John Ross : The Next Mexican Revolution

Liberation Army of the South, led by Emiliano Zapata, fought the government forces of Gen. Porfirio Diaz, in the state of Morelos, Mexico. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
The next Mexican Revolution:

Don't look now but the long-awaited resurgence of the Mexican Revolution has already begun.

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / September 22, 2010

MEXICO CITY -- As the 100th anniversary of the Mexican revolution steams into sight, U.S. and Mexican security agencies are closely monitoring this distant neighbor nation for red lights that could signal renewed rebellion.

The most treacherous stretch for those keeping tabs on subversion south of the border is between September 15th, the recently celebrated bicentennial commemorating the struggle for Mexico's independence from Spain, and November 20th, the day back in 1910 that the liberal Francisco Madero called upon his compatriots to take the plazas of their cities and towns and rise up against the Diaz government.

At least 10 and as many as 44 armed groups are currently thought to be active in Mexico and the two months between the 200th anniversary of liberation from the colonial yoke and the 100th of the nation's landmark revolution, the first uprising of landless farmers in the Americas and a precursor of the Russian revolution, is a dramatic platform from which to strike at the right-wing government of President Felipe Calderon.

Among the more prominent armed formations is the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) which rose against the government in 1996 and is based in Guerrero and Oaxaca, and three distinct split-offs: the Democratic Revolutionary Tendency (TDR); the Justice Commandos - June 28th, thought to be linear descendents of the followers of guerrilla chieftain Lucio Cabanas who fought the government along the Costa Grande of Guerrero in the 1970s; and the Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent Peoples (ERPI) which also espouses Cabanas's heritage and is active in the Sierra of Guerrero where Lucio once roamed.

Others on the list released two years ago by the CISEN, Mexico's lead anti-subversion intelligence-gathering apparatus, include the largely-disarmed Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), an indigenous formation that rose in Chiapas in 1994; the Jose Maria Morelos National Guerrilla Coordinating Body, thought to be based in Puebla; and the Jaramillista Justice Commandos that takes its name from Ruben Jaramillo, the last general of revolutionary martyr Emiliano Zapata's Liberating Army of the South gunned down by the government in 1964, which has taken credit for bombings in Zapata's home state of Morelos.

The TAGIN or National Triple Indigenous and Guerrilla Alliance, thought to be rooted in southeastern Mexico, boasted in a e-mail communiqué at the beginning of the year that a coalition of 70 armed groups have agreed on coordinated action in 2010.

Also in the revolutionary mix are an unknown number of anarchist cells, at least one of which takes the name of Praxides G. Guerrero, the first anarchist to fall 100 years ago in the Mexican revolution.

Primarily operating in urban settings, anarchist cells have firebombed dozens of ATM machines and banks, new car showrooms, bullrings, and slaughterhouses (many anarchists are militant vegans) in Mexico City, Mexico state, Guadalajara, San Luis Potosi, and Tijuana. The U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has just added Mexican anarchist groups to the Obama government's terrorist lists.

Thus far, no group in this revolutionary rainbow has struck in 2010, and the window is narrowing if Mexico's twin centennials are to be a stage upon which to launch new uprisings. If this is to be the year of the next Mexican revolution, the time to move is now.

Objective conditions on the ground are certainly ripe for popular uprising. At least 70% of the Mexican people live in and around the poverty line while a handful of oligarchs continue to dominate the economy -- Mexico accounts for half of the 12 million Latin Americans who have fallen into poverty during the on-going economic downturn.

Despite Calderon's much scoffed-at claims that the recession-wracked economy is in recovery, unemployment continues to run at record levels. Hunger is palpable on the farm and in the big cities. Indeed, the only ray of light is the drug trade that now employs between a half million and a million mostly young and impoverished people.

Labor troubles, always a crucible of revolutionary dynamics, are on the rise. A hundred years ago, conditions were not dissimilar. The fallout from the 1906-7 world depression that saw precious metal prices, the nation's sustenance, fall off the charts sent waves of unemployment across the land and severely impacted conditions for those still working.

As copper prices bottomed, workers at the great Cananea copper pit scant miles from the Arizona border in Sonora state, went out on strike and owner Colonel William Green called in the Arizona Rangers to take the mine back. Twenty six miners were cut down and the massacre gave birth to the Mexican labor movement.

In March 2010, President Calderon dispatched hundreds of federal police and army troops to Cananea to break a protracted, nearly two-year strike at the behest of the Larrea family, the main stockholders in Grupo Mexicano Industrial which was gifted with the copper pit, the eighth largest in the world, after it was privatized by reviled ex-president Carlos Salinas in 1989. Calderon's hard-nosed labor secretary Javiar Lozano has threatened arrest of miners' union boss Napoleon Gomez Urrutia, now in self-exile in Vancouver, Canada.

Lozano is also deeply embroiled in take-no-hostages battles with the Mexican Electricity Workers Union (SME) over privatization of electricity generation here that has cost the union, the second oldest in the country founded during the last Mexican revolution, 44,000 jobs. A near death hunger strike by the displaced workers failed to budge the labor secretary and SME members now threaten to shut down Mexico City's International Airport.

History is often colored with irony. The first important battles in the Mexican revolution were fought around Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, a key railhead on the U.S. border and a commercial lifeline to El Norte for dictator Porfirio Diaz. In skirmish after skirmish, the irregulars of Francisco Villa and Pascual Orozco challenged and defeated the dictator's Federales and began the long push south to hook up with Emiliano Zapata's southern army in Morelos state on the doorstep of the capitol.

Ciudad Juarez was devastated by the cruel battles between the revolutionaries and the dictator's troops. Dead wagons plied the dusty streets hauling off the bodies of those who had fallen to be burnt out in the surrounding desert. Today, once again, Ciudad Juarez is the murder capitol of Mexico.

Mexican troops, mobilized to fight the narco-insurrection. Image from. Mcauley's World's Webblog.
Over 1,800 have been killed in this border city so far in 2010, a record year for homicides, as the homegrown Juarez drug cartel and its local enforcers, the "La Linea" gang, try to defend the "plaza," the most pertinent drug crossing point on the 1964 mile border, from the Sinaloa cartel under the management of "El Chapo" Guzman, and his local associates, "Gente Nueva" ("New People").

Much as today when the narco kings like "El Chapo" or his recently slain associate "Nacho" Coronel are vilified by the Mexican press and President Calderon as "traitors" and "killers" and "cowards," 100 years back revolutionaries were cast as villains and vandals hell-bent on tearing down the institutions of law and order.

Pancho Villa was universally dissed as a cattle rustler, a "bandido," "terrorista," and rapist. When Zapata, "the Attila of the South," and his peasant army came down to Mexico City in 1914 to meet with Villa, the "gente decente" (decent people) locked up their homes and their daughters to protect them from the barbarian hordes.

Similarly, in 2010, the corporate press lashes out at the cartels and their pistoleros as crazed, drug-addled mercenaries who will shoot their own mothers if enough cash and cocaine are offered. Villa's troops were no strangers to such accusations. "La Cucaracha," the Villista marching song, pleads for "marijuana para caminar" ("marijuana to march").

All this duel centennial year, ideologically driven leftists here have been waiting with baited breath for a resurgence of armed rebellion such as in 1994 when the EZLN rose up against the "mal gobierno" in Chiapas, or in 1996 when the EPR staged a series of murderous raids on military and police installations -- but the leftists may be barking up the wrong tree.

If revolution is to be defined as the overthrow of an unpopular government and the taking of state power by armed partisans, then the new Mexican revolution is already underway, at least in the north of the country where Calderon's ill-advised drug campaign against the cartels (in which according to the latest CISEN data 28,000 citizens have died) has morphed into generalized warfare.

Although the fighting has been largely confined to the north, it should be remembered that Mexico's 1910 revolution began in that geography under the command of Villa and Orozco, Venustiano Carranza, Alvaro Obregon, and Francisco Madero, and then spread south to the power center of the country.

Given the qualitative leap in violence, Edgardo Buscaglia, a keen analyst of drug policy at the prestigious Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico now describes Calderon's war as a "narco-insurgency" -- a descripton recently endorsed by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Daily events reported in the nation's press lend graphic substance to the terminology.

Narco-commandos attack military and police barracks, carrying off arms and freeing prisoners from prisons in classic guerrilla fashion. As if to replay the 1910 uprising in the north, the narco gangs loot and torch the mansions of the rich in Ciudad Juarez. The narcos mount public massacres in northern cities like Juarez and Torreon that leave dozens dead and seem designed to terrorize the local populous caught up in the crossfire and impress upon the citizenry that the government can no longer protect them, a classic guerrilla warfare strategy.

One very 2010 wrinkle to the upsurge in violence: car bombs triggered by cell phones detonate in downtown Juarez, a technology that seems to have been borrowed from the U.S. invasion of Iraq (El Paso just across the river is home to several military bases where returning veterans of that crusade are housed). Plastique-like C-4 explosives used in a July 15th car bombing that killed four in downtown Juarez are readily available at Mexican mining sites.

Further into the interior, commandos thought to be operating under the sponsorship of the Zetas cartel, have repeatedly shut down key intersections in Monterrey, Mexico's third largest city and the industrial powerhouse of the nation, with stolen construction equipment and stalled buses and trailer trucks purportedly to clear surrounding highways of traffic for the movement of troops and weaponry into this strategic region.

Now the narco-insurrection has invaded the political realm as manifested by the assassination of the one-time ruling PRI party's front-running candidate for governor of Tamaulipas state in July 4th elections. But party affiliation doesn't seem to be a determining factor in this ambience of fear and loathing. The kidnapping of right-wing PAN party Padrino Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, one of the most powerful politicos in Mexico and a possible presidential candidate in 2012, must send chills up and down the spines of Calderon and his associates.

Who actually put the snatch on "El Jefe" Diego remains murky. The Attorney General's office is now pointing fingers at the Popular Revolutionary Army, which is active in the Bajio region where the PANista was taken last May 14th. In 2007, the EPR claimed credit for the bombing of PEMEX pipelines in Guanajuato and Queretero in retaliation for the disappearances of two of its historical leaders.

The Mexican military has long calculated the eventual "symbiosis of criminal cartels with armed groups that are disaffected with the government" ("Combat Against Narco-Traffic 2008" issued by the Secretary of Defense).

Fifty thousand of the Mexican Army's 140,000 troops and large detachments of Naval Marines are currently in the field against the narco-insurrectionists. With an eye to the eventual "symbiosis" of the drug gangs with armed guerrilla movements, the U.S. North Command which is responsible for keeping the North American mainland free of terrorists and regards Mexico as its southern security perimeter recently sent counterinsurgency trainers here to assess threats -- their visit was confirmed at a Washington D.C. press conference July 21st by Under-secretary of Defense William Wechsler.

Meanwhile, the military is setting up new advance bases in regions where there have been recent guerrilla sightings such as the Sierra Gorda, strategically located at the confluence of Queretero, Guanajuato, and San Luis Potosi states.

