Ireland: British collusion exposed in hundreds of paramilitary murders

The BBC’s Panorama program on May 28 made explosive revelations about British state collusion with paramilitaries in the North of Ireland, implicating it in the murder of hundreds of people, and in subsequent cover-ups.

The documentary, titled "Britain’s Secret Terror Deals", detailed British security forces collusion with illegal paramilitary groups in the North on a vast scale, running thousands of informants and agents, many of them known criminals and murderers.

Former Police Ombudsman Baroness Nuala O’Loan told the program that some paramilitary informants recruited by the security forces during “the Troubles” were serial killers, and that their crimes – including murder, intimidation, drug smuggling and terrorism – were covered up.

“They were running informants and they were using them,” O’Loan told the program.

“Their argument was that by so doing they were saving lives, but hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people died because those people were not brought to justice and weren’t stopped in their tracks,” she said.

"There was impunity really for these people to go on committing their crimes. Many of them were killers, some were serial killers."

Ireland: Attacks on leading Sinn Féin members a threat to peace

Arson attack on a Sinn Féin billboard in Derry

A series of violent attacks and bomb threats against leading members of Sinn Féin, as well as a fatal shooting, threaten to overshadow May 7 elections in the six counties in the north of Ireland.

In recent weeks leading up to the May 7 British General Election there have been a series of arson attacks on Sinn Féin electoral billboards across the six counties.

Since the start of May, however, these attacks have escalated dramatically into a campaign of intimidation and violence, including arson, death threats, and bomb alerts targeting leading republicans.

On May 2, a number of cars were set alight in Derry, including one belonging to well-known local community worker and Sinn Féin activist Sean McMonagle.

Early in the morning of May 5, high profile Sinn Féin member Gerard “Jock” Davison was gunned down near his home in the Markets area of south Belfast on his way to work at the local community centre.

Euskal Herria: Spanish arrests a snub to calls for peace in the Basque Country

Guardia Civil arresting Oihana Barrios

The Spanish state has responded to an international declaration calling for the release of Basque political prisoners and a restoration of the peace process by arresting four representatives of the prisoners’ rights movement.

On March 25, Guardia Civil (Spain’s heavily politicised military police) arrested Nagore López de Luzuriaga, Izaskun Abaigar, Fernando Arburua and Oihana Barrios, in a series of coordinated raids in an operation codenamed “Pastor” (“Shepherd”).

Spain’s Ministry of the Interior confirmed that the operation had been carried carried out in the Basque provinces of Gipúzkoa, Vizcaya and Alava, as well as in Nafarroa, and that more arrests have not been ruled out.

The Ministry accused the four arrested of being part of a network using Basque political prisoners to support terrorism, and of coordinating a “cohesion front” among the prisoners on behalf of a terrorist organisation.

In fact, the “terrorist organisation” they are accused of working for – the armed separatist group ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna; “Basque Homeland and Freedom”) – has been on a "permanent ceasefire" since 2012, and accepts the necessity of a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

Raul Reyes and Colombia's tragedy

On March 1, Raul Reyes, a central leader of the 18,000-strong left-wing guerrilla army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), was killed in an illegal midnight attack by the Colombian army. The attack targeted a FARC encampment three kilometres south of the border in the Putumayo province of Ecuador.

At least 21 FARC members were killed in their sleep during the cluster bomb attack. The Colombian military then invaded Ecuadorian territory to retrieve the body of Reyes, the FARC's chief negotiator and public spokesperson. Reyes' bloodied corpse, still wearing pyjamas, was presented to the Colombian media as a trophy.

Reyes — born Luis Edgar Devia Silva on September 30, 1948 — began his revolutionary activities as a member of the youth organisation of the Colombian Communist Party, where he became an organiser.

Reyes became a union militant, working at a Nestle plant, until 1980, when he, along with many other unionists, was kidnapped and tortured by the army.

Seeing few alternatives, he moved to the mountains to join the FARC, which was waging an armed struggle against the Colombian dictatorship. Reyes' transformation — from union activist to guerrilla — reflects the tragic reality of politics in Colombia, which holds the macabre record of the highest rate of killings of trade unionists in the world.

By 1984, Reyes was on the seven-member FARC secretariat and, as their chief international spokesperson, became the best-known face of the FARC.

The current armed conflict in Colombia dates back more than five decades, to "La Violencia", the 10-year civil war between the Conservative and Liberal parties of the Colombian oligarchy that caused at least 200,000 deaths from 1948-58.

Many workers and peasants fled the violence, creating independent "peace communities" in the country's south. When the government attacked these communities, residents formed self-defence organisations with the assistance of the communist party. Out of these groups, the FARC was formed in 1964.

