cyber-offensive From: Paul Canning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Precedence: bulk Reuters Monday, December 28, 1998 Colombian death squads launch cyber-offensive BOGOTA -- Colombia's ultra-right death squads have joined other warring factions in the country's long-running civil conflict and are carving out hi-tech battle lines in cyberspace. More used to using assault rifles and chain-saws in a low-tech ``dirty war'' against suspected Marxist rebel sympathizers, a nationwide paramilitary alliance known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) launched its website sometime over the last month: www.colombialibre.org. ``The AUC is a politico-military organization which aims to confront the military aggression of subversive groups but also calls on the state to transform the theaters of conflict into fertile ground for development and peaceful cohabitation,'' the AUC home page says. The page bears a logo of a peasant sowing seeds against the backdrop of a map of Colombia colored in the yellow, blue and red of the national flag. Colombia's main guerrilla groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), the oldest and largest rebel forces in the hemisphere, have had a foothold on the Internet for at least the last two years. Both groups, which field a combined combat force of some 20,000 fighters, post their founding principles on the Internet, together with keynote speeches by rebel commanders and details of their latest military strikes. Not to be left behind, the Colombian army also has a home page, picturing a fierce-looking commando clutching an Israeli-made Galil assault rifle and daubed in camouflage war-paint. On the ground, the reality of Colombia's three-decade-old war is less sophisticated. More than 35,000 people have died in the fighting in the last 10 years alone. In the same period, some one million civilians -- many of them peasants who have never seen a computer let alone surfed cyberspace -- have been forced to flee their homes for fear of getting caught in the cross-fire of the bloody conflict. -- |: Paul Canning [EMAIL PROTECTED] � http://www.rainbow.net.au/~canning >Queers for Reconciliation http://reconciliation.queer.org.au � *PoliticalGoo http://www.rainbow.net.au/~canning/politicalgoo >QAnnounce http://announce.queer.org.au/ end ============== Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html The Year 2000 Bug - An Urgent Sustainability Issue http://www.peg.apc.org/~psutton/grin-y2k.htm
