quote:

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.”
...

Death By The Blues posted:

https://twitter.com/ytirawi/status/1713660980780048478

they are going to bomb them anyways

RadiRoot posted:

what is the electricity situation?

Atrocious Joe posted:

Context for Colombia

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

It goes on for longer

Chillgamesh posted:

So I looked this guy up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Rumkowski Norm's basically calling Mehdi a huge collaborator. Didn't realize Mehdi was that big of an Israel whitewasher but I don't watch MSNBC or pay attention to Twitter that much. Also lol:

Mr SuperAwesome posted:

how are they going to inspect them and then bomb them? surely they will end up deliberately bombing their own troops? what

1stGear posted:

Presumably they would inspect them and refuse to let the convoy through if they find anything objectionable. If Egypt refuses to allow the inspections, then they bomb the convoy.

Its all semantics of course, Israel isn't going to allow any aid into Gaza no matter what.

1stGear posted:

Presumably they would inspect them and refuse to let the convoy through if they find anything objectionable. If Egypt refuses to allow the inspections, then they bomb the convoy.

Its all semantics of course, Israel isn't going to allow any aid into Gaza no matter what.

Al Jazeera, yesterday posted:

Israel did not open the Rafah crossing into Egypt
By Kim­ber­ly Halkett in Washington, DC

We’ve been working the phones for several hours trying to determine whether that negotiated opening of the Rafah crossing to allow roughly 600 Palestinian-Americans to escape to the Egypt side actually took place.

We had understood it would be open from 12:00 until 17:00 local time (09:00-14:00 GMT). But the latest information we’ve been able to piece together is that it never opened.

We’ve reached out to the US State Department multiple times – it has not provided us updated information but our sources on the ground tell us the crossing never opened. From what we can determine, the Egypt side did open but Israel did not live up to their side of the agreement and did not open their side of the border on the Gaza end.

And so not only were Palestinian-Americans not allowed to evacuate, but the Egyptian side – which had humanitarian aid waiting to come into Gaza – was prevented from entering Gaza.

Zoeb posted:

When defenders of Israel say that Israel is not doing a genocide but that Palestinians should be grateful for their restraint, I am reminded of Gul Dukat from Star Trek Deep Space 9 and his preposterous monologue about how the bajorans should have been grateful for his leadership.

webcams for christ posted:

full statement from President Gustavo Petro:

quote:

The barbarity of consumption based on the death of others leads us to an unprecedented rise of fascism, and therefore, to the death of democracy and freedom. It's barbarism, or global 1933, as I call it. 1933 was the year Hitler came to power.

What we see in Palestine will also be the suffering in the world of all the peoples of the south.

The West defends its excessive consumption and its standard of living based on destroying the atmosphere and climate, and to defend it, knowing that it will cause the exodus from the south to the north, and not only of the Palestinian people; he is ready to respond with death. It does not want to transform its economic system except as far as the market goes to decarbonize it. And he knows that the effort will be minuscule to save life on the planet. His policy seeks to defend the consumption bubble of the rich on the planet and not save humanity, whose majority is disposable, like the children of Gaza.

That's why the strong anti-immigration policies, the concentration camps for immigrants, the thousands of dead shipwrecks, that's why the Darién plug, that's why the economic blockades of rebel countries.

The right in the West sees the solution to the climate crisis as a "final solution", the right once again dreams of Hitler and conquers the majority of the rich and Aryan peoples of the West and our Latin American oligarchies, who do not see another world where live than that of the "malls" of Florida or Madrid.

The southern right uses violence, they break democracy, they feel, in the north, legitimized to do so. They believe they can kill and commit genocide, they just need the blessing of world power.

We are going to barbarism if we do not change power. The life of humanity, and especially of the people of the south, depends on the way in which humanity chooses the path to overcome the climate crisis produced by the wealth of the north. Gaza is just the first experiment in considering us all disposable.

e: wrong hyperlink

DesertIslandHermit posted:

Another reminder to read The Jarkata Method

Dokapon Findom posted:

https://twitter.com/RadishHarmers/status/1713576089870549307

Inspiring!

quote:

Former Official Wanted by Mexico Takes Refuge in Israel
Israel has refused to extradite Tomás Zerón, accused of torture and evidence tampering, because of Mexico’s criticism of the country, an Israeli official said.

By Ronen Bergman and Oscar Lopez
Published July 15, 2021
Updated July 16, 2021

TEL AVIV — A former top Mexican official accused of compromising the investigation of a notorious mass abduction has taken refuge in Israel while the extradition case against him is mired in a diplomatic tussle over Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, Israeli and Mexican officials say.