Since John F. Kennedy's administration, the US government has funded and supported the Colombian government in its brutal counter-insurgency war and state repression against the Colombian people — more than half of whom live in abject poverty.

After a truce was negotiated in 1984, the FARC helped form the Patriotic Union (UP), which participated in elections and won a number of senators and hundreds of local councillors. A wave of terror was unleashed in the year following the elections that resulted in 4000 UP activists being murdered.

Faced with this mass slaughter, the FARC withdrew back to the jungle, where they now control around a third of Colombian territory.

In the late 1990s, the FARC took part in peace negotiations with President Andres Pastrana's government. They were again betrayed. Under the cover of a truce, the Colombian government prepared for an escalation of its war.

The US and Colombian governments devised Plan Colombia, whereby the US provides Colombia with around US$600 million in military aid each year.

Ostensibly part of the "war on drugs", Plan Colombia is actually focused on the part of the country controlled by the guerrillas, while ignoring areas controlled by the right-wing terrorist paramilitaries of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC).

Despite claims from the US and Colombian governments, the FARC denies it is involved in drug trafficking, insisting its involvement extends only as far as refusing to forcibly eradicate the coca plants that are the only source of income for impoverished peasants in territories that it control. The FARC calls for alternative crops to be provided for peasants to grow, and sustainable markets to build effective local economies.

A 2002 Colombian government report admitted that the FARC garners only 2.5% of the profits of the cocaine industry, through taxes imposed on the areas it controls. By contrast, the AUC (linked to the Colombian state) receives 40% of drug profits, and is connected to the large cocaine cartels.

Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe is himself linked to both the paramilitaries and the illicit drug trade. Uribe's father was a drug trafficker killed by the FARC in 1983 and Uribe himself was close friends with notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar of the Medellín Cartel, who was killed in a shoot-out in 1993. In  fact, in 1991, the US Defense Intelligence Agency listed Uribe as one of Colombia's top 100 drug lord in his own right.

As governor of Antioquia province, Uribe was also an architect of the Convivirs, the immediate predecessors of the AUC. When the Convivirs were outlawed in 1997, they were simply transformed into the then-legal AUC. The AUC are responsible for the murder of over 800 people every year, including trade unionists, peasant leaders and peace activists, and claim to control 35% of the Colombia's Congress.

It was in the struggle against this system — of state-sponsored terror controlled by drug lords and corrupt politicians, and of terrible poverty and oppression — that Raul Reyes gave his life. At the time of his assassination, the FARC were again negotiating for prisoner exchanges with the Colombian government.

Reyes was centrally involved in these negotiations — which were torpedoed by Uribe in November. In particular, Reyes was the key negotiator with the French government over negotiations for the release of French-Colombian Ingrid Betancourt, who is being held by the FARC.

To the last, Reyes insisted that the FARC "is struggling for a new Colombia, hand in hand with the Colombian people. The FARC is part of the people. It is struggling for political power so that there are no exploiters or exploited, so that we can have a just society."

Uribe's brutal murder of Reyes and other FARC fighters was aimed at destroying this goal.

Colombia: Washington's other oil war

After almost five years, and countless thousands of people dead and disappeared, the US$7.5 billion initiative known as "Plan Colombia" has failed — politically and militarily — to bring an end to the crisis that characterises the violence-ridden South American country of Colombia.

Begun in 2000, Plan Colombia was ostensibly designed to take the "war on drugs" to the drug producers. The US argued these were primarily "narco-terrorists" — the Marxist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the smaller Army of National Liberation (ELN), as well as the right-wing paramilitaries, the so-called United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC).


However, the US has other motives. While most of the country has not been explored for oil, Colombia is already the third-largest exporter in Latin America, after Venezuela and Mexico. The industry accounts for one third of Colombia's exports, and most of Colombia's oil exports are to the US.


Colombia sits on the Venezuela-Orinoco belt, the planet's largest accumulation of hydro-carbons, which it shares with Venezuela and Ecuador. However, the latter two countries, like most of South America, are part of a left-wing revolt against Washington's neoliberal policies.


In Ecuador, a popular uprising just overthrew one president seen as too close to Washington. In Venezuela, the Bolivarian revolution, led by Hugo Chavez, has reasserted popular control over the country's oil reserves, and used the revenue to the benefit of the poor majority. Washington has responded to such anti-capitalist behaviour with support for an unsuccessful coup, an attempted shutdown of the oil industry, and a relentless propaganda campaign against Chavez, all with little effect.


This situation makes securing Colombian oil a priority for the US. US military expenditure and training is in fact concentrated in the oil rich areas of Colombia, particularly Arauca and Putumayo, which are in the guerrilla heartland.