Terry Collingsworth said the SLC’s findings are consistent with his theory that Chiquita “began supporting the AUC to clear the FARC out of that region.”  For more info check this out.

New report peels back layers on how, why Chiquita paid extortions to Colombian terrorists

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30430167/

The first demand was for $10,000.

It was delivered in the late 1980s to the manager of a Colombian banana farm at Chiquita Brands International Inc. It came from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Marxist rebels who implied Chiquita employees would be kidnapped if the money wasn’t paid.

“Everyone understood this was clearly extortion money,” said Robert Kistinger, then in charge of Latin American operations for Chiquita. “We had an ongoing situation where people were being killed.”

And so begins a tale that ends badly for Chiquita.

In March 2007, the Cincinnati banana company stunned investors, employees and the local business community by admitting it made regular payments to Colom­bian paramilitary groups for 15 years, ending in 2004. It said it had no choice – the lives of its employees were at risk.

Chiquita pled guilty to a felony charge of engaging in transactions with terrorists. It has paid $10 million toward a $25 million fine and faces 10 federal suits seeking billions in damages. Nine have been consolidated before U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra in South Florida.

That’s where you’ll find Kistinger’s account of that $10,000 demand.

It’s part of a recently filed 269-page report by a “special litigation committee” of Chiquita’s board of directors. The SLC is a legal strategy, often used to defend shareholder complaints. The report was filed with a motion to dismiss shareholder litigation. In a separate motion, Chiquita asked Marra to toss out six tort actions that argue Chiquita should be held liable to the families of people killed by the guerrilla groups it funded.

“Chiquita’s board and management, faced with an untenable situation, struggled to act in the best interests of the company and to do the right thing,” said the report’s concluding paragraph. “Pursuing litigation will only prolong the company’s entanglement in matters that have absorbed, distracted and damaged it for close to six years.”

Legal strategy aside, the SLC report offers an inside look at Chiquita’s turbulent history in Colombia. For the first time, it identifies executives who initiated payments, those who tracked them and those who ultimately halted the practice in 2004. And it sheds light on why the payments continued even after prosecutors warned they were illegal.

“We read it with interest,” said Steven Steingard, whose Philadelphia law firm, Kohn Swift & Graf, represents the widows of five American missionaries kidnapped and murdered by the FARC in 1993 and ’94.

“I’m not aware of a case where an Ameri­can company has laid out in such detail those kinds of things,” he said. “It’s a remarkable listing of …the conduct that went on for years and years that nobody knew about.”

Deadly bus attack

Chiquita’s special litigation committee is a panel of independent Chiquita directors, all of whom joined after the firm exited Colom­bia and stopped making payments. Those directors, Howard Barker, William Camp and Clare Hasler, spent nine months inves­ti­gating how officers and directors managed the payments and disclosed them to federal prosecutors and investors. The SLC had its own law firm, hired its own investigators. They interviewed more than 50 witnesses and reviewed 750,000 pages of docu­ments. They provided extensive context on the political climate in Colombia, where leftist revolutionaries made a practice of menacing and extracting payments from land owners and multinationals. Chiquita was both.

“The SLC believes that the total amount of the guerrilla payments ranged from $100,000 to $200,000 per year,” the report said.

Initially, the money went to left-wing groups, known as FARC and ELN. Violence was pervasive in Colombia. The SLC details many acts against the company, including a 1995 incident in which a bus carrying employees was attacked and 25 people killed.

“Several witnesses believed that the FARC targeted the bus,” the report stated. “The mass­acre had a major impact on personnel both in Colombia and Cincinnati in reinforcing the reality of the threat of violence.”

Starting in 1997, Chiquita paid a right-wing group known as the AUC, a sworn enemy to the FARC. It was designated a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department, making payments to it a violation of U.S. law. The SLC affirmed what Chiquita has said for years: No company offi­cial knew of the designation until 2003. Within two months of its discovery, the company reported its violations to the Justice Department.

