BoRev.Net

Lots of good information from El Cid here. Just want to say thanks.

@El Cid: I think Lagos' partner there is Hilda Solis, not Colin Powell.

Check: Do not attend any costume parties (or any party for that matter) with DAS agents; its not safe.

El Cid,

Okie doke, thnx

Tiempo reports that the international representatives to serve on Honduras' 'Truth Commission' (not its formal title) will be Colin Powell and former Chilean President Ricardo Lagos.

Micheletti, for his part, has publicly accused Zelaya supporters of having been behind those killings and sequestrations, though as yet no evidence has been submitted publicly and no groups have claimed responsibility, as far as I have seen.

Sunday police found the remains of Enzo Micheletti, a nephew of the acting president, near Choloma, some 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of the capital along with those of another youth.
The 25-year-old, who was the son of the de facto leader's brother, had vanished on Friday.

Sunday army Colonel Concepcion Jimenez shot and killed outside his house.

Tuesday the father of acting deputy defense minister Gabo Jalil was
kidnapped - Alfredo Jalil, a wealthy businessman who manages a company that supplies uniforms to the Honduran army,

Looks like things are going to get ugly for the junta.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jKCvSaa95d98McapIhva8WGtaYaQ

Weird DAS s**t

Una fiesta con funcionarios del DAS colombiano finaliza con matanza
Por: Caracol Radio
Fecha de publicación: 31/10/09

31 de octubre 2009. - El Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS, inteligencia estatal) señaló en un comunicado que dos personas muerieron y cuatro resultaron heridas en una fiesta donde participaban funcionarios de ese organismo de inteligencia del estado colombiano.

La tragedia se registró en la madrugadsa de este sábado en la población de Chía, departamento de Cundinamarca. Al parecer la matanza se inició cuando un detective activo del Organismo de Seguridad, dio muerte a dos de sus compañeros e hirió a cuatro más y al parecer intentó contra su vida, quedando también herido.

Señala el comunicado, que tan pronto se conocieron los hechos ocurridos el Das ordenó una investigación interna de los mismos y se dio el traslado a las autoridades competentes para que a su vez adelanten las investigaciones correspondientes. Según mencionan los medios colombianos, los funcionarios participaban en una fiesta de disfraces.

A better voice than mine on the subject, via Colombia Reports, by Pablo Rojas Mejia:

Despite these scandals, and I say this as an opponent of Uribe, it is highly unlikely that any direct links will be found between the President himself and paramilitary groups anytime soon. Moreover, the excessive national focus on those polarizing and fruitless debates misses the point. An equally important and more urgent question – especially in an election season - is whether the Uribe presidency has effectively diminished the Colombian paramilitary phenomenon, independently of his past and present links to it.

Indeed, any policy named “Democratic Security” must surely be evaluated by its ability to curb the paramilitary phenomenon for two obvious reasons. First, no country can aspire to be a true democracy while drug-funded death squads are “cleansing” the streets of social undesirables and the political opposition.

Second, regardless of their original aims, Colombia’s paramilitary groups have long been the country’s single largest security threat.

By the time Uribe took office in 2002, the AUC was responsible for more violent deaths than the FARC and ELN combined, according to every international NGO and human rights organization..

...what effect have seven years of Uribe had on the Colombian paramilitary phenomenon?

Paramilitarism certainly looks very different than it did in 2002 when Uribe took office.

Seven years ago, uniformed soldiers with AUC armbands ruled much the country with an iron fist, from the poor hillside neighborhoods of Medellin to the country’s eastern plains. That is obviously no longer the case.

True, former paramilitaries and their new recruits are once again battling for control of the narcotics trade, but, according to the government, they are little more than weakened and fragmented drug gangs...

...Colombia’s most powerful neoparamilitary groups are funding Bogota’s social cleansing groups and taking over other illegal activities such as petty drug dealing and extortion.

These include warlord Cuchillo’s gang ERPAC, the Black Eagles, former drug lord Martin Llanos’s Buitraguenos gang, and a little-known fourth group called Heroes of Castaño (as in AUC founder Carlos Castaño).

In addition, just this week, new reports in El Tiempo suggested that the Medellin-based gang Office of Envigado had sent some of its highest-ranking assassins to reorganize paramilitary factions in Soacha and Ciudad Bolivar...

...paramilitary violence is also ravaging rural areas, primarily along Colombia’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts and its border with Venezuela. As in cities, these aren’t merely apolitical drug gangs, but new paramilitary structures with social and political visions that, in many cases, continue to collaborate with local politicians and landowners.

For example, indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities on the Pacific coast who resist the expansion of massive African palm plantations have repeatedly been threatened and even attacked by heavily armed thugs...

...Take, for example, the war-torn southwestern departments of Cauca and Nariño.

According to journalists who have visited the area, the army has recently intensified military operations in that region in response to rising violence, but the Colombian armed forces target only the FARC guerrillas, while the narcoparamilitary Rastrojos gang moves freely in the jungle and continues to grow in size, wealth and firepower...

...Whatever their original intent, the death squads who operated under the AUC label quickly spiraled out of control.