Leftists who have been awaiting a more "political" uprising in 2010 are not convinced by Buscaglia's nomenclature. A real revolution must be waged along ideological and class lines which the narco-insurrection has yet to manifest. Nonetheless, given the neoliberal mindset of a globalized world in which class dynamics are reduced to market domination, the on-going narco-insurrection may well be the best new Mexican revolution this beleaguered nation is going to get.

[An abbreviated version of "The Next Mexican Revolution" appeared in the Guardian (London, U.K.) September 13, 2010. Note: John Ross's cancer has returned and he is suspending publication of his column while he undergoes chemotherapy in San Francisco. He can be reached at johnross@igc.org. Readers who crave Ross's words are advised to consult El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City (Nation Books 2010), available at your local independent bookstore.]

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John Ross : An Uprising of Bones in Mexico

Tlatecuhtli, Aztec goddess of the earth, a fierce frog-like creature. The monumental 12-ton slab was discovered during an excavation beneath a popular Mexico City cantina. Photo from Noticias Azatlan Virtual.
An uprising of bones:
Macabre marks past and present in Mexico

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / June 27, 2010

MEXICO CITY -- Under the martial cadence of muffled drums, the bones rolled solemnly up the elegant Paseo de Reforma atop a dozen military vehicles. Four skulls could be spotted in one large glass urn. "Look Papi, there goes Hidalgo!" a small boy pointed excitedly -- one of the skulls is purported to be that of Miguel Hidalgo, the country priest who rose in rebellion in 1810 to initiate Mexico's struggle for independence from Spain, an event whose bicentennial is being celebrated this year.

For his efforts, Hidalgo was fusilladed by a Royal firing squad then decapitated and his head hung from a public building to impress upon would-be disciples the folly of rebellion.

Other urns were full of arm bones and femurs, said to be the remains of Jose Maria Morelos, Vicente Guerrero, Guadalupe Victoria, Leona Vicaria and her lover Andres Quintana Roo, and other heroes of the struggle for independence.

The macabre military parade was captained by President Felipe Calderon this May 30th to usher in Bicentennial festivities that will climax in September. The bones of the heroes are being shifted from their crypts in the slender column that supports the gilded Angel of Independence installed by dictator Porfirio Diaz (1876-1910) just weeks before the Mexican revolution exploded a hundred years ago.

Under Calderon's direction, they were being transported up to Chapultepec Castle, the colonial palace that overlooks the city, where experts will sort out whose bones are whose, and polish them up in anticipation of the big fiesta.

2010, of course, also marks the 100th anniversary of the Mexican revolution but the bones of the heroes of that landmark uprising of the poor are buried in their own monument, currently undergoing renovation. Of the duel centennials, the marking of the Mexican revolution has been downgraded by the right-wing president Calderon who reportedly is uncomfortable with the images of such revolutionaries as Emiliano Zapata, Francisco Villa, and others who once overthrew a conservative government.

But the bones of the heroes are not the only bones stirring in Mexico these days. In Taxco, the historic Guerrero state silver mining town, now a tourist Mecca, at least 77 cadavers were removed this June from the shuttered San Francisco Cuadra mineshaft, all of them casualties of Calderon's never-ending drug war. Although most had been reduced to piles of bones, more recent victims were identified by striking tattoos of Santa Muerte, the death goddess of the narcos.

The bones retrieved from the Taxco mine are thought to have been deposited there by pistoleros in the employ of La Familia, a drug gang based in next-door Michoacan state, notorious for beheading its rivals. Some drug war observers link the death cult to the Evangelical prosperity gospel.

On June 16th, La Familia gunmen and federal police troops mixed it up outside Taxco. According to Mexican drug war officials, a total of 15 dead pistoleros were added to the mounting bone pile. Taxco's stock as a tourist destination has declined precipitously since the killing spree began.

All over Mexico, the narco bones are piling up. 23,000 citizens have perished since Calderon declared war on the drug cartels 43 months ago to curry favor with Washington and garb himself in the mantle of military authority after a fraud-marred presidential election that left him with little credibility. To underscore the campaign, Calderon donned a military field jacket two sizes too big for his small, pudgy stature to the delight of the nation's acid-penned political cartoonists.

In addition to the 23,000 dead, hundreds are missing in action, many buried in clandestine common graves like the Taxco silver mine. Families set out on federal and state highways and never arrive home. Some vanish at impromptu checkpoints set up by the military and police and the drug gangs.

A record number of bones were collected this May when 1060 died in the drug war, a 43% increase over May 2009. June has been even more horrific. This June 11th while Mexico's national team inaugurated the World Cup football championship in South Africa, 85 new candidates for the bone pile were counted, a new one-day record.

Two 70-plus days followed. Ninteen addicts were slain in a Chihuahua City drug clinic, the fourth mass killing at such facilities in the state in the past year. In Ciudad Madero where 20 were slain, a clique known as "The Artists of Assassination" took credit for distributing the dead in a score of colonies in this Tamaulipas oil town.

A skull -- perhaps that of revolutionary legend Miguel Hidalgo -- seen in a glass crypt containing the bones of a dozen national heroes in Mexico , Sunday, May 30, 2010. The remains were carried through the city in a solemn Bicentennial procession. Photo by Marco Ugarte / AP.
On June 15th, 29 members of the Zeta Cartel were massacred inside a Mazatlan Sinaloa state penitentiary by rivals from El Chapo Guzman's Pacific Cartel armed with automatic weapons. El Chapo ("Shorty") is reputed by U.S. National Public Radio to be Calderon's favorite narco lord. Thirty-five prisoners had previously been slaughtered in the prison since the first of the year.

On the same day as the massacre in Mazatlan, a dozen federal troops were ambushed by La Familia near Zitacuaro Michoacan in the heart of the Monarch butterfly sanctuary zone. The ambush occurred almost a year to the date of a La Familia attack that cost 10 federal police officers their lives.

With the daily body count zooming, President Calderon has been obligated to launch a media campaign in an effort to convince a dubious public that he is winning his drug war. In mid-June, the President's public relations team bought up double truck space in every daily newspaper and weekly magazine in the country for the publication of Calderon's 5,000-word defense of his failing policies, shifting blame for the violence to the insatiable demand for drugs of his nearest neighbor to the north which he also lamented is arming the drug cartels via thousands of gun shops strung along the 1964 mile border.

The president also put the onus on the purportedly increasing affluence of Mexicans (presumably due to his administration's economic initiatives) that has provided them with enough disposable income to buy drugs.

Sic.

Felipe Calderon's mobilization of the armed forces to take on the cartels has been, at best, a big bust. Sending in the troops has predictably led to massive corruption. The Mexican Army, which took over the drug war from very corruptible state and federal police, is now so untrustworthy that the Navy is being deployed in high profile operations.

Civilian security agencies are riddled with cartel infiltrators. Officials on drug gang payrolls have been uncovered in the Special Prosecutor for Organized Crime office, the Federal Police command, and even Interpol and the U.S. Homeland Security Customs & Border Enforcement. Human rights abuses have climbed to over a thousand incidents a month reported to the National Commission on Human Rights (CNDH.)

The border around Reynosa, Tamaulipas and McAllen, Texas is particularly treacherous. On June 3rd, three boys -- the youngest was 13 -- were gunned down by Mexican Army troops near Reynosa. The military claims they were Gulf cartel gunmen ("sicarios"). Their parents testify they were wearing their middle school uniforms when the soldiers opened fire.

Calderon's preference for marketing the Bicentennial of Independence reflects the skittishness of his rightist PAN party to deal with class-based social upheaval. On the other side of the political ledger, the Left is focused on the possibility of renewed uprising as the nation approaches the centennial of the 1910 revolution.

Tattoo depicting Santa Muerte, the death goddess of the narcos. Image from Marzia Tattoo / Flickr.
Class tensions, exacerbated by the spiraling economic downturn; the increasing concentration of wealth in the coffers of the oligarchy; and rampant injustice are seen as signposts towards a new Mexican revolution. But the Left may have missed the boat. Indeed, if revolution can be defined as the violent overthrow of a sitting government, the new Mexican revolution has already begun:

• Item -- Narco commandos are in the field inflicting double-digit casualties on federal security forces such as in the June 15th ambush in the Monarch butterfly sanctuary. Police and military outposts and prisons have been repeatedly overrun by such commandos.


• Item -- Revolutionaries seek to demonstrate to the masses that the government can no longer protect them. The recent spate of bloody massacres seems to be directed to this end.


• Item -- On June 9th, Monterrey youth gangs affiliated with the Zetas shut down that northern industrial city, blocking central thoroughfares and freeways with stolen trailer trucks, tourist buses, and earth-moving equipment at rush hour, a stunt that would make many left revolutionaries salivate. A similar shutdown in April was rumored to have provided the Zetas with free access to move troops and weapons through this strategically located metropolis.


• Item -- "Plata o plomo" ("silver or lead"), the slogan of the drug gangs when dealing with the political parties and elected officials, is operative. Candidates for all three major parties have been threatened, bribed, and sometimes assassinated in the run-up to state elections this July. The kidnapping of a powerful politico and possible PAN presidential candidate is another indicator that an armed struggle for state power is in process.

Amidst dibilitating narco wars and bicentennial ballyhoo, older bones are rising to the surface these days.

Deep beneath the Templo Mayor or Great Temple in Mexico City's old quarter where the Aztec emperors butchered tens of thousands of warriors to win the blessings of Tlaloc, the god of the rain, and Huitzilopochtli, the sun at mid-day, the bones of the ancients are rattling around as never before.

In 2006, at the foot of the altar to Tlaloc on the corner of Guatemala and Argentina Streets, the National Institute of History and Anthropology (INAH) began to excavate a site beneath a popular cantina, El Seminario. Ten meters down, the diggers hit pay dirt: a monumental 12-ton slab depicting the Tlatecuhtli, the Aztec goddess of the earth, a fierce frog-like creature that had been buried for five centuries following the fall of the Mexica empire to the European invaders.

Archeologist Eduardo Matos Mocuhtezuma, on whose watch the earth goddess was uncovered, speculates that the Tlatecuhtli was installed by the Emperor Mocuhtezuma II (no relation) to cover the tomb of Ahuizotl, one of the most powerful of Mexica rulers.
Although the bones of Ahuizotl have not yet been located, the discovery of many offerings ("ofrendas") -- textiles, gold jewelry, tiny figures of Aztec deities -- indicate a new find is imminent.

This May 17th, the Tlatecuhtli, which has broken into four large sections and is missing a four foot section where its viscera should be, was painstakingly carried into the Templo Mayor museum to be the centerpiece of an exhibition documenting the "Time and Destiny" of Mocuhtezuma's governance -- his fall in 1521 amidst multiple signs of doom and gloom marked the end of the Aztec empire.

As they were 500 years ago, these are apocalyptical times. The deluge of bones here is accompanied by premonitions of cataclysm: global warming, a deadly Gulf of Mexico oil spill, terrifying acts of violence and vengeance.

