How Israel Facilitated the Guatemalan Genocide

[Judi Lynn]

BY
MARK LEWIS TAYLOR

tered thousands of indigenous Maya.



Ixil indigenous people protest in front of a banner describing the crimes of former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt on May 24, 2013, in Guatemala city. (Johan Ordonez / AFP via Getty Images)


It was on the streets of Guatemala City in 1987 that I began awakening to Israel’s partnership with the United States in facilitating genocide.
Today we are “seeing genocide” — a decades-long cumulative “genocidal condition” — being played out, as Israeli modern culture and media professor Ariella Aisha Azoulay argues. We see it in the US/Israeli onslaught against Gaza. My memories and knowledge return to reflect on Israel’s connection to genocidal practice, not only in Gaza but also in Guatemala.

In the Guatemala of the 1980s, a counterinsurgency by US-backed military governments slaughtered indigenous Maya and tens of thousands of other dissidents and suspects. There was no social media to cover it. Most American citizens knew nothing of it. The killing of this period in Guatemala has been recognized as “genocide” by official analysts and by a thorough twelve-volume investigative report. This latter study made clear the appropriateness of the phrase “acts of genocide” to name the crimes of Guatemala’s military against the Maya, in spite of the military’s claim that it lacked “intent” to commit genocide, that it was only motivated by economic, political or military concerns. As with Israel in Gaza to Palestine, so with Guatemalan elites relative to the indigenous Maya, it is the historical record of decades of accumulative killing, occupation, forced removal, and dehumanization that establishes the acts and conditions as those of genocide.

The studies of Guatemala’s genocide, as I will show, also reveal the special role of Israel in that slaughter under the aegis of US imperial interests.

I was first in Guatemala in 1987 to interview educators and activists who were important for my research about the role of religious beliefs among Maya indigenous peoples as they waged resistance to their ongoing repression. 1987 was a year when Guatemala’s latest series of military governments had just passed the worst mass violence against Maya communities, the worst occurring between 1981 and 1983. The period is often called a “hidden/silent holocaust,” the “Guatemala holocaust,” or the “Maya holocaust.” And this is only one site of Israel’s involvement with massive state violence and terrorism throughout Latin America. I had been working with Guatemalans and others in the United States to seek an end to US military aid to Guatemala.

One day in 1987, as the dust and smog of a Guatemala City street swirled about me, I walked in conversation with an activist friend and mentor. We were interrupted, startled by a loud order given by an authoritative command, projected by a deep vibrating loudspeaker. Call it a Darth Vader–like sound — only sharper, slightly higher pitched, and more threatening at high volume.

More:
https://jacobin.com/2024/04/israel-guatemala-genocide-gaza-imperialism/

[RandySF]

1. No offense to Judi Lynn

but this feels like one of those "it's the Jews" stories.

[wnylib]

2. I agree.

[Marcus IM]

4. "The jews" and the gov't of Israel are not one and the same.

Another well worn trope.

--


From the article Judi Lynn posted ...

Israel’s connection to all this has been extensively researched.

Israel became heavily involved with Guatemala’s military government, especially after US president Jimmy Carter cut off most of US military aid to Guatemala in 1977 due to its notorious record of human rights abuses. Investigative journalist George Black, writing for NACLA, reported that Israel eagerly stepped in for the United States, becoming “Guatemala’s principal supplier. In 1980, the Army was fully re-equipped with Galil rifles [Israeli manufactured] at a cost of $6 million.” In later years, Guatemalan military elites were proud that they had quelled the insurgency largely without US aid. Israel had played a much-valued proxy role for US military suppliers.

In an infamous massacre, one of many, the Israeli connection was clearly present. At the village of Dos Erres on December 6, 1982, Israeli-trained commandos left the village completely burned down, after shooting, torturing, and/or raping over two hundred villagers. A United Nations investigative team reported: “All the ballistic evidence recovered corresponded to bullet fragments from firearms and pods of Galil rifles made in Israel.” This was just in the one village of Dos Erres. The same twelve-volume investigation reports that Israeli-made Galil rifles were used throughout the highlands, while US-made helicopters ferried troops into the highlands for what the report argues were “acts of genocide.”

