8chan/8kun QResearch Posts (23)
#17460005 at 2022-08-29 17:35:00 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #21400: To The Moon? Edition
https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/we-are-brothers:-venezuela-and-columbia-restore-diplomatic-r
"We are brothers": Venezuela and Columbia restore diplomatic relations
For the first time in three years, Venezuela and Colombia have restored full diplomatic relations Sunday as a new leftist government in Bogota takes its course.
The new Colombian ambassador, Armando Benedetti, arrived in the city of Caracas and published on Twitter: "Relations with Venezuela should never have been severed. We are brothers and an imaginary line cannot separate us." The new Venezuelan ambassador to Colombia, Felix Plasencia, also landed on Sunday in Colombia to expedite the normalization of diplomatic ties.
He was welcomed by deputy foreign minister Rander Pena Ramirez, who tweeted: "our historical ties summon us to work together for the happiness of our peoples."
Gustavo Petro, Colombia's new and first leftist president, and Venezuela's socialist President Nicolas Maduro announced on August 11 their plans to restore diplomatic relations that were broken in 2019. That was the pinnacle of years of tension between leftist Venezuela and Colombia under successive conservative presidents, starting with Alvaro Uribe. Following the series of events, embassies and consulates in both countries were closed, and flights between the neighbors were grounded.
The 2,000-kilometer land border between the two Latin American countries was closed between 2019 and October 2021, and was opened to pedestrians only. Petro is Colombia's first leftist president and wishes to establish a strong relationship with Caraca unlike his predecessor, Ivan Duque, who did not acknowledge Maduro as president - but rather opposition leader Juan Guaido, a US-backed right-wing candidate during the Venezuelan elections who claimed to have become interim President of Venezuela.
Colombia was one of around 60 countries to do so, having renounced Venezuela's 2018 presidential election, which was boycotted by the opposition. In addition to exchanging ambassadors, the normalization process will entail the full reopening of the border.
The frontier has been the scene of conflict between armed groups. The cities of Caracas and Bogota have also announced plans to restore military relations as well. Benedetti stated that more than eight million Colombians earn a living from trade with Venezuela, which is why one of the intentions is to re-establish trade relations between the two countries.
A similar expectation sits on the Venezuelan side, where industrialists want to normalize trade that reached $7.2 billion in 2008 but collapsed when the border closed. Maduro said during a national economic council session on Tuesday. "We will propose to (Colombian) President Gustavo Petro establishing a vast economic zone for trade and industry between Norte de Santander and the state of Tachira".
The Venezuelan leader highlighted that this project could be expanded to include the states of Apure, Amazonas, and Zulia, all of which lie on the Colombian-Venezuelan borders.
>> Recently seeing a lot of V signs being made.
#14492791 at 2021-08-30 19:32:15 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #18334: We're In Info Lockdown Re: OPSEC. Enjoy The Show Edition
Colombia arrests 'Sinaloa Cartel money laundering chief'
Colombia's police on Saturday detained a senior drug trafficker for allegedly laundering money for the Sinaloa Cartel.
According to local media, Nestor Tarazona was reportedly arrested near Pereira, the capital of the Risaralda province and one of the cities where the senior drug lord allegedly laundered money for the Mexican cartel.
Colombia's authorities did not publicly confirm the arrest of the senior crime lord with ties to family members of former President Alvaro Uribe and Vice-President Marta Lucia Ramirez.
Whether Tarazona was jailed after his latest arrest is unclear.
Elusive career
According to newspaper El Tiempo, Tarazona has been linked to drug trafficking since the 1980's but primarily known for the breeding and trading of horses.
The narco was first arrested on drug trafficking charges in 1989 in the United States and sentenced to prison after a second arrest in 1990.
Tarazona was released and repatriated to Colombia in 1995, after which the narco resumed his criminal activities from the central Colombian Meta province, according to the US Treasury Department.
At one point, Tarazona moved to Mexico, according to US authorities and transnational crime website InSight Crime.
Despite being convicted of drug trafficking and accused of money laundering in 2009, the narco apparently had no difficulty traveling between Colombia, Mexico and the United States where he was arrested again in 2012.
Curiously, the Treasury Department's removed the narco from its so-called Kingpin List and Colombia's prosecution opened an investigation against Tarazona the same year.
The narco went off the radar after shutting down one of his businesses in Colombia in 2013, investigative journalist Martha Elvira Soto said in her 2014 book "Cocaine Horses."
Alleged government ties
Tarazano is one of multiple narcos with ties to both the Sinaloa Cartel and the Colombian government, specifically Colombia's vice-president and Uribe, another horse breeder.
While in Mexico, police seized a 26-ton cocaine shipment meant for the narco and arranged by "Memo Fantasma, a jailed business partner of Martinez's husband, according to InSight Crime.
Tarazano's front companies in Colombia were reportedly part of a Sinaloa Cartel money laundering network that was largely controlled by the Cifuentes Clan of Uribe's fugitive niece and her convicted mother, who had two children with the former president's late brother.
During his elusive career, the mafioso created money laundering companies throughout Colombia.
https://colombiareports.com/colombia-arrests-sinaloa-cartel-money-laundering-chief/
#11376814 at 2020-10-31 18:15:20 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #14530: If God Be For Us, Who Could Be Against Us Edition
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/07/28/biden-privatization-plan-colombia-honduras-migration/
How Joe Biden's privatization plans helped doom Latin America and fuel the migration crisis
July 28, 2019
By Max Blumenthal
While campaigning for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination this year, former Senator and Vice President Joseph Biden has touted the crucial role he played in designing US mega-development and drug war campaigns that transformed the socio-political landscape of large swaths of Latin America.
"I was one of the architects of Plan Colombia," Biden boasted in a July 5 interview with CNN, referring to the multi-billion dollar US effort to end Colombia's civil war with a massive surge of support for the country's military. According to Biden, the plan was a panacea for Colombia's problems, from "crooked cops" to civil strife.
But Biden's plan for Colombia has contributed directly to the country's transformation into a hyper-militarized bastion of right-wing rule, enhancing the power and presence of the notoriously brutal armed forces while failing miserably in its anti-narcotic and reformist objectives.
This year alone, more than 50 human rights defenders were killed in Colombia in the first four months of 2019, while coca production is close to record levels. And as Colombian peace activists lamented in interviews with The Grayzone, the US is still in complete control of Bogotá's failed anti-drug policy, thanks largely to Plan Colombia.
Biden has also pumped up his role in an initiative called the Alliance for Prosperity, which was applied to the Northern Triangle of Central America. The former vice president was so central to the program's genesis that it was informally known as "Plan Biden."
Marketed as an answer to the crisis of child migration, Biden's brainchild channeled $750 million through a right-wing government installed by a US-orchestrated military coup to spur mega-development projects and privatize social services.
The Grayzone visited Honduras in July and documented, through interviews with human rights defenders, students, indigenous activists, and citizens from all walks of life, how the Alliance for Prosperity helped set the stage for a national rebellion.
In recent months, teachers, doctors, students, and rural campesinos have been in the streets protesting the privatization plans imposed on their country under the watch of Biden and his successors.
The gutting of public health services, teacher layoffs, staggering hikes in electricity prices, and environmentally destructive mega-development projects are critical factors in mass migration from Honduras. And indeed, they are immediate byproducts of the so-called "Biden plan."
"Biden is taking credit for doing something constructive to stop the migration crisis and blaming the concentration camps [on the US-Mexico border] on Trump. But it's Biden's policies that are driving more people out of Central America and making human rights defenders lives more precarious by defending entities that have no interest in human rights," explained Adrienne Pine, a professor of anthropology at American University and leading researcher of the social crisis in Honduras, in an interview with The Grayzone.
"So $750 million US taxpayer dollars that were allocated to supposedly address child migration are actually making things worse," Pine added. "It started with unaccompanied minors and now you have children in cages. Largely thanks to Biden."
'I was one of the architects of Plan Colombia'
In an interview with CNN on July 5, Biden was asked if he favored decriminalizing the entry of Latin American migrants to the United States. Responding with a definitive "no," Joe Biden stated that he would be "surging folks to the border to make those concrete decisions" about who receives asylum.
Biden argued that he had the best record of addressing the root causes of the migration crisis, recalling how he imposed a solution on Central America's migration crisis. "You do the following things to make your country better so people don't leave, and we will help you do that, just like we did in Colombia," he said.
"What did we do in Colombia? We went down and said, okay, and I was one of the architects of Plan Colombia," Biden continued. "I said, here's the deal. If you have all these crooked cops, all these federal police, we're sending our FBI down, you let us put them through a lie detector test, let us tell you who you should fire and tell you the kind of people you should hire. They did and began to change. We can do so much if we're committed."
With the arrogance of a pith-helmeted high colonial official meting out instructions on who to hire and fire to his docile subjects, Biden presided over a plan that failed miserably in its stated goals, while transforming Colombia into a hyper-militarized bastion of US regional influence.
