Fight Back News Service is circulating the following Oct. 9 statement by the Alliance for Global Justice.

The Colombian National Police massacred between 8 and 16 persons, wounding more than 50, in the municipality of Tumaco, Nariño on Thursday afternoon, October 5, 2017. The attack was directed against protesting coca growing families demanding the government fulfill its commitments to voluntary eradication programs.

Additionally, on Sunday, October 8, 2017, the National Police attacked an international team sent to investigate the massacre. The police used tear gas and stun grenades to disperse representatives from the United Nations, the Organization of American States, and a journalist from the Colombian weekly, Semana. The National Police and Colombia's military are both under the direction of the Ministry of Defense.

Initially, the Colombian government claimed that the massacre was the result of an attack by dissident insurgents who oppose accords between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People's Army (FARC-EP). However, eyewitnesses from the community concur that the violence was perpetrated by the police. Since the implementation of the accords, Tumaco has been the site of several assassinations of local leaders and attacks against protesters by the armed forces and paramilitaries.

Colombian peace accords were implemented as the law of the land in late November 2016. They include provisions for crop substitution and infrastructure development to create a viable alternative to illicit crops. Under the National Comprehensive Program for Illicit Crop Substitution, the Colombian government has signed 105,000 crop substitution pacts with rural families and it is estimated that its goal of crop substitution programs for 50,000 hectares will be reached by the end of the year. The government has also forcibly eradicated another 50,000 hectares during the same period, often in the same areas where it has signed substitution agreements.

Even when substitution pacts have been signed, they have been beset with delays in payments and infrastructure and road improvements. Some peasant families complain that they must travel through areas of paramilitary activity to access benefits. Another difficulty has been that some communities requesting to participate in the voluntary program have been ignored and subjected to forced eradication.

The Trump administration is pressuring Colombia to abandon the voluntary program in favor of forced eradication which frequently results in state violence. The White House is also urging Colombia to return to aerial fumigation of illicit crops with Monsanto’s RoundUp Ultra. Vice President Mike Pence, Ambassador to Colombia Kevin Whitaker, and William Brownfield, the Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, have all declared that the US will not support voluntary eradication programs because they are the result of accords signed between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP. The fact does not seem to matter that these accords have brought an end to a 52-year civil war that left more than 220,000 persons dead; 92,000 disappeared; and 6 million rural families displaced. Nor does it matter that the FARC-EP no longer exists and former insurgents have disarmed. The new FARC, the Common Alternative Revolutionary Force, is a legal, nonviolent, and civilian political party that is integrated into civil society.

The White House justifies their position by repeating the myth that the now defunct FARC-EP have been and continue to be major narcotics traffickers. However, both Colombian and US government studies have debunked this assertion. It is generally recognized that the FARC-EP had levied a tax on narco-traffickers, but had not been major producers or merchants of narcotics. A 2001 Colombian government study found right wing paramilitaries to be responsible for more than 40% of the cocaine trade and the FARC-EP for no more than 2.5%.

Donnie Marshall, the head of the Drug Enforcement Agency under Pres. George W. Bush has gone on record saying, “…there is no evidence that any FARC or ELN units have established international transportation, wholesale distribution or drug money-laundering networks in the United States or Europe.”

According to Rafael Suarez, who was a military advisor to the Uribe administration, “if you reduce the FARC to just a drug cartel, you make the possibility of negotiating a political settlement more difficult.” Of course, if the goal is not peace, but the consolidation of stolen lands, then the strategy works well of branding the FARC-EP as major drug traffickers and carrying out a “War on Drugs” that is really a War of Displacement and a War against Farmers.

On the other hand, Colombia’s former president Álvaro Uribe was on a Defense Intelligence Agency list in 1991 as one of Colombia's top narco-traffickers. His administration received billions of dollars in US funding via Plan Colombia.

William Brownfield first came to the State Department in 1979, under the Carter Administration. He was promoted to his current position as an Assistant Secretary of State under Pres. Barak Obama and continues in the job under the Trump administration. Before that, he had served as Ambassador to Colombia during the Uribe administration, and as Ambassador to Chile and to Venezuela. He has had assignments with the State Department and the Pentagon's Southern Command in El Salvador, Argentina, Panama, and Honduras. He is accused of helping cover up an incident in which four Honduran community members, including two pregnant women, were killed with shots fired from a State Department helicopter in 2012. He has announced his imminent retirement.

But given his long background as a promotor of the US Empire, his pronouncements against voluntary eradication programs in Colombia are chilling. On August 2, 2017, Brownfield reported that, “The United States is not currently supporting the Colombian government's voluntary eradication and crop substitution program because the FARC is involved.... In 2016, 675 attempted eradication operations were cancelled in the field due to restrictive rules of engagement that prevented security forces from engaging protestors.”