More than a dozen knew

The SLC identified more than a dozen employees and board members who knew about the payments prior to the company’s discovery of the terrorist designation. They included former CEOs Keith Lindner, Steven Warshaw and Cyrus Freidheim, and company attorneys Charles Morgan, Robert Olson and Gregory Thomas. As early as 1995, the company had tracking mechanisms to monitor what it then called “sensitive” payments. In 1994, it produced the first in a series of legal opinions that concluded the payments complied with Colombian law.

From 1998 to 2001, the company “disclosed a large quantity of information” about guerrilla payments to investigators from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department, the SLC revealed.

“Despite these broad disclosures, no one from the government ever suggested that the payments violated any provision of U.S. law,” the report stated.

The SEC probe led to a $100,000 settlement in which Chiquita admitted an employee paid a $30,000 bribe to a port official in Uraba and that it violated accounting provisions in how it recorded the payment. The settlement was finalized in 2001, weeks after the AUC was listed as a terrorist organization.

Payments to the AUC continued for 28 months after the initial listing. They continued for nearly a year after Chiquita discovered the designation in 2003. The SLC report indicates that’s partly because company officials feared the consequences of halting payments and partly because they misjudged the response they would ultimately receive from prosecutors.

Condoning the payments?

The report devotes 40 pages to its four years of negotiations with the Justice Department. One recurring theme in those pages is a communications gap on the crucial question of whether payments could continue while prosecutors reviewed facts in the case.

Those problems started with an April 24, 2003, meeting in Washington, D.C. It was arranged by Chiquita director Roderick Hills, a former SEC chairman. Participants included Olson, Hills, outside counsel Laurence Urgenson and Michael Chertoff, former secretary of Homeland Security who was then the head of Justice’s criminal division.

“The meeting at DOJ – and the interpretation of its meaning by Hills, Olson and Urgenson – had an enormous influence on the company’s actions in the months that followed and ultimately became a source of fierce controversy between DOJ and the company,” said the report.

Chertoff told Chiquita the payments were illegal. But he agreed to consider “the foreign policy implications” of a withdrawal and acknowledged the issue was “complicated.” Within a month of that nuanced response, Chiquita resumed payments to the AUC, according to the report.

Hills told the SLC that it was “inconceivable that DOJ did not understand that payments would have to continue” and Olson “believed the government was, in effect, condoning the payments” while other government agencies reviewed the matter.

In September 2003, the SLC reports that federal prosecutor Michael Taxay “specifically declined” to tell Chiquita that the payments had to stop. But Taxay’s boss at the time claims that isn’t true.

“They were certainly told,” said Roscoe Howard Jr., now a partner with the Trout­man Sanders firm in D.C. “I know they were told because I directed that they be told.”

Taxay couldn’t be reached for comment.

Howard said Chiquita sought meetings with higher-ranking Justice Department officials when it didn’t get the answers it wanted from prosecutors. But he doesn’t think that approach influenced the outcome of the case.

“I’m sure Chiquita wanted to approach this as a policy issue,” he said. “I was treating it like a regular crime.”

‘Necessary to protect lives’

According to the SLC, Chiquita was encouraged by the early response from Justice Department officials. But a December 2003 meeting “went badly … and strained the company’s relationship” with prosecutors.

In the following two months, Chiquita agreed to sell its Colombian subsidiary, hired CEO Fernando Aguirre and made its last payment to the AUC. Prosecutors intensified efforts in early 2004, but the case appeared headed for settlement by the end of that year. In September 2005, a new prosecutor took charge, turning the case in a “more aggressive direction,” according to the report.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Malis hauled directors before a grand jury in 2005 and told Chiquita “directors … on the board while the payments were ongoing” could face charges. He pushed for the firm to expand its privilege waiver so prosecutors could examine letters and e-mails between Chiquita and its law firm, Kirkland & Ellis.

Chiquita’s potential fine was later reduced from $79 million to $25 million, but the government wouldn’t budge on the request that executives not be prosecuted.