Plan Colombia: 'They come and ask for bread, and you give them stones'
Plan Colombia was originally conceived by Colombian President Andrés Pastrana in 1999, as an alternative development and conflict resolution plan for his war-torn country. He considered calling it the "Plan for Colombia's Peace."
The proposal was quickly hijacked by the Bill Clinton administration, with Joe Biden lobbying in the Senate for an iron-fisted militarization plan. "We have an obligation, in the interests of our children and the interests of the hemisphere, to keep the oldest democracy in place, to give them a fighting chance to keep from becoming a narcostate," Biden said in a June 2000 floor speech.
When Plan Colombia's first formal draft was published, it was done so in English, not Spanish. The original spirit of peace-building was completely sapped from the document by Biden, whose vigorous wheeling-and-dealing ensured that almost 80 percent of the $7.5 billion plan went to the Colombian military. 500 US military personnel were promptly dispatched to Bogota to train the country's military.
"If you read the original Plan Colombia, not the one that was written in Washington but the original Plan Colombia, there's no mention of military drives against the FARC rebels," Robert White, the former number two at the US embassy in Bogota, complained in 2000. "Quite the contrary. [Pastrana] says the FARC is part of the history of Colombia and a historical phenomenon, he says, and they must be treated as Colombians."
White lamented how Washington had abused the trust of the Colombians: "They come and ask for bread, and you give them stones."
Plan Colombia was largely implemented under the watch of the hardline right-wing President Álvaro Uribe. In 1991, Uribe was placed on a US Drug Enforcement Agency list of "important Colombian narco-traffickers," in part due to his role in helping drug kingpin Pablo Escobar's obtain licenses for landing strips while Uribe was the head of Colombia's Civil Aeronautics Department.
Under Uribe's watch, toxic chemicals were sprayed by military forces across the Colombian countryside, poisoning the crops of impoverished farmers and displacing millions.
Biden with former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe at the Concordia Summit in June 2017
Six years after Bill Clinton initiated Plan Colombia, however, even US drug czar John Walters was forced to quietly admit in a letter to the Senate that the price of cocaine in the US had declined, the flow of the drug into the US had risen, and its purity had increased.
Meanwhile, a UN Office of Drugs and Crime report found that coca cultivation reached record levels in Colombia in 2018. In other words, billions of dollars have been squandered, and a society already in turmoil has been laid to waste.
For the military and right-wing paramilitary forces that have shored up the rule of leaders like Uribe and the current ultra-conservative Colombian president, Ivan Duque, Plan Colombia offered a sense of near-total impunity.
The depravity of the country's military was put on bold display when the so-called "false positives" scandal was exposed in 2008. The incident began when army officers lured 22 rural laborers to a far-away location, massacred them, and then dressed them in uniforms of the leftist FARC guerrillas.
Victims of Colombia's "false positives" scandal, where laborers were massacred to justify Plan Colombia funding
It was an overt attempt to raise the FARC body count and justify the counter-insurgency aid flowing from the US under Plan Colombia. The officers who oversaw the slaughter were paid bounties and given promotions.
Colombian academics Omar Eduardo Rojas Bolaños and Fabián Leonardo Benavides demonstrated in a meticulous study that the "false positives" killings reflected "a systematic practice that implicates the commanders of brigades, battalions and tactical units" in the deaths of more than 10,000 civilians. Indeed, under Plan Colombia, the incident was far from an isolated atrocity.
Colombian activist Santiago Salinas in Bogotá
Colombian activist Santiago Salinas in Bogotá (Photo: Ben Norton)
Forfeiting Colombia's national sovereignty
In an interview in Bogotá this May, The Grayzone's Ben Norton asked Colombian social leader Santiago Salinas if there was any hope for progressive political transformation since the ratification of Plan Colombia.
An organizer of the peace group Congreso de los Pueblos, Salinas shrugged and exclaimed, "I wish." He lamented that many of Colombia's most pivotal decisions were made in Washington.
Salinas pointed to drug policy as an example. "It seems like the drug decisions about what to do with the drugs, it has nothing to do with Colombia.
"There was no sovereign decision on this issue. Colombia does not have a decision," he continued. It was the Washington that wrote the script for Bogota. And the drug trade is in fact a key part of the global financial system, Salinas pointed out.
But Biden was not finished. After 15 years of human misery and billions of wasted dollars in Colombia, he set out on a personal mission to export his pet program to Central America's crime and corruption-ravaged Northern Triangle.
Biden eyes Central America, selling mass privatization
In his July sit-down with CNN, Joe Biden trumpeted his Plan Colombia as the inspiration for the Alliance for Prosperity he imposed on Central America. Channeling the spirit of colonial times once again, he bragged of imposing Washington's policies on the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
"We'll make a deal with you," Biden recalled telling the leaders of these countries. "You do the following things to make your country better so people don't leave, and we will help you do that."
Biden announced his bold plan on the editorial pages of the New York Times in January 2015. He called it "a joint plan for economic and political reforms, an alliance for prosperity." Sold by the vice president as a panacea to a worsening migration crisis, the Alliance for Prosperity was a boon for international financial institutions which promised to deepen the economic grief of the region's poor.
The Alliance for Prosperity "treated the Honduran government as if it were a crystal-clear, pure vessel into which gold could be poured and prosperity would flow outward," explained Dana Frank, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of the book, The Long Honduran Night.
"In reality, the Plan would further enrich and strengthen the political power of the very same elites whose green, deliberate subversion of the rule of law, and destruction of natural resources and of Indigenous and campesino land rights, were responsible for the dire conditions the proposal ostensibly addressed," Frank added.
In Honduras, the government had no capacity or will to resist Biden's plan. That is because the country's elected president, Juan Manuel Zelaya, had been removed in 2009 in a coup orchestrated by the United States.
As Zelaya told The Grayzone's Anya Parampil, the Obama administration was infuriated by his participation in ALBA, a regional economic development program put forward by Venezuela's then-President Hugo Chavez that provided an alternative to neoliberal formulas like the so-called "Biden Plan."
Following the military coup, a corporate-friendly administration was installed to advance the interests of international financial institutions, and US trainers arrived in town to hone the new regime's mechanisms of repression.
Under the auspices of the Central American Regional Security Initiative, the FBI was dispatched to oversee the training of FUSINA, the main operational arm of the Honduran army and the base of the Military Police for Public Order (PMOP) that patrols cities like an occupation force.
In an October 2014 cable, the US embassy in Tegucigalpa acknowledged that the PMOP was riven with corruption and prone to abuse, and attempted to distance itself from the outfit, even though it operated under the umbrella of FUSINA.
This June, the PMOP invaded the Autonomous University of Honduras, attacking students protesting the privatization of their school and wounding six.
US-trained troops shoot Honduran students protesting privatization@AnyaParampil reports from inside a student occupation at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH), where protesters are being shot by military policehttps://t.co/HQHX497zPW
- The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews) July 13, 2019
The creation by the US embassy in Honduras of a special forces unit known as the Tigres has added an additional layer of repressive muscle. Besides arresting activists, the Tigres reportedly helped a drug kingpin escape after he was detained during a US investigation.
While violent crime surged across Honduras, unemployment more than doubled. Extreme poverty surged, and so too did the government's security spending.
To beef up his military, President Juan Orlando Hernández dipped into the social programs that kept a mostly poor population from tumbling into destitution.
Chart on Honduran budget priorities by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2017
As Alex Rubinstein reported for The Grayzone, the instability of post-coup Honduras has been particularly harsh on LGTTBI (Lesbian, Gay, Trans, Travesti, Bisexual, and Intersex) Hondurans. More than 300 of them have been killed since 2009, a dramatic spike in hate crimes reinforced by the homophobic rhetoric of the right-wing Evangelical Confraternity that represents the civil-society wing of the ultra-conservative Hernandez government.
As the social chaos enveloped Honduran society, migration to the US-Mexico border began to surge to catastrophic levels. Unable to make ends meet, some Hondurans sent their children alone to the border, hoping that they would temporary protective or refugee status.
By 2014, the blowback of the Obama administration's coup had caused a national emergency. Thousands of Hondurans were winding up in cages in detention camps run by the US Department of Homeland Security, and many of them were not even 16 years old.
That summer, Obama went to Congress for $3.7 billion in emergency funds to ramp up border militarization and deport as many unaccompanied Central American minors as possible.
Biden used the opportunity to rustle up an additional billion dollars, exploiting the crisis to fund a massive neoliberal project that saw Honduras as a base for international financial opportunity. His plan was quickly ratified, and the first phase of the Alliance for Prosperity began.
From the IADB's sanitized survey of the Alliance for Prosperity
Energy industry rush dooms indigenous communities and human rights defenders
The implementation of the Alliance for Prosperity was overseen by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), a US-dominated international financial institution based in Washington, DC that supports corporate investment in Latin America and the Caribbean.