Laid out on an immense bier, the Tlatecuhtli is visible from three stories above the museum floor. Viewed from on high, she seems immersed in beatific repose, her heavy lids turned demurely downwards and her serrated tongue dangling comically from her open mouth. Capped by a crown of caracoles (snails) she is perched on thick claws that communicate maximum animal power.

Jesus, a breakfast companion at the Café La Blanca, studies the photo in the morning daily, La Jornada. "Wow! What do you think will happen to us if she ever wakes up?" he wonders.

[John Ross lives in Mexico City a few blocks from the Tlatecuhtli and the subject of his latest cult classic El Monstruo: Dread & Redemption In Mexico City ("gritty & pulsating" -- New York Post.) He is can be fingered at johnross@igc.org.]

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John Ross : The U.S., Mexico, and the Drug War Scam

Uncle Sam: "They're crazy if they think I won't stick my nose into the issue of Mexican drug trafficking." Cartoon from WeedTV.
The Big Scam:
How and why Washington hooked
Mexico on the Drug War

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / April 30, 2010

[The following borrows from a talk of the same name I delivered at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C.on April 21, 2010. -- J.R.]

When I first returned to Mexico City in the wake of the great 1985 earthquake, the biggest drug pushers in that distant neighbor nation were Sherwin Williams Paint ("tinner" or "activo") and Resistol-Dupont glue ("chemo"). Street kids were huffing down gallons of these pernicious intoxicants in the allies and sewers of this monster megalopolis.

A few months ago, my Mexico City medicinal marijuana distributor burst into my rooms at the venerable Hotel Isabel. R. was agitated. She had just encountered an eight-year old child smoking crack in Tepito, a high crime neighborhood here in the maw of the Monstruo. R. is a child of the streets herself but she was horrified that the crack pipe had come to the barrio. "An eight year-old kid, John!" she clucked maternally.

Things have changed in the Mexican drug marketplace during the protracted hiatus that I have been in residence in Chilangolandia and not for the best.

We know the story by rote now. In the mid-1980s, the Colombianos, weary of dodging the Yanqui Navy in the Caribbean, moved the cocaine biz to Mexico and its porous, nearly 2,000 mile border with the United States and contracted with the Sinaloa boys who owned the black tar and brown heroin smuggling routes into the U.S. southwest. Pretty quick, the Sinaloa boys were splitting profits with the Pablo Escobars and soon would take over the trade, contracting for coca production in the Andes and distributing the blow in El Norte, thus achieving true cartel status.

Every American president since Ronald Reagan has declared a war on drugs.
Every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan has declared a war on drugs -- I calculate that in the past 25 years, I have covered five distinct drug wars. Billions have been wantonly flushed down the drain since Reagan's declaration of war in 1985 and the W word has become a much bigger business. For the cartels, the "war" is a price support system that gooses up profits. For the drug warriors, the "war" is the goose that keeps laying the platinum egg, and security budgets have ballooned. The greater the perceived threat, the higher the ante zooms.

Marijuana is a case in point. Although the U.S. has become the world's number one producer of fine marijuana, drug war honchos keep bamboozling the U.S. Congress that Mexican cartels are reaping millions moving the yerba into the U.S. market. The truth is that marijuana is a bulky, low-rent drug that necessitates all sorts of costly logistics to traffic into the U.S. and yields little profit for the cartels.

Although the multi-ton loads occasionally taken down by U.S. and Mexican authorities on both side of the border push up drug war numbers and provide a rationale for budget increases, to the cartels marijuana often functions as a decoy -- the next truck over will be smuggling much more compact and profitable loads of cocaine, speed, and heroin where the real money is made.

Since Mexico's northern border militarized after 9/11, the cartels have to hold the loads in Mexico longer, and time being money in the capitalist ethic, the drugs have leaked into the Mexican street. The cartels now do battle over retail sales, control of "plazas" (routes, cities, whole states) and even neighborhoods and street corners. 23,000 have died in the past three years -- 2700 alone in Ciudad Juarez in 2009, about one murder every two and half hours. Kids are on the crack pipe in Tepito and life in the Mexican street has become an annex of "The Wire."

Has the U.S. deliberately given Mexico this drug problem, and why? Some of us think that one intended consequence of border militarization was to up drug supply and use in Mexico. Only then could Mexico be manipulated into becoming a willing partner in Washington's drug war. Mexico has in fact traditionally argued that drugs are a North American problem. If the gringos would only dry up demand north of the border, the problem would go away. Besides, drug money provides Mexican banks with much needed liquidity.

Drugs and immigration are hot button issues that are shamelessly exploited by U.S. corporate media and Washington uses such Mexico bashing to win security and energy concessions south of the border. We shall speak to what specifically the U.S. wants a bit later in this discourse -- but first a little context.

I need to qualify the following chronology of Mexican presidencies and their various efforts to fight Washington's drug wars: I entertain the not-so-crackpot theory that each of Mexico's five neo-liberal presidents has had favored narco-lords ("consentidos") whose allegiances they cultivate by cracking down on their rivals. It is in the interest of the Mexican government to deal with one strong capo rather that five or six unruly mobs with conflicting demands and unpredictable ambitions.

Former Mexican presidents Miguel de la Madrid and Carlos Salinas. Photo from El Universal.

Miguel de la Madrid (1982-88) -- De la Madrid's favorite narco was a rude capo by the name of Rafael Caro Quintero, a Sinaloa boy with 10,000 hectares of marijuana under cultivation in Búfalo, Chihuahua. (U.S. production had not yet gained dominance.) Somehow De la Madrid's defense secretary who then ran the nation's rudimentary drug war could never locate this enormous swatch of greenery.

Then a DEA contract pilot did a flyover, spotted the humongous patch, and informed his boss, Kiki Camarena, a U.S. agent based in Guadalajara, of the find. Caro Quintero's gunsels kidnapped the two, tortured them to death, and buried them in a shallow grave on a Michoacan hog farm. Caro, who carried picture I.D. describing him as a Mexican security agent, then fled to Costa Rica.

The discovery of Camarena's body put the Reagan administration on a war footing with Mexico. Ambassador John Gavin, an even worse actor than his boss, threatened invasion. De la Madrid, whose government was hopelessly beholden to Washington for the 1982 Mexican debt crisis bail out, had no alternative and Caro Quintero was brought back home to face the music and wound up running a discotheque in a Mexico City penitentiary.

But Rafael Caro Quintero, who had once purportedly offered to pay off Mexico's record $102 billion USD foreign debt, was a Sinaloa boy and De la Madrid's commitment to the Sinaloa cartel remained solid.

Carlos Salinas (1988-94): De la Madrid's party, the long-ruling PRI, had stolen the 1988 election and his successor Carlos Salinas needed Washington's approbation badly, entering into preliminary negotiations with George Bush I for a North American Free Trade Agreement. Bush wanted two concessions: a brake on the flow of Central American migrant workers through Mexico into the U.S. (Mexico subsequently upped deportation rates 100%) and the head of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, the Sinaloa capo who made the Colombian connection. Salinas complied.

Salinas's consentido was one Juan Garcia Abrego whose family had been involved in moving contraband across the east end of the border for generations. The Gulf Cartel, as his gang was dubbed, dominated the trade in Salinas' native state Nuevo Leon and black sheep brother Raul reportedly partied with Garcia Abrego on the weekends. The Gulf Cartel flourished by utilizing landing strips on Navy bases in Tamaulipas to fly in the blow from the south.

But the Sinaloa boys did not vanish from the scene after the incarceration of Felix Gallardo -- they just moved the shop closer to the border in Tijuana. The 11-member Arellano Felix clan, all nieces and nephews of Uncle Miguel Angel, took over the empire. Their juice during the Salinas years was made abundantly clear after the Cardenal of Guadalajara was assassinated in May '93 during a shoot-out between Arellano Felix pistoleros and another Sinaloa faction under the tutelage of a young turk named Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

Indeed two Arellano Felix brothers were given safe conduct to and from Mexico City to negotiate the matter with Papal Nuncio Giralamo Prigione. When Prigione rang up Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, to inform the President that the two most wanted drug dealers in Mexico were sitting in his living room, Salinas seemed uninterested.

Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000): During Zedillo's stint at the helm of state, the U.S. Congress humiliated Mexico with annual certification of the country's cooperation in the White House-declared War on Drugs. To placate the Clinton administration, which had once again rescued Mexico from default during the economic collapse of 1995-6, Salinas' successor (and ultimately bitter rival) each year would offer up a fresh capo on the eve of the certification vote.

Zedillo's final tender was the Salinas pet Garcia Abrego and the trade shifted from the Gulf Cartel to the middle of the border in Ciudad Juarez under the stewardship of yet another Sinaloa boy Amado Carrillo, "The Lord of the Skies," who revolutionized the business by flying DC-6's loaded gunnel to gunnel with Colombian blow straight into the border region.

One reason for Carrillo's spectacular success: he enjoyed the protection of Zedillo's drug czar General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo. The General went down in 1997 just weeks after he had been praised at a ceremony in the Clinton White House. Gutierrez Rebollo's fall presaged Carrillo's -- "The Lord of the Skies" expired the next year in a private hospital not a mile from Los Pinos, purportedly during a liposuction procedure.

Former Mexican president Vicente Fox.

Vicente Fox/Felipe Calderon (2000-2010): The Mexican political structure changed spots in 2000 when the right-wing PAN party candidate Vicente Fox vanquished the PRI. A month after Fox's inauguration in December, El Chapo Guzman walked out of a Super-Maxi in Jalisco, and has never been seen or touched since although he remains in plain sight as testified to by the recent face-to-face interview of his closest confederate El Mayo Zambada by veteran newshound Julio Scherer (El Mayo offered to hook Scherer up with El Chapo.)

Under Fox, the Chapo ("Shorty") consolidated his position as Mexico's Narco of the Decade and is currently listed by Forbes Magazine as the 42nd most powerful potentate on the planet, ahead of world leaders like France's Sarkozy.

The latest phase of this charade began six days after Fox's successor Felipe Calderon took the oath of office. Calderon, like Salinas, had been awarded the 2006 election amidst widespread allegations of fraud. Half the electorate believed that he had obtained office by wholesale flimflam and he needed the authority of the military and the backing of Washington to legitimatize his presidency. 30,000 troops were dispatched to Calderon's home state of Michoacan and the President donned an Army field jacket two sizes too big for him under the illusion that war confers authority.

Three years later, 23,000 Mexican citizens are dead and Calderon has learned that the people in whose name the war is being fought turn against their rulers when the wars they fight are perceived to be losing ones.

As noted, Mexican presidents boost the fortunes of their consentidos by taking down their rivals and leaving the favored ones alone. In an analysis of 50,000 drug war arrests since 2006, specialist Edgardo Buscalgia counts only 2000 low level Chapo operators -- the rest are all in the employ of Chapo's rivals, the Beltran Leyva gang in particular.