Alas, it took me too long to learn how many other ways Israel had been involved in Guatemala’s massive state violence. Harvard-trained political scientist Bishara Bahbah in his book Israel and Latin America: The Military Connection (1986) termed Israeli military aid to Guatemala a “special case” within a larger set of Israel’s armament sales to Latin America over the decades. Other works make similar points, such as the study by Milton Jamail and Margo Gutiérrez, It’s No Secret: Israel’s Military Involvement in Central America.

Scholars continue to study Israel’s military contribution to militarizing today’s global order. Israel is adept at marketing itself as a provider of technology for the “pacification” of the global order’s trouble spots. Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper documents this at length in his book War Against the People: Israel, The Palestinians, and Global Pacification (2015). Halper notes that in Guatemala, Israel’s military aid and training were instrumental in setting up forced-settlement “re-adjustment” communities or “model villages” designed to monitor massacre survivors. This was even referred to by Guatemalan military officers as a “Palestinization” of Guatemala’s postmassacre Maya lands, where shock and awe and scorched earth campaigns had left a devastated people. Guatemala-born journalist Victor Perera described the result “a distorted replica of rural Israel.” Ian Almond, who recounted Perera’s description, stated that Israeli-trained Guatemalan colonel Eduardo Wohlers, in charge of the Plan of Assistance to Conflict Areas, admitted that “the model of the kibbutz and moshav is planted firmly in our minds.”

[Voltaire2]

5. OFFS criticizing the actions and policies of

the state of Israel is Not Anti-Semitic.

Israeli trained the Guatemalan police and military in ‘counter insurgency tactics’ that included torture and death squads. They stepped in when we were constrained by Carter era laws against participating in and supporting these activities. The result was what is now recognized as a brutal genocide against the Mayan population.

If you find the facts, the reality, antisemitic, that’s your problem.

[Doc Sportello]

9. If you read the article you wouldn't have to rely on feels

You could provide actual points and facts to refute it. Instead of just another meme.

[Goddessartist]

3. Thank you, Judi Lynn

for this article. My son in law is from Guatemala. I had no idea about all of this. It doesn't surprise me at all.

[GreenWave]

6. Article goes into depth at Israeli involvement.

It is unfair for some in our forum to presuppose all Israelis are Jews or all Jews are Zionists or even any religion is a "race".

Other actors are possibly at play too. Big Pharma will destroy ecosystems to get at the last medicinal property plant growing freely in the world to jack up the price globally. This means Native Americans will fight back to save the land, hence getting killed by "civilized" cultures that have refined the art of killing.

There are also self appointed proselytes that invade other regions of the world, disrespecting local laws and customs and infiltrate Native American lands and ruining life for those inhabitants, all in the name of bringing Jesus to those people.The Yanomami used to welcome what few strangers they encountered. Now they may even kill them.

When I worked in Venezuela such an invasion occurred. The native Americans sent their cacique to talk to the other cacique about why this was happening. They probably thought there were only a few thousand people on Earth. When the cacique reached Caracas, a booming city of 5,000,000 + he died from shock. Many were outraged that such a situation had occurred. So it was decided to return the deceased cacique to his people but with a boat filled with singers and dancers using as many indigenous instruments as possible. The boat had exceeded its carrying capacity and once it reached the Orinoco River it capsized killing most of the inhabitants including a group of young musicians, Madera. The GOP friendly government tried quickly to lie about the incident claiming all aboard just got a little wet. Alí Primera remembers them in his song Tim Marín.

[GreenWave]

7. Lyrics to Tin Marin (a cultural museum for young folks)

Sólo se mojaron (So they just got wet)
Y en la orilla están (They are on the river bank)
Secándose al sol (Just drying up in the sun)
Pronto sonarán (Soon they will make sounds)
Tengo un gran dolor (I have a big pain)
En el costillar (in my rib cage)
Se afloja el tambor (If the drum falls apart)
Y es por la humedad (it's because of the wetness)

Fuego con llanto es vapor (Fire and crying is vapor)
Vapor con viento no es naa, se va (Vapor in the wind is nothing, it leaves)
Como lluvia volverá (And comes back as rain)
Para comenzar la siembra (To start planting)

Muchacho pásame los fósforos (Son hand me the matches)
Que esa madera va a arder (that this Madera is going to burn)
Muchacho pásame los fósforos
Que esa madera va a arder
Ese fuego alumbrará el camino (This fire will light up the way)
Pa' donde habrá que coger (To where one must go)
Pa' donde va a hacer (To where one must do)