A graphic on the IADB's website outlined the plan's objectives in anodyne language that concealed its aggressively neoliberal agenda.
For instance, the IADB promised the "fostering [of] regional energy integration." This was a clear reference to Plan Pueblo Panama, a region-wide neoliberal development blueprint that was conceived as a boon to the energy industry. Under the plan, the IADB would raise money from Latin American taxpayers to pay for the expansion of power lines that would carry electricity from Mexico all the way to Panama.
Honduras, with its rivers and natural resources, provided the project with a major hub of energy production. In order for the country's energy to be traded and transmitted to other countries, however, the International Monetary Fund mandated that its national electricity company be privatized.
Since the implementation of that component of "Plan Biden," energy costs have begun to surge for residential Honduran consumers. In a country with a 66 percent poverty rate, electricity privatization has turned life from precarious to practically impossible.
Rather than languish in darkness for long hours with unpaid bills piling up, many desperate citizens have journeyed north towards the US border.
As intended, the Alliance for Prosperity's regional energy integration plan has spurred an influx of multi-national energy companies to Honduras. Hydro-electric dams and power plants began rising up in the midst of the lush pine forests and winding rivers that define the Honduran biosphere, pushing many rural indigenous communities into a life-and-death struggle.
This July, The Grayzone traveled to Reitoca, a remote farming community located in the heart of the Honduran "dry sector." The indigenous Lenca residents of this town depend on their local river for fish, recreation, and most importantly, water to irrigate the crops that provide them with a livelihood. But the rush on energy investment brought an Italian-Chilean firm called Progelsa to the area to build a massive hydro-electric dam just upstream.
Reitoca community leader Wilmer Alonso by the river threatened by a major hydro-electric project (Photo: Ben Norton)
Wilmer Alonso, a member of the Lenca Indigenous Council of Reitoca, spoke with The Grayzone, shaking with emotion as he described the consequences of the dam for his community.
"The entire village is involved in this struggle," Alonso said. "Everyone knows the catastrophe that the construction of this hydro-electric plant would create."
He explained that, like so many foreign multi-nationals in Honduras, Progelsa employs an army of private thugs to intimidate protesters: "The private company uses the army and the police to repress us. They accuse us of being trespassers, but they are the ones trespassing on our land."
US reinforces 'factors that generate violence the most in our society'
The Alliance for Progress also provided the backdrop for the assassination of the renowned Honduran environmentalist and feminist organizer Berta Cáceres.
On March 3, 2016, Cáceres was gunned down in her home in rural Honduras. A towering figure in her community with a presence on the international stage, Cáceres had been leading the fight against a local dam project overseen by DESA, a powerful Honduran energy company backed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and run by powerful former military officers.
The representative that DESA sent to sign its deal with USAID, Sergio Rodríguez, was later accused of masterminding Cáceres' murder, alongside military officials and former company employees.
In March 2018, the Honduran police arrested DESA's executive president, Roberto David Castillo Mejía, accusing him of "providing logistics and other resources to one of the material authors" of the assassination. Castillo was a West Point graduate who worked in the energy industry while serving as a Honduran intelligence officer.
This July, The Grayzone visited the family of Berta Cáceres in La Esperanza, a town nestled in the verdant mountains of Intibucá. Cáceres' mother, Doña Berta, lives there under 24-hour police guard paid for by human rights groups.
The Cáceres household is bristling with security cameras, and family members get around in armored cars. In her living room, we met Laura Zúñiga Cáceres of the Civic Council of Indigenous and Popular Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), the human rights group that her mother Berta founded.
Laura Zuniga Caceres of COPINH in the home where Berta Caceres was raised (Photo: Ben Norton)
"The violence in Honduras generates migrant caravans, which tears apart society, and it all has to do with all of this extractivism, this violence," Zúñiga Caceres told The Grayzone. "And the response from the US government is to send more soldiers to our land; it is to reinforce one of the factors that generates violence the most in our society."
"We are receiving reports from our comrades that there is a US military presence in indigenous Lenca territory," she added. "For what? Humanitarian aid? With weapons. It's violence. It's persecution."
Gutting public healthcare, driving more migration
The Alliance for Prosperity also commissioned the privatization of health services through a deceptively named program called the Social Protection Framework Law, or la Ley Marco de Protección Social.
Promoted by Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández as a needed reform, the scheme was advanced through a classic shock doctrine-style episode: In 2015, close associates of Hernández siphoned some $300 million from the Honduran Institute for Social Services (IHSS) into private businesses, starving hospitals of supplies and causing several thousand excess deaths, mostly among the poor.
With the medical sector in shambles, Hondurans were then forced to seek healthcare from the private companies that were to provide services under Hernandez's "Social Protection" plan.
"The money that was robbed [in the IHSS scandal] was used to justify the Ley Marco Proteccion Social," Karen Spring, a researcher and coordinator for the Honduras Solidarity Network, told The Grayzone. "The hospitals were left in horrible conditions with no human capital and they were left to farm out to private hospitals."
"When Hondurans go to hospitals, they will be told they need to go to a private company, and through the deductions in their jobs they will have to pay a lot out of pocket," Spring said. "Through the old universal system you would be covered no matter what you had, from a broken arm to cancer. No more."
In response, Hondurans poured out into the streets, launching the March of Torches - the first major wave of continuous protests against Hernandez and his corrupt administration.
In March 2015, in the middle of the crisis, Joe Biden rushed down to Guatemala City to embrace Hernández and restore confidence in the Alliance for Prosperity.
"I come from a state that, in fact, is the corporate capital of America. More corporations are headquartered there than anyplace else," Biden boasted, with Hernández and the presidents of Guatemala and El Salvador standing by his side. "They want to come here. Corporate America wants to come."
Joseph Biden embraces Juan Orlando Hernandez in Guatemala City, February 2016
Emphasizing the need for more anti-corruption and security measures to attract international financial investment, Biden pointed to Plan Colombia as a shining model - and to himself as its architect. "Today Colombia is a nation transformed, just as you hope to be 10 to 15 years from now," the vice president proclaimed.
Following Biden's visit, the privatization of the Honduran economy continued apace - and so did the corruption, the repression, and the unflinching support from Washington.
Hondurans take to the streets, wind up in US-style supermax prisons
By 2017, the movement in Honduras that had galvanized against the US-orchestrated 2009 coup saw its most immediate opportunity for political transformation at the ballot box. President Hernández was running for re-election, violating a constitutional provision on term limits. His opponent, Salvador Nasrallah, was a popular broadcast personality who provided a centrist consensus choice for the varied elements that opposed the country's coup regime.
When voting ended on November 26, Nasrallah's victory appeared certain, with exit polls showing him comfortably ahead by several points. But suddenly, the government announced that a power outage required the suspension of vote counting. Days later, Hernández was declared the victor by about 1 percent.
The fraud was so transparent that the Organization of American States (OAS), normally an arm of US interests in Latin America, declared in a preliminary report that "errors, irregularities and systemic problems," as well as "extreme statistical improbability," rendered the election invalid.
But the United States recognized the results anyway, leaving disenfranchised Hondurans with protest as their only recourse.
"Hondurans tried to change what happened in their country through the 2017 elections, not just Hernández but all the implementation of all these policies that the Biden plan had funded and implemented all these years since the coup," explained Karen Spring, of the Honduras Solidarity Network.
"They tried to change that reality through votes and when the elections turned out to be a fraud, tons of people had no choice but to take to the streets."
At the front lines of the protests in 2017 was Spring's longtime partner, the Honduran activist Edwin Espinal. Following a protest in November of that year where property damage took place, Espinal was arrested at gunpoint at his home and accused of setting fire to the front door of a hotel. He fervently denied all charges, accusing the government of persecuting him for his political activism.
In fact, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had placed a protective measure on Espinal in 2010 in response to previous attempts to legally railroad him.
The government placed Espinal in pre-trial detention in La Tolva, a US-style maximum security prison normally reserved for violent criminals and narco-traffickers. Last October, Espinal and Spring were married in the jail while surrounded by masked guards.
Karen Spring and Edwin Espinal marry in La Tolva in October 2018 (Photo: Karen Spring)
"Since the Biden plan, contractors have been coming down to build these US-style maximum security prisons," Spring said. "That's where my husband Edwin Espinal is being held."
"They say the company is Honduran but there's no way Hondurans could have built that without US architects or US construction firms giving them the plans," she added. "I've been in the prison and it's like they dumped a US prison in the middle of Honduras."
Reflecting on her husband's persecution, Spring explained, "Edwin wanted to stay in his country to change the reality that caused mass migration. He's one of the people who's faced consequences because he went to the streets. And he's faced persecution for years because he's one of the Hondurans who wanted to change the country by staying and fighting. Berta Caceres was another."
"Hondurans wanted to use their votes to change the country and now they're voting with their feet," she continued. "So if Biden's plan really addressed the root causes of the migrant crisis, why aren't people asking why migration is getting worse? Hondurans are voting on the Biden plan by fleeing and saying your plan didn't work and it made our situation worse by fleeing to the border."