Today, the paramilitary phenomenon has returned, wreaking havoc from the streets of Bogota to the jungles of Nariño.

Colombia can be neither fully democratic nor truly secure until it eradicates paramilitary violence. On that front, the Uribe presidency has been an utter failure.

However, it should be borne in mind that virtually no one in the U.S. foreign policy and security and military establishment gives the slightest shit, and will dump any amount of money and military aid into the system because Plan Colombia was the most successful program EVAR after the hallowed SURGE, at most threatening temporary delays.

Meanwhile the apes at the Washington Post will jump up and down about how Hugo Chavez will killusall because of whatever minor thing happened today.

How popular is Uribe in the countryside? I hear that the polls they do are mostly four cities: do they have an urban bias (if the rural population in Colombia isn't that big, I'd assume that the polls should more or less reflect the entire country). The other thing is voting rates (at least in the presidential elections I remember) is pretty low ...

These are real empirical issues, and of course it's hard to carry out surveys & polls where communication and transportation are on the levels that are encountered in the countryside.

But I don't think it was accidental that the vast majority of cases which have either resulted in convictions or the overturning of elections (several Senate seats) or are under investigation are where narco-paramilitaries bribed, suborned, threatened, and assassinated in order to support pro-Uribe candidacies were in the countryside -- they knew who their ally was.

If they had been so confident in their ally's election, would the paras have been brought in with such ferocity to ensure local victories? Particularly those just prior to the vote to change the law so that Uribe could run for a 2nd term? And given that his own 2005 re-election campaign chief, Jorge Noguera, was then installed at the head of the DAS and used his position to facilitate the paramilitary assassination of labor organizers and academics, according to his murder charges before the courts?

Another reason I view it as complex is one you would encounter in any nation -- what if the leadership which is doing such systematic damage to the fundamental democratic system truly is popular, even in all areas?

Do you fail to note what is true and what is happening because people do or do not agree?

Likewise, if Bush Jr's popularity in the U.S. had remained at 90%, would any of his harmful policies have been less harmful?

Further, one could ask -- could 'democratic security' have proceeded out of competence and openness without the devil's deal which backed it up? Did Colombians know that was the choice being made?

Bosque: The article was from 17 October.

The actual agreement, whose text you can read here, holds that the Honduran Congress will take the lead in voting to retrocede to the pre-June 28th status quo ante on the Presidency, with the advice of the Court.

5- DEL PODER EJECUTIVO

Para lograr la reconciliación y fortalecer la democracia, en el espíritu de los temas de la propuesta del acuerdo de San José, ambas comisiones negociadoras hemos decidido, respetuosamente, que el Congreso Nacional, como una expresión institucional de la soberanía popular, en uso de sus facultades, en consulta con las instancias que considere pertinentes como la Corte Suprema de Justicia y conforme a la ley, resuelva en lo procedente en respecto a “a retrotraer la titularidad del Poder Ejecutivo a su estado previo al 28 de junio hasta la conclusión del actual período gubernamental, el 27 de enero del 2010”. La decisión que acepte el Congreso Nacional deberá sentar las bases para alcanzar la paz social, la tranquilidad política y gobernabilidad que la sociedad demanda y el país necesita”.

FWIW, the hosts on Radio Globo have been in a pretty good mood yesterday and this morning.

If Congress decides to stage a coup, Obama should share the Presidency with them?

So far Zelaya is not agreeing with all the terms of the proposal.

Article

Coming out of the lurker closet...
Are you aware of this?

A nephew of de facto leader Roberto Micheletti was killed in a possible political attack and a colonel was shot dead in a separate incident.

http://www.france24.com/en/20091027-micheletti-nephew-enzo-jimenez-colonel-shot-ho

Coming out of the lurker closet...
Are you aware of this?

A nephew of de facto leader Roberto Micheletti was killed in a possible political attack and a colonel was shot dead in a separate incident.

http://www.france24.com/en/20091027-micheletti-nephew-enzo-jimenez-colonel-shot-honduras-political-crisis-murder

How popular is Uribe in the countryside? I hear that the polls they do are mostly four cities: do they have an urban bias (if the rural population in Colombia isn't that big, I'd assume that the polls should more or less reflect the entire country). The other thing is voting rates (at least in the presidential elections I remember) is pretty low ...

Okay, why is Uribe so popular? Is it mostly "seguridad democratica"?

It's a very complicated question, but, yes, overall.

But it's also useful to recall that the vast majority of gains from increased security have been to the urban centers, while the 3+ million dispossessed internal refugees and the thousands murdered by narco-paramilitaries and to a lesser extent narco-guerrillas are overwhelmingly in the countryside, and they pretty much count for nothing in the national dialogue.

It's not that there haven't been real gains seen by notable swathes of the population, particularly in urban and elite centers. There have. It's just that a great deal of it was purchased via a grand and fairly covert bargain with a nation-wide mafia force, and now you are seeing the investigative and bureaucratic manifestation of such an earlier deal.

Think of it as the even dark mirror of the U.S. after 9/11, where many people seemed okay with the notion that additional security could be purchased if the President had free reign to do the dirty and secret things he deemed necessary.