Cantar y cantar (Sing and sing)
Hasta que la vida (Until life becomes)
Se vuelva un cantar ( a narrative song)
Y nuestro combate una sola canción (and our struggle one united song)

Porque esa madera no sirve pa' guacal (Because this Madera is not for baskets)
Porque esa madera es puro corazón (Because it is pure heart)
Porque esa madera es puro corazón
Porque esa madera no sirve pa' guacal

Madera olorosa (Fragrant madera)
A jazmín café (Like coffee with jasmin)
Madera preciosa, preciosa madera (Precious Madera)
Haremos una mano con esa madera (Let's make a hand out of Madera)
Para golpear bien fuerte (To punch really hard)
A quien desde siempre (They who always punch)
Golpea y golpea nos golpea( and punch us)

Tin marín, que arda la candela how the candle burns
Tin marín contra la humedad against wetness
Tin marín que arda la candela
Tin marín contra la humedad
Muchacho tambor
Manos quitiplás (hands african-native american)
Sólo se mojaron vuelven a sonar (Just va little wet, now starting the sound)
Muchacho tambor
Manos quitiplás
Sólo se mojaron vuelven a sonar

Tin marín que arda la candela
Tin marín que arda la candela
Sólo se mojaron
Y en la orilla están
Secándose al sol
Pronto sonarán
Tengo un gran dolor
En el costillar
Se afloja el tambor
Y es por la humedad

It is possible that some of the drowned were put on rafts that were sent off in the river)

[Judi Lynn]

8. I started seeing articles about Yair Klein around 2001 or so, and posted some of them here then.

At the time he was involved in arms, and training Colombian paramilitaries, also termed "death squads", and had established an international reputation for himself as a mercenary, and was all over the place involved in war-related actions. I saw his name repeatedly, he was in and out of prisons, etc at various times. Colombia's paramilitaries, by the way, were know as death squads, and they terrorized Colombian villagers relentlessly, and interfered with elections, as well, including assassinating people considered leftists and progressives, even a well-known anti-war TV comedian, Jaime Garzón, ethnic cleansing, social cleansing, publicly butchering villagers with chainsaws to instill paralyzing fear among them. ETC. The worst.

Just took a quick look, found this article:

Who Is Israel’s Yair Klein and What Was He Doing in Colombia and Sierra Leone?
STORY
JUNE 01, 2000

Last weekend, Colombian intelligence agents arrested two Israelis and a Colombian suspected of being part of an arms-smuggling network attempting to deliver more than 50,000 guns to guerrillas. [includes rush transcript]

Colombian officials are investigating whether the detained Israelis are linked to Yair Klein, an Israeli mercenary accused by Colombian authorities of training right-wing paramilitaries and drug-traffickers in the late 1980s and 1990s.

And it is this man Yair Klein that we are going to take a close look at today. It’s the story of a leading mercenary but also of the governments and shadowy forces he has worked with.

In late April, Yair Klein was released from a Sierra Leone prison where he spent 16 months on charges that he was smuggling arms to rebels from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF).

Klein is a former lieutenant colonel in the Israeli Army. In the 1980s he established a paramilitary mercenary company called Spearhead Ltd. Through this company, Klein began providing arms and training to forces in South America.

In 1989, Klein, along with several other former Israeli officers, was charged by authorities in Colombia of providing paramilitary training and arms to drug lords running international cocaine cartels. He is also accused of training Mafia assassins whose targets have included Colombian politicians. Klein is also suspected of involvement in the explosion of a Colombian airliner in November 1989.

More:
https://www.democracynow.org/2000/6/1/who_is_israels_yair_klein_and





- click for image -

https://tinyurl.com/2p8kvfdk

[Judi Lynn]

10. Google translation from a Colombian publication. . .

How did Yair Klein arrive in Colombia?
Tue, 11/13/2012 - 12:00

In a Justice and Peace hearing that seeks to reveal the origin of paramilitary training schools in Colombia, and that is advanced against former paramilitary chief Ramón Isaza, and other desmo

