora, Quito. April 12 from AFP; El Tiempo, Bogota, April 11; El Diario-La Prensa, April 11; Accord, April 18 from ONIC website)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, April 17 Weekly News Update on the Americas
See also WW4 REPORT #108
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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, May 10, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution
http://WW4Report.com
Continue ReadingCOLOMBIA: INDIGENOUS TOWNS BESIEGED; DAM REPARATIONS WONfrom Weekly News Update on the Americas
PUBLIC OUSTS PRESIDENT GUTIERREZ
On April 19, some 50,000 Ecuadorans–including entire families with children–marched peacefully through the capital, Quito, from La Carolina park to Carondelet, the government palace. They carried Ecuadoran flags, sang the national anthem and chanted “Everyone out”–a demand for the removal of all the politicians and government officials, including President Lucio Gutierrez Borbua. (Servicio Informativo “Alai-amlatina,” April 20; ALTERCOM, April 20)
Gutierrez had fired the entire Supreme Court on April 15; on April 18, the 100-member Congress voted 89-0 to ratify the court’s dismissal and declare a “judicial vacancy” until agreement can be reached on a non-partisan mechanism for electing judges. Congress declined to invalidate the Supreme Court’s April 1 decision to annul corruption trials against ex-presidents Abdala Bucaram (1996-1997) and Gustavo Noboa (2000-2003), and ex-vice president Alberto Dahik (1992-1995). The annulling of the trials, and the three fugitives’ subsequent return to Ecuador, were the sparks that set off the current round of protests in Quito. (Prensa Ecumenica/Inter Press Service, April 19)
The government responded to the April 19 march, the largest so far, by ordering repression, sending 4,000 police agents into the streets with armored cars, rotweiler dogs, horses, high-pressure water hoses and hundreds of canisters of toxic gases. Pro-government snipers also fired at the crowd from the Ministry of Social Welfare building. The protests, and the repression, lasted through the night; at least 130 people were treated for asphyxiation from the gases, another 44 suffered other injuries, and dozens of people were arrested.
Photographer Julio Augusto Garcia Romero suffered respiratory failure from tear gas inhalation during the April 19 march; television cameras showed him yelling at police to stop the repression before he collapsed. He died later at the hospital. Garcia was originally from Chile, and had fled to Ecuador during Chile’s dictatorship; he had worked for 30 years as a progressive journalist in Ecuador on popular education and communication projects. Another protester, a woman who was not identified in news reports, died after being run over by a military vehicle.
The police repression–in which the armed forces apparently did not participate–only caused the protests to radicalize. An April 20 day of protest for high school and university students was joined by thousands of others angered by the repression. After Gutierrez dismissed the protesters as “outlaws” (forajidos), the movement took up the label, calling itself the “revolution of the outlaws.” (Asamblea Permanente de Derechos Humanos–APDH, Ecuador, April 19, 20; Alai-amlatina, April 20; ALTERCOM, April 20/05; Servicio Paz y Justicia del Ecuador, April 21; El Telegrafo, Guayaquil, April 20; Washington Post, April 20; Prensa Ecumenica/IPS, April 19; La Republica, Uruguay, April 21 from AFP)
Early on April 20, someone fired shots at Radio La Luna, the radio station which served as a media center for the protests. On April 19, the station received telephoned threats. (Organizacion Mundial Contra la Tortura–OMCT, April 20) On April 18, the station’s signal was cut for several hours in the evening. The station’s director, Paco Velasco, said he had to move his family out of Quito after they received death threats. Radio La Luna is part of a nongovernmental organization called the Popular Education Center, which maintains offices above the studio. (WP, April 20)
Progressive sources blame some of the violence on gangs of hired thugs organized by ex-social welfare minister Antonio Vargas–a former secretary general of Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) who was expelled by that organization as a traitor–and his deputy, Bolivar Gonzalez. An arrest order has been issued for Gonzalez for allegedly ordering snipers to shoot at protesters from the social welfare building. (ALTERCOM, April 24)
CONAIE, which backed Gutierrez for the 2002 elections but broke with his government in May 2003, joined the Quito-based movement demanding his ouster and also organized protests in several provinces. CONAIE president Luis Macas said his organization would not negotiate compromises, and if Gutierrez is replaced, would continue to press its demands: for withdrawal from talks over a free trade treaty with the US; closure of the US military base in Manta; and rejection of “Plan Colombia,” the US-backed military project in that neighboring country. (Prensa Ecumenica/IPS, April 19)
Nearly 1,500 indigenous people, members of the Federation of Evangelical Indigenous People of Ecuador (FEINE), arrived in Quito on April19 from various provinces of the country and gathered near the National Congress in support of Gutierrez, and to demand that the legislature come up with a solution to the crisis. (ET, April 20) Renan Borbua Espinel, a cousin of the president and head of the ruling Patriotic Society party in the important coastal city of Guayaquil, said he was sending thousands of pro-Gutierrez supporters by bus to the capital to “defend democracy and the Constitution.” Quito Mayor Paco Moncayo, who backed the protests and called for Gutierrez to resign, sent city buses and dump trucks with sand to block entrances to the capital to keep out the Gutierrez supporters. (AP, April 20)
