Title: Re: [CIA-DRUGS] Colombian hitman says CIA druglord ordered murder of journalist on 12/13/00 11:49 PM, Bob at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
https://www.strategy.com/news/reports_fullstory.asp?fstoryID=170CD347-D0B5-11D4-A048-00902785ADFF&fBroadCastMethod=1&fTopicName=Colombia
Colombian hitman says paramilitaries ordered murder of journalist
BOGOTA, Dec 13 (AFP) - A self-described hit man in the pay of
right-wing paramilitaries told a private Caracol television channel that
he carried out the high-profile murder of journalist and satirist Jaime
Garzon in August 1999.
His confession came just as another Colombian journalist, Alfredo Abad,
was assassinated at dawn Wednesday as he left his home in the southern
town of Florencia, local mayor ucrecia Murcia said.
Abad, 36, was attacked as he was on his way to Radio Caracol's station
in Florencia, the capital of the southern department of Caqueta, some 750
kilometers (465 miles) south of Bogota.
Murcia said a police operation was underway to find the killers and discover
the motive for the shooting.
Abad was the second journalist to be killed in Florencia in the last 13 days.
On December 1, radio reporter Guillermo Leon Agudelo was stabbed to
death, apparently by thieves demanding money.
Like Abad, Agudelo, 47, worked for Radio Caracol's Voice of the Jungle
program.
The interviewed gunman, claiming to be one of the top men in a group known as
the "Terrace Gang," said Garzon's death was ordered and paid for by the
head of the paramilitary Self-Defense Units of Colombia (AUC) Carlos Castano.
While he admitted pulling the trigger -- from a motorcycle in Bogota, the man
said his group was not happy with the job, but that it came under pressure to
do it.
"We didn't do it for money, but under pressure. I must admit, we did it through
cowardice," the source said, adding that since the murder his group and the
AUC broke off relations.
The gunman, who said Castano paid 13,000 dollars for the hit, spoke with
Caracol Television in the northeastern city of Medellin.
He appeared on air wearing a ski mask and surrounded by several heavily
armed individuals.
The Terrace Gang, he said, also murdered human rights activists Jesus
Maria Ovalle, Eduardo Umana and Hernan Henao between 1997 and 1999.
Castano had also ordered those hits, the alleged gunman said, adding that
his group kept the weapon used in both murders as "key evidence" and would
be willing to turn it over to the Attorney General's office as long as gang
members received preferential treatment by the justice system.
After the interview, Attorney General Alfonso Gomez told Caracol that the
hitman's statement "must be taken with a pinch of salt since they come from an
outlaw."
Garzon, 39, was one of Colombia's most popular journalists and had played an
active role in the peace process in this country wracked by civil war for nearly
four decades. He was gunned down by two men on a motorbike while on his way
to work at Radionet radio station.
He had belonged to a civilian committee dedicated to keeping channels of
communication open between President Andres Pastrana's conservative
government and leftist rebel groups, for which he was publicly threatened
by Castano.
Altogether six journalists have been killed in Colombia this year.
Journalists here are frequently threatened by right-wing paramilitaries, leftist
guerrillas, drug traffickers and hired gunmen, authorities have said.
axm/fgf/mdl
AFP
Who is Carlos Castano?
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/examiner/hotnews/stories/27/colombiasun.dtl
Guerrillas control half of Colombia
By Jeremy McDermott
SPECIAL TO THE EXAMINER
August 27, 2000
(c)2000 San Francisco Examiner
The destabilizing effect of the narco-wars has taken a toll on the whole
country, not just Putumayo. Colombia is in the depths of a recession, with
unemployment exceeding 20 percent. State funds are running low, and the
country is borrowing massively from abroad just to keep the economy afloat.
Right-wing death squads
While federal security forces have had no success in stopping the FARC
expansion through Colombia, the right-wing paramilitary army of the
Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, has "cleansed" vast tracts of
Colombia of Marxist guerrillas. Human rights groups insist the
paramilitaries act with the connivance, if not the active support, of the
Colombian army.