You know -- so what if the President has to consort with some pretty dirty types? We're fighting some really awful and dangerous foes. Don't we want the nasty guys who are our foes' enemies on our side? And maybe it's only temporary -- we'll reel these guys back in in a few years, when they've done their job.

Well, at some point, the results end up being noticed even outside the remote rural areas, and spread to lots more levels and forms of government than you originally thought.

For Spanish speakers, here are a few reports about some recent Hugowood productions:

http://abn.info.ve/noticia.php?articulo=205175&lee=5

http://abn.info.ve/noticia.php?articulo=205165&lee=5

Okay, why is Uribe so popular? Is it mostly "seguridad democratica"?

Oh joy, two more wankers for my list. Why do vampires hate democracy?

So, this should technically be a scandal in the US too, no?

No. It's merely evidence that the hard-working CIA is attempting to proteck ar feedum while 'rogue elements' occasionally make their job more difficult.

Meanwhile, in internationally unsurprising news, Jorge Castañeda is still a d-bag.

By the way, shouldn't this be a scandal in the US too? After all, DAS is supposed to be a BAD institution, so bad that they decided to disband it (yeah, yeah, not quite, but still ...). And yet here is evidence that the CIA is working with and FOR this nasty institution ... So, this should technically be a scandal in the US too, no?

El_Cid, Uh huh. They also apparently have Ven oppo collaborators.

Ever retaining its commitment to justice, the Colombian government has swiftly reacted to the disclosure of documents in Venezuela revealing Colombian government efforts not only to spy on but to bribe, suborn, and corrupt high government and military officials by investigating whoever disclosed the documents with treason.

La Fiscalía General de la Nación mostró este viernes su preocupación por el hecho de que Venezuela haya tenido acceso a una información que era de uso privativo de organismo de inteligencia colombianos.

El jefe del ente investigador, Guillermo Mendoza, manifestó que el hecho podría dar lugar a una investigación por el presunto delito de revelación de datos a funcionarios estatales del vecino país.

Además, indicó que se pudo haber incurrido en el "traición a la patria" y revelación de documento sometido a secreto.

El pronunciamiento se dio horas después de que el Gobierno venezolano hubiera denunciado la presencia de agentes de inteligencia del Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS) que adelantaban labores de espionaje en ese país.

I would emphasize again that the documents don't simply reveal "espionage" in the sense of Colombia monitoring its neighbors, but plans to pay off and suborn and corrupt high government and military officials in the Venezuelan, Bolivian, and Ecuadoran governments.

If this had been Hugo Chavez and Venezuela so blatantly (and admittedly) caught, the Washington Post would be calling for a Congressional resolution to initiate a nuclear attack on Venezuela.

In the Honduran press (i.e., Tiempo), Zelaya seems fairly resigned to the prospect that giving Congress the ability to vote on a compromise restoration government may likely not result in any strong personal return.

El gobierno provisional encabezado por Roberto Micheletti aceptó anoche que el Congreso Nacional decida sobre la restitución del derrocado presidente Manuel Zelaya Rosales, lo que allanó el camino a una aceptación de las elecciones de noviembre de parte de la comunidad internacional.

La restitución de Zelaya Rosales está atada a una opinión previa de la Corte Suprema de Justicia, pero según Zelaya Rosales, ese extremo queda a criterio de los diputados del Poder Legislativo puesto que la Corte ya se pronunció al respecto en agosto pasado.

A las 11:15 de la noche el subsecretario de Estado de los Estados Unidos para Asuntos del Hemisferio Occidental, Thomas Shannon; y el asesor de la Comisión de Asuntos Políticos de la Organización de Estados Americanos (OEA) Víctor Rico, anunciaron la firma de las actas concernientes al punto ocho de la agenda que se refiere a la restitución de Zelaya Rosales y el resto de los puntos acordados.

This would at least accord with Edmundo Orellana's argument that the only Honduran legal way out of the current crisis would be for the Congress to negate its June 28th vote overthrowing the elected President.

Perhaps Zelaya will be 'restored' under the condition that he face arrest and trial for charges lodged before the coup.

We'll see what happens, but it's neither a complete reversal for the Honduran military and the oligarchs, nor free time declared for right wing jackasses throughout the hemisphere to overthrow elected governments on weak Constitutional grounds.

When Zelaya was overthrown, the State Department thoughtlessly blurted out the obvious: It was a coup and Micheletti is a usurper.

Jet setting coup booster Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) is holding up Asst. Sec State Shannon's confirmation as Ambassador to Brazil over the U.S. government's refusal to acknowledge Micheletti is the savior of Democracy. So, Tom Shannon gets sent down to Honduras to cut a deal that will allow the U.S. to gracefully acquiesce to Micheletti's government. Shannon gets to sip caipirinas in Rio and the U.S. gets a meaningless vote to tell the English language media. Because it can't be a dictatorship if somebody, somewhere voted on it. Nevermind that Congress voted to oust Zelaya in the first place.

Don't do it, Mel! It's a TRAP!!!

(Not only that, but it's legitimizing the illegitimate. Not good. NOT GOOD.)