Álvaro Uribe Velez in London

Photo: RATB, 21 May 2011 anti-Uribe picket, London, UK.

Source: Polo Democratico Alternativo, 20 May 2011.

Álvaro Uribe VÉLEZ: WANTED FOR MURDER, CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY, CORRUPTION, HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS.

On Saturday 21 May, former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Velez, will be in London at the invitation of the London Business School .

The presence of the former Colombian president in cities across the United States and Europe has been strongly denounced by protestors who reject attempts to impose an academic label on a man who does not merit it and who’s name, and that of his family, are so closely linked to criminal activities in Colombia . This is not only an insult to the intelligence; it is an affront to the peoples’ dignity.

The existence of direct links between the former president, and many members of this family, with the Colombian narco-paramilitary organisations is an open secret. His cousin and political mentor Mario Uribe has been sentenced to prison by Colombian justice system for involvement with paramilitary activities. His brother Santiago Uribe is being investigated for the same crimes while hundreds of Congressional representatives from his party are in prison or under investigation for drug-trafficking and for assisting paramilitary organisations. Recently many high ranking members of his government have been sent to prison on charges of corruption. Some media have even declared that no more Uribista politicians will fit in Colombian goals, which are full of his followers.

Uribe was the broker in a perverse political strategy which, during his eight years in government, resulted in thousands of forced disappearances, thousands of torture victims, hundreds of massacres, thousands of political murders (including hundreds of trade unionists), millions forcefully displaced, thousands exiled and disgraceful impunity for all of these crimes.

Uribe was behind huge corruption scandals that have involved his officials and even his own sons. During his terms he imposed open and illegal repression, institutionalising the most abhorrent crime, including the so-called ‘false positives’ (extrajudicial killings of civilians attributed to the Colombian Army); he violated the principles of international law by ordering military incursions, bombings and kidnappings in neighbouring countries. He was the only Latin American president who gave complete support to the US/British invasion of Iraq . During his term as president, and even now that he has stood down, his criticisms of dozens of human rights defenders has led them to receive death threats signed by paramilitary groups called 'Black Eagles'.

In economic terms, Uribe left the country with 68% of the population living in poverty or destitution (indigence). More than 8 million people live in indigence and 20 million live in poverty. Acute malnutrition kills 20,000 children under the age of 5 years old every year. Today Colombia has the 11th highest social inequality in the world, and is more unequal than any other country in the Americas . It has the second highest number of displaced people in the world.

'We reject the attempts to turn Uribe into a respectable academic figure. This will not wipe clean his blood stained record. Join us to tell the London Business School not to give a platform to the perpetrators of state terror'.

Join us to make sure that Uribe knows he is not welcome in London!!

Photo: RATB, 21 May 2011 anti-Uribe picket, London, UK.

The first picket is from 4pm to 7pm on Saturday 21 May at the Latin American Business Forum at the RCOG, 27 Sussex Place, Regent's Park, London NW1, nearest tube: Baker Street.


The second picket is from 5pm to 8pm, Monday 23 May at the LSE Campus, Houghton Street, London WC2. Nearest tubes: Covent Garden, Holborn, Temple


Convened by: Polo Democratico Alternativo.
Supported by: ASLADOPEA, Todas las Voces Todas, Movimiento 22, Rock Around the Blockade (RATB), Movimiento Ecuador en el Reino Unido (MERU).

Narco-trafficker Uribe appointed 'Distinguished Scholar' by Georgetown University

Rally Against Uribe’s Appointment at Georgetown
by Rachel Winch, 18 November 2010.
Source: NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America).


In 2004 Gerardo Cajamarca Alarcón, a union activist finally fled Colombia after paramilitary forces killed four of his friends and threatened to kill him. He believed his life was in imminent danger, and he had good reason. Colombia has been named “the murder capital of the world for trade unionists”; over the past few years, out of every ten trade unionists killed in the world, seven have been from Colombia.

Cajamarca fled a land ruled by Colombian president Álvaro Uribe, who has been accused of supporting the paramilitary forces responsible for a number of the union deaths. On November 3, Cajamarca stood in front of a rally of students, faculty, and human rights activists who were demonstrating against Uribe’s appointment as a “Distinguished Scholar in the Practice of Global Leadership” at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. to share his story and demand that Uribe be prosecuted for his crimes.

“We are here in the name of our dead,” Cajamarca told the crowd. “For truth, justice, and reparations.” Holding photos of union leaders who had been assassinated, he went on to describe the cooperative links between transnational corporations and the 2002-2010 Uribe administration, and the role this cooperation played in these killings. Uribe “represents this criminal system,” he concluded.

Uribe, who has been involved in the Colombian political system since he was elected mayor of Medellín in 1982, has also been connected with the illegal surveillance of Supreme Court judges, journalists, and human rights defenders. Hollman Morris, a Colombian journalist who is now a prestigious Nieman fellow at Harvard University (although his visa was initially denied by the U.S. State Department), described his experiences being targeted by Uribe at a talk following the rally: “I understood that any journalism I were to do just got a lot more dangerous. Any curve could have an ‘accident.’” Uribe targeted the internationally renowned journalist as a “publicist for terrorism,” a public smearing technique the Colombian president used to discredit a number of journalists and human rights defenders.

On August 11, just four days after Uribe finished his term in office, Georgetown University announced that he had been selected as a Distinguished Scholar and that beginning in September he would “conduct seminars and other programmatic activities for students in the School of Foreign Service and the broader university community . . . to help foster conversations on important issues facing the international community.”

“We are looking forward to having President Uribe join our university community,” said Georgetown University President John J. DeGioia. “Having such a distinguished world leader at Georgetown will further the important work of students and faculty engaging important global issues.”