The feared warlord Carlos Castano, who heads the 7,000-strong army of
right-wing death squads, inherited the mantle from his brother Fidel, once a
part of the Medellin drug cartel when it was the most powerful crime
organization in the world. Fidel Castano is now dead, killed in a battle
with guerrillas in the jungles near the Panama border, but his brother
carries the torch with even more ruthless efficiency.
"We have absolutely nothing to do with drug traffickers," asserted Commander
Hawk, the head of the AUC in Putumayo. Looking like the drug traffickers he
maintains he loathes, a gold chain around his neck and a semi-automatic
pistol on his bedside table, he insisted the AUC acted only as a facilitator
and intermediary.
Peasants in Putumayo tell a very different story.
"The paras (paramilitaries) are offering 2.4 million pesos ($1,200) for a
kilo of coca base, while the guerrillas in the jungle only pay 1.8 million
($900)," said Jose Sons, who has a few fields in the jungle.
Carlos Castano has admitted publicly that 70 percent of his income comes
from the drug trade.
http://www.wbenjamin.org/WB_Kiosk.html
Colombia Ultra-Right Warlord Talks of U.S. Covert Ops
by Karl Penhaul http://www.commondreams.org
BOGOTA - Colombia's most-feared death squad leader has alleged
that U.S. anti-narcotics agents sought to enlist his outlaw paramilitary
gang to combat drug traffickers, raising fresh fears of U.S. covert
operations in this war-torn Andean nation.
In a television interview late Wednesday, Carlos Castano, leader of the
5,000-member, ultra-right United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia
(AUC), said the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) asked
him to force Colombian drug traffickers to surrender to U.S. justice.
The plan, he said, was also a way of eroding the economic mainstay
of powerful Marxist rebel factions, whom U.S. and Colombian
authorities accuse of funding a long-running uprising with proceeds
from the booming cocaine and heroin trade.
In Washington on Thursday, the DEA declined to comment on the
allegations, which came less than two months after U.S. Congress
approved a record $1.3 billion package of mostly military aid to
help Colombia fight the drug trade and guerrillas.
``The (U.S.) DEA...sent me a message and through that there was a
possibility of ending narco-trafficking in Colombia,'' Castano said
Wednesday, speaking with RCN television in his stronghold in
northern Cordoba province.
``I received a call saying the DEA was opening the doors so that
Colombian drug traffickers could surrender to U.S. justice and
... it needed a significant force in Colombia that would induce these
people to take that decision,'' added the ultra-right warlord, who
swapped his trademark combat fatigues for a white knitted sweater
and drab green pants.
At a news conference in Washington, State Department spokesman
Richard Boucher said State Department officials had ''no intention
of soliciting his (Castano's) help'' but did not address claims against
the DEA.
US Covert Operations
Some U.S. officials have accused Castano of funding his anti-guerrilla
crusade with drug money and insist he has heavy backing from the
military in his ``dirty war'' against suspected leftist sympathizers. In
practice, however, President Andres Pastrana has done little to track
him down.
The RCN interview with Castano coincided with a visit to Colombia
by a high-level U.S. delegation, including White House anti-drug
chief Barry McCaffrey and Undersecretary of State Thomas
Pickering. President Clinton plans to visit Colombia on Aug. 30.
The U.S. aid package has fueled fears that Washington could be
dragged deep into Colombia's civil conflict that has cost 35,000 lives
in just the last 10 years. Castano's comments renewed suspicion that
U.S. agencies have been carrying out secret operations behind the back
of the Colombian government and the U.S. Congress.
``There are serious concerns about the nature of the U.S. engagement
and fears about covert operations and escalating paramilitary activity,''
said Winifred Tate, Colombia specialist at the non-governmental
Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).
Allegations, though hard to prove, about U.S. covert operations in
Colombia are not new.
DEA agents were suspected of forging a covert alliance linking the
Cali drug cartel, Castano's paramilitary gunmen and Colombian
security forces to combat Pablo Escobar's Medellin cocaine cartel
in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Washington-based Human Rights Watch has also accused U.S.
military intelligence officials of helping Colombia set up the
forerunners of today's illegal paramilitary groups in the late 1960s
and early 1970s.