#10271284 at 2020-08-13 06:26:39 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #13145: "Anons have the strong covfefe tonight" Edition
Colombian Electoral Council Opens Formal Investigation Of President Duque For Illegal Campaign Financing
The National Electoral Council (CNE) of Colombia announced today that it has opened a preliminary investigation against President Iván Duque and his political party Centro Democrático (CD). The party allegedly failed to comply with electoral regulations on electoral financing during the campaign of 2018 in which Duque was elected president.
The CNE explained that the investigation is related to alleged contributions from the Venezuelan businessman Oswaldo Cisneros for a total value of US$300,000.
According to the Colombian Constitution, national electoral campaigns are prohibited from receiving donations from abroad. Cisneros is a businessman linked to the oil industry and his family is among the richest in Venezuela.
The starting point for the investigation was wiretapping requested by the Colombian Public Ministry. The people involved in the conversations were: Nubia Stella Martínez, director of CD; María Claudia Daza, who was an advisor to former president Alvaro Uribe and is now out of the country; and José "Ñeñe" Hernández, a cattle rancher who was murdered last year in Brazil during a robbery.
María Daza spoke with both about the alleged contributions of the Venezuelan businessman Oswaldo Cisneros. In the conversation between Martínez and Daza, published by the newspaper El Tiempo, Uribe's former adviser asked, "What happened with the Venezuelan?", to which the director of the president's political party replied, "Yes. Do you know how much he gave us? $300,000."
However, the CD director herself tried to justify her words by arguing that she suffered a 'lapse' when speaking with Daza. "It was not 'gave', but 'offered to give' (...). I said that sum because it was the one the businessman used. But one thing is what people offer in the campaigns and another is what they actually end up giving," Martinez explained to the Colombian newspaper.
The CNE summoned both to testify, as well as Luis Guillermo Echeverri, campaign manager of current president Ivan Duque. In addition, the electoral council sent a letter in which the "CD is asked to send a copy of the accounting supports of the electoral campaign of the then candidate Dr Iván Duque Márquez, in order to determine the origin and amount of the contributions consigned in the income report and expenses of the campaign to the Presidency."
https://southfront.org/colombian-electoral-council-opens-formal-investigation-of-president-duque-for-illegal-campaign-financing/
#10185793 at 2020-08-05 04:23:37 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #13035: The Up In Smoke Edition
Colombia's Supreme Court places former president Alvaro Uribe under house arrest as he faces charges of fraud and witness tampering
https://twitter.com/AFP/status/1290845102647029761
#9508115 at 2020-06-06 22:05:32 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #12169: CASTLE_ROCK_GODSPEED Edition
#12166
>>9505853 No surprise, Radical leftist AOC supports 'Defund the Police' movement
>>9505860 Secret Service 'Special Operations Counter Sniper Team' w/ long duffle bags heading into Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation + Institute building a block north of WH
>>9505905 French forces kill al-Qaida's North African commander
>>9505912, >>9505936 Hayward: Democrats Embrace the 'Four Stages of Ideological Subversion
>>9505958 Live: George Floyd's Memorial Service Takes Place In North Carolina | NBC News
>>9505965 Military units providing crowd and riot control will be following training and method covered in US Army Field Manual FM 3-19.15
>>9506025 Flashback from 2017: Donors of Anti-Trump "Resistance" Group Revealed (GS)
>>9505978 Eyes on: Antifa advertising to pay protestors in Lincoln, NE + Omaha, NE - "we want to cause as much chaos and destruction as possible"
>>9505987 Prayer to combat witchcraft attack + digs on Carlo Maria Viganò
>>9506001 POTUS tweets Nunes interview on OAN re: Rosenstein testimony
>>9506005 Article on Archbishop Viganò's letter to President Trump (from Q's post)
>>9506037 DC traffic cams, Antifa movements, Temporary U.S. Marshalls sworn in and other happenings
>>9506046 Report on China's space capabilities
>>9506095, >>9506246 US Army soldier assigned to the 470th Military Intelligence Brigade + wife and 4 kids MURDERED
>>9506188 Provocateurs are already active in Canada. Big turnouts today.
>>9506252 Defense Secretary Mark Esper Orders National Guard in D.C. to Disarm, Wear Soft Caps Instead of Helmets
>>9506270 Ahmadinejad's Back? Veteran Iranian Politician Reportedly Plans to Run for President Again in 2021
>>9506291 All Seattle protesters now eligible for free drive-up COVID-19 testing
>>9506320 NBC News: The suspect in Wednesday night's stabbing of a NYPD officer in Brooklyn was recorded saying "Allahu Akbar" 3 times during the incident, the NYPD says.
>>9506346 Yellow Jackets being replaced by BLM? Macron Govt Fears Black Lives Matter Protests Could Spread Riots Across France
>>9506352 40/60? They lied about all this. What else have they lied about?
>>9506353 RE: @robbystarbuck tweeting the NYT article lb, What they are doing is emotional, familial, financial and racial BLACKMAIL.
>>9506354 Anon: We need to be monitoring Washington DC Facebook Marketplace for Antifa comms
>>9506385 Fake Police Arrested, Allegedly Filming Video to Frame Real Cops as Racist
>>9506453 Planefag dig on spoopy plane registered to Vitali Lapko
>>9506562 #12166
#12165
>>9505734 Street Level Liberals waking up?
>>9505720 LA Govt Official kicks BLM off porch
>>9505477 1200 Public Health Experts advocate mass gatherings because "White Supremacy" is bigger threat than COVID-19
>>9505467 Swedish Police Chief: "We stand on the side of the Protestors".
>>9505455 Secret Service Sniper Equipment spotted near White House, >>9505468, >>9505648
>>9505358 Following the Pen of Catherine Herridge leads to UCMJ Articles 2 and 88 re Contempt towards officials, >>9505362
>>9505355 Colombia's Supreme Court opens another criminal investigation against former President Alvaro Uribe
>>9505311 CBS Herridge Tweet decoded >>9505321, >>9505557, >>9505651
>>9505245 Anti-Government Protests in Beirut Explode Into Violence
>>9505165 Planewatch, >>9505181, >>9505485, >>9505717
>>9505156 Netanyahu, Gantz said to form mini-security cabinet to discuss West Bank annexation, Iran nuclear program
>>9505147 The DC stream is now streaming
>>9505123 US Launches First Airstrikes Against Taliban Since Ceasefire Ended
>>9505109 Thousands rally in Tel Aviv against Netanyahu's annexation plans
>>9505108 89 former DOD Officials call out Trump's 'inflammatory' threat
>>9505085 Archive.org under attack again
>>9505083 Literature on Coup d'etat
>>9505802 #12165
Previously Collected Notables
>>9503507 #12162, >>9504261 #12163, >>9505042 #12164
>>9501218 #12159, >>9501966 #12160, >>9502730 #12161
>>9498827 #12156, >>9499605 #12157, >>9500379 #12158
>>9496586 #12153, >>9497353 #12154, >>9498125 #12155
>>9494275 #12150, >>9495034 #12151, >>9495818 #12152
Notables Aggregators: https://wearethene.ws & https://qnotables.com
#9507343 at 2020-06-06 21:29:56 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #12168: RIP Jared Esquibel Harless Edition
#12165
>>9505734 Street Level Liberals waking up?
>>9505720 LA Govt Official kicks BLM off porch
>>9505477 1200 Public Health Experts advocate mass gatherings because "White Supremacy" is bigger threat than COVID-19
>>9505467 Swedish Police Chief: "We stand on the side of the Protestors".