Chertoff declined to comment. Malis could not be reached for comment.

The impact of the SLC report will depend on what lawyers make of it. Brigham Young University law professor Gordon Smith said it should help Chiquita dispose of the four shareholder cases pending against it.

“Courts are reluctant to … overturn the findings of an SLC that’s deemed to be independent, fully informed and acting in good faith,” Smith said.

But two plaintiff attorneys pursuing lawsuits on behalf of victims of paramilitary violence say the report will help their case. Terry Collingsworth said the SLC’s findings are consistent with his theory that Chiquita “began supporting the AUC to clear the FARC out of that region.” The Washington lawyer’s human rights group has filed suits on behalf of several hundred victims of Colombian paramilitary violence.

“It was a partnership,” he said. “I’ve talked to the commander and sub-commander … of AUC units in Colombia. They got calls all the time from managers of the banana plantations to handle various security matters.”

The SLC invited plaintiff lawyers to share information on the company’s activities in Colombia. As of February, those lawyers had not provided the SLC with “any factual information,” the SLC report indicated.

“There is no evidence, documentary or testimonial, that any Chiquita personnel believed the payments were made for the purpose of supporting either right-wing or left-wing groups,” said Chiquita spokesman Ed Loyd. “The SLC’s factual findings bear out what the company has said all along. The payments were necessary to protect the lives of our employees.”

Apart from liability issues, some argue the SLC report points to a need for legislation to clarify the responsibilities of U.S. companies doing business abroad. Arvind Ganesan, director of the business and human rights program at Human Rights Watch in New York, said Chiquita executives spent years researching the legality of the payments.

That decision would have been simple “if there were a law that said, ‘You cannot supply material support to a known human-rights abuser,’” said Ganesan. “Maybe the real lesson is, this should have been illegal in the first place.”

This is a bad sign for the peace process in Colombia.  The FARC relented on their major condition for peace talks – the demilitarized zone – and now Uribe is saying that isn’t good enough?!  The bottom line is that Uribe doesn’t want peace, then people might look at the narco-terrorist administration he runs.

Terms set for Colombia Farc talks

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7975879.stm

Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe has said he is ready to hold peace talks with Colombia’s Farc rebels, but that strict conditions would have to be met.

He called for “a halt to all criminal activities” and a verifiable ceasefire.

“We believe in peace, but we won’t allow new tricks,” he said, reiterating his resolve to fight the Farc.

On Sunday, the rebel group dropped its demand for a demilitarised area to be set up as a precondition for talks on a swap of rebel hostages for prisoners.

Farc has launched a new offensive, including a campaign of bomb attacks in cities, since suffering a series of defeats in 2008 – though it has recently suggested it may be willing to pursue “political alternatives”.

The government, meanwhile, has been pursuing a strategy of pressuring individual rebel units into abandoning the 45-year civil conflict rather than engaging in high-level talks with the leadership.

Now Mr Uribe has said he is willing to talk, but on tough conditions.

“Peace has its demands. The moment a new process begins there must be a clear sign, a halt to all criminal activities by the groups who want to engage in the process, with verification,” he said.

‘Democratic values’

Without the verification, he said, “we risk talking peace in a language that obfuscates terrorism”.

He reiterated his government’s resolve to fight terrorism “in an all-out effort and in full respect of democratic values”.

Mr Uribe has repeatedly been accused of ignoring human rights in his determination to crush the rebels.

The Farc, meanwhile, has relaxed its insistence on securing an extensive demilitarised zone in Colombia’s south-west as a precondition for talks over exchanging 22 prominent hostages for hundreds of jailed rebels.

There were several failed attempts at peace negotiations with Mr Uribe’s predecessor, Andres Pastrana, but since Mr Uribe came to power in 2002 such initiatives have been largely abandoned.

“The guards of Ingrid Betancourt had been paid off”

 

http://www.semana.com/noticias-international/the-guards-of-ingrid-betancourt-had-been-paid-off/121642.aspx

A former French mediator questions the official version of spectacular “Operation Checkmate“, a rescue mission carried out by the Colombian army on July 2nd 2008, that freed former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, three US citizens and eleven more Farc hostages from captivity in the jungles of Colombia.