The Beltran Leyvas, who had split off from El Chapo and formed their own cartel, were taken out last December in a Cuernavaca search and destroy mission, their hideaway probably discreetly disclosed to authorities by El Chapo himself. Not unsurprisingly, the Army, which is thought to have been compromised by the drug cartels, was kept purposefully out of the picture -- Navy Marines were the primary security forces deployed in the raid.

For the past 20 years, the Generals had been the go-to guys in Mexico's many drug wars, having replaced relentlessly corrupt police agencies. Now the Navy has replaced the Generals.

Many years ago, Ronald Reagan's defense minister Casper Weinberger wrote a book called The Next War, a series of scenarios of future international conflicts. In one script, the U.S. is forced to invade Mexico because the drug cartels had seized the presidency and presented a national security threat to Washington. This scenario is still operative at the Pentagon and has become a crowbar to beat Mexico into submission.

What does Washington want from Mexico?

On the security side, the U.S. seeks total control of Mexico's security apparatus. With the creation of NORCOM (the North Command) designed to protect the U.S. landmass from terrorist attack, Mexico is designated North America's southern security perimeter and U.S. military aircraft now have carte blanche to penetrate Mexican airspace.

Moreover, the North American Security and Prosperity Agreement (ASPAN in its Mexican initials) seeks to integrate the security apparatuses of the three NAFTA nations under Washington's command. Now the Merida Initiative signed by Bush II and Calderon in early 2007 allows for the emplacement of armed U.S. security agents -- the FBI, the DEA, the CIA, and ICE -- on Mexican soil and contractors like the former Blackwater cannot be far behind. Wars are fought for juicy government contracts and $1.3 billion in Merida moneys are going directly to U.S. defense contractors -- forget about the Mexican middleman.

On the energy side (the "prosperity" euphemized in the ASPAN), the designated target is, of course, the privatization of PEMEX, Mexico's nationalized oil industry, with a particular eye out for risk contracts on deep sea drilling in the Gulf of Mexico utilizing technology only the EXXONs of this world possess.

I speak today four blocks from the White House where these strategies to force Mexico to its knees have been unscrupulously implemented during multiple presidencies, including that of Barack Obama. I have no illusions that my words will have resonance in those hallowed halls.

This talk is not directed at Obama and his drug war lieutenants but to those of us who have been victimized by a cruel hoax that continues to kill, maim, and pillage peoples on both sides of the border. Those of us who have opposed every U.S. war from Vietnam to Afghanistan must demand an end to the White House's War on Drugs.

[John Ross and El Monstruo wind up their three-month coast-to-coast odyssey this week in Boston with presentations at the IPS-Jamaica Plains Forum (Friday the 30th) and an International Workers Day rally on the Boston Commons Saturday, May 1st (12-2.).]

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Marion Delgado in Colombia : Don Mario's War

Don Mario: Colombian police escort Daniel Rendon Herrera at a Bogota airport after his April 2009 arrest. Photo by William Fernando Martinez / AP.
Colombia: Don Mario's war

By his own account, [his] victims number somewhere around 9,000, but hey, who’s counting? He murdered so many Colombians that he can only guess in round numbers.

By Marion Delgado / The Rag Blog / April 20

AT LARGE IN COLOMBIA -- “Don Mario” was on TV during the week of March 21-26. He was making another appearance before Colombia’s Peace and Justice Commission. After Carlos Castaño, Don Mario (nee Daniel Rendon Herrera), is as big a “Mister Big” in the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC; United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia) as they come. At one time he controlled most of the cocaine transportation out of Colombia.

The Don swaggered across the TV's flat screen and into the Commission’s hearing room. At 44 years, he looked good in his Armani suit and of course, his right sleeve was pulled up a little to display his Rolex watch. It is rumored that he wears a new one every day. He stacked 200 million Colombian pesos on the table, paused, turned to smile at the TV cameras, and sat down. La Plata was his down payment on restitution he is required to make to the families of his victims.

By his own account, those victims number somewhere around 9,000, but hey, who’s counting? He murdered so many Colombians that he can only guess in round numbers.

I have mentioned him several times in my dispatches over the last few months, but he was always a bit of a mythical figure. A leader of one of the most powerful AUC blocs, the Urabá or Urabeños, his name came up again and again in my research. The televised hearings, or more appropriately, “The Don Mario Show," made me want to find out more about who he is and what he had done. I had a good source, Don Mario himself.

The Colombian government put a price on his head, five billion pesos (two and a half million U.S. dollars). Don Mario in turn offered a $1,000 reward for every killed policeman. While his AUC companeros were demobilized, or at least pretended to be, the Don stayed on the run. He was captured in April 2009. But Don Mario, legendary paramilitar, wasn’t finished.

He applied for the amnesty offered under the Peace and Justice Act. If he would make a full “confession” of his crimes, and make restitution to his victims, he would avoid prison in Colombia and be protected from extradition to the U.S. The U.S. Departments of Justice and State have twice requested his extradition, and have been twice refused by the Supreme Court of Colombia.

Don Mario began to tell his story in early November 2009 and, over five- and six-day-long weeks, has continued to confess through mid-March 2010. There are hundreds of pages of testimony, with no English translation yet. It’s a book, bigger than a book. It's way too big to blog, so I have extracted his account of one time, in one place, with all the players, that tells the story of one part of Don Mario’s war. It’s his story, but some of it I got from Human Rights Watch, NACLA, and other NGO’s, from the UN Commission on Human Rights, and some from the stories filed with the Commission by the unwilling participants, the Colombian people. It was their war more than it was Don Mario’s

The time and place

In little more than a few months between late 2003 and early 2004, about 3,000 people, including civilians and combatants, were killed in Casanare, a Department, or state, in eastern Colombia rich with oilfields across rolling, fertile plains.

Two paramilitary factions, supposedly created to combat rebel guerrillas, fought each other for control of drug trafficking, oil royalties, and thousands of hectares of land in Casanare in a paranoiac, hellish war that left thousands of victims, a war still very much a secret even in Colombia.

In this chilling war of deceit, paranoia, and greed, even children paid the ultimate price.

Martin Llanos’ war in los llanos (plains) of Casanare

Very little is known of the war in Casanare. Several different factions of paramilitaries clashed not only with Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia -- Ejército del Pueblo (FARC or FARC-EP; Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- Peoples Army) rebels, but among themselves.

Many paramilitaries who committed crimes in this Department never participated in the process of demobilization of the AUC. Many of the protagonists have died, or are fugitives.

Drug boss and paramilitary chief Hector Buitrago, alias “Martin Llanos," refused to demobilize and is still wanted in connection with crimes committed by his group. Miguel Arroyave, alias "Archangel," was later killed by his own men. Pedro Oliverio Guerrero Castillo, alias “Cuchillo," went into hiding but was captured in March 2010.

The plains inhabitants, the Casanareños, witnessed a massacre in which even children were killed, as hundreds of civilians and paramilitaries clashed with each other.

In his testimony, as part of the Peace and Justice Law, Don Mario said the man responsible for the war was emerald trader Victor Carranza; however, Carranza's motives for such scheming remain obscure.

“Carranza spoke with Miguel (Arroyave) about Martin (Llanos), and from there I realized that he was using Miguel to alienate Martin. I think he did the same with Martin,” said Don Mario. He said Carranza sowed discord between the two paramilitary leaders, telling each one that the other wanted to kill him.

The war was costly, not only for the population it ravaged, but on the pocketbooks of the combatants. According to Don Mario, within a month the Centaurs Bloc of the AUC spent about U.S. $7 million for the war. On one day of fighting, his men used 100,000 rounds of ammunition at a cost of U.S. $200,000, said the former paramilitary, chief financial officer of the Centaurs until mid-2004.

One combatant said the war with Llanos made Archangel distrust everyone, even his own men. Many were killed on “suspicion” alone.

Few in this region dare speak about the months-long massacre even now. What is agreed is that for decades illegal armed groups had fought for a slice of the pie in Casanare: oil, timber, agriculture, and illicit coca crops.

Emerald trader Victor Carranza. Photo from El Espectador.

The back story

The war in Casanare began about mid-1986, when Buitrago/Llanos organized a paramilitary group, the "Buitragueños," to fight guerrillas. The group operated in Casanare, Meta, and part of the Ariari subregion, which irked Pirabán Manuel de Jesus, aka “Pirata," and Guerrero/“Cuchillo” of the Centaurs.

One villager knowledgeable of the Buitragueños expansion said that Buitrago/Llanos joined with the Ramirez and Feliciano families, both large landowners, and began setting up cocaine processing labs in Monterrey and Tauramena Aguazul. They also began murdering people by the hundreds. Local cattle ranchers, big supporters of the AUC for protecting their grazing lands, gave the paramilitaries ranches from which to mount their operations.

Besides engaging in counterinsurgency against the guerrillas, Buitrago's forces intimidated and forced entire villages to become complicit in covering up drug trafficking activities.

“They collected people in the parks, locked down students in their classes, and told people not to leave their houses because of alleged danger of subversive guerrilla activity, but the fact is they wanted people 'locked away' so they wouldn’t see the trucks loaded with paramilitaries or with chemicals to process the cocaine. It was all a big lie because the guerrilla presence wasn’t seen in Monterrey,” said a former Casanare municipal official.

The Buitragueños did not limit themselves to fabricating guerrilla threats. After 1995, they began a systematic campaign to seize land with oil fields and to evict farmers from exploration areas.

“From Monterrey to Tauramena Aguazul, they came to farms and cattle ranches. ‘Sign or die,' they said to landowners regarding deeds and titles. Threats, or worse, were also offered to girls who did not succumb to advances. They were raped or banished if they did not sleep with them,” says a person who lived in the area.

The prosecutor and judges of Villavicencio finally launched a conspiracy investigation against Buitrago/Llanos, resulting in his incarceration. He later escaped.

While Buitrago/Llanos consolidated power south and north of Casanare, the Autodefensas Campesinas del Casanare (ACC), paramilitaries aligned with Carlos Castaño, began to move into parts of Guaviare and Meta Departments.

Castaño, a founder and one-time leader of the AUC who was later killed by his own men, came to Casanare with members of the Autodefensas Campesinas de Córdoba y Urabá (ACCU) and killed over 50 people near Meta in 1997.

The slaughter was supported by the ACC. But soon a feud developed between the Martin Llanos group and the Castaño paramilitaries. This deepened with the slaughter of 11 members of a judicial commission investigating a land dispute in October, 1997. That massacre, ordered by Llanos, offended Castaño.

By this time, Castaño forces had pushed into Casanare and Arauca Departments, clashing with FARC and Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN; the National Liberation Army) guerrillas.

With Castaño’s entrance into his turf, Llanos began to feel threatened.

Departamento de Casanare, Colombia. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

The war gets crazier

Ex-fighters said Llanos began to step up extortion, killing farmers to seize land, and exerting political pressure to remain in control of Casanare.