>>9505455 Secret Service Sniper Equipment spotted near White House, >>9505468, >>9505648
>>9505358 Following the Pen of Catherine Herridge leads to UCMJ Articles 2 and 88 re Contempt towards officials, >>9505362
>>9505355 Colombia's Supreme Court opens another criminal investigation against former President Alvaro Uribe
>>9505311 CBS Herridge Tweet decoded >>9505321, >>9505557, >>9505651
>>9505245 Anti-Government Protests in Beirut Explode Into Violence
>>9505165 Planewatch, >>9505181, >>9505485, >>9505717
>>9505156 Netanyahu, Gantz said to form mini-security cabinet to discuss West Bank annexation, Iran nuclear program
>>9505147 The DC stream is now streaming
>>9505123 US Launches First Airstrikes Against Taliban Since Ceasefire Ended
>>9505109 Thousands rally in Tel Aviv against Netanyahu's annexation plans
>>9505108 89 former DOD Officials call out Trump's 'inflammatory' threat
>>9505085 Archive.org under attack again
>>9505083 Literature on Coup d'etat
>>9505802 #12165
Previously Collected Notables
>>9503507 #12162, >>9504261 #12163, >>9505042 #12164
>>9501218 #12159, >>9501966 #12160, >>9502730 #12161
>>9498827 #12156, >>9499605 #12157, >>9500379 #12158
>>9496586 #12153, >>9497353 #12154, >>9498125 #12155
>>9494275 #12150, >>9495034 #12151, >>9495818 #12152
Notables Aggregators: https://wearethene.ws & https://qnotables.com
#9506586 at 2020-06-06 20:42:55 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #12167: Do You See What Is Happening? Edition
Global Announcements
>>9502804 HRC FBI Mail Digs, >>9503200, >>9504111
Klausutis/Scarborough diggz https://pastebin.com/FFB6n1VG
DC Live Streams: >>9502052, >>9502349, >>9502360, >>9502852, >>9502855, >>9502856, >>9503587
DC Surveillance Tools:
>>9502289 Bus tracker for arrivals in Washington DC
>>9502398 D.C. traffic cams
>>9501918 Train tracker for DC area
Notables
are not endorsements
#12166
>>9505853 No surprise, Radical leftist AOC supports 'Defund the Police' movement
>>9505860 Secret Service 'Special Operations Counter Sniper Team' w/ long duffle bags heading into Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation + Institute building a block north of WH
>>9505905 French forces kill al-Qaida's North African commander
>>9505912, >>9505936 Hayward: Democrats Embrace the 'Four Stages of Ideological Subversion
>>9505958 Live: George Floyd's Memorial Service Takes Place In North Carolina | NBC News
>>9505965 Military units providing crowd and riot control will be following training and method covered in US Army Field Manual FM 3-19.15
>>9506025 Flashback from 2017: Donors of Anti-Trump "Resistance" Group Revealed (GS)
>>9505978 Eyes on: Antifa advertising to pay protestors in Lincoln, NE + Omaha, NE - "we want to cause as much chaos and destruction as possible"
>>9505987 Prayer to combat witchcraft attack + digs on Carlo Maria Viganò
>>9506001 POTUS tweets Nunes interview on OAN re: Rosenstein testimony
>>9506005 Article on Archbishop Viganò's letter to President Trump (from Q's post)
>>9506037 DC traffic cams, Antifa movements, Temporary U.S. Marshalls sworn in and other happenings
>>9506046 Report on China's space capabilities
>>9506095, >>9506246 US Army soldier assigned to the 470th Military Intelligence Brigade + wife and 4 kids MURDERED
>>9506188 Provocateurs are already active in Canada. Big turnouts today.
>>9506252 Defense Secretary Mark Esper Orders National Guard in D.C. to Disarm, Wear Soft Caps Instead of Helmets
>>9506270 Ahmadinejad's Back? Veteran Iranian Politician Reportedly Plans to Run for President Again in 2021
>>9506291 All Seattle protesters now eligible for free drive-up COVID-19 testing
>>9506320 NBC News: The suspect in Wednesday night's stabbing of a NYPD officer in Brooklyn was recorded saying "Allahu Akbar" 3 times during the incident, the NYPD says.
>>9506346 Yellow Jackets being replaced by BLM? Macron Govt Fears Black Lives Matter Protests Could Spread Riots Across France
>>9506352 40/60? They lied about all this. What else have they lied about?
>>9506353 RE: @robbystarbuck tweeting the NYT article lb, What they are doing is emotional, familial, financial and racial BLACKMAIL.
>>9506354 Anon: We need to be monitoring Washington DC Facebook Marketplace for Antifa comms
>>9506385 Fake Police Arrested, Allegedly Filming Video to Frame Real Cops as Racist
>>9506453 Planefag dig on spoopy plane registered to Vitali Lapko
>>9506562 #12166
#12165
>>9505734 Street Level Liberals waking up?
>>9505720 LA Govt Official kicks BLM off porch
>>9505477 1200 Public Health Experts advocate mass gatherings because "White Supremacy" is bigger threat than COVID-19
>>9505467 Swedish Police Chief: "We stand on the side of the Protestors".
>>9505455 Secret Service Sniper Equipment spotted near White House, >>9505468, >>9505648
>>9505358 Following the Pen of Catherine Herridge leads to UCMJ Articles 2 and 88 re Contempt towards officials, >>9505362
>>9505355 Colombia's Supreme Court opens another criminal investigation against former President Alvaro Uribe
>>9505311 CBS Herridge Tweet decoded >>9505321, >>9505557, >>9505651
>>9505245 Anti-Government Protests in Beirut Explode Into Violence
>>9505165 Planewatch, >>9505181, >>9505485, >>9505717
>>9505156 Netanyahu, Gantz said to form mini-security cabinet to discuss West Bank annexation, Iran nuclear program
>>9505147 The DC stream is now streaming
>>9505123 US Launches First Airstrikes Against Taliban Since Ceasefire Ended
>>9505109 Thousands rally in Tel Aviv against Netanyahu's annexation plans
>>9505108 89 former DOD Officials call out Trump's 'inflammatory' threat
>>9505085 Archive.org under attack again
>>9505083 Literature on Coup d'etat
>>9505802 #12165
#9505821 at 2020-06-06 19:50:15 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #12166: It's Good to be Black! Edition
Global Announcements
>>9502804 HRC FBI Mail Digs, >>9503200, >>9504111
Klausutis/Scarborough diggz https://pastebin.com/FFB6n1VG
DC Live Streams: >>9502052, >>9502349, >>9502360, >>9502852, >>9502855, >>9502856, >>9503587
DC Surveillance Tools:
>>9502289 Bus tracker for arrivals in Washington DC
>>9502398 D.C. traffic cams
>>9501918 Train tracker for DC area
Notables
are not endorsements
#12165
>>9505734 Street Level Liberals waking up?
>>9505720 LA Govt Official kicks BLM off porch
>>9505477 1200 Public Health Experts advocate mass gatherings because "White Supremacy" is bigger threat than COVID-19
>>9505467 Swedish Police Chief: "We stand on the side of the Protestors".
>>9505455 Secret Service Sniper Equipment spotted near White House, >>9505468, >>9505648
>>9505358 Following the Pen of Catherine Herridge leads to UCMJ Articles 2 and 88 re Contempt towards officials, >>9505362
>>9505355 Colombia's Supreme Court opens another criminal investigation against former President Alvaro Uribe
>>9505311 CBS Herridge Tweet decoded >>9505321, >>9505557, >>9505651
>>9505245 Anti-Government Protests in Beirut Explode Into Violence
>>9505165 Planewatch, >>9505181, >>9505485, >>9505717
>>9505156 Netanyahu, Gantz said to form mini-security cabinet to discuss West Bank annexation, Iran nuclear program
>>9505147 The DC stream is now streaming
>>9505123 US Launches First Airstrikes Against Taliban Since Ceasefire Ended
>>9505109 Thousands rally in Tel Aviv against Netanyahu's annexation plans
>>9505108 89 former DOD Officials call out Trump's 'inflammatory' threat
>>9505085 Archive.org under attack again
>>9505083 Literature on Coup d'etat
>>9505802 #12165
#12164
>>9505007 DC mayor does not have the power to send away National Guard: Attorney
>>9504914 6.5 POTUS COMMS + ++ +++
>>9504884 Antifa protests reach Rural America, >>9504936
>>9504822 FL Supreme Court Strikes Down Anti-'Assault Weapons' Amendment
>>9504804 Judge in Jeffrey Epstein grand jury case has ties to those with a stake in outcome
>>9504785 Facebook blocking some of its users from posting live content
>>9504782 George Papadopoulos pipes in on current situation with RR, Barr, Durham.
>>9504732 If you find this mark on your house, Antifa may have singled it out
>>9504675 Former Chief of Staff, John Kelly, joins Generals Mutiny, agreing with Jim Mattis.
>>9504588 Protesters Throw Molotov Cocktails at U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, >>9504621
>>9504561 US Marines order Confederate flag to be removed from public display
>>9504533 Fake Police Arrested, Allegedly Filming Video to Frame Real Cops as Racist
>>9504507 Influencing behavior through supercomputers
>>9504493 CBS -> Catherine Herridge Twitter pics since NOV 2019., >>9504510
>>9504476 Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano encourages President Trump to continue his fight on behalf of the "children of light", >>9504816, >>9504737 Prelimenary digs on him are promising
>>9504482 EAM loyalists: Nr. 017 released. WHITE CROSS node 3896 size 185
>>9504421 Planewatch, >>9504543, >>9504665, >>9504766
>>9504400 Divorce Rate increases 30% in Saudi Arabia, as polygamous husbands are uncovered
>>9504381 Breaking911 wipes tweets pre June 4th, flipped sides?
>>9504377 Croatia: NGO files charges against police for abusing migrants
>>9504374 Sauce for the 53rd infantry brigade swearing in as US Marshals.
>>9504355 Evidence points to CNN and Shaun King guilty of fabricating George Floyd video.
>>9504348 Jamie Dimon Takes the Knee in front of Bank Vault, sparking Outrage
>>9504326 Loop Capital. Very Important.