In a Justice and Peace hearing that seeks to reveal the origin of paramilitary training schools in Colombia, and that is carried out against former paramilitary chief Ramón Isaza, and other demobilized people, Yair Klein, the mercenary who trained the Castaños in 1988, He said through a videoconference from Israel that the Colombian army supplied weapons and a military base for training to the Magdalena Medio self-defense group. Furthermore, he said that one of the people who witnessed the paramilitary training in the 90s was later elected President of the Republic. But he never said a name. “I'm not saying that he was one of the people he trained but that that is one of the people he paid. Some of the landowners in the area he paid like all the rest of the landowners,” Klein said. The Israeli mercenary also revealed that his stay in Colombia was sponsored, at the time, by the Ministry of Agriculture, an entity that had to sell several herds of cattle in order to finance his services and training. Klein trained the brothers Carlos and Fidel Castaño, and the hitman who would later murder Luis Carlos Galán. He was also involved in an arms transaction that ended up in the possession of “El Mexicano”, the boss of the Medellín cartel, as well as coup attempts in Honduras, Panama, Lebanon and some African countries. He was tried in absentia in Colombia and sentenced to more than ten years in prison in 2001. He was detained for three years in Russia, awaiting Colombia's extradition request, and in 2010 he managed to be sent to Israel, where he currently lives. * This is how Yair Klein arrived in Colombia: Klein traveled to Colombia with his papers in order. With the knowledge of his country and the Israeli embassy, ​​as well as Colombian authorities who formally received him. The first place he visited was Urabá, he toured the banana farms, met with employers and workers and made the first diagnosis of how to train the first self-defense groups that were beginning to organize for war. But the contract worked out for him in Puerto Boyacá, where the ranchers gathered the resources to bring him and the two instructors who accompanied him. The year 1988 began, the president was Virgilio Barco. At the El Dorado airport he was met by former army lieutenant Ariel Otero, who would be his guide. “An hour later we were sitting at one of the tables in a steakhouse in the center of the city. Two people from the administrative department of DAS Security arrived there (the director was General Miguel Maza Márquez) and the president of Banco Ganadero (…) They told me that they wanted me to train their people in Puerto Boyacá. The next morning we traveled. Before noon we arrived at Puerto Boyacá. The first meeting was with the mayor; with Henry Pérez, the president of the Board of Directors of the Livestock Association, a DAS official, and the colonel of the Army brigade in the area (Colonel Arsenio Bohórquez, commander of the Bárbula battalion). “They took me to see the training area.” Thus begins the story of what would become a bloody nightmare of pain for Colombia, a good part of whose protagonists are dead. From the hand of Yair Klein a war machine was started that continues to leave consequences. Klein's testimony could complicate the life of former general Miguel Maza, who has been accused and served several months in prison for the crime of Luis Carlos Galán. Das, under the direction of Maza, was one of the institutions that, together with some sectors of the Armed Forces, participated in the military training strategy of the group that became the genesis of the AUC, according to Yair Klein himself. In his book The Klein Case: The Origin of Paramilitarism in Colombia, he recounts in detail the events that occurred on the trip in which he completed his training contract for war: “The next morning was my appointment at the YOU GIVE. And I told them in general what he did and how it was done. They asked me how much I charged them. I didn't want to make money with them because it seemed more important to establish contact. So I told them: “20,000 dollars,” which is the price to pay the coaches. It was a very high-level meeting: there were the DAS instruction commander, the DAS operations commander; and when we were sitting there, someone opened the door, stuck his head in, looked at us and left. They asked me: “Do you know who he is?” "It's General Maza." *Extracted from the book The Klein case: the origin of paramilitarism in Colombia.By Olga Behar and Carolina Ardila from Ícono

Editores.
Colombia News

https://www.kienyke.com/historias/como-llego-yair-klein-colombia

[Judi Lynn]

11. Another article from a Colombian publication, Google translated:

Israel, the chainsaw and the paramilitary massacres in Colombia

By Wari

11/26/2023

Published in
Current Events / Colombia / Columns / Justice and Human Rights / Latin America / Politics

Today, when Israel carries out before our eyes, live and direct, the genocide of the Palestinian population, we evoke the criminal impact that the intervention of mercenaries and Israeli soldiers has had in the formation of paramilitary groups of murderers, which They bloodied this country and one of whose most terrifying symbols of death has been the chainsaw.

