The Secret History of Israel's Role in Genocide in Colombia
The Secret History of Israel’s Role in Genocide in Colombia
May 13, 2024
As a diplomatic row erupts between the former allies, Dan Cohen republishes his 2021 MintPress News exposé on the role of Israeli agents in training death squads and devising plans for genocide in Colombia.
Gustavo Petro at North-South Schism session at World Economic Forum in January 2024. (WEP/Flickr)
By Dan Cohen
Uncaptured Media
On Oct. 16 last year, Colombia demanded that Israel’s ambassador Gali Dagan depart the country. “At the very least, apologize and leave,” foreign minister Álvaro Leyva said. This came one day after Israel halted weapons exports to Colombia.
“If we have to suspend foreign relations with Israel we will suspend them. We don’t support genocides,” Columbian President Gustavo Petro tweeted.
The diplomatic row erupted in response to Petro’s scathing criticism of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, in which he compared Israeli military to Nazis.
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I investigated Israel, Klein and Eitan’s role in the decades-long Colombian bloodbath for MintPress News in 2021, republished here.
By Dan Cohen
MintPress News
June 2, 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.
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Death Squad Leader: What I Learned in Israel
Klein held three training sessions, each for around 30 people. Assisting him were three trainers, all of whom were colonels in the Israeli army: Tzadaka Abraham, Teddy Melnik and Amatzia Shuali.
Klein trained brothers Carlos and Fidel Castaño, the squad leaders who would go on to form the notoriously violent United Self-Defense Forces, known in Spanish by its acronym, AUC.
Under the patronage of wealthy landowners, drug lords, ranchers, politicians and the Colombian military, the AUC committed bloodcurdling massacres all over the country, even using chainsaws to murder and dismember peasants, all aimed at terrorizing communities into fleeing from their land.
The United Nations estimated in 2016 that the AUC was responsible for 80 percent of the deaths in the conflict.
More:
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/05/13/the-secret-history-of-israels-role-in-genocide-in-colombia/
(Your time is never wasted researching what has been done with the well more than $11,000,000,000 the US Govt. has poured into Colombia's extremely corrupt feudal system to fight first "commies" and immediately after, "drug traffickers, " starting around 2000. )
(Colombia's war on the poor has been ongoing since the 1940's, when the first very popular beloved leftist anti-crime lawyer ran for the Presidency and was publicly executed, kicking off a 10 year period known as La Violencia. )