“Llanos was going crazy. He did not allow anyone within 30 feet of him, and if he suspected someone would turn him in, they would be tortured and later assassinated. Several youths were killed and returned to their families in black plastic bags. Dozens of his men were executed like this in Puerto Lopez, on mere suspicion,” said residents who saw the corpses.

Llanos’ paranoia drove him to kill people close to him, such as Victor Feliciano Alfonso; his wife, Martha Nelly Chavez; Juan Manuel Feliciano Chavez; and four other family members in February 2000. Only Victor Francisco Feliciano was left alive; he denied any family ties to drug trafficking.

Llanos began to lose control of the northern department, especially Yopal, where the population was caught in the crossfire.

In April 2001 about 15,000 people protested the violence. Traders, farmers, civilians, and politicians shook off their fear and called for an end to warfare under banners saying, “Our silence fills the graves of the plains with Casanareños.”

However, fighting intensified until an average of 10 people per week were being killed, although police recorded that in the first quarter of 2001 there were "only" 85 murders. Police statistics differ deeply from reports of the Ombudsman, according to whom, between 1997 and the first three months of 2001, there were 31 massacres, of which 12 were in Yopal in the first months of 2001.

During April 2001, 2,404 farmers were also displaced. Still, authorities described Casanare as “a haven of peace.”

In April, 2001, Martin Llanos called forced meetings of ordinary citizens, from taxi drivers to teachers, to try to influence electoral campaigns. In one meeting, 200 teachers came to Monterey, where the paramilitary leader declared, “Those who vote for the Democratic candidates or for Horacio Serpa should assume [there will be] consequences,” said one teacher who attended the meeting, now a refugee in Villavicencio.

“He came in a small helicopter they called 'the wasp,' greeted former classmates from the Joint Normal School in Monterrey, recalled their days as students, and even became remorseful. He spoke for about 15 minutes, turned, and left,” said the teacher.

The paramilitaries' infighting in Casanare also produced divisions within the ACC's southern and northern factions, the latter commanded by Luis Eduardo Ramirez Vargas, alias "HK", killed by Bogotá police in December 2005.

The beginning of the end

Miguel Arroyave/“Archangel” shared power in the Centaurs Bloc with Carlos Castaño and his brother Vicente in early 2002. At that same time, Miguel Angel and Victor Manuel Mejia Munera shared power in the Arauca Vencedores Bloc. These groups eventually formed an alliance against Martin Llanos in Meta, Casanare, and Arauca.

Castaño’s forces did not know the terrain and at first took a beating from Llanos’ men.

Videos circulating in Monterrey, recorded by members of the ACC in the area, showed fighting between the two sides in rural areas of Mapiripan. The images revealed rotting bodies, abandoned military equipment, and machine gun crossfire between ragtag groups of terrified youths of African descent, in panicked, leaderless flight.

After these initial defeats, Castaño sent reinforcements from the Centaurs, Central Bolívar (BCB), and St. Martin Blocs, and quickly gained numerical superiority.

Llanos’ forces were reduced to 300. Castaño’s men pushed them north of Casanare.

According to some Monterrey survivors, the Colombian Air Force helped out with bombing raids. A former Centaurs commander said Miguel Arroyave had asked a senior air force officer to help stop Llanos.

Surrounded and demoralized, Llanos dug in near El Tropezón, a few miles from Puerto Lopez. There his forces took a stand until the air force bombings.

Decimated then, Llanos began "recruiting" in the capital districts of Ciudad Bolivar, Soacha, Kennedy, Bosa, and Suba, and in the Morichal district of Villavicencio. His remaining forces took 30 children by force there.

“People had to leave the sidewalks of Caribayona and El Pinal, because they tricked or forced children as young as 12 years old into their ranks,” said the mother of one of those children, who later rescued him from the mountains and fled to another city.

A fourteen-year-old member of the AUC in Medellín.Photo © 2002 Marcelo Salinas / Human Rights Watch.

The horror of teenagers inside the ACC

“Those caught crying were killed in front of others. And if someone fell asleep on watch, a worse fate fell upon them,” said the family of another minor arrested in a military action and sent to a reform institution.

Skirmishes between the competing paramilitaries lasted until early 2004. One battle in February that year lasted for five days at Caribayona, near Villanueva. In that confrontation, more than 140 paramilitaries from both sides were killed, and about 20 farmer-soldiers were killed near Villanueva during Archangel’s eventual retreat.

“In the combat zone, superiors asked their troops, some of them children, if they were tired. If they responded affirmatively, they were shot. So were the wounded that arrived in Puerto Lopez and Monterrey. They asked the nurses which paramilitaries had serious wounds. They were rounded up in a single place and then a fighter would toss in a grenade, or they were simply shot,” eyewitnesses testified.

Fighting continued between Villanueva, Monterrey, and Tauramena.

“Finally, Castaño's men overtook the fighters loyal to Llanos, whom many said had made a pact with the devil. Prisoners were shoved into a corral, given only one meal a day, and every week one was beheaded. There were guys who painted their nails black and lined up to drink the blood of the victims,” said another woman whose daughter lived for a time with one of Llanos’ men.

In July 2004, the Colombian army secured El Tropezón and captured ACC fighters on the outskirts of Monterrey. The crows were fattened on those who fell in this battle.

In a single day in Puerto Lopez, 30 child soldiers died, and in Tauramena 20 others were killed near La Candelaria. Their bodies, pulled by tractors, were cast into the river Metada with their stomachs cut open so they would sink.

Fighting led to displacement of civilians in Las Delicias, El Yari, El Retorno, El Tranquero, and everywhere the forces of Llanos and Castaño met. About 30,000 people were forced to leave La Tronca de la Selva. Many protested because the Army did nothing to stop the violence.

When the end was near, Martin Llanos fled with a guard of 10 men and 70 children from Bogotá, Villavicencio, and around the region. The children were used as human shields to cover the paramilitary leader’s flight.

Days later, on September 26, the Colombian government said in a statement that 79 men of the ACC had been killed. Many fighters surrendered and others were captured, but Llanos, wounded, fled to Ecuador. He then moved on to Brazil, and later to the border between Colombia and Venezuela, from where he still sends threats and warnings of revenge to enemies in Monterrey.

Although hundreds of paramilitary units of the Casanare Centaurs demobilized, they have been replaced by resurgent groups and remnants of the Urabeños, Carlos Castaño’s original bloc that only pretended to demobilize. They now operate side by side, still protecting the cocaine trade, old wars forgotten…but not old war stories.

Don Mario is cleansed

Don Mario, who was paymaster of the Centaur Bloc and “inherited” the leadership when Castaño was murdered, checked his Rolex. He'd had enough storytelling for the day.

Despite his participation in the Casanare wars and the murder of 9,000 Colombians there and elsewhere, he has finished telling all of his stories, paid a paltry sum in restitution, and will now go free.

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Mexico : Fear of 'Narco Guerrilla' Haunts Officials

Cieneguillas state prison in Zacatecas, Mexico, where armed commandos freed more than 50 inmates in a raid May 16, 2009. Photo by Oscar Baez / AP / Huffington Post.
Phantom of Mexican narco guerrilla
Haunts U.S. security chiefs

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / April 1, 2010

MEXICO CITY -- Last May, in a meticulously planned raid reminiscent of classic guerrilla jail breakouts that are legend in Latin America, a commando of 20 heavily armed fighters freed 53 comrades from a prison in the northern state of Zacatecas. Were the perpetrators in fact guerrilleros from some as-yet unknown revolutionary foco or narcos emulating a guerrilla-style jailbreak intent on freeing their own?

Recent assassination attempts against high-ranking state officials -- Sinaloa's Secretary of Tourism (successful), Coahuila's Attorney General (the restaurant at which he was dining with a Texas mayor was sprayed with automatic weapon fire), and a Baja California finance undersecretary (hung by the neck from a Tijuana freeway overpass) -- suggest revolutionary retribution in a year that marks the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution in which jitters of new uprisings are legion -- January 1st was welcomed in with anarchist bombs, sabotage, and "expropriations" in Mexico City and Tijuana on the northern border.

Although the incidents cited suggest revolutionary subversion, they were all the handiwork of Mexico's five narco cartels locked in an intractable war with both President Felipe Calderon's military and federal police -- and reportedly hundreds of U.S. drug warriors -- that has now taken more than 19,000 lives since December 2006.

The jail breakout in Zacatecas and the Sinaloa and Coahuila shootings are attributed to the syndicates headed by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, his former associates in the Beltran Leyva gang, and the notorious Zeta cartel.

The hanging of Baja California state finance official Rogelio Sanchez Jimenez was charged to a blood-drenched capo Teodoro Garcia Simentel aka "El Teo" or "Three Letters" who is deemed responsible for hundreds of hangings, beheadings, and excessively violent homicides -- an associate, Santiago Meza ("El Pozalero") has reportedly confessed to dissolving 300 victims in vats of acid -- most allies of the fading Arellano Felix clan with whom El Teo is contesting Tijuana.

Simentel was captured this past January 14 in an upscale residential neighborhood of La Paz in adjouning Baja California Sur state, the second top-rung narco purportedly taken down by Mexican authorities in a month. The bust earned bouquets of kudos from Washington, which is financing Calderon's drug war under the $3,000,000,000 Merida Initiative.

The U.S, role in the capture of El Teo and Arturo Beltran Leyva, "the Boss of Bosses" who was gunned down by Mexican marines December 16, appears to have been purposefully downplayed. According to an unidentified member of Calderon's Security Cabinet as reported by Gustavo Castillo, a La Jornada correspondent with exceptional sources, Simentel was located by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a first indication that ICE is now being deployed in Mexico's drug war.

The Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI are also thought to have armed agents on the ground here under provisions of the Merida Initiative and the North American Security and Prosperity Agreement.

The Calderon government vehemently denies that participation of U.S. agents led to the capture of El Teo or Beltran Leyva although it acknowledges enhanced cooperation between the two nations' drug fighters. The suggestion that Washington has assets on the ground here is not acceptable to many Mexicans whose country has been repeatedly invaded and even annexed by U.S. troops, and is regarded as a violation of national sovereignty.

The number of U.S. security agents working in Mexico is closely held but observers of Washington's presence here such as specialist Jorge Camil affirm that it has been rising dramatically since the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and Washington and now totals in the hundreds. The DEA and the FBI now have offices in provincial capitals such as Tuxtla Gutierrez Chiapas, close to the Guatemalan border and multiple smuggling routes.

Mexico is not only in the crosshairs of the U.S. security apparatus because of the flourishing drug trade -- the infiltration of terrorists across the porous border also excites attention although all reported incidents to date have proven to be false alarms.

Of increasing interest to Washington is the possible alliance of narco gangs with Mexico's fledgling guerrilla cells, an interpolation of the Colombian model.

The concept of narco-guerrilla coalescence was first proffered in the mid-1980s soon after Ronald Reagan officially proclaimed the War on Drugs. Then-veep George H.W. Bush, a Navy man, was placed in charge of overseeing interdiction efforts in the Caribbean to stop the Colombian cocaine flow into the southern United States.