Around 10:30 AM on April 20, national police commander Jorge Poveda resigned. “I regret what happened yesterday,” said Poveda, referring to the April 19 repression of demonstrators. “I cannot continue to be a witness to the confrontation with the Ecuadoran people. I am not a violent man,” he said. (AP, April 20; Alai-amlatina, April 20)
Around 1 PM on April 20, Ecuador’s Congress held a special session in the auditorium of the International Center for Higher Studies in Communication for Latin America (CIESPAL). The legislators voted to remove Congress president Omar Quintana, a member of the Ecuadoran Roldosista Party and ally of ex-president Bucaram. Then 60 of the 62 legislators present voted to remove Gutierrez from office–based on a constitutional clause that allows removal of the president for “abandonment of the position.” Around 2PM, new Congress president Cynthia Viteri swore in Vice President Alfredo Palacio Gonzalez as Ecuador’s new president. Palacio had broken ranks with Gutierrez shortly after the two were elected in November 2002. (AP, April 20; Alai-amlatina, April 20; ET, April 21)
Crowds of protesters quickly surrounded the CIESPAL building pressing demands that Palacio resign, Congress be dissolved, a Constitutional Assembly be convened; that there be no free trade treaty and no dollarization; and a new political model be created. Palacio told the crowd the political situation must be resolved via the existing electoral laws; he also promised that all the corrupt politicians would be jailed. (ET, April 21)
Right after the vote, soldiers abandoned the protective perimeter they had set up around Carondelet, while Adm. Victor Hugo Rosero, head of the armed forces joint chiefs of staff, announced at a news conference that the military had withdrawn its support for Gutierrez. “We cannot remain indifferent before the pronouncements of the Ecuadoran people,” said Rosero. (AP, April 20; Alai-amlatina, April 20)
Around 2:30 PM, Gutierrez fled Carondelet palace in an army helicopter for the Quito international airport, which was closed. Demonstrators at the airport prevented him from boarding a small plane there, and forced him to flee again in the helicopter, this time for the La Balbina military base outside Quito. Interim attorney general Cecilia de Armas said an arrest order had been issued against Gutierrez for ordering repression against protesters. (AFP, April 20) Gutierrez finally took refuge in the Brazilian ambassador’s residence, where he asked for political asylum. On the morning of April 21, the Brazilian government agreed to grant Gutierrez asylum, and began negotiating with Palacio to allow safe passage for Gutierrez to be flown to Brasilia. (WP , April 22)
Palacio agreed on April 22 to allow Gutierrez to leave for Brazil. Around 4:15 AM on April 24, when a crowd of protesters surrounding the ambassador’s residence had finally thinned, Gutierrez managed to slip out through a back entrance of the residence. He and his family left the country on a Brazilian air force Boeing 737 and arrived in Brasilia seven hours later. (AP, April 24)
On April 21, Palacio swore in new cabinet ministers for the ministries of government, foreign relations, economy, foreign trade and defense. (ET, April 22) The new economy and finance minister, Rafael Correa, is reportedly a critic of dollarization, “free trade” pacts and International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies. (NYT, April 22) Apparently on the morning of April 22, new commanders were sworn in to head the armed forces and national police. (ALTERCOM, April 24)
The Organization of American States (OAS) held a special session of its permanent council on April 22 to address the crisis. In a resolution, the 34-member organization agreed to send a high-level diplomatic delegation to investigate whether Gutierrez’ removal was constitutional. The resolution avoided any explicit recognition of Palacio’s government. (AP, April 24; Miami Herald, April 24)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, April 24
ROOTS OF THE CRISIS
After three consecutive days of creative protests by thousands of Ecuadorans in the capital, on April 15 Gutierrez had declared a state of emergency in the Quito metropolitan area and dissolved the Supreme Court of Justice. The move sparked more and larger protests, with demonstrators calling Gutierrez a dictator and demanding the immediate departure of the government and the entire political class. The next day, April 16, Gutierrez backed down and revoked the state of emergency.
The current crisis erupted on Dec. 8, when a majority in Congress voted for a measure backed by Gutierrez which removed all the Supreme Court’s judges and named new ones. The new court was supposed to be temporary; Gutierrez said he was forced to dissolve it again because Congress had failed to take the necessary measures to resolve the issue. But Gutierrez’ communication secretary, Ivan Ona, said the Court was planning to issue some resolutions which would have “disturbed the country.” Several opposition politicians said that Supreme Court president Guillermo Castro Dager was preparing to release some rulings favoring former bankers Roberto and William Isaias, who were charged with corruption.