>>9504317 German foreign minister to fly to Israel to stop Tel Aviv's West Bank plans, report says
>>9505042 #12164
#12163
>>9504127 US corporate media act as 'mouthpieces of intelligence services' on foreign policy & national security - ex-WSJ journalist to RT
>>9504004 Without Consulting Trump White House - Defense Secretary Esper Orders National Guard NOT to Carry Guns or Ammunition in Washington DC
>>9503934 Boatfag Report
>>9503900 'We're coming to get you out of the White House'
>>9503839 Continued dig on Jacob Frey, >>9503972 Dai Thao
>>9503792 Warroom Operation #ObamaGate #TheyAllKnew
>>9503575 Planewatch, >>9503697, >>9504209
>>9503604 Twitter Accounts Tell Protesters all They Need to Know-Direct from the Streets
>>9503633 Mayor Muriel Requests withdrawal of all Military & extraordinary Federal Law enforcement in the city
>>9503667 Stephen Jackson, alleged 'twin' of George Floyd, speaks at rally after police officer charged with murder, >>9503869
>>9503776 New White House Tweet: "Those who fought here.."
>>9503777 Malaysia refuses $3 billion Goldmann Sachs offer, claiming they stole more than that.
>>9504261 #12163
#9505802 at 2020-06-06 19:49:06 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #12165: Love more than Hate Edition
#12165
>>9505734 Street Level Liberals waking up?
>>9505720 LA Govt Official kicks BLM off porch
>>9505477 1200 Public Health Experts advocate mass gatherings because "White Supremacy" is bigger threat than COVID-19
>>9505467 Swedish Police Chief: "We stand on the side of the Protestors".
>>9505455 Secret Service Sniper Equipment spotted near White House, >>9505468, >>9505648
>>9505358 Following the Pen of Catherine Herridge leads to UCMJ Articles 2 and 88 re Contempt towards officials, >>9505362
>>9505355 Colombia's Supreme Court opens another criminal investigation against former President Alvaro Uribe
>>9505311 CBS Herridge Tweet decoded >>9505321, >>9505557, >>9505651
>>9505245 Anti-Government Protests in Beirut Explode Into Violence
>>9505165 Planewatch, >>9505181, >>9505485, >>9505717
>>9505156 Netanyahu, Gantz said to form mini-security cabinet to discuss West Bank annexation, Iran nuclear program
>>9505147 The DC stream is now streaming
>>9505123 US Launches First Airstrikes Against Taliban Since Ceasefire Ended
>>9505109 Thousands rally in Tel Aviv against Netanyahu's annexation plans
>>9505108 89 former DOD Officials call out Trump's 'inflammatory' threat
>>9505085 Archive.org under attack again
>>9505083 Literature on Coup d'etat
#9505609 at 2020-06-06 19:38:59 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #12165: Love more than Hate Edition
Saturday 06.06.2020
>>9505231 ---------------- Remember your oath. (Cap: >>9505253)
#12165
>>9505477 1200 Public Health Experts advocate mass gatherings because "White Supremacy" is bigger threat than COVID-19
>>9505467 Swedish Police Chief: "We stand on the side of the Protestors".
>>9505455 Secret Service Sniper Equipment spotted near White House, >>9505468
>>9505358 Following the Pen of Catherine Herridge leads to UCMJ Articles 2 and 88 re Contempt towards officials, >>9505362
>>9505355 Colombia's Supreme Court opens another criminal investigation against former President Alvaro Uribe
>>9505311 Clockfags, take notice, >>9505321l, >>9505557
>>9505245 Anti-Government Protests in Beirut Explode Into Violence
>>9505165 Planewatch, >>9505181, >>9505485
>>9505156 Netanyahu, Gantz said to form mini-security cabinet to discuss West Bank annexation, Iran nuclear program
>>9505147 The DC stream is now streaming
>>9505123 US Launches First Airstrikes Against Taliban Since Ceasefire Ended
>>9505109 Thousands rally in Tel Aviv against Netanyahu's annexation plans
>>9505108 89 former DOD Officials call out Trump's 'inflammatory' threat
>>9505085 Archive.org under attack again
>>9505083 Literature on Coup d'etat
#9505355 at 2020-06-06 19:25:06 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #12165: Love more than Hate Edition
Colombia's Supreme Court Opens Another Criminal Investigation Against Former President Alvaro Uribe
The net may finally be closing in on Senator and former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez. He is Colombia's equivalent of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, constituting the epicentre of power politics for almost two decades since he was first elected president by a landslide in 2002. He served in that capacity until 2010, and has remained one of the most powerful personalities in the Colombian political-military establishment ever since.
Although many of his closest lieutenants and associates have been prosecuted and are serving long prison sentences for crimes committed during this period (2002-2010), and in many cases Uribe has been implicated in them and it is inconceivable that they could have been commissioned and carried out without his knowledge, he has thus far managed to divert and avoid all accusations against him notwithstanding a large number of outstanding investigations which seem to be frozen in time and lost in space.
There are a multitude of investigations pending before a Congressional committee that show no signs of progress after many years. There are about a dozen investigations before the Supreme Court that remain stuck in the preliminary stages, again in some instances for many years. As some of the cases have approached preliminary hearings, the Supreme Court has found its position threatened as Uribe's political colleagues and allies in the Congress have been trying to push through sweeping changes to the judicial system which coincidentally would abolish the Supreme Court completely. Earlier this year the plenary bench of the Supreme Court abdicated many of its powers when the sitting magistrates failed to reach agreement over the appointment of new members.
Finally, on numerous occasions key witnesses against Uribe have turned up dead (it still flabbergasts me, why can't prosecutors and magistrates take testimony at the moment a witness is identified or very shortly thereafter - in this respect, former paramilitary chief Salvatore Mancuso could well be at the top of the endangered species list).
On the 15th of May, the Investigative Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice opened a preliminary investigation against Álvaro Uribe, pursuant to a complaint that arrived to the court by email. According to the complaint, Uribe was the recipient of information obtained through illegal interceptions and surveillance that military intelligence officers were carrying out against journalists, politicians, lawyers and government opponents. This is the latest preliminary investigation known against Uribe, but it is not the only one. At least two Supreme Court magistrates involved in investigating Uribe have been targets of the illegal intercepts and surveillance, either by military intelligence units directly or by other extremely powerful and well-equipped groups.
https://southfront.org/colombias-supreme-court-opens-another-criminal-investigation-against-former-president-Alvaro-Uribe/
#9024308 at 2020-05-04 15:33:45 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #11551: You'll Love How This Movie Ends Edition
Colombian military sacks 11 senior general and officials over spying probe
Colombia's military has been shaken by spy allegations that reached all the way to the office of President Alvaro Uribe.
On Friday, 11 senior officials were sacked and a senior general was forced to resign over an ongoing investigation into allegations that the Colombian military illegally spied on journalists, politicians, opposition politicians, Supreme Court magistrates and other military members.
The investigation by the Attorney General's office began in January after the news magazine Semana published a scathing report. According to the report, members of the Administrative Department of Security (DAS), were reportedly spying on officials since as far back as the 2016 peace negotiations with the FARC rebels.
The ongoing probe is looking into several former directors of the DAS security service and more than a dozen other former or current officials at that agency. The Inspector General's office has called both Supreme Court Justice Jaime Arrubia and President Alvaro Uribe to testify as witnesses.
https://sofrep.com/news/colombian-military-sacks-11-senior-general-and-officials-over-spying-probe/
#6078387 at 2019-04-07 00:55:56 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #7773: Progressive Cannibals Edition
>>6078199 Alvaro Uribe
Álvaro Uribe Vélez (born 4 July 1952) is a Colombian politician who served as the 57th President of Colombia from 7 August 2002 to 7 August 2010.
Uribe studied law. Álvaro Uribe focused his political career and became a member of the political party Partido Centro Democrático. In 1993 he attended Harvard University, receiving a Certificate of Special Studies in Administration and Management at Harvard Extension School and Certificate in Negotiation and Dispute Resolution at Harvard Law School. Between 1998 and 1999, he studied at St Antony's College, Oxford, England, on a Chevening-Simón Bolívar scholarship and was appointed Senior Associate Member at St Antony's College.