By Renán Vega Cantor

El Tiempo , an official newspaper of the establishment, published on November 10, 1998 a news item with the headline: “The terror of the chainsaw is back” and in its first paragraphs it said: “Twelve dead were left until yesterday by the incursion of one hundred paramilitaries, who toured the districts of Santa Isabel , in Remedios , and El Tigre , in Vegachí , last weekend. The peasants of these Antioquia towns reported that several of their neighbors were mutilated with chainsaws and then buried in mass graves by paramilitaries who identified themselves as the R-20 group , a faction of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC).” Do not think that this information was something exceptional; On the contrary, news about the use of the chainsaw and other bestial forms of torture were the daily bread of this country for long and endless years.

The brutal act of using the chainsaw to destroy human beings (specifically guerrillas, peasants, social leaders and left-wing politicians) was a recurring practice by paramilitary groups in this country, during the period 1988-2010 and extends until the present due to the existence of pique houses in some places in Colombia . This is something that should produce universal condemnation, similar to that received by genocides and other crimes against humanity, mainly those carried out by Nazi Germany and as the genocidal crimes of the State of Israel should receive .

The chainsaw has acquired a media presence these days, because in the Argentine elections the far-right candidate Javier Milei has used it as one of the distinctive symbols of his presidential campaign and, in addition, has raised the bloody flag of Israel. This update of the chainsaw in the Latin American panorama of the moment serves to remind us of the dark relationship between Israel and the Colombian paramilitaries, who turned this device into a weapon of torture and death, as an expression of the Creole "learning" of criminal techniques with brand of Israel.

ISRAEL INSTRUCTS PARAMILITARY KILLERS
The ideologues and instructors in the use of the chainsaw as an instrument of terror were the Israeli military and mercenaries who in the late 1980s trained hitmen and murderers, who were linked to the Medellín Cartel , landowners and ranchers in Magdalena Medio. , to political leaders of Puerto Boyacá , to soldiers of the Colombian Army and other instances of the State. Between 1986 and 1988, soldiers and mercenaries from the Israeli Army made their presence in Colombia and came to prepare a body of assassins, with the Zionist slogan of eliminating, using all the means at their disposal, the insurgent movements, their social bases and all those forces or movements (of farmers, workers, students, teachers, urban residents) that were considered “enemies” of Colombian-style capitalism.

Among those instructors and advisors were Rafael 'Rafi' Eitan , a member of the State of Israel's espionage, with an impressive terrorist and counterinsurgency record in several countries around the world. This individual was hired, secretly, as an advisor to the government of Virgilio Barco [1986-1990] and as revealed by journalist Alberto Donadío , he was the one who recommended the extermination of the Unión Patriota. And it was not difficult for him to suggest how to eliminate this left-wing political party, whose strength at that time was important in certain rural areas and small towns of the country, since it had extensive experience in persecuting and exterminating Palestinians in the occupied territories. At the same time, Eitan intervened in the negotiation and purchase of Israeli aircraft by the Colombian Army, during which time Israeli pilots trained Colombian pilots in bombing peasants and insurgents.

Klein trained brothers Carlos and Fidel Castaño , the squad leaders who would later form the notoriously violent United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). Under the patronage of wealthy landowners, drug traffickers, ranchers, Colombian politicians and military personnel, the AUC committed gruesome massacres across the country, even using chainsaws to murder and dismember peasants, all with the goal of terrorizing communities into fleeing. of their lands.”

Another of Israel's mercenaries, the most famous of all, is Yair Klein , who also has an endless criminal record in various places around the world. And in Colombia he was the main instructor of the Magdalena Medio murderers, who later dispersed throughout the national territory, leaving in their wake an endless trail of blood and horror.

More:
https://www.elciudadano.com/actualidad/israel-la-motosierra-y-las-masacres-paramilitares-en-colombia/11/26/

[Judi Lynn]

12. From the Associated Press: Israeli who trained Colombian militias goes home

Lt.-Col. Yair Klein wanted in Colombia on charges of training the 'death squads' released from jail and is on his way back to Israel.

By DIAA HADID, Associated Press

JERUSALEM — An Israeli wanted in Colombia for training militias that killed hundreds returned home Saturday after he was released from a Moscow jail, disappointing activists and victims who have tried for years to bring him to justice.
Yair Klein is accused of training far-right paramilitary groups in the 1980s that stole land and murdered Colombians during a decade-long reign of terror across the countryside.