Noël Saez, 67, a former mediator who had been commissioned by France to negotiate with Farc, has made now new accusations that overshadow the official version of how the rescue of the fifteen hostages took place, without shooting a single bullet.

In an interview published in France’s major conservative daily “Le Figaro“ on Monday (March 9th), Mr Saez asserts that “the guards of Ingrid Betancourt had been paid off“ by the Colombian government long before the day the rescue mission occurred. “Otherwise, they would have never lost their hold of the hostages“, Mr Saez says. However, during the interview he does not present any concrete proof of this being true.

Asked by “Le Figaro“ about the secrets hiding behind the assumed success of the rescue mission, the former French consul in Bogotá affirms: “people in Colombia are convinced that (the mission) was the result of an extraordinary job made by the army. I am willing to show the opposite“.

In charge of this will be “L’emissaire“ (“The Emissary“), a book written by Mr Saez with the collaboration of the French journalist Claude Mendibil and placed into circulation by publisher Robert Laffont on Monday. In 250 pages, Mr Saez seeks to explain why “public opinion ignores how the rescue operation was accomplished“. Until now, there is general consensus about “Operation Checkmate“ being one of the most cleanly accomplished and perfectly designed military missions in history.

In his book, Mr Saez also deals with “revealing the truth“ regarding the negotiations he leaded during his time as mediator between Farc and the French government. His mission had been to achieve the release of Ingrid Betancourt, who aside from the Colombian also possesses French citizenship. Between 2005 and 2008, Mr Saez had represented the governments of Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy vis-à-vis with the leaders of Farc.

Mr Saez is convinced that the success of “Operation Checkmate” involved previous negotiations between the government of Álvaro Uribe and ’César’, the member of Farc in charge of watching after the fifteen hostages that were rescued. “The mission has been presented to us at the best of Hollywood-style“, he says. “But if you truly know Farc, it is unconceivable that something like that could have really happened“.

According to Mr Saez’ book, “Operation Checkmate “ had already begun in February 2008, five months before the spectacular rescue took place. He told “Le Figaro“: “At that time, president Uribe informed Bernard Kouchner (France’s Foreign Minister) and me that the wife of ’César’, who had important duties within Farc, had been taken under arrest“. Mr Saez thinks that from this point on, and after finding an agreement with the government, ’César’ started to cooperate. He would yield the liberation of the 15 hostages under the condition of not being extradited to the United States.

Mr Saez sees a support to his statements in an assessment made by President Uribe two weeks before the “Operation Checkmate” occurred. “A guerrilla fighter who has offered to release Ingrid Betancourt along with other hostages has received a letter from government, as he demanded from us. The director of DAS (Colombia’s Intelligence Service) did this with my authorization. We have told his that if he keeps his word he will not be extradited. Let’s hope he will“, Mr Uribe said during a panel on June 13th 2008.

For Mr Saez, as false as the version spread by the government about the way in which the mission was carried out was the news—also divulged by the government on the eve of the mission—saying that he (then still working as emissary) had traveled to the Colombian jungles to meet Alfonso Cano, a rebel who had been recently appointed maximum chief of Farc. “That announcement only tended to make it credible for the guerrilla that the operation was taking place. The government used us“.

Mr Saez statements are concordant with versions of the same story divulged by the Swiss broadcasting station “Radio Suiza Romande“, according to which “Operation Checkmate“ was an imposture—the truth being, that 20 million dollars had been paid to several Farc members in charge of keeping Ingrid Betancourt, the three American soldiers and the other rescued hostages under surveillance. This information, published by the Swiss radio just one day after the mission took place, came from an anonymous source quoted by journalist Frédéric Blassel.