Under Bush's watch, intelligence reports placed the onus on the Marxist-Leninist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the Army of National Liberation (ELN), and M-19, a left nationalist movement later decimated by the Colombian army, for extending protection to such world-class kingpins as Pablo Escobar.

The truth was, however, more diffuse: paramilitary units such as the United Auto-Defenders of Colombia (AUC) armed by right-wing rural "terratenientes" (rich land owners) and the Colombian military were the big players in the so-called "narco-guerrilla" although several FARC fronts openly provided protection to the druglords.

The narco-guerrilla thesis eventually became the underlying reason d'etre for Plan Colombia in which the twin wars on drugs and terrorism were married. Since the late 1990s, Washington has pumped billions into Colombia to sustain this counter-insurgency strategy. The Merida Initiative, signed in that Yucatan city by George Bush and Felipe Calderon in 2007, is often referred to as Plan Mexico. As recipients of billion dollar boodles in U.S. drug war largesse, Colombia's Alvaro Uribe and Mexico's Calderon are Washington's most significant allies on a continent where the left has taken power in a majority of countries.

Today, despite a decade of Plan Colombia, Colombian cocaine production has held steady and the FARC ranks as Latin America's most powerful narco-guerrilla. Although Mexico has no known counterpart, FARC activities here are closely monitored. FARC offices were shuttered during the presidency of Vicente Fox (2000-2006) -- the FARC and Colombian president Andres Pastrana entabled negotiations in Mexico City in the 1990s.

A Colombian-born National University graduate student was deported to Bogotá last year on terrorism charges for sympathizing with the FARC and Uribe has issued extradition warrants for a Mexican student who survived the bombing of the Ecuadorian jungle camp of FARC leader Raul Reyes (not his real name) in 2008.

One connection: FARC operators are said to consort with the Valle del Norte Cartel, the main Colombian supplier for El Chapo's Sinaloa Cartel. A purported 2007 jungle tete a tete between Reyes, and an unidentified cartel representative suggested the possibility that the Sinaloa boys would buy cocaine directly from the Colombian rebels rather than deal with a series of middlemen suppliers.

The Zapatistas have waged a crusade against drugs in their autonomous communities in southeastern Chiapas. Photo from latinamericanstudies.org.
Mexico's armed leftists take pain to steer clear of association with drug gangs. Military intelligence first identified the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) as drug and gunrunners on the Guatemalan border, an estimate said to have been backed up by CIA satellite overflights. The Zapatistas have dodged the stigma by waging a vigilant crusade against drugs in their autonomous communities in southeastern Chiapas. Cultivation of marijuana by militants is severely punished by banishment from the EZLN. Nonetheless, the Mexican Army has repeatedly stormed into Zapatista villages on the pretext of marijuana patch sightings.

Mexico's homegrown guerrilla bands have their roots in the north of the country where this distant neighbor nation's 1910-1919 revolution first germinated -- revolutionary martyrs Francisco Madero, Pancho Villa, Venustiano Carranza, and Alvaro Obregon were all northerners who marched their armies south to seize power.

In 1965, Arturo Gamiz, a disaffected rural schoolteacher, and 12 rebels laid siege to army barracks in Ciudad Madero, Chihuahua -- all were killed in the assault. Six years later, the September 23rd Communist League based in the northern industrial city of Monterrey took its name from the date of the assault -- 15 armed groups of which the September 23rd league was the most prominent operated throughout Mexico in the 1970s. The Forces of National Liberation (FLN), also based in Monterrey, gave birth to the EZLN in Chiapas. A sister guerrilla, the Villista Army of National Liberation in Chihuahua was never consolidated.

Conditions in the north of Mexico where both the narco cartels and the military concentrate their forces are propitious for a resurgence of guerrilla activity. Unemployment in the region, driven by the decline of the maquiladora industry (many assembly plants have moved to China), is at a 15-year high. The rural economy has been eclipsed by neo-liberal adventures such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the deepening recession, the worst in 80 years, is forcing campesinos to abandon their land. A hundred years ago in this vast, mineral-rich region of deserts and scarred mountains, landless peasants and displaced farmers formed the nucleus of Pancho Villa's revolutionary army.

In 2010, many survive the economic crisis by turning to drug cropping -- a half million Mexicans are said to earn their living in the drug economy. One indication of increasingly close ties between militant farmers and the drug cartels was the slaying of Margarito Montes Parra, longtime leader of the leftist UGOCEP (General Popular Union of Workers and Farmers) who was ambushed by cartel gunmen in Ciudad Obregon last fall.

Widespread human rights abuses by federal troops who combat the narcos along the northern border has provoked a wave of anti-army, anti-government anger in many northern states and conditions for a Gamiz-like assault on military installations cannot be discounted should drug gangs and armed radicals find common cause.

For prospective guerrilla formations, alliance with narcos has its perks: weapons and money. Both the narcos and the radicals are interested in subverting the state although their motives may be distinct. For anti-imperialist revolutionaries, poisoning the Yanquis with drugs is a weapon of class war. But negatives abound: everything the cartels touch is corrupted by profit-driven mercantile greed that is at odds with revolutionary ideals -- although there are always those who will argue that the end justifies the means.

For Homeland Security and Washington's security apparatus, the nightmare prospect of a coalition of narcos and guerilleros cruising the border is reason enough to sustain agents on the ground south of the border whether or not Mexican authorities are prepared to admit their presence.

Indeed, this January, Obama's Justice Department announced the merger of its International Terrorism and Narcotics investigation units to prepare for just such an eventuality. The vision of Mexico as a potentially failed narco-state advanced by the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a 2008 evaluation is a five-star national security issue for Washington and the option of a U.S. preventative invasion is always on the table.

[John Ross continues to slog across Obama's America now in the second month of his monster book tour. Ross and El Monstruo -- Dread and Redemption in Mexico City will visit St. Louis April 4-7, and Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi on April 9 for a symposium on Mexico City. He will tour Baltimore, Washington, New York, and Boston April 19 through May 1. For details write johnross@igc.org.]

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Colombia : Uribe's Murderous Secret Police

Top: Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS) headquarters in Colombia. Photo from El Tiempo. Below, forces of the paramilitary Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) on patrol. Photo from latinamericanstudies.org.
Colombia's DAS:
Vicious security octopus acts with impunity

By Marion Delgado / The Rag Blog / February 2, 2010

CARTAGENA DE INDIES, Colombia -- If you’ve ever traveled to Colombia, then you’ve met the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS), the government’s Administrative Department for Security. When you get off the plane, DAS employees stamp your passport and, perhaps, ask why you’re visiting.

The DAS does much more than stamp passports, though. It is a powerful agency, a sort of “secret police” institution founded in 1960. Its mandate covers intelligence and counter-intelligence, domestic and international. It is also a law enforcement body whose agents have judicial police powers: they investigate crimes and can arrest and interrogate people. The DAS also provides bodyguards and security services for high government officials and others at risk.

To someone familiar with the U.S. government, the DAS is a strange beast. It combines aspects of the FBI, the CIA, and ICE. It isn't part of any cabinet ministry like Defense or Interior; it is part of the Colombian President’s office.

If you think this arrangement seems like a recipe for disaster, you’re right.

Disaster has struck with a vengeance during President Álvaro Uribe’s administration. According to recent reports in Colombia’s media and testimony from former officials, the DAS was essentially at the service of right-wing paramilitaries and major narcotraffickers between 2002 and 2005. It drew up hit lists of union members and leftists, and plotted to destabilize neighboring Venezuela.

Before DAS

The government of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953-1957) replaced the existing security police by creating the Servicio de Inteligencia Colombiano (SIC) in 1953, which was answerable to the President’s office and used methods like those of the FBI in the U.S. The SIC worked in close coordination with the state Office of Information and Propaganda in activities such as the monitoring of the press. SIC was advised in this effort by Karl von Merk, a former secretary to Nazi Germany’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, according to a report by journalist Alberto Donadío.

SIC's focus was on hunting down communists and dissidents. A military commander in the western province of Valle del Cauca has said SIC agents also operated in complicity with "los paracos" there – paramilitary squads hired by Colombia's conservative elites.

At a Feb. 5, 1957, bullfight, when Rojas Piniella’s daughter, Maria Eugenia's, was booed upon her arrival, numerous SIC agents among the crowd beat the vocal spectators mercilessly. According to U.S. Embassy reports, 20 people were killed.

What does the DAS do?

The DAS, created by decree in 1960 by then-President Alberto Lleras Camargo, who came from the Liberal Party, but who, like most liberals was a closet fascist, continued the SIC’s work, under the shelter of the then-existing "State of Siege" and the security statute (the latter adopted in late 1982), instruments that almost became a permanent part of the legal system after a new 1991 constitution was adopted. However, under this constitution, the State of Siege laws were abandoned. It does include a "catch-22" section covering whatever the agency wants to do, essentially: "Raison de Estado," or "reasons of State."

According to a later draft law on the state of emergency, searches and wiretapping could be carried out without a legal warrant. While this law would have applied to the “justice” apparatus, it was not passed; however DAS can and did wiretap, as it is independent of normal justice channels.

Today, the DAS' roles include domestic intelligence gathering, passport and immigration control, security services for threatened individuals, and acting as Colombia’s main interface with Interpol. The DAS has been a key partner for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Uribe’s DAS

Álvaro Uribe’s first DAS Director (2002-2005) was Jorge Noguera, who directed Uribe’s 2002 campaign in the state of Magdalena. In early 2006, Noguera was revealed to have collaborated closely with some of Colombia’s most notorious narcotraffickers and right-wing paramilitaries. He allegedly facilitated drug shipments and gave the paracos lists of human rights defenders and labor leaders to assassinate.

In late 2008, the DAS was found to have ordered illegal surveillance of opposition Senator Gustavo Petro, a revelation that forced the resignation of then-DAS Director Maria de Pilar Hurtado. (Four appointees and one interim director have led the DAS during Uribe’s seven-plus years in office.)

Spying on human rights defenders

International human rights workers were targeted by DAS as well as politicians. E-mails from Human Rights Watch ended up in DAS files, and the G-3 recommended carrying out “offensive intelligence” against the organization’s Americas director, José Miguel Vivanco. The OAS Inter-American Human Rights Commission protested when it was revealed that the DAS had spied on a June, 2005, visit of UN Special Rapporteur for Women’s Rights Susana Villarán.

Forces of the paramilitary AUC check citizens' identification at roadblock. Photo from latinamericanstudies.org.

Links with paramilitaries

According to Rafael Garcia, the agency’s former chief of information systems who has made a series of explosive allegations, “Jorge Noguera conspired against the governments of neighboring countries, did away with leftist leaders, participated in narcotrafficking operations, maintained relations with paramilitary groups," etc. etc.