Human rights activists are pleading with Israel to open an investigation into Klein’s actions during that period in the hopes that he could be tried locally.

“Israel should not be a safe haven for somebody who is implicated in atrocities in Colombia,” said Jose-Miguel Vivanco of the New York-based Human Rights Watch.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry spokesman did not return requests for comment.

Colombian officials said they would still try extradite the former Israeli military officer, who was sentenced in absentia in 2001 to almost 11 years jail. Israel, however, is not likely to agree ship off one of its citizens to trial elsewhere.

. . .

Klein was convicted in Colombia of helping set up training camps to teach private armies working for drug lords Pablo Escobar and Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha about explosives, car bombs and high-profile killings. The armies later morphed into Colombia’s right-wing death squads.

More:
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-israeli-who-trained-colombian-militias-goes-home-2010nov20-story.html

[Judi Lynn]

13. From the Monthly Review:New investigation reveals role of Israeli operatives in Colombia's "political genocide"

| Graphic by Antonio Cabrera | MR OnlineGraphic by Antonio Cabrera
New investigation reveals role of Israeli operatives in Colombia’s “political genocide”
By Dan Cohen (Posted Jun 05, 2021)

On April 6, 1984, a group of men dressed in police uniforms arrived at the home of Milcíades Contento in the town of Viotá, Colombia. Contento was a peasant, communist and member of the Patriotic Union (UP), a newly-formed experimental political party born out of the 1985 peace negotiations between the conservative President Belansio Betancourt and the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The men seized Contento, tied him up and dragged him away. The next day, his corpse was found in a nearby village.

The murder of Milcíades Contento marked the beginning of a nearly two-decade extermination campaign. From 1984-2002, at least 4,153 UP members – including two presidential candidates, 14 parliamentarians, 15 mayors, nine mayoral candidates, three members of the House of Representatives and three senators – were murdered or dissapeared, in what a Colombian court deemed was a “political genocide.” According to data presented to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the purge claimed more than 6,000 victims through murders, disappearances, torture, forced displacement and other human rights violations. From May 1984 to December 2002, not a month passed without a murder or disappearance of a UP member. In the 2002 elections that brought Álvaro Uribe to power, the Patriotic Union had been so thoroughly wiped out that it failed to meet the electoral threshold and the government removed the party’s legal status.

According to a recent investigation by renowned Colombian journalist Alberto Donadio, the extermination of the Patriotic Union was devised by Betancourt’s successor, President Virgilio Barco Vargas, implementing a plan concocted by of one of the most decorated spies in Israeli history, Rafael ‘Rafi’ Eitan.

The revelations underscore the pivotal relationship that has developed between Israel and Colombia – the United States’ respective top allies in the Middle East and Latin America. Both countries are testing grounds for military weapons and strategies that have long been exported around the world. Following the success of the U.S. government’s Plan Colombia in debilitating the FARC guerrilla movement, it has been hailed as an exportable counterinsurgency model to be applied from Mexico to Afghanistan. Israel, for its part, maintains the world’s largest repression- and weapons-testing laboratories in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, where it has a captive population of several millions Palestinians.

Through the presence of Rafi Eitan in Colombia, the burgeoning alliance of junior partners of the U.S. empire deepened. Despite a series of scandals, the Israel-Colombia relationship has only grown stronger over the years. Under President Iván Duque, the two countries have renewed ties and Israeli military personnel have trained their Colombian counterparts in “counter-terrorism.”

Yet the systematic murder of the UP remains one of the most extreme cases of political violence in Latin America. The scale of killing is especially striking because, unlike many of the bloodiest U.S.-backed regimes of the 1980s, Colombia never became a dictatorship. The killing of the UP – known among its perpetrators as El Baile Rojo (The Red Dance) – took place in an ostensible “democracy.”

More:
https://mronline.org/2021/06/05/new-investigation-reveals-role-of-israeli-operatives-in-colombias-political-genocide/

[Judi Lynn]

14. More in this article in a section concerning Yair Klein:

- snip -
Yair Klein arrives in Colombia

For Colombians, a different Israeli is well-known for his role in the death squad rampages that have plagued the country since the 1980s. While Eitan was advising President Barco, an Israeli mercenary named Yair Klein arrived in Colombia and began training narco-paramilitaries in how to defeat the FARC insurgency.