At that point, the Colombian government insinuated that Mr Blassel’s source had been another former European mediator, the Swiss citizen Jean-Pierre Gontard, a university professor that had represented the government of Switzerland at the face of Farc during many years. Mr Gontard’s country, together with France and Spain, had been included within the Group of Friendly Nations, an international commission that, with the accordance of President Uribe, was in charge of seeking a solution of armed conflict with Farc.

Nonetheless, as his French colleague, Mr Gontard had to leave the country, too. Shortly after the success of “Operation Checkmate“, the government accused him—on the basis of evidence found in the laptop of former Farc leader Raúl Reyes—of having transgressed his functions as mediator.

Until shortly, Mr Gontard had remained silent despite the strong and frequent accusations delivered against him by government officials. But the reproaches became so loud (he supposedly appears as the carrier of half a million dollars belonging to Farc found some months ago in Costa Rica), that he broke his silence in an interview published in “Le Monde“ on February 2nd . Mr Gontard categorically denies having transgressed the functions given to him by the Swiss government.

In the interview published in “Le Figaro“ on Monday, his colleague Noël Saez sustains a parallel version. “I’ve got nothing to hide”, he says.

FARC rebels voluntarily free 4 Colombian hostages

In any “war” where promotion is performance based you’re going to have individuals that inflate their numbers in every way possible so as to get ahead.  In the “war on drugs” here in America this means that cops will plant evidence and make ’sweep’ arrests where innocents are regularly included with dealers.  In Colombia the effect is much more deadly, as civilians are murdered and counted among the army’s tally of “guerrillas killed in action.” 

 

Who to kill? Colombia army picks soldier’s brother

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hx7D8zSRQDgU1FRiOXpH0NhR3dGwD94DTV6O1

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — The soldiers in Antelope Company’s Third Platoon hadn’t registered a guerrilla kill in months. And without results, they feared they wouldn’t be let off base for Mother’s Day.

So they hatched a plan, according to : Lure a civilian to their camp, murder him and register him as a rebel slain in combat.

Montes, 24, didn’t object — until he met the quarry. It was Leonardo, the older brother he hadn’t seen since he was 9.

Montes said he tried to dissuade his commander, who responded with threats. He slipped his brother out of the camp, he says, only to see him show up dead a week later, a “guerrilla kill” with three bullets in his torso and a gaping facial wound likely caused by a knife.

The men of Antelope Company of the 31st Rifle Batallion, 11th Brigade, 7th Division, did not get their “liberty passes.” Montes’ family filed a formal complaint, one of 245 complaints involving alleged killings of civilians by Colombian security forces last year that prosecutors are investigating.

It is among the most chilling examples of what the United Nations’ top human rights official, Navi Pillay, calls “widespread and systematic” extrajudicial killings by Colombia’s U.S.-backed military. Many of the killings were allegedly committed merely to inflate rebel casualty numbers.

Five of Montes’ fellow soldiers now face a criminal probe in his brother’s April 2007 death, joining some 480 soldiers under investigation for about 1,000 extrajudicial killings during the presidency of President Alvaro Uribe.

The scandal comes at a particularly delicate moment for Uribe. President-elect Barack Obama has cited human rights concerns in opposing the U.S.-Colombia trade agreement President Bush wants ratified before he leaves office in January. Obama told Bush on Tuesday that he opposes including the deal in an economic stimulus package the U.S. Congress is to begin debating next week.

Uribe, meanwhile, is cleaning house: A week before Obama’s election, he ordered the biggest-ever purge of Colombia’s military, firing 20 officers — including three generals and four colonels — for negligence. On election day, the army commander resigned.

Armed forces chief Gen. Freddy Padilla told The Associated Press that the Montes case contributed to the sacking of the commanding general of the 7th Division, based in Medellin. Prosecutors say there is no evidence Leonardo was a rebel — or for that matter anything more than a 33-year-old farm worker.

Montes, meanwhile, is isolated under special guard for his own safety at a military post outside Medellin.

“I can’t sleep. I’m awake all night, tossing and turning in bed,” he told the AP. “I have this psychosis that at any moment someone could come, something could happen to me, that they are going to kill me.”