Garcia contends that Noguera maintained a close relationship with Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, “Jorge 40,” the leader of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC; United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia) paramilitaries’ powerful Northern Bloc, who controlled (and probably still control), much narcotics transshipment from the eastern half of Colombia’s Caribbean coast along with Hernán Giraldo’s Tayrona Resistance Front. Garcia says that Noguera met several times with “Jorge 40” to talk about local politics, including candidates in the 2003 municipal and gubernatorial elections. “On various occasions Jorge Noguera told me that 'Jorge 40' was very grateful for the collaboration that he had offered him,” said Garcia

In an interview with Semana, a Colombian news magazine, José Miguel Narvaez, who as sub-director was Noguera’s second-in-command at the DAS, said he told Colombian government investigators that Noguera’s relationships with paramilitaries went beyond “Jorge 40." Other paracos who got help from the DAS included Luis Eduardo Cifuentes (“El Aguila”), AUC's chief in Cundinamarca (the department around Bogotá); Carlos Mario Jimenez (“Macaco”) of the powerful Central Bolivar Bloc; and Miguel Arroyave, who headed the Centauros Bloc in Bogotá and in the southern llanos (the savannahs of Meta, Casanare, Guaviare and Vichada provinces) until his own men killed him in September, 2004. Narvaez said that Enrique Ariza, whom Noguera recruited to be the DAS chief of intelligence, ran a telephone wiretapping operation at the request of “Macaco."

Semana reported that DAS agents protected “Salomón," the right-hand man for a Cundinamarca paramilitary leader known as “El Pájar," whenever “Salomón” visited Bogotá. Also, in both April and June 2004, senior DAS officials foiled operations against “El Aguila," tipping him off that police and DEA agents knew his whereabouts and planned to capture him.

Another witness, a 15-year DAS veteran named Enrique Benitez, says he saw Noguera call off a secret operation to capture Hernán Giraldo. Shortly afterward, the DAS agent who'd developed the operation was transferred to a post in far-off Arauca department.

Garcia said that some DAS contractors had to pay 10% kickbacks to DAS officials, who passed most of the money on to the paramilitaries. Garcia told Semana, “Once Noguera told me that he had to do a favor for the paramilitaries of the llanos,” meaning Arroyave’s Centauros.

Responding to reports of an unnamed DAS agent who complained to Narvaez, along with fired agent Carlos Moreno, that DAS intelligence chief Ariza “stole some intelligence documents on Miguel Arroyave” and erased the information they contained, Garcia said, “I know that Jimmy Nassar, who ended up being Noguera’s advisor, offered this service. I’ve known people from the Centauros Bloc, to whom Nassar offered to erase their files in the system. He charged between 5 million and 10 million pesos (2,250 to 4,500 USD).”

Moreno has alleged that the DAS performed a similar file-disappearance service for Arroyave’s principal rival in the llanos region, Hector Buitrago, alias "Martin Llanos," in exchange for more millions of pesos.

Cambio, another Colombian magazine, reports that the DAS even gave "Jorge 40" an armored SUV intended for President Uribe’s exclusive use:

On November 17, 2004, the DAS sub-director at the time, José Miguel Narváez, called the DAS section chiefs in Atlántico and Cesar and told them that, by Noguera’s instructions, they were to place at the disposal of Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, 'Jorge 40', in Santa Fe de Ralito – where the AUC commanders were concentrated – an armored SUV for his personal protection... Days later, the paramilitary chief was using a red Toyota Prado, license plate QGC 851, with armor and a special chip to allow it to pass through security forces’ roadblocks. The incredible part of this story is that the vehicle had been acquired by the Atlántico governor’s office and given to the DAS for the exclusive use of President Álvaro Uribe when he visits the Atlantic coast. Informed about the matter, the government ordered a search for the vehicle, which was found in Valledupar with 'Jorge 40' at the wheel.”

Helping “Don Diego” and other narcos

Diego Montoya ("Don Diego"), the most powerful leader of Colombia’s most powerful drug cartel, the Norte del Valle organization, is on the FBI’s 10 most-wanted fugitives’ list alongside Osama bin Laden. That, says Garcia, didn’t stop the DAS from helping Montoya avoid capture. "Giancarlo [Auqué, who served as DAS intelligence director before Ariza] and Jorge Noguera passed secret information to... Montoya and the idea was not just to help him avoid capture, but to let him know that an informant in his own organization was revealing his location."

There is more. According to Semana, "Carlos Robayo, alias 'Guacamayo', was for years the right hand of the Norte de Valle boss. Two years ago, Semana witnessed 'Guacamayo' calling one of his contacts in the DAS and asking him to remove [from DAS archives] arrest orders, background information, photographs and fingerprint data for a dozen people. He also demanded that these materials be brought to [him]. Less than two hours after [the] call, a DAS detective arrived with the package."

The DAS also appears to have helped Montoya's archrival in the Norte del Valle cartel, Wilber Varela, alias "Jabón." Carlos Moreno said he was once sent to the attorney general’s office (Fiscalía) to steal files about a case tying unnamed individuals to Varela.

Drug boss Diego Montoya (Don Diego) is arrested in 2007. Photo from Telegraph, U.K.

Uribe’s 2002 campaign:
Narco funds, voter fraud, and paramilitary ties

Garcia also alleges that Noguera helped to facilitate narcotraffickers’ contributions to Uribe’s 2002 presidential campaign, mentioning lesser-known figures like Néstor Ramón Caro, a Casanare-based narcotrafficker whose extradition to the U.S. was sought in 2001; Raúl Montoya, from Magdalena department; and Ramón Crespo of Barranquilla.

In the run-up to the 2002 presidential election, García says, the Uribe campaign did “things that were more serious than what happened in the Samper campaign” [in 1994, when winning candidate Ernesto Samper allegedly took contributions from the Cali drug cartel].

Before Uribe named him to the DAS directorship, Noguera managed the Uribe campaign in the Caribbean coast department of Magdalena. This province was (and probably still is) under the heavy influence of two paramilitaries, the Northern Bloc and the Tayrona Resistance Front. The paramilitaries’ influence on politics is visible there: in 2003, their mayoral candidates ran unopposed in 14 of Magdalena’s 30 municipalities.

According to Garcia, Noguera and Juan Carlos Vives (now Uribe’s "drug czar") campaigned in Magdalena municipalities where it was impossible to do so without paramilitary permission, and were in contact with "Jorge 40."

But García’s charges go further.

An electoral fraud was organized [for the March 2002 legislative elections] to carry to the Congress the candidates preferred by the AUC’s Northern Bloc. I named three senators [and] three candidates for the House of Representatives from Magdalena, two Senate candidates from Cesar and two for the House, two House candidates from La Guajira, and a Senate candidate from Bolívar.

In Cesar, Magdalena, La Guajira and Bolívar states, Garcia said that Noguera used illegally obtained electoral-census data to ensure that, in several districts, those who did not show up at the polls still “voted” for the paramilitaries’ candidates. The same fraud was repeated two months later, said García, to benefit Uribe. Indeed, while Uribe’s challenger, Horacio Serpa, did rather well in northern Colombia thanks to the strength of Liberal Party machinery, Uribe won overwhelmingly in the districts where García alleges fraud occurred.

García also contends that in 2002, Presidential candidate Uribe actually met with José Gelves, another leader of the Tayrona Resistance Front. Gelves, an AUC member since 2000, told Semana that he did indeed meet with Uribe, and actively campaigned for him.

In 2003, García says, Noguera met with "Jorge 40" to discuss the October gubernatorial election in Magdalena.

Jorge Noguera went to see 'Jorge 40' and asked him to support his friend José Fernández de Castro, but 'Jorge 40' said no, because they were supporting Trino Luna [who ran and won unopposed]. Everyone had to vote for him. Jorge [Noguera] went to the meeting with 'Jorge 40' one Saturday, accompanied by retired General Rito Alejo.

Gen. Rito Alejo de Río is widely seen as a paramilitary supporter. He commanded the Colombian Army’s 17th Brigade in the northwestern region of Urabá while paramilitaries carried out near-daily peasant massacres without Army intervention, and Uribe was governor of Antioquia department, incorporating much of Urabá. Alejo was recently defeated in his bid for a seat in Colombia’s Senate.

Ordering assassinations of unionists and activists

One of García’s most frightening claims is that the DAS drew up a list of union leaders, leftist activists, and academics and passed it along to the Northern Bloc. According to Semana, several of those listed have been killed, most have received death threats, and others have been detained by the authorities.

“The detectives who told me about it showed me part of the list,” García says. “I wrote down some of the names. It drew my attention because it included Zullty Cotina, who had already been killed, and that of [Barranquilla professor] Alfredo Correa de Andreis, who was murdered after I saw the list.”

García offers new information about what happened to Professor Correa, whom the DAS arrested in 2004 on charges of "rebellion." Held in prison for months, and then released for lack of evidence, he was murdered weeks later. Though the DAS arrested Correa in Barranquilla, in Atlántico department, García says that the unit that carried out the arrest was from neighboring Bolívar department, whose section chief at the time, Rómulo Betancourt, is now under investigation for links to paramilitaries.

García says he in fact witnessed Noguera, when hiring Betancourt for the Bolívar post, actually asking “Jorge 40” for permission to do so.

When Semana asked whether assassinations of those on the DAS list were carried out by the DAS or paramilitaries, García responded, “They were carried out by self-defense groups [paramilitaries]. But they told me that the killing of [Correa] had been carried out by people from the DAS. I also told the prosecutor that I had heard mention of a Cartagena union organizer who was killed while holding his child’s hand.”

Three unions with members on the DAS list that have been hit particularly hard are the Association of Health and Social Security Workers (ANTHOC) and two agricultural workers’ unions, Sintragrícola and Fensuagro. Since 2001, two ANTHOC leaders have been killed and 40 have received death threats.

The union’s vice-president, Gilberto Martínez, says he began receiving threats in 2001, intensifying in 2003. He told Semana, “Since that moment we have denounced, in many places, the conspiracy between the DAS and the paramilitaries in Atlántico to follow, threaten and murder members of our union. These denunciations have not prospered in the justice system, but now Mr. García has ratified them.”

A hit on Chávez?

Though he offers few details, citing security concerns for himself, García also told Colombia’s press that “there existed a destabilization plan against the Venezuelan government, and there are many Colombian government people involved.”

García contends that Noguera and others were drawing up plans to kill high officials in the Venezuelan government, including leftist President Hugo Chávez. His allegations recall the 2004 arrest of 114 Colombian men at a compound near Caracas, a combination of young campesinos from Norte de Santander department and paramilitaries from AUC's Northern Bloc. At the time, Chávez described the Colombians’ presence as part of a plot to kill him.

Six months later, Venezuela was shaken by the assassination of prosecutor Danilo Anderson, the first such attack the country had seen in over 30 years. In November 2009 a Colombian man identifying himself as a demobilized paramilitary member who'd served the DAS as an intelligence source told Venezuelan authorities that Noguera had advance knowledge of a plan to kill high-ranking Venezuelan officials like Anderson and President Chávez. García’s testimony lends credibility to this story. Venezuelan authorities also claim that “Jorge 40” paid a visit to Maracaibo, Ven., to meet with anti-Chávez figures.

