CSN Editorial Page
A MORE JUST RESOLUTION
By John I. Laun
Those of us who follow responses in the United States to the paramilitary activities in Colombia are very concerned. We believe evidence clearly shows that the paramilitaries, who have carried out so much death and destruction in the Colombian countryside, were a creation of the Colombian state, or at least acted in concert with state security forces from the beginning. Our question now is how the Obama Administration may view the attempts on behalf of the Colombian victims of paramilitary atrocities encouraged and paid for by U.S. corporations, among them Chiquita Brands and Drummond Corporation.
The reason for our concern: President-elect Obama has chosen Eric Holder as U.S. Attorney General. Besides advising President Clinton that he was “neutral, leaning toward favorable” for the indefensible pardon of Marc Rich, Holder reportedly played a major role as a private lawyer for Chiquita Brands in negotiating an agreement under which the Company paid a $25 million fine and its executives, who had approved payments to the A.U.C. paramilitary organization in Colombia, were relieved of further liability. The Chiquita officials knew the A.U. C. was identified as a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department, having been placed on the U.S. terrorist list by Secretary of State Colin Powell on September 10, 2001. The money Chiquita paid was purportedly to provide protection to Chiquita installations and personnel in Colombia. In fact, the A.U.C. used the money in a generalized campaign to terrorize and murder peasants and workers in the Uraba region of northern Colombia. They have murdered literally thousands of defenseless civilians, the vast majority of whom had no ties whatever to guerrilla organizations.
The idea that a monetary payment to the U.S. Government is sufficient penalty for the knowing illegal acts of U.S. corporations which caused thousands of innocent deaths in Colombia is, in a word, wrong. It is wrong morally, wrong politically and wrong legally. The $25 million fine does not go to the victims of A.U.C. atrocities; it goes to the U.S. Government. And these victims of the Chiquita-financed terrorism receive nothing! And the man who negotiated that disposition is now to be U.S. Attorney General!
The Colombian counterpart to the U.S. Attorney General, Fiscal General Mario Iguaran, has said he is not pleased with a deal that lets Chiquita off the hook in return for a $25 million forfeit to the U.S. Government. He wants to see Chiquita executives answer in Colombia for their willing financing of illegal paramilitary violence. That would be a good step. It would also be good and right for the Obama Administration to permit, and even support, claims in U.S. courts fr damages against Chiquita, and not raise as a defense that these claims have been foreclosed by the settlement negotiated by Attorney Holder.
And what about the $25 million paid by Chiquita as a fine? That money should rightly go to compensate the victims of Chiquita’s hired paramilitaries. If President Obama favors justice, he should provide at least this much toward a just resolution of the claims of the Colombian victims and their families. older
Colombia Support Network
P.O. Box 1505
Madison, WI 53701-1505
phone: (608) 257-8753
fax: (608) 255-6621
e-mail: csn@igc.org
http://www.colombiasupport.net
A MORE JUST RESOLUTION
By John I. Laun Those of us who follow responses in the United States to the paramilitary activities in Colombia are very concerned. We believe evidence clearly shows that the paramilitaries, who have carried out so much death and destruction in the Colombian countryside, were a creation of the Colombian state, or at least acted in concert with state security forces from the beginning. Our question now is how the Obama Administration may view the attempts on behalf of the Colombian victims of paramilitary atrocities encouraged and paid for by U.S. corporations, among them Chiquita Brands and Drummond Corporation. The reason for our concern: President-elect Obama has chosen Eric Holder as U.S. Attorney General. Besides advising President Clinton that he was "neutral, leaning toward favorable" for the indefensible pardon of Marc Rich, Holder reportedly played a major role as a private lawyer for Chiquita Brands in negotiating an agreement under which the Company paid a $25 million fine and its executives, who had approved payments to the A.U.C. paramilitary organization in Colombia, were relieved of further liability. The Chiquita officials knew the A.U. C. was identified as a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department, having been placed on the U.S. terrorist list by Secretary of State Colin Powell on September 10, 2001. The money Chiquita paid was purportedly to provide protection to Chiquita installations and personnel in Colombia. In fact, the A.U.C. used the money in a generalized campaign to terrorize and murder peasants and workers in the Uraba region of northern Colombia. They have murdered literally thousands of defenseless civilians, the vast majority of whom had no ties whatever to guerrilla organizations. The idea that a monetary payment to the U.S. Government is sufficient penalty for the knowing illegal acts of U.S. corporations which caused thousands of innocent deaths in Colombia is, in a word, wrong. It is wrong morally, wrong politically and wrong legally. The $25 million fine does not go to the victims of A.U.C. atrocities; it goes to the U.S. Government. And these victims of the Chiquita-financed terrorism receive nothing! And the man who negotiated that disposition is now to be U.S. Attorney General! The Colombian counterpart to the U.S. Attorney General, Fiscal General Mario Iguaran, has said he is not pleased with a deal that lets Chiquita off the hook in return for a $25 million forfeit to the U.S. Government. He wants to see Chiquita executives answer in Colombia for their willing financing of illegal paramilitary violence. That would be a good step. It would also be good and right for the Obama Administration to permit, and even support, claims in U.S. courts fr damages against Chiquita, and not raise as a defense that these claims have been foreclosed by the settlement negotiated by Attorney Holder. And what about the $25 million paid by Chiquita as a fine? That money should rightly go to compensate the victims of Chiquita's hired paramilitaries. If President Obama favors justice, he should provide at least this much toward a just resolution of the claims of the Colombian victims and their families.
What “Democratic Security” and For Whom?