Montes told his story last month to the Colombian newsmagazine Semana. In several telephone interviews, he declined to retell the details because he is under orders not to. But he said the magazine quoted him faithfully. His testimony is also supported by declarations made to judicial authorities by Montes and others.

Here is Montes’ account:

The 31st Rifles was bivouacked in the hamlet of San Juan in the northern province of Cordoba. Soldiers were listless, some malarial. Mother’s Day was coming.

Montes said his batallion had a policy: “For every enemy killed you get 15 days leave.” So soldiers in Montes’ company began talking about “legalizing” someone — cynical service slang for killing a civilian.

One moonless rainy night, Montes’ platoon leader, a corporal, told him they had chosen a victim, he said. It was a man from La Guajira, the Caribbean coastal province from which Montes himself hailed.

Curious, Montes went to see the man, gave him a cigarette and, not recognizing him in the dark, determined they were from the same town, the same street. It was Leonardo, with whom Montes shared the same father.

The two hugged and Montes, incredulous and outraged, told his brother of the sinister intentions of the soldiers who had befriended him and invited him to the camp.

Montes pleaded with the company commander, Capt. Jairo Garcia, to let him go, but said the captain told him that if he tried to stop them he would put Montes on point during patrols “so my legs could be blown off by a mine.” The captain, who is under criminal investigation, called Montes a liar and a chronic slacker in a sworn declaration.

Montes got Leonardo safely out of the camp that night and figured the episode was over. But a few days later, as he was being treated for malaria in a nearby town, he learned his company had scored a “positivo” and that soldiers tried to bury his brother in an unmarked grave.

The after-action report said Leonardo was killed in a firefight with a small group of rebels. It said the others got away. Montes, citing fellow fighters, told investigators that the 9mm Browning pistol and grenade found on the body were planted by soldiers.

Montes was enraged. His brother had been killed “for nothing more than a liberty pass.” The romanticized vision of soldiering Montes held when he joined the army in 2006, he says, was buried with Leonardo.

“Officers get promoted on merit and you win merit by … killing the most subversives. But that’s not so easy,” Montes said. “So what happens? They look for the easiest victims.”

“Mexican student was no guerrilla”

Lucia Morett talking with Daniel Ortega

http://colombiareports.com/colombian-news/news/1343-qmexican-student-was-no-guerrillaq.html

Mexico’s attorney general says investigators have found no evidence that a Mexican student who survived a Colombian military raid on a FARC camp in Ecuador had ties to the guerrillas.

But Eduardo Medina said Monday the investigation of Lucia Morett remains open.

The March 1 cross-border attack killed Raúl Reyes, a top commander of the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and 24 others, including four Mexican university students.

Morett is exiled in Nicaragua because of Mexico’s investigation. She says she traveled to Ecuador only to learn about the guerrillas’ peace proposals.

Colombian President Álvaro Uribe said in April his government suspected the Mexican students were rebel accomplices. Their families deny that. (AP)

In the brutal civil war that has raged in Colombia for over 40 years, the right wing is guilty of crimes against humanity.  The death squads massacred entire villages and regularly killed non-violent activists of all stripes (e.g. NGO, union, etc).  In the tradition of the Paraguayan, Argentinian, and Chilean militaries of the 70s we see that the Colombian forces also “disappeared” their victims quite often.  It should be noted that anything done by these right-wing forces was at the behest of America.  And we should also note that this violence continues to this day!  Even the day of action (advertised below) against the right wing disappearences led to about 10 organizers being killed at the hands of the right wing Aguiles Negras militia.  It is very dangerous to be involved in almost any political activity in Colombia, but especially political activity associated with the left (union organizing, etc).

Unearthing Secrets of Colombia’s Long War

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/26/AR2008082603154.html?nav=rss_email/components

ANORI, Colombia — A team of forensic anthropologists painstakingly dug up the bodies — two from the town’s decaying mausoleum, others from the moist earth in the cemetery, a couple from a field nearby. The preferred method of death: a single gunshot to the head. One young man had been beheaded, his skull now nowhere to be found.