GUARDIAN (London) Wednesday June 21, 2000
Colombians do not need help like this
by Isabel Hilton
America says it's intensifying the war on drugs. The truth is sinister
Meeting in London this week, senior officials from the EU, the US and
Japan were discussing how much backing they should give to an aid package
for Colombia. Colombia certainly needs assistance. The question is whether
the help on offer will make matters better or worse.
Just to recap on what ails Colombia: an undeclared civil war that has
lasted 30 years, displacing up to 40% of the population. Last year there
were 402 massacres, many committed by paramilitary gangs working in
conjunction with the Colombian army, others by guerrilla forces. The
government has effectively ceded a third of the country - mainly the south
- to the FARC, the largest guerrilla army, with whom it has initiated
peace talks. Oh, and there's cocaine, of course - a trade that keeps the
war going, corrupts the government and the judiciary and ensures the
attention of the US.
That might be a good thing, except that it is the wrong kind of attention.
The document under consideration in London is called Plan Colombia.
President Andres Pastrana first announced it as a development plan for his
country when he visited Washington two years ago, shortly after his
election. Even before taking office, Pastrana had flown to meet rebel
leaders - showing that he wanted to negotiate and that he acknowledged
that a real end to violence required social justice. Social justice, in
turn, demands development, and the plan he brought to Washington was a
collection of economic and social programmes that he hoped would transform
the areas in conflict. He called it a Marshall plan for southern Colombia,
hoping that his country's patent need would elicit a generous response.
In the event, the international community pledged nothing to the plan. The
US, however, offered to expand military assistance for counter-narcotics
operations until, last year, Colombia became the world's third-largest
recipient of US military aid. Meanwhile, Plan Colombia has been redrafted.
Social and economic concerns come last. Top of the list is more military
aid aimed, the US would have us believe, at suppressing the cocaine trade.
There are two problems with this. Firstly, all the many wars that have
been declared on drugs have ended in defeat. Secondly, the areas that the
US proposes to target are, funnily enough, those controlled by the FARC,
or, as Washington calls them, the narco-terrorists. There is no mention of
counter-narcotics operations against the paramilitaries - despite the fact
that the DEA itself described Carlos Castano, the self-proclaimed leader
of the paramilitary death squads, as a trafficker linked to a powerful
cartel.
The redrafted Plan Colombia has little to do with Pastrana's vision and
everything to do with the US desire to get involved in counter-insurgency
in Colombia. The role of the EU would be to pay to alleviate some of the
suffering this would cause.
Latin America hands are thinking they have seen something like this
before. Where else did the US pour vast sums into a corrupt army working
closely with psychopathic death squads? Where else did it pretend to
believe that the men who shot dead an archbishop as he celebrated mass had
nothing to do with government security forces? Twenty years on, have
lessons been learned from El Salvador?
Apparently not. There are already US "advisers" in Colombia in numbers
that are beginning to reach El Salvador levels. Evidence collected by the
New York based Human Rights Watch links half of Colombia's 18
brigade-level army units to paramilitary activity.
These units operate throughout the country, including areas in receipt of
US military aid. In 1997, 1998, and 1999, the Colombian government's own
investigations demonstrated that army officers worked closely with
paramilitary groups, sharing intelligence, carrying out joint operations
and supplying weapons. Their targets included human rights workers and
academics who had documented atrocities. The officers named remain in
their posts.
Nowhere in the latest version of Plan Colombia is there mention of curbing
paramilitary activity or bringing to justice those responsible for
civilian massacres and disappearances.
What will be the result of Plan Colombia? The US estimates it will create
another 10,000 refugees. Aid agencies believe there could be 10 times
that. Aerial spraying of coca with herbicides and bacteriological agents
will destroy legitimate crops, create more forced migrants and wreak
ecological damage - all without denting the traffic one iota. US
helicopter manufacturers, on the other hand, think it is a fine idea. Tony
Blair has also expressed enthusiasm for the plan and offered to mobilise
EU support. For Colombia's sake, I hope he changes his mind.
Was this the journalist in Queens, NY who was gunned down in a restaurant?
Arlene Johnson
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