Uribe started his political career in his home department of Antioquia. He has held office in the Empresas Públicas de Medellín and in the Ministry of Labor and was the director of the Special Administrative Unit of Civil Aeronautics (1980-1982). He was named Mayor of Medellín in October 1982 by Belisario Betancur. However, he was discharged of his function in February 1983, five months after his appointment, by Président Betancur for his alleged collaboration with drug traffickers.[1] He was Senator between 1986 and 1994 and finally Governor of Antioquia between 1995 and 1997 before he was elected President of Colombia in 2002. Following his 2002 election, Uribe led successful campaigns against the FARC and the ELN. On 13 January 2009 the United States awarded President Uribe the Presidential Medal of Freedom. However, the war was accompanied by large-scale exactions: thousands of civilians were killed by the Colombian army (see "False positives" scandal) with almost total impunity, according to the United Nations.[2] and millions of people have been victims of forced displacement.[3]
In an official document of the Defense Intelligence Agency, dated 1991, Álvaro Uribe appears at number 82 of a list containing the names of the most important drug dealers in Colombia. Uribe is described there as a collaborator of the Medellín Cartel and intimate friend of Pablo Escobar; he is also accused of possessing financial interests in companies engaged in drug trafficking and would have assisted the cartel with regard to extradition laws.[4][5] Recently released diplomatic cables show that a Colombian senator told the U.S. Embassy in 1993 that the founders of the Medellín Cartel financed Uribe's senate election campaign.
#6062797 at 2019-04-05 20:35:55 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #7754: Roadblock Down Wall Going Up Edition
>>6062767
Elsztain representing Rockefeller, Rothschild interests in Argentina
As Argentine newspaper La Nación noted in 2005:
[Elsztain is] the Argentine businessman with the greatest [international] contacts in the business world ... and, like no other Argentine, has a direct channel to many of the world's wealthiest men, who in many cases become his [Elsztain's] partner in local projects."
Indeed, Elsztain and his associates are often the avenue through which international oligarchs insert themselves into Argentina's economy and politics, first for Soros and now for much more powerful figures.
The Council of the Americas (COA) was originally founded in 1963 by David Rockefeller as the Business Group for Latin America, which two years later became known as the Council for Latin America and then the Center for Inter-American Relations before undergoing a final name change. From its founding to its current state, the COA has been the voice of the multinational corporations (and the oligarchs behind them) that represent the vast majority of U.S.-based private investment in Latin America. The organization is often described as the Latin American equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which was chaired by David Rockefeller for several decades and has long been heavily funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. David Rockefeller founded the COA while serving as CFR chairman.
Rockefeller was the COA chairman from 1981 to 1992 and was honorary chairman until his death in 2017. The vast majority of the directors on COA's board are executives of Latin American operations of major European and U.S. multinational corporations such as Shell Oil, JP Morgan, PepsiCo, Chevron, Boeing, Citigroup and Microsoft. One of the group's chairmen after Rockefeller was John Negroponte, who was involved in the Reagan era cover-up of U.S. support for Latin American death squads and was deeply involved in the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was the "brainchild" of COA. Negroponte also served as U.S. ambassador to Iraq and later deputy secretary of state under George W. Bush and was the first Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Negroponte is currently COA chairman emeritus and on its board of directors.
The current COA chairman is Andrés Gulski, a former IMF official and Santander bank executive who is currently CEO and President of AES power company, which - alongside Mindlin and Lewis' Pampa Energia - is one of the top electricity producers in Argentina. Gulski also served in Venezuela's ministry of finance in the U.S.-backed, pre-Chávez government and more recently was on Barack Obama's Export Council. COA's current president and CEO is Susan Segal, a former JP Morgan executive who "was actively involved in the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s, sitting on many Advisory Committees as well as serving as chairperson for the Chilean and Philippine Advisory Committees" while the former country was ruled by a brutal, U.S.-backed military dictatorship. She also received an award from Colombia's then-President Alvaro Uribe, who once led Colombia's right-wing narco-death squads.
3/3
#5747712 at 2019-03-18 04:13:41 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #7351: Thanks For Playing, @Jack Edition
>>5745417 7348
Rigged?
https://www.valuewalk.com/2018/04/george-soros-money-philippines/
There is a dark path from Comelec/Smartmatic debacles to destabilized Latin America, British Malloch Brown, the Balkans, billionaire speculator George Soros, ambassador Philip Goldberg, drugs, and compromised institutions.
///
During the '90s, Malloch Brown rented his apartment from Soros while working on UN assignments in New York. The cozy ties were projected on the world stage. Soros used the Brit to influence public organizations. So from the World Bank, Malloch Brown moved on to serve as the head of the UN Development Program and Kofi Annan's deputy secretary-general.
Soros expanded his projects in collaboration with Malloch Brown and UN, particularly in Eastern Europe where his Open Society Institute (OSI) shaped the West's post-Cold War agendas. When the UNDP's course of action conflicted with that of Soros, it was overruled by Soros or Malloch-Brown, UN authorities lament. Concurrently, Soros's speculation contributed to the Asian financial crisis and sharp devaluations.
In 2002, Malloch Brown suggested that the UN and Soros' OSI work together to fund humanitarian functions, despite moral hazards associated with a publicly-financed UNDP and Soros's philanthropy that was tied to a hedge fund. The reward ensued in 2007, when Soros' Quantum Fund appointed Malloch Brown as vice-president, and vice chairman of the Open Society, despite the lack of investment experience. Reduced transparency deepened in 2011, when Soros decided to transform the Quantum Fund into a family investment group, to avoid having to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and comply with reporting requirements under the Dodd-Frank Reform Act.
Malloch Brown was busy, too. He joined Gordon Brown's UK government until a controversy about his family's occupancy of a government-owned government led him to step down. So he became a chairman for the Washington-based FTI Consulting. After the Great Recession, FTI had the largest restructuring business in the US (e.g., Lehman Brothers, GM). However, in Latin America, it has been linked with efforts by right-wing Colombian groups and former President Alvaro Uribe to destabilize Venezuela. Uribe has been associated with drug trafficking and ties with Pablo Escobar, as documented by the US Defense Intelligence Agency.
It was amid all this turmoil that Malloch Brown became the chair of the election technology group SGO, ostensibly to ensure "fair voting processes."
while most other mainstream fishwraps point out that Soros does not own Smartmatic…
well maybe not on paper but by influence…hmmm
#5215554 at 2019-02-17 03:33:29 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #6664: Amen Edition
BRIEF MEMO FOR CHERYL MILLS ON COLOMBIA - FOR SECRETARY CLINTON
From: Hillary Clinton
To: Cheryl Mills
Date: 2010-06-05 09:16
Subject: BRIEF MEMO FOR CHERYL MILLS ON COLOMBIA - FOR SECRETARY CLINTON
UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05775576 Date: 08/31/2015
RELEASE IN PART B5
From: H <hrod17@clintonemail.com >
Sent: Sunday, June 6, 2010 4:16 PM
To: 'millscd@state.gov'
Cc: 'sullivanjj@state.govi; Huma Abedin
Subject: Re: Brief memo for Cheryl Mills on Colombia - for Secretary Clinton
B5
Original Message
From: Mills, Cheryl D <MillsCD@state.gov >
To: H
Sent: Thu Jun 03 13:48:20 2010
Subject: FW: Brief memo for Cheryl Mills on Colombia - for Secretary Clinton
fyi
From: Brownfield, William R
Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2010 10:41 AM
To: Mills, Cheryl D
Subject: RE: Brief memo for Cheryl Mills on Colombia - for Secretary Clinton
Cheryl
B5
UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05775576 Date: 08/31/2015
Feel free to share if you wish.
WRB
From: Mills, Cheryl D
Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2010 7:33 AM
To: Sullivan, Jacob J; Posner, Michael H
Cc: Abedin, Huma; Kelly, Craig A; Brownfield, William R; Fuchs, Michael H; Baer, Daniel B; Reines, Philippe I
Subject: FW: Brief memo for Cheryl Mills on Colombia - for Secretary Clinton
See b/I re travel to columbia
From: Buhl, Cindy [mailto:Cindy.Buhl@mail.house.gov]
Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 2010 3:49 PM
To: Mills, Cheryl D
Cc: Buhl, Cindy
Subject: Brief memo for Cheryl Mills on Colombia - for Secretary Clinton
Dear Cheryl -
In my last email (Friday, 5/28), I attached the letter from the bipartisan Co-Chairs and Executive Committee members of
the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission sent to Assistant Secretary Mike Posner expressing grave concern about the
recent rise in death threats, attacks and murders of Colombian human rights defenders, religious, community and other
NGO leaders. Congressman McGovern also strongly encouraged the Secretary to meet with representatives of those
organizations and individuals being threatened, with a particularly effort to reach out to and invite the Bishops of
Tumaco (Narifio), Barrancabermeja/Medio Magdalena (Santander), and we would now add Putumayo, since the
Colombian Catholic Church just advised us yesterday of increased death threats against religious workers there. In
addition, we recommended inviting Monserior Hector Fabio Henao, director of Pastoral Social, at the Archdiocese in
Bogota, who represents all the pastoral work of the Church throughout the country, as well as representatives from the
Mennonite and Lutheran churches, in particular.