A retired military officer, Klein started a mercenary firm called Hod Hahanit (Spearhead) in 1984, drawing from the pools of former Israeli police and special operations units.

According to the book All Is Clouded by Desire: Global Banking, Money Laundering, and International Organized Crime, the mercenary outfit struck its first deal amid the civil war in Lebanon, supplying the notoriously brutal Christian Phalangist militias – the same force that massacred between 800 and 3,500 Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps under direct Israeli military supervision in September 1982.

In 1987, Klein landed in Colombia to meet with Israeli Lieutenant Colonel Yithzakh Shoshani and Arik Afek, both of whom had established themselves years before with lucrative deals selling military equipment in Colombia. Shoshani subsequently became the main conduit between Klein and his Colombian customers.

In 1990, Afek’s decomposing body was found with multiple gunshot wounds in the trunk of a car at Miami International Airport after a pedestrian noticed the odor. He was reportedly being investigated by the CIA and was wanted by Colombian authorities.

Klein told me in a telephone interview that he was working through the Israeli Ministry of Defense and the state-owned weapons manufacturer, Israel Military Industries (IMI), which had a contract with a Colombian data surveillance company obtained through Colombia’s Ministry of Defense. He said he was originally hired to provide security for the banana-growing operations in the region of Uraba, where the American fruit company Chiquita had paid millions of dollars to Colombian death squads.

Shoshani, he explained, worked for a company called AMKAN, which is a subsidiary of IMI. The Colombian Federation of Cattlemen, long known for its ties to paramilitaires, contacted Shoshani to have Eitan train a force to fight guerrillas.

With Shoshani guiding him, Klein returned to Israel in 1988 and met with top paramilitary and military figures as well as wealthy businessmen. All of this, Klein assured me, was done with the full knowledge of the Israeli government. “You can’t do anything without permission from the Ministry of Defense,” he said.

Klein’s statement upends the claim of then-Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Israeli Defense Ministry had denied Klein’s company a license and warned him to leave the country.

Death squad leader: ‘I learned an infinity of themes in Israel’
Klein held three training sessions, each for around 30 people. Assisting him were three trainers, all of whom were colonels in the Israeli army: Tzadaka Abraham, Teddy Melnik and Amatzia Shuali.

Klein trained brothers Carlos and Fidel Castaño, the squad leaders who would go on to form the notoriously violent United Self-Defense Forces, known in Spanish by its acronym, AUC. Under the patronage of wealthy landowners, drug lords, ranchers, politicians and the Colombian military, the AUC committed bloodcurdling massacres all over the country, even using chainsaws to murder and dismember peasants, all aimed at terrorizing communities into fleeing from their land. The United Nations estimated in 2016 that the AUC was responsible for 80% of the deaths in the conflict.

Carlos Castaño



Carlos and Vicente Castaño

[Judi Lynn]

15. More concerning Castano warlords: Former police agent investigated for murder of paramilitary boss

Former police agent investigated for murder of paramilitary boss
by Sarah Arnio November 23, 2009

A former agent of the Gaula is being investigated in connection with the death of paramilitary leader Vicente Castaño. The Gaula is a special anti-kidnapping and extortion unit created as part of Medellin’s military police in 1996.

The disappearance and murder of paramilitary boss Castaño occurred in March 2007, although his body was never found.

The information was brought to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s attention by former paramilitary officer and deputy to Castaño Bryon Jimenez while negotiating with U.S. authorities. According to Jimenez, Don Berna, H.H., and other paramilitary bosses backed the murder of the leader of the Castaño Gil dynasty.

One man close to the suspect and also involved in the crime went to the DEA to offer 16 photographs in exchange for protection for himself and his family.

The photographs handed over to both Colombian and U.S. officials incriminate Carlos Alberto Zapata Herrera, known as Camilo or Carracas. Zapata is an expert shooter and was a member of the Gaula for over 17 years. He was also one of the collaborators in the Office of Envigado paramilitary crackdown.

Along with Zapata, two other Gaula officers, one of whom is dead, are also connected with the murder.

Zapata was one of the higher officials in Gaula who received monthly payments to protect Castaño and was at his side for at least six months, testified Jimenez.

