| Graphic by Antonio Cabrera | MR OnlineGraphic by Antonio Cabrera
New investigation reveals role of Israeli operatives in Colombia’s “political genocide”
By Dan Cohen (Posted Jun 05, 2021)
On April 6, 1984, a group of men dressed in police uniforms arrived at the home of Milcíades Contento in the town of Viotá, Colombia. Contento was a peasant, communist and member of the Patriotic Union (UP), a newly-formed experimental political party born out of the 1985 peace negotiations between the conservative President Belansio Betancourt and the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The men seized Contento, tied him up and dragged him away. The next day, his corpse was found in a nearby village.
The murder of Milcíades Contento marked the beginning of a nearly two-decade extermination campaign. From 1984-2002, at least 4,153 UP members – including two presidential candidates, 14 parliamentarians, 15 mayors, nine mayoral candidates, three members of the House of Representatives and three senators – were murdered or dissapeared, in what a Colombian court deemed was a “political genocide.” According to data presented to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the purge claimed more than 6,000 victims through murders, disappearances, torture, forced displacement and other human rights violations. From May 1984 to December 2002, not a month passed without a murder or disappearance of a UP member. In the 2002 elections that brought Álvaro Uribe to power, the Patriotic Union had been so thoroughly wiped out that it failed to meet the electoral threshold and the government removed the party’s legal status.
According to a recent investigation by renowned Colombian journalist Alberto Donadio, the extermination of the Patriotic Union was devised by Betancourt’s successor, President Virgilio Barco Vargas, implementing a plan concocted by of one of the most decorated spies in Israeli history, Rafael ‘Rafi’ Eitan.
The revelations underscore the pivotal relationship that has developed between Israel and Colombia – the United States’ respective top allies in the Middle East and Latin America. Both countries are testing grounds for military weapons and strategies that have long been exported around the world. Following the success of the U.S. government’s Plan Colombia in debilitating the FARC guerrilla movement, it has been hailed as an exportable counterinsurgency model to be applied from Mexico to Afghanistan. Israel, for its part, maintains the world’s largest repression- and weapons-testing laboratories in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, where it has a captive population of several millions Palestinians.
Through the presence of Rafi Eitan in Colombia, the burgeoning alliance of junior partners of the U.S. empire deepened. Despite a series of scandals, the Israel-Colombia relationship has only grown stronger over the years. Under President Iván Duque, the two countries have renewed ties and Israeli military personnel have trained their Colombian counterparts in “counter-terrorism.”
Yet the systematic murder of the UP remains one of the most extreme cases of political violence in Latin America. The scale of killing is especially striking because, unlike many of the bloodiest U.S.-backed regimes of the 1980s, Colombia never became a dictatorship. The killing of the UP – known among its perpetrators as El Baile Rojo (The Red Dance) – took place in an ostensible “democracy.”
More:
https://mronline.org/2021/06/05/new-investigation-reveals-role-of-israeli-operatives-in-colombias-political-genocide/
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