U.S. Advises Security Apprenticeships in Colombia http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/2463-us-advises-security-apprenticeships-in-colombia

Uribe’s improved cooperativeness vis-à-vis the U.S.—as evidenced in the U.S.-Colombia Defense Cooperation Agreement signed in October 2009, authorizing U.S. use of Colombian military bases—has not, however, relieved him of dubious affiliations. The parapolitics scandal, for example, has revealed paramilitary ties to a number of Uribe’s allies in the national Congress and to other pro-Uribe politicians.

As for Gates’ praise for Plan Colombia, the success of the program is called into question by the fact that billions of dollars of U.S. aid have failed to curb drug trafficking to the U.S. I observed some of the effects of the plan during a visit last year to farms in the southern Colombian department of Putumayo, where inhabitants complained of repeated fumigation of their banana crops, cows, and children, while coca fields continued to spring up in the area undeterred.

Paramilitary violence and fumigations are two of the reasons Colombia possesses the second highest number of internally displaced persons after Sudan, with the aim of displacement being to free up land for exploitation by interested parties.Andrew Oxford notes the oxymoronic quality of Colombian human rights advances when “Colombia still has an impunity rate of 96% in the more than 2,700 worker’s-rights related murders that have been perpetrated in the last twenty years” and when “[m]ore trade unionists have been assassinated in Colombia in the last six years than [in] the rest of the world combined