We of the Alliance for Global Justice are intimately familiar with circumstances facing rural Colombian families who are forced to cultivate illicit crops such as coca, marijuana, and poppies. We have a close relationship with FENSUAGRO, Colombia's federation of agricultural workers and peasant farmers unions. We have traveled extensively with FENSUAGRO on barely passable roads to villages where families are trying to raise and sell legal crops, especially in coffee growing areas. They do so against incredible odds. We have traveled roads that have required us to stop every 15 to 20 minutes to make repairs just so we could keep going. We have trampled in the rainy season to villages like Maracaibo, Tolima, where we were laboring through paths so muddy that we were covered up to and past our knees. We have seen again and again rural villages that lack schools and teachers (or that have schools with virtually no supplies), health services, electricity, or any viable way to get crops to markets. In such cases, families turn to the cultivation of illicit crops because narcotraffickers are the only economic interests who will travel to these villages to make purchases.

For the United States government to demand forced eradication over voluntary programs constitutes nothing less than a cynical call for bloody repression of Colombian farming families. The Trump administration does not want peace in Colombia. It wants more death and displacement so that access to natural resources is cleared for transnational corporations. It wants Colombia to exist first and foremost as an outpost of Empire and a threat to the stability of the entire region. We who love peace and justice want something very different. We know that a Colombia at peace and rooted in justice would be a major step towards peace, justice, and liberation from Empire throughout Latin America and, indeed, the world.

#Colombia #PeoplesStruggles #massacre #Antifascism #Tumaco #Americas

Shuja’iya massacre will stain the hands of all who are silent and complicit

The Zionist enemy carried out a horrific massacre today against the civilians of Shuja’iya neighborhood in eastern Gaza City, targeting homes with mortars, tanks, missiles and aircraft, killing dozens of martyrs and wounding hundreds, where many remain under the rubble of their destroyed homes amid a barrage of shells and rockets.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine pledged that the blood of the martyrs of the Shuja’iya massacre, of the war crimes and genocide committed by land, air and sea in every inch of Gaza against civilians in their homes, children, women, and the elderly, will not be wasted, and that the enemy will never be able to break the will and steadfastness of our people and their valiant resistance which will fight and resist this cowardly and criminal enemy until the last breath.

The Front noted that the Zionist criminal occupation has brought death, destruction and devastation to our neighborhoods, camps and cities, saying that the occupation forces were incapable of stopping the resistance or its qualitative strikes against occupation forces, and have expressed their cowardice by targeting innocent civilians in their homes.

The Front saluted the brave resisters in all the Palestinian military organizations who are willing to sacrifice in order to block the progress of the occupation forces, for our people to survive and confront the war machine, and praised its ongoing painful strikes to the enemy.

Furthermore, the Front emphasized that the international community is responsible for the crimes against our people in Gaza with its ongoing military, financial, and political support to the occupation entity, providing it with political cover to commit crimes against our people.

The Front demanded that Palestinian Authority officials and spokespeople stop engaging in the language of defeatism and to instead respect the Palestinian popular mood, which shouts that no voice is louder than the voice of the resistance. Our legitimate resistance is a point of pride for all of our people; we are convinced that we will win, and we will mend our wounds, we will rise from the rubble and the ruins to rebuild our homes again.

The Front saluted with pride the steadfast people in Gaza from Rafah to Beit Hanoun who have suffered so much pain and yet refuse to concede to the threats of the occupation. People with such steadfastness will inevitably triumph and no war machine will be able to defeat them or to force them to abandon their embrace of the resistance.

#GazaPalestine #Gaza #AntiwarMovement #PopularFrontForTheLiberationOfPalestine #Palestine #Israel #massacre #Shujaiya #MiddleEast

A report from the United Nations in September documented that U.S. and NATO forces have killed at least 577 civilians so far this year, an increase of 21% from the numbers of civilians killed in 2007. The rise in civilian deaths reflects the increasing reliance on air strikes, as U.S. forces find they are unable to patrol the vast areas of Afghanistan under control of the insurgency.

The U.S. military and their allies are locked in an increasingly desperate struggle to keep their grip on the country, while the Afghan resistance and the popular movement against the occupation are growing stronger. U.S. military deaths have risen by 30% so far this year, a reflection of the rise in the strength of the insurgency. The frequency of resistance attacks against U.S., NATO and pro-U.S. Afghan security forces has risen by 40% compared to 2007 levels. Amidst the deteriorating security situation, it is reported that three separate strategy reviews of the Afghanistan war are currently underway in the White House.

20,000 additional U.S. troops are expected to pour into Afghanistan throughout the next year, with the first troops arriving in January. When completed, U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan will rise to approximately 60,000. Although President-elect Barack Obama has long stated his desire to ‘surge’ the troop forces in Afghanistan, there are no indications that an increase in troop levels will bring increased security to the occupation. The core issues of self-determination and national liberation for the Afghan people will not be solved by an increase in U.S. troop levels and popular anger at U.S. and NATO atrocities against civilians will only grow in the coming year.

#WardakProvinceAfghanistan #Occupation #Insurgency #Afghanistan #NATO #civilianDeaths #massacre #Asia