The latest round of protests followed the April 4 decision of the interim Supreme Court to invoke a technicality in annulling corruption trials against ex-presidents Abdala Bucaram and Gustavo Noboa and ex-vice president Alberto Dahik, all three of whom had fled the country after being charged. Within days, all three had returned to Ecuador.
The mobilizations in Quito picked up steam on April 13 with a “cacerolazo,” in which demonstrators banged on pots and pans, followed by a “reventon”–bursting of balloons–on April 14 and a “tablazo” on April 15, in which protesters made noise with pieces of wood. On April 16, protesters hurled streams of toilet paper at the main government building in a “rollazo,” suggesting the need to wipe clean the excrement of corruption. Scheduled for April 17 was a “basurazo,” in which demonstrators planned to dump garbage at the Congress building. Meanwhile, the city council of Cuenca announced an “escobazo” (loosely translated, a broom attack) for April 17 to “clean up the country.” A local radio station in Quito, Radio La Luna, played a key role by spreading word of the mobilizations and opening up the airwaves to citizens who want to express their anger at the government.
CONAIE held campesino protests throughout the country; CONAIE leader Humberto Cholango said the protests could lead to a nationwide indigenous uprising. (El Mundo, Spain, April 16, 17; EFE, April 16; Ecuador Indymedia, April 16; Servicio Informativo “Alai-amlatina.” April 5, 16)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, April 17
CONGRESS EXPELS 11 MEMBERS
On April 26, Ecuador’s Congress expelled 11 of its 100 deputies for having betrayed their parties by backing ousted president Gutierrez Borbua’s April 15 move to dismantle the Supreme Court. The expulsion was the result of a shifting of forces in the Congress and the formation of a new majority, an alliance of the Social Christian Party, the Democratic Left (ID) party, the indigenous Pachakutik party and others. The primary beneficiary of the expulsion is Pachakutik, which regains five deputy seats it had lost to “sellouts” who broke party ranks to back Gutierrez. The Social Christian Party regains two seats, and the ID gets one; the rest of the expelled deputies–plus several who resigned before they could be expelled–were from minor parties. The new majority then voted in ID deputy William Lucero as the new president of Congress.
The same day, April 26, it was reported that ousted ex-president Abdala Bucaram was back in Panama, where he lived for eight years before returning to Ecuador in April, after Ecuador’s Congress declined to interfere with an April 1 Supreme Court ruling throwing out the corruption case against him.
Meanwhile, new president Alfredo Palacio had breakfast with the US ambassador on April 25 and told her that Ecuador will respect the agreement that allows the US to use the Manta air base for drug trafficking operations. The US will be able to keep its 400 troops at the base until 2009, said Palacio. An end to the US presence at the Manta base was one of the demands made by the protesters against Gutierrez. (La Jornada, Mexico, April 27)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, May 1
Weekly News Update on the Americas
See also WW4 REPORT #99
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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, May 10, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution
http://WW4Report.com
Continue ReadingECUADOR: PROTESTS OUST PRESIDENT; CONGRESS, JUDICIARY PURGEDfrom Weekly News Update on the Americas
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s brief Latin American visit covered five countries: Brazil on April 26, Colombia on April 27, Chile April 28-29 and El Salvador in the evening of April 29; she returned to Washington on April 30. According to unnamed “U.S. officials,” the trip was intended to forge a new alliance with the growing number of left-leaning Latin American governments. (New York Times, April 27; BBC News, April 30; Miami Herald, April 28, 29, May 1)
Rice was also trying to isolate Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who had confirmed on April 24 that Venezuela was ending a longstanding military exchange program with the U.S. “Any exchange of officers…is suspended until who knows when,” he said on his weekly television program. “There will be no more joint operations or anything like that.” Chavez said some US exchange officers, if not all, had been “carrying on a little campaign” against him “within the Venezuelan military institution.” He also revealed that several months earlier a US woman had been arrested and then released when she was spotted secretly photographing a Venezuelan military base; her documents showed she was a US naval officer. (La Jornada, April 25 from AFP, DPA, Reuters]
Rice seemed to have no luck in isolating Chavez. At a joint press conference with Rice on April 26 in Brasilia, Brazilian foreign minister Celso Amorim said the government of President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva was trying to cooperate in a “positive” way with Venezuela. (La Republica, Peru, April 27 from EFE) But according to Folha de Sao Paulo, Lula felt Chavez was “going out of bounds” by cutting off military cooperation, and on April 25 he sent his adviser Jose Dirceu to Caracas for discussions with Chavez on the subject. (LJ, April 29 from AFP, DPA)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, May 1
Weekly News Update on the Americas
See also WW4 REPORT #108
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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, May 10, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution
http://WW4Report.com
Continue ReadingVENEZUELA: CHAVEZ OUSTS PENTAGON, OUTMANEUVERS RICEKudos to Pacific New Service for picking up our recent commentary on the coordinated propaganda blitz against Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Readers of WW4 REPORT are aware that within a week of each other, Otto Reich called in a National Review… Read moreJINSA, National Review in anti-Chavez blitz