The evidence indicates that Zapata and his two accomplices entered the farm where Castaño was hiding out with a camera to register their work. So they wouldn’t betray him later, Zapata attempted to kill his two partners. He killed one of them, but the other managed to escape with the photos. Jimenez says the photos show Zapata chopping up Castaño with a machete.



The photographs handed over to both Colombian and U.S. officials incriminate Carlos Alberto Zapata Herrera, known as Camilo or Carracas. Zapata is an expert shooter and was a member of the Gaula for over 17 years. He was also one of the collaborators in the Office of Envigado paramilitary crackdown.

Along with Zapata, two other Gaula officers, one of whom is dead, are also connected with the murder.

Zapata was one of the higher officials in Gaula who received monthly payments to protect Castaño and was at his side for at least six months, testified Jimenez.

The evidence indicates that Zapata and his two accomplices entered the farm where Castaño was hiding out with a camera to register their work. So they wouldn’t betray him later, Zapata attempted to kill his two partners. He killed one of them, but the other managed to escape with the photos. Jimenez says the photos show Zapata chopping up Castaño with a machete.

More:
https://colombiareports.com/former-police-agent-investigaegd-for-murder-of-paramilitary-boss/

This is Fidel Castaño:

[Goddessartist]

16. Just heinous, each one

of these articles you post. It's just horrible. These people are monsters.The ugliness of this training and all of this is so horrific. How can these people live with themselves?

[Judi Lynn]

17. They've been at it for many years, probably intensively since the 1940's, and a political assassination

of a deeply popular, successful progressive Presidential Candidate, and the onset of "La Violencia":

Wikipedia:

La Violencia (Spanish pronunciation: [la βjoˈlensja], The Violence) was a ten-year civil war in Colombia from 1948 to 1958, between the Colombian Conservative Party and the Colombian Liberal Party, fought mainly in the countryside.[1][2][3]

La Violencia is considered to have begun with the assassination on 9 April 1948 of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a Liberal Party presidential candidate and frontrunner for the 1949 November election.[4] His murder provoked the Bogotazo rioting, which lasted ten hours and resulted in around 5,000 casualties.[4] An alternative historiography proposes the Conservative Party's return to power following the election of 1946 to be the cause.[4] Rural town police and political leaders encouraged Conservative-supporting peasants to seize the agricultural lands of Liberal-supporting peasants, which provoked peasant-to-peasant violence throughout Colombia.[4]

La Violencia is estimated to have cost the lives of at least 200,000 people, almost 2% of the population of the country at the time.[5][6][7]

The La Violencia conflict took place between the Military Forces of Colombia and the National Police of Colombia supported by Colombian Conservative Party paramilitary groups on one side, and paramilitary and guerrilla groups aligned with the Colombian Liberal Party and the Colombian Communist Party on the other side.

The conflict caused millions of people to abandon their homes and property. Media and news services failed to cover events accurately for fear of revenge attacks. The lack of public order and civil authority prevented victims from laying charges against perpetrators. Documented evidence from these years is rare and fragmented.[citation needed]

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Violencia

~ ~ ~


It got progressive worse, and the U.S. right-wing was wildly supportive of the feudal, racist, fascist ruling party which also has been the staunch supporters of the AUC paramilitary death squads, which have disposed of so many bodies they've used mass graves, mobile crematoria, or simply slit them open, filled them with stones so they wouldn't float, and pitched them into rivers.

Unbelievably ruthless. You may recall during the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the defense loudly contended it was probably Nicole Simpson's Colombian drug dealers who slit her throat right down the the spine and left it in her yard! Without a doubt they were far more vicious than the Mexican Cartels, as they would massacre entire villages when prompted by mega-landowners, corporations, etc.

The country's military was discovered to have lured young farm boys to seek a job with the military, then simply killed them, dressed them in guerrilla clothing, put guns in their hands, took photos for "proof" they had been killed attacking the military, and were given credits for enemy kills, and rewards! The process was called "Double Positives" and it was a huge story in the Washington Post when it finally was covered in the US, after it had been happening for years.

If you start researching this astounding violence in Colombia, you may well nearly have nightmares about it. They even murdered women town elders disliked for being town drunks, or otherwise embarrassing, or even vendors who made the town look shabby.

Thank you for your post, Goddessartist.

[Marcus IM]

18. Now this is a thread with some meat on its bones. Thank you Judi Lynn! Bookmarking!

Appreciate the research.