However, on September 29, students delivered an open letter to DeGioia, signed by over 150 scholars, asking Georgetown to dismiss Uribe because of his involvement in human rights violations. The letter—which was written by Colombian Jesuit Father Javier Giraldo Moreno S.J.—explained some of Uribe’s controversial history in Colombia. It cited “Uribe’s ties to paramilitary groups,” among other serious human rights violations and scandals that defined his two terms as president. Not only did Uribe “continue to sponsor those paramilitary groups,” Giraldo wrote, “but he defended them and he perfected them into a new pattern of legalized paramilitarism . . . while at the same time lying to the international community with a phony demobilization of the paramilitaries.”

Georgetown Peace Studies professor Mark Lance explained at the rally that the decision to appoint Uribe as a Distinguished Scholar was not an isolated aberration to glorify human rights violations. Rather, it is a more deeply rooted practice of the university to invite people who are perceived as powerful to train students to be the next class of elite: “They brought him here for one very simple reason,” Lance avowed. “Because he was a president. That’s all that mattered in the making of this decision. Because if you’re powerful in this sense of power, if you run national organizations, you’re welcome here. Because that fits into a conceptualization of education that’s shared by many educators, many faculty, and, I’m afraid, many students at this university.”

Former Distinguished Scholars in the Practice of Global Leadership in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown have indeed been politically powerful, including Former President of Poland Aleksander Kwasniewski, former National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar, and former Ambassador at Large Robert L. Gallucci. The most controversial was the appointment of a George W. Bush administration Iraq war architect Douglas Feith as a professor at the School of Foreign Service in 2006 (but not as a Distinguished Scholar), which caused similar faculty and student protests.

Following the rally, Georgetown University law students delivered Uribe a subpoena summoning him to testify in a case against Drummond Company, Inc., an Alabama-based coal company that is being tried in U.S. Federal Court on accusations of paying paramilitary forces to kill union organizers and other civilians in the regions of Colombia where they are mining. After a number of thwarted attempts, the students successfully served the subpoena as Uribe was leaving a class he was teaching.

The subpoena itself encapsulates the core reasons why so many at Georgetown are angered by Uribe’s appointment: In 2009 nearly 500 family members of Colombian civilians who the paramilitary assassinated filed the case after uncovering evidence that Drummond funded the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the paramilitary forces responsible for the assassinations. The Drummond plaintiffs summoned Uribe to testify in the case on the grounds that he has “direct knowledge of several key issues in the case,” which includes both governmental collusion with the AUC and governmental protection of the Drummond mining facility. Students hope that the subpoena will further the case of the Colombian families and also support their efforts to repeal Uribe’s appointment at Georgetown.

Uribe’s deposition in the Drummond case is scheduled for November 22 in Washington, DC. Students and faculty are continuing to organize against Uribe’s status as “Distinguished Scholar” and are committed to do so until he has been discharged. “When we win this campaign and Uribe is forced to leave Georgetown,” Charity Ryerson, a Georgetown Law student and leader of the movement against Uribe’s appointment told a Georgetown University reporter “a message will be sent that our community does not condone the model of politics Uribe represents.”

As Gerardo Cajamarca Alarcón said as he closed his address to the crowd gathered, “For our dead, not one minute of silence. An entire life of fighting.”


Rachel Winch is a NACLA Research Associate

Ex-Colombian president Álvaro Uribe named as Narco-trafficker

In this declassified US government document from 1991, which lists key narco-traffickers in Colombia, former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) appears as number 82 (see page 10). President Uribe intensified the war against the FARC as he built a centralised military and police system – with US, Israeli and British support - a killing machine with 200,000 military, 30,000 police, several thousand death squad killers and over a million middle- and upper-class Colombians who support ‘wiping out the FARC’ – meaning eliminating independent popular organisations. Uribe is the closest that Colombia has seen to a fascist ruler.

Ex-Colombian president Uribe named as Narco-trafficker (p 10)

Leader of Death Squads Wins Colombian Election

Source: Global Research.ca
by James Petras, 27 June 2010

Juan Manuel Santos, notorious Defense Minister in the regime of outgoing President Alvaro Uribe and closely identified with high crimes against humanity “won” the recent Presidential elections in Colombia, June 2010. The major electronic and print media CNN, FOX News, Washington Post, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the once liberal Financial Times (FT) hailed Santos election, as a great victory for democracy. According to the FT, “Colombia not Venezuela is (the) best model for Latin America” (FT 6/23/2010 p. 8). Citing Santos “overwhelming” margin – he garnered 69% of the vote, the FT claimed he won a “strong mandate” (FT 6/22/2010). In what has to be one of the most flagrant cover-ups in recent history, the media accounts exclude the most egregious facts about the elections and the profoundly authoritarian policies pursued by Santos over the past decade.

The Elections: Guns, Elites and Terror
Elections are a process (not merely an event) in which prior political conditions determine the outcome. During the previous eight years of outgoing President Uribe’s and Defense Minister Santos’ rule, over 2 million, mostly rural poor, were forcibly uprooted and driven from their homes and land and displaced across frontiers into neighboring countries, or to urban slums. The Uribe-Santos regime relied on both the military and the 30,000 member paramilitary death squads to kill and terrorize entire population centers, deemed “sympathetic” to the armed insurgency, affecting several million urban and rural poor. Over 20,000 people were killed, many, according to the major Colombian human rights group, falsely labeled “guerrillas”. Santos as Defense Minister was directly implicated by the Courts in what was called “false positives”. The military randomly rounded up scores of poor urban youth, shot them and claimed a resounding victory over the FARC guerrillas.