The parapolitics scandal continues, with judges battling the Uribe administration:

“Presidency is conspiring against the court”

http://colombiareports.com/2008/08/25/presidency-is-conspiring-against-the-court/#more-2488

Colombia’s Supreme Court says staff members of the Colombia’s Presidency are conspiring against the high court in an attempt to discredit the ‘parapolitics’ investigations after news broke high officials had met with a warlord’s attorneys.

“I do not understand how it is possible that the legal and press secretary of the President can meet with a renowned paramilitary, while the whole country knows he belongs to an illegal armed group. (…) I don’t know how President Uribe can call for the arrest of members of the Office of Envigado while his legal adviser is receiving members of this same office,” Supreme Court president Francisco Javier Ricaurte said.

Ricaurte repeated his claim the government is trying to discredit the Court and deligitimize its judges, because of its investigations into the alleged involvement of paramilitaries in congress.

“In my opinion this is the most serious of events that occurred in the government’s actions against the Court. (…) I do not understand the Presidency received a paramilitary to hand over some supposed evidence against judges of the Supreme Court,” the Supreme Court president added.

Ricaurte announced it will ask the Prosecution and the country’s Attorney General to investigate the “conspiracy” and to sanction the officials involved. Colombia’s Chief Prosecutor Mario Iguarán announced he will start an investigation conserning the meeting between the presidency, Don Berna’s lawyer and the recently murdered paramilitary ‘Job’

The Presidency has admitted to have the attorneys of extradited paramilitary boss ‘Don Berna’ and his close ally ‘Job’.

The cover-up of the parapolitics scandal continues….

Prosecutors have no access to extradited bosses

http://colombiareports.com/2008/08/23/prosecutors-have-no-access-to-extradited-bosses/#more-2458

Colombian prosecutors say they have had no access to 14 ex-paramilitary chiefs since their extradition to the U.S. three months ago, throwing a wrench into investigation of the ‘parapolitics’ scandal, reported El Tiempo Saturday.

Their testimony is “crucial to preventing that the atrocious crimes committed by the extradited members in Colombia remain unprosecuted,” wrote head prosecutor Mario Iguarán in a letter sent August 14 to his U.S. counterpart requesting expedited access for prosecutors and judges to the extradited Colombians, the newspaper wrote.

Former AUC head Salvatore Mancuso said Thursday he is willing to testify in court, joining at least three other jailed former chiefs, according to El Tiempo.

Critics have charged that the sudden extradition of the 14 former paramilitary bosses earlier this year came to forestall investigations into a widening ‘parapolitics’ scandal.

Why does the Colombian government disregard opportunities to get to the bottom of the para-politics scandal?  Even the scumbag former leaders of the AUC don’t want to see the politicians get away. 

Mancuso wants to testify against parapoliticians

http://colombiareports.com/2008/08/21/mancuso-wants-to-testify-against-parapoliticians/#more-2417

Salvatore Mancuso, former head of the AUC and currently held in a U.S. prison, complained to Colombia’s Supreme Court he had never been asked to testify in parapolitics trials, adding he is willing to do so.

The former number one of the country’s paramilitary organization had a five page letter delivered to the Court stating he is willing to testify in court, but never was asked to.

Mancuso wrote he is available to any request to appear as a witness at any time and denied he had refused to cooperate in the trials against congressmen Juan Manuel López and Reginaldo Montes.

“It is not true the lawyer and his defendant refused to sign the authorization. They just were never asked,” the letter said, Caracol Radio reported Thursday.

According to the AUC head, there are people who are seeking to disrupt the peace process and the failure of the demobilization process, making sure “the truth behind the armed conflict will never be known”.

Mancuso was extradited to the U.S. in May after the government accused him and other AUC heads of failing to collaborate with Colombian justice. The warlords are now awaiting trial for drug trafficking.