While in Colombia, the most important thing the Secretary can do is avoid effusive praise for President Alvaro Uribe,
who leaves office in August. Inside Colombia, the visit by the Secretary is being described as focusing solely on the free
trade agreement and continuing support of the counterdrug strategy/Plan Colombia. Without changes in the human
rights situation and the culture of impunity, it is unlikely that anything the Secretary might say or do will alter the
equation on Capitol Hill regarding the trade agreement. It should be noted that the October 2008 GAO report on the
counter-drug operations in Colombia concluded that U.S. assistance was successful in increasing security in parts of the
country, but a failure in the areas of counter-narcotics (GAO-09-71) , and a subsequent April 2009 USAID evaluation on
U.S. aid for Plan Colombia for illegal crop reduction and Colombian counternarcotics policies actually contribute to
increased coca production.
#5155021 at 2019-02-13 14:52:03 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #6585: Good Morning Sunshines Edition
>>5155011
(contd)
"Giustra's donations create the problem that it could be difficult for the public to have confidence that Clinton's certifications of Colombia's labor rights record were made on the merit and without bias or partiality," said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis and a national expert on ethics in government. "Public officials need to know that even feelings of gratitude are an inappropriate influence."
The Clintons' financial relationship with Giustra "could undermine the public's confidence in [Hillary's] decisions," Clark said, particularly in a case that involves certifying the human- and labor-rights record of a country where Clinton's own State Department has admitted that "violence, threats, harassment, and other practices against trade unionists continued."
"It would be one thing if it was the secretary certifying that Finland is complying with human rights standards," Clark said. "But Colombia?"
That war-torn South American country has long been at the center of the relationship between the Clintons, Giustra and Pacific Rubiales.
Giustra and Bill Clinton reportedly first met in 2005, at a fundraiser for tsunami victims held at Giustra's home in Canada. They quickly became jet-setting friends. That year, as Giustra was on his way to becoming one of the Clinton Foundation's largest individual donors, an aide to Bill Clinton arranged an introduction between Giustra and the then-president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, the Wall Street Journal reported. After the meeting, Uribe moved to begin privatizing his country's state-owned oil company, Ecopetrol. Pacific Rubiales soon expanded its operations in Colombia in partnership with Ecopetrol, which was still being overseen by Uribe.
Giustra was at the time developing deep ties to Pacific Rubiales, seeding the firm with capital, according to CEO.ca. Other ties to the company remain: CEO.ca reports that Giustra is today a co-investor with Pacific Rubiales' executive director in a separate firm called Blue Pacific that has done business with the oil company. Giustra also serves on the board of Endeavour Mining, after a stint as that company's chairman. According to Endeavour documents, the conglomerate has advised and held equity stakes in Pacific Rubiales, and two of Giustra's fellow Endeavour board members (including its CEO, who has donated at least $50,000 to the Clinton Foundation) simultaneously serve on Pacific Rubiales' board. Giustra is listed as the founder of Pacific Rubiales on Endeavour's website, and Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper has called Pacific Rubiales a "Giustra-connected shell company."
Giustra's connections to Pacific Rubiales proved fruitful for the Clintons when in 2007 the oil giant became one of the first donors to a venture between Giustra and Bill Clinton. In a Pacific Rubiales news release quoting Giustra, the company announced that it was joining with its financial backers to give $4.4 million to the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (CGEP).
Incorporated in Canada as a "charitable business," CGEP says it seeks to "generate both social impact and financial returns" for investors. A majority of CGEP's partners have connections to oil and mining industries in Colombia. Two partners have major business interests in Colombia's palm oil industry, which human rights groups say is in part responsible for the world's second-largest internal refugee population, after Syria.
According to its website, the CGEP's mission is to address "market gaps in developing country supply or distribution chains." One of its larger projects has been to train young workers for jobs in "tourism, health care and port logistics" in Cartagena, Colombia, where the Giustra-connected company Blue Pacific owns a port that was under construction as of 2013, World Bank documents show.
Potential Complication
As Giustra continued expanding his businesses in Colombia, one potential complication for Colombian investors was the prospect of Democrats nixing a proposed U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement. During the 2008 presidential campaign, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton declared their unequivocal opposition to the deal, with the latter saying there should be "no trade deal with Colombia while violence against trade unionists continues in that country." She pledged that year to "do everything I can to urge the Congress to reject the Colombia Free Trade Agreement."
#4902391 at 2019-01-25 17:58:07 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #6258: Who Alerted Fake News Edition
>>4902266
Venezuela isn´t the big problem
Colombia is the BIG PROBLEM
50 years of civil war Jesuits C_A Israel
traffic cartels (drugs people oil food, everything)
Narco Politicians Alvaro Uribe is worst
6 bases of USA (maybe nuclear capacity cabal undergrounds compounds)
#3661372 at 2018-10-30 06:24:54 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #4648: Stay The Course Edition
>>3661323
More on Venezuela:
Duque sends 5000 troops to northeast Colombia days after locals beg not to militarize region
Colombia's President Ivan Duque said Sunday that he would send 5,000 soldiers to the northeast of the country days after locals begged him not to.
Duque announced the arrival of the soldiers while visiting the town of Ocaña in the troubled Catatumbo region that has been controlled by guerrillas for decades and is the country's second most important coca growing region.
https://colombiareports.com/duque-sends-5000-troops-to-northeast-colombia-days-after-locals-beg-not-to-militarize-region/
Colombia suggests alliance with Brazil's Bolsonaro to overthrow Venezuela's Maduro: report
A top Colombian official told Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo that its government will support Brazilian's far-right President-elect Jair Bolsonaro if he wants to overthrow the socialist government of Venezuela.
According to Folha, a top diplomatic official said that "if [President-elect] Bolsonaro wants to help overthrow Maduro with a military intervention, he will have the support of Colombia."
According to the anonymous source, Colombian President Ivan Duque and his political patron, the hard-right former President Alvaro Uribe, would agree with a military intervention.
"If it is [United States President Donald] Trump or Bolsonaro are the first to set foot in Venezuela, Colombia will follow suit without hesitation," the diplomat told Folha.
Venezuela's authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro has accused the governments of the US and Colombia for years of trying to topple his administration, which is not recognized as legitimate by the majority of countries in the western hemisphere.
https://colombiareports.com/colombia-suggests-alliance-with-brazils-far-right-bolsonaro-to-overthrow-venezuelas-government-report/
#3273217 at 2018-10-01 02:35:58 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #4146: Hang In There Justice K Edition
Keeping on with Guatemala:
DECISION BRIEF: UN Anti-Corruption Programs Are So Biased That US Must Shut Them Down
The "anti-corruption" cesspool of political bias is most glaring in our own hemisphere. The UN has given a pass to the corrupt and murderous Ortega family dictatorship in Nicaragua and its sister FMLN Marxist government in El Salvador. Instead, the UN focuses on Guatemala, a politically and culturally conservative country where the far Left, after a 30-year campaign of violent extremism, has no hope of coming to power democratically.
For most of the past decade, a special UN-sponsored agency has attacked Guatemala and aid the former Communist violent extremists. That agency, the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), worked with the former insurgents and their grassroots community organizations to infiltrate and tear down the constitutional and democratic order. Under a slogan to end "impunity and corruption," CICIG ran its own investigations and criminal prosecutions of Guatemalans who had opposed the Communists in the past.
CICIG's UN-appointed leader, Ivan Velasquez, is a Colombian lawyer and political activist tied to the FARC, ELN, and M19 narcoterrorists. As a judge in Colombia, Velasquez went after self-defense forces that combated the Cuban-backed guerrillas, and reputedly intervened on behalf of jailed narcoterrorists, while being part of their political front groups. Former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe said that as a judge, Velasquez was a member of pro-guerrilla "political group" and "never an impartial judge."
More in:
https://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2018/09/25/decision-brief-un-anti-corruption-programs-are-so-biased-that-us-must-shut-them-down/
#2455286 at 2018-08-04 23:47:20 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #3096: OHIO RALLY LIVE HIGH ENERGY Edition
Venezuela said it derailed a plot to kill President Nicolas Maduro, arresting two hitmen it said wanted to assassinate the leftist leader on orders from a Colombian conservative ex-president.
Interior Minister Miguel Rodriguez said at a briefing that Caracas arrested the alleged hitmen, two Colombians, on August 13.
The pair, Victor Johan Guache Mosquera and Erick Leonardo Huertas Rios, were part of "a group of 10 men who were coming to carry out the murder of the president," working with former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, Rodriguez charged.
Maduro himself called on US President Barack Obama to say if he ordered or knew of the alleged assassination plan.
Maduro said that besides Colombia, it was hatched by far-right Venezuelan opposition figures in Miami. Maduro is a frequent and fiery critic of Washington, as was his predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez.
"Is President Obama so weak that decisions are made for him in the United States to kill a Latin American head of state without his knowing it?" Maduro said to reporters.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/27/maduro-assassination-plot-venezuela_n_3820765.html?guccounter=1
#2294271 at 2018-07-26 09:03:14 (UTC+1)
Q Research #2891 Night of the Living Bread Edition
>Colombia ex-president alleges MI6 plot as death squad investigation closes in
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/25/colombia-Alvaro-Uribe-mi6-death-squads-charges