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The USA believed that the Colombian army was behind a wave of assassinations of leftist activists and but spent the following twenty years deepening its relationship with the Colombian armed forces, newly launched paperwork present.
The Central Intelligence Company had proof that the Colombian army had supplied a goal record to paramilitaries who killed 20 banana plantation employees in a high-profile bloodbath, the paperwork present, however went on to ship billions of {dollars} in help to the Colombian authorities.
On Tuesday, a reality fee in Colombia will launch a long-awaited report that makes an attempt to construct an intensive historical past of the nation’s decades-long inside battle, wherein at the least 260,000 individuals died.
The report, written on account of the nation’s 2016 peace cope with its largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, is supposed for use by Colombia’s subsequent authorities to create insurance policies that transfer the nation towards an enduring peace. It might assist form Colombia’s future relationship with the USA.
Among the many themes explored within the report is the position of the U.S. authorities, which spent a long time funding and coaching the Colombian army in its struggle towards the FARC and the drug economic system that financed their insurgency.
And amongst items of proof used to jot down Tuesday’s report are 1000’s of declassified U.S. paperwork gathered and arranged by the Nationwide Safety Archive, a Washington-based nongovernmental group that makes a speciality of supporting post-conflict reality commissions.
A digital library of the paperwork might be revealed in August. However the Nationwide Safety Archive supplied The New York Instances with some paperwork forward of time. They reveal that the USA had a long time of data of alleged crimes dedicated by the Colombian army — “and but the connection continued to develop,” mentioned Michael Evans, director of the Archive’s Colombia challenge.
Significantly demonstrative, he mentioned, are a sequence of C.I.A. operational reviews not usually accessible to the general public, even after a file request.
One report, written in 1988 throughout a interval wherein leftist activists have been being killed regularly, discovered {that a} wave of assassinations carried out towards “suspected leftists and communists” was the results of “a joint effort” between the intelligence chief of the Colombian Military Fourth Brigade and members of the Medellín narcotics trafficking cartel.
Lots of these killed have been related to a celebration known as the Patriotic Union. The report mentioned it was “unlikely” that this occurred “with out the information of the Fourth Brigade commander.”
Later within the doc, a C.I.A. officer writes of a 1988 bloodbath wherein 20 farmworkers, lots of them union members, have been killed. The C.I.A. officer signifies that the U.S. authorities believed the assassins “obtained the names of their meant targets” from the Colombia Military’s tenth Brigade intelligence unit.
Different paperwork present that the USA knew oil corporations have been paying paramilitaries for cover, and that at the least one firm gathered intelligence for the Colombian army.
One firm was “actively offering intelligence on guerrilla actions on to the Military,” in response to the C.I.A., “utilizing an airborne surveillance system alongside the pipeline to reveal guerrilla encampments and intercept guerrilla communications.”
The Colombian Military “efficiently exploited this data and inflicted an estimated 100 casualties throughout an operation towards the guerrillas” in 1997, in response to the report.
One other doc, written in 2003, hints at one of many grimmest chapters of the warfare, known as the false positives scandal. In that case, the Colombian army is accused of killing 1000’s of civilians throughout the presidency of Álvaro Uribe and making an attempt to go them off as fight deaths, in an effort to indicate it was successful the warfare.
In latest court docket testimony in Colombia, former troopers have mentioned they felt pressured to kill fellow Colombians by higher-ups.
A July 2003 memo to Donald Rumsfeld, then the secretary of protection, from the highest Pentagon deputy for particular operations celebrates a major rise in fight kills since Mr. Uribe took workplace took — 543 in simply six months, in contrast with 780 over the past two years of the earlier authorities.
The doc is titled “latest successes towards the Colombian FARC.”
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