Former DAS director Jorge Noguera. Photo from Cambio.

Murdering informants

According to Cambio, in his recorded statement Moreno talked about extrajudicial executions of DAS informants “who were no longer useful or who posed a danger because they knew too much.”

The magazine discusses the case of Fernando Pisciotti, mayor of El Banco in Magdalena department. In October 2003 Noguera and Juan Carlos Vives (at the time a vice-minister of interior, now head of the national drug enforcement directorate or DNE) visited Pisciotti’s town. The mayor complained that paramilitaries were pressuring local officials for their candidate to run unopposed in the upcoming mayoral elections, that they had plans to do the same in the congressional elections, and that he and other locals feared for their safety.

Noguera and Vives told Pisciotti to meet them at the DAS headquarters in Bogotá on November 15, and to bring a written report of his accusations. When the mayor reported to Noguera’s office, the DAS director was unable to meet with him. On December 9, Pisciotti was kidnapped. His body was found hours later, shot in the head. Cambio reports, “Based on the case file, Julio César Pisciotti, a lawyer and the victim’s brother, said that before killing him, the murderers tied his feet together with his shoelaces, beat him, and read to him excerpts from the document that he gave to the DAS.”

Though Noguera remains under investigation, he faces no formal charges to date. In fact, President Uribe did him the great honor of naming him Colombia’s Consul in Milan, Italy, in February 2009, where he remains today.

Where is President Uribe on all this nastiness?

Miami’s El Nuevo Herald reported that Uribe was already well-informed about problems in the DAS back in January 2004 when Enrique Benítez, then-head of the DAS bodyguard division, gave evidence of corruption in a major agency arms buy supposedly destined for those assigned to protect union members. Not only did Benítez’s whistle-blowing fail to get the case properly investigated, Noguera demoted him and transferred him to the distant, poor, conflictive department of Chocó near the Panama border.

Benítez met to discuss his situation with José Roberto Arango, at the time an advisor to Uribe. Benítez says Arango told him, “President Uribe is already aware of all the corruption in the DAS, but I don’t understand why he doesn’t want to get this (expletive) [an apparent reference to Noguera] out of the director’s position.”

These continuing, unrelenting episodes cannot any longer be blamed on a few functionaries with axes to grind, or a few “bad apples." There are abundant signs of a criminal takeover of Colombia’s most important intelligence agency.

The ongoing accusations have worsened an atmosphere already charged with suspicions and fears about Colombia's demobilization and negotiation process with the paramilitaries. Some of the government’s critics are already speaking of the formation of a “Mafioso” state.

'G-3': the secret police’s secret police

In 2003, then-DAS Director Noguera created the “Special Strategic Intelligence Group” (G-3), which appeared nowhere in the agency’s organization charts. The G-3, whose very existence the DAS denied until March 2009 was created to carry out sensitive intelligence operations including, according to one document from agency headquarters: “Surveillance of organizations and people with tendencies to oppose government policy in order to restrict or neutralize their actions.”

The G-3 was abolished when Noguera left in November 2005. However, many of its functions passed to another DAS unit, the “National and International Observation Group” (GONI). The G-3’s original coordinator, Jaime Fernando Ovalle, remained in the DAS until November 2008, when he was fired for his role in the illegal surveillance of Senator Petro. The GONI was dissolved in March 2009. [Coincidentally or not, in the U.S. Army, "G-3" designates Operations and Training at the Brigade level.]

Colombian president Alvaro Uribe. Photo from Vivirlatino.

Spying on judges

The G-3 appeared to focus principally on non-governmental activists. The GONI’s targets, however, included Supreme Court magistrates who have been investigating dozens of President Uribe’s political allies’ alleged ties to murderous paramilitaries.

In May 2009 investigators found recordings revealing that all the candidates opposing Uribe’s 2006 re-election bid were wiretapped. Colombia’s daily El Espectador published a list of 36 prominent politicians, nearly all from the opposition, and six noted journalists who were under surveillance at the time.

One DAS detective said he was assigned to monitor people like ex-presidents Ernesto Samper and Andrés Pastrana. This included wiretapping and wearing disguises to meetings and events, as well as following their children, wives, advisors, and assistants.

Semana columnist Daniel Coronell noted a series of “inexplicable coincidences” in which DAS agents searched the agency’s restricted database for information about former president César Gaviria, an Uribe critic. Days later, on April 27, 2006, Gaviria's sister was murdered.
Revelations of new spying

In its August 30, 2009, issue, Semana reported that, in the wake of the DAS surveillance revelations,

Things not only have not changed, but they have even gotten worse. The wiretaps and surveillance of [Supreme] Court members, journalists, politicians and some lawyers continue. And if that weren’t enough, they have extended to some presidential candidates [Colombia has elections in 2010] and, recently, to members of Congress.

"Some of the [wiretapping] equipment being used was hidden from the Attorney-General [Fiscalía] and Inspector-General [Procuraduría] during the... investigation,” an anonymous DAS source involved in the operation told Semana. "Two weeks ago, some of the equipment was returned to Bogotá to monitor members of Congress, based on the referendum voting." The "referendum," a bill passed by Colombia’s Congress in September, will schedule a plebiscite on changing the country’s constitution to allow Uribe to run for an unprecedented third straight term.

The U.S. response

Among the new wiretap recordings are more of Judge Iván Velásquez, the Supreme Court’s chief “paraco-politics” investigator. One is of a mid-2009 phone conversation between Velásquez and James Faulkner, a Justice Department official at the U.S. embassy. “It worries me to hear the voice of my judicial attaché in a wiretapped call,” U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield told reporters.

It should come as no surprise that the voices of U.S. Embassy personal are heard on the DAS wiretaps. It is the Embassy, and Brownfield, along with other U.S. agencies and departments, that provided the equipment to tap the phones and read the e-mails in the first place, paid for, of course, with your U.S. taxpayer dollars.

In February 2009 Brownfield recognized this fact, but said that the U.S. aid to an agency embroiled in a scandal over illegal spying was given solely in order to "resist, combat and eventually defeat drug trafficking, international crime, and terrorism."

Ahhh yes, “the drug war,” the ever present excuse for criminal activity, both at home and abroad. Never mind that the equipment was used to, among other crimes, promote and facilitate the flow of drugs to the U.S.

The response from Washington…

Barack sez:

“[W]e obviously think that... steps... have already been made on issues like extrajudicial killings and illegal surveillance that it is important that Colombia pursue a path of rule of law and transparency, and I know that that is something that President Uribe is committed to doing.” – President Barack Obama, June 29, 2009, hosting President Uribe at the White House.

Hillary sez:

“Allegations of illegal domestic wiretapping and surveillance by Colombia’s Department of Administrative Security (DAS) are troubling and unacceptable. The importance that the Prosecutor General’s Office has placed on prosecuting these crimes is a positive step for Colombia, but media and NGO reports allege that illegal activity continues, so it is even more vital that the Colombian government take steps to ensure that this is not the case... [A] rigorous, thorough and independent investigation [is] in order to determine the extent of these abuses and to hold all perpetrators accountable.” – September, 2009 State Department press release announcing that Colombia, in the department’s view, meets human rights conditions in U.S. foreign aid law.

Stop it; I’m laughing my culo off here!

However, Congress sez:

The U.S. Congress has now voted to stop subsidizing DAS, removing its funding from the U.S. Consolidated Appropriations Act (USCAA 2010) for 2010 passed earlier this year. The Colombian government recently decided to disband the agency, after it was found to have illegally wiretapped the Chief of the National Police, the Minister of Defense, as well as former Presidents, Supreme Court judges, prominent journalists, union leaders and human rights advocates.

Activities of the scandal-prone agency had not, until now, affected U.S.-Colombian relations, nor had they dampened U.S.-Colombian intelligence cooperation. But, in a surprising development, the USCAA 2010 bars DAS from receiving U.S. funds for law enforcement training and anti-narcotics trafficking operations. The Act explicitly connects the suspension of aid with "reports that the DAS has repeatedly engaged in phone tapping, e-mail interception, and other illegal activities against law-abiding citizens, including collusion with illegal armed groups."

It is worth noting that the suspension applies to DAS’ possible successor organizations.

This from a government that is itself engaged in warrantless phone taps of thousands; you might notice they didn’t mention the Colombian murders and disappearances. Well, one thing at a time, it seems...

Postscript:
Prosecutor investigates DAS Agency officials in La Guajira

Less than a month ago a new chapter surfaced in the DAS story.

A few days before Christmas, Colombian President Álvaro Uribe learned from intelligence reports that the Director of the Public Prosecutions branch in La Guajira, Lozano Claudia Doria, and others, were paid for returning seized drug shipments to a cocaine trafficking network.

Attorney General Guillermo Mendoza has opened an internal investigation because information came to his office months ago that senior prosecution officials in La Guajira and two DAS detectives in the region had participated in the return of a shipment of cocaine for which they received 800 million pesos ($400,000 USD) from traffickers. Mendoza has assigned a procurator from the Superior Court of Bogotá to investigate the allegations.

The case hinges largely on a witness identified as "Mary," who has been for several years an informer, described as "reliable." In statements to the court, he said he had learned that DAS officials were paid for the return of two shipments: one of cocaine and another of marijuana.

"Mary" was moved to Bogotá and into a witness protection program, but before the move, on November 21, after giving his first public comments about the corruption network operated by the DAS and attorneys, he was attacked at his home in Riohacha.

According to "Mary"’s account, in November 2008 DAS investigators Germain William Velasco and Jose Galindo returned a shipment of 500 kilos of cocaine that had been confiscated by authorities near Maicao, and received 850 million pesos in the deal.

He claimed that both Galindo and Velasco began to buy expensive cars and properties in other cities, and live like kings, and that Velasco had confided that the operation had been the brainchild of senior prosecution officials, who had also received money, including the branch director, Lozano Doria.

The witness' statements were corroborated by a former prosecutor, former judge, and a senior member of the Army, who assured officials that, in effect, the return of the drug shipment occurred, and that prosecutors would also have been involved. "You cannot imagine the degree of corruption of these prosecutors," said one witness.

EXCHANGE Magazine contacted the director of DAS, Felipe Munoz, for the agency's side of the story Munoz said there was an internal investigation to establish the responsibility of his subordinates in the case, but for now there is no conclusive result.

The magazine also interviewed Claudia Lozano, Director of the Public Prosecutions branch of La Guajira.

EXCHANGE: You've been involved in an alleged return of a shipment of cocaine. What can you say about that?

Claudia Lozano: They want to ruin my reputation.

EXCHANGE: But before the prosecution a witness said a DAS detective told him that you were involved in the release of the drug and therefore received money.
Claudia Lozano: I am amazed with what you say.

I too am amazed.

The Rag Blog

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