Mischaracterizations of The Wall Street JournalCSN Editorial by John I. Laun, November 2, 2008 On Monday October 20 the Wall Street Journal's
"Americas" columnist, Mary Anastasia O'Grady, wrote a column
criticizing Barack Obama for calling attention to the murders of
labor union leaders in Colombia and human rights abuses there. It was
the latest in a long series of wrong-headed columns by Ms. O'Grady,
who appears oblivious to the real situation in Colombia. She lavished
praise upon President Alvaro Uribe and his government at the very
moment when he was sending troops into the sugar mills in western
Colombia to break up a strike by sugar cane cutters and mill workers,
with two killed and over 100 injured. Uribe also sent troops to break
up a peaceful march of indigenous peoples to protest being forced off
their lands by illegal paramilitaries with the tacit support of the
Colombian Army. Ms. O'Grady's suggestion that labor union members and
others "are much safer under Uribe" is patently false. Here are some real facts: 1) Colombia has more
internally displaced people (over 4 million of the country's 44
million people) than any other country in the world. A large number
of these have been forced from their homes as a result of President
Uribe's policies, which favor clearing resource-rich lands of the
peasants, indigenous communities and Afro-Colombians who live there
in order to promote large-scale export agriculture focused on African
palm production and to deliver to multinational corporations
extensive deposits of gold, coal, oil and other valuable minerals,
which the Uribe government allows them to extract and export with
very low royalty payments. The indigenous communities alone have
reported 1,253 deaths in the 6 years of the Uribe Administration. 2) The attacks on labor union members have been
unrelenting. The number killed in recent years, including the 6 years
of Alvaro Uribe's Presidency, total more than 2,000. Multinational
businesses, among them Coca Cola, Drummond Coal, Occidental
Petroleum, and Chiquita Brands, have either hired, or winked as
private security forces hired, illegal paramilitary forces to target
union organizers in their Colombian affiliates or their own
operations in Colombia. 3) Ms. O'Grady has written that "Peace has finally
settled in after years of unspeakable terror." Contrary to her
perceptions (or intentional misrepresentations), most of rural
Colombia continues to suffer from violence at the hands of resurgent
paramilitaries, whose murderous activities remain unpunished. More
than 15,000 persons have been "disappeared" by paramilitary forces,
later turning up dead or buried in mass graves. And there have even
been murders of innocent civilians kidnapped and killed by Colombian
Army units, which present them falsely as "guerrillas killed in
combat" (known in Colombia as "false positives"). These killings are
in response to Uribe's pressure for the Army to report high numbers
of dead guerrillas, in return for which the reporting units and their
officers receive rewards from the government. Senator Gustavo Petro,
who first called attention to this phenomenon in 2006, reported this
week that as many as 2,000 noncombatant civilians have been murdered
in this Army campaign. Why doesn't Ms. O'Grady mention the "false
positives", which have caused terror throughout Colombia? Similar to
General Westmoreland's body count motivation during the Vietnam War,
this wretched policy needs to be roundly condemned and ended. 4) The Uribe Administration has been penetrated with
paramilitaries linked to high officials in his government. Ms.
O'Grady in her article "FARC's Human Rights Friends" of July 7, 2008
quotes favorably a Colombian to the effect that the paramilitaries
have been good medicine for Colombia---"like chemotherapy. It makes
sick and your hair falls out, but it saves your life." For Ms.
O'Grady, obviously, some lives are worthy---those of Alvaro Uribe and
the narrow economic elite his policies favor--- and others are not.
Her outrageous comment, in support of the creation of a paramilitary
state over which President Uribe has presided, ignores the death and
destruction the paramilitaries linked both to Uribe's government and
to the Armed Forces have caused to hundreds of thousands of people. For Ms. O'Grady those who criticize the Uribe
government's human rights record are "friends" of the FARC
guerrillas. She quotes from a 2003 internal U.S. Embassy report (one
wonders how Ms. O'Grady got to see this report) to the effect that
analyses by non-governmental organizations, for example those of the
Jesuit research center CINEP, "contained a heavy bias against the
government while granting a wide berth to guerrillas." In fact, CINEP
statistics report guerrilla abuses as well as Army and Police abuses,
as Ms. O'Grady would learn if she were to consider seriously and
impartially the work of this important defender of human rights. Most
human rights organizations, including the Colombia Support Network
(CSN), have consistently denounced abuses by the guerrillas, and have
publicly and severely criticized the FARC for kidnapping and for
other human rights and humanitarian law abuses. Unfortunately, Ms. O'Grady's severely biased and fact-
free description of Colombia appears to parallel the view of the Bush
Administration, which has ignored the illegal paramilitary background
of the Uribe Administration and refused to grant visas to many
Colombians who would tell the truth about Colombia to citizens and
policy-makers in this country. The latest to be denied a visa is
Father Rafael Gallego, a Catholic priest who works in the small town
of Tiquisio in the Middle Magdalena region of Colombia. CSN invited
Father Rafael to come to the United States and Canada to describe his
work in helping develop community organizations of peasants and small-
scale miners and initiating a community-based radio station with
them. On October 23 the U.S. Consulate in Bogota denied Father Rafael
a visa for secret "security" reasons, refusing to reveal the nature
and basis for this decision to him, or CSN, or his Catholic Bishop,
or the Provincial Head of the Jesuits in Colombia, who all supported
his visa request. What could be so dangerous about Father Rafael's planned
visit? He has worked for peace and rejected armed conflict, has
helped the poor and disadvantaged in an area where paramilitary
control is pervasive. He has sought to help bring to his parishioners
real security and real democracy, not the flawed, chimerical so-
called "democratic security" of President Uribe and his Bush
Administration apologists. Kudos to Barack Obama for continuing to
call attention to the problems with Uribe's Colombia.
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