The Mexican authorities have accused the official, Tomás Zerón de Lucio, the former director of Mexico’s equivalent of the F.B.I., of abduction, torture and tampering with evidence in the investigation into the disappearance of 43 students in 2014, and of embezzling about $50 million in state funds in another case.

Mr. Zerón, who says the charges are false and politically motivated, has applied for asylum in Israel, where he has lived for nearly two years.

Israel has not acted on either the extradition request or the asylum claim, much to the consternation of Mexican officials, human rights organizations and the families of the victims, who are still seeking the truth about their loved ones’ disappearance in what appears to have been a massacre in southern Mexico.

Israel has not commented publicly on the case, but a senior Israeli official said that it was being slow-walked as “tit-for-tat diplomacy” against Mexico, which has supported United Nations inquiries into allegations of Israeli war crimes against Palestinians.

“Why would we help Mexico?” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to offer a candid view of a diplomatic dispute.

The official also said that there may be merit in Mr. Zerón’s asylum claim, which was still being investigated.

Mr. Zerón, the former chief of Mexico’s Criminal Investigation Agency, was best known for leading the campaign that led to the 2014 capture of the drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán, known as “El Chapo.”

As one of the nation’s top law enforcement officers, Mr. Zerón also led the investigation into the kidnapping and presumed massacre of 43 students from a teachers’ college in Ayotzinapa, in Guerrero state, on Sept. 26, 2014. The students were forced off buses by municipal police officers in the city of Iguala, taken away in police vehicles and never seen again.
...

quote:

...
"Zerón is a central figure in the construction of the false ‘historical truth’ version of the Ayotzinapa case—the version that federal authorities manufactured under torture and that has now been discredited,” said Stephanie Brewer, Mexico Director at the Washington Office on Latin America and a long-time observer of the Ayotzinapa case. “The importance of his return to Mexico to be held accountable, and potentially to provide useful information, shouldn’t be underestimated.”

Zerón fled the country long before the current roundup began. His legal woes began in 2016, when he was forced to resign his post as head of the AIC after international investigators from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights accused him of evidence tampering in the Ayotzinapa case. The Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) questioned whether Zerón had, during his initial “investigation,” planted evidence at a site along the San Juan River in Guerrero with the help of torture-induced testimony from accused Guerreros Unidos boss, Agustín García Reyes, known as “El Chereje.” Reyes later said in a deposition by the Físcalia General de la República (FGR), an independent prosecutor’s office, that Zerón had brought him to the site in October 2014 to falsely state on camera that he had thrown trash bags full of the students’ burnt remains into the river, and that Zerón had threatened to throw him from the helicopter they were traveling in lest he refuse to parrot the story.

In July 2020, Secretary of Foreign Affairs Marcelo Ebrard announced that Mexico was seeking to extradite Zerón from Canada, where he was last spotted, on charges that he had overseen the torture of detainees as part of the previous administration’s cover-up. Days later, video footage was leaked to the Mexican daily Milenio showing Zerón interrogating Felipe Rodriguez Salgado, also known as “El Cepillo,” an accused Guerreros Unidos Boss. Salgado is hunched over, shirtless and hooded. In front of him stands Zerón, arms crossed, directing his testimony. “A la primera mamada te mato, güey,” Zerón tells him—roughly, “One wrong move and I’ll kill you, dumbass.”

But by the time of Ebrard’s announcement, Zerón was long gone, reportedly having escaped to Israel in September 2019. Why Israel? The answer seems to lie primarily in the deep ties between Zerón and the Israeli cyber-surveillance industry.

Mexico’s Expansion of Cybersurveillance Technology Under Peña Nieto

Mexico was one of the first clients of the Israeli technology firm NSO Group, whose proprietary Pegasus spyware has been used by authoritarian governments around the world to spy on journalists, dissidents, lawyers, and others. In its dealings with the company, Mexico reportedly selected around 700 mobile phones for Pegasus espionage—the largest number of surveillance subjects submitted by any state client of the NSO Group.

In 2016, the magazine Proceso reported on emails between the Mexican private security company Balam Seguridad Privada and the Italian cybersurveillance company Hacking Team. Their correspondence showed that in 2014, two Balam employees, Rodrigo Ruiz Treviño de Teresa and the Israel-born Asaf Israel Zanzuri, sold NSO Group’s Pegasus software to the office of the Mexican attorney general in a $32 million contract. In one email “a Balam employee indicated that the ‘key person’ in the negotiations for the sale of spying programs was Tomás Zerón de Lucio.” Another email from Hacking Team described Zerón’s hunger for the company’s Remote Control System tool, saying that he planned to use the malware to surveil prosecutors across Mexico.

In 2017, researchers from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab found that Pegasus had been used to target a range of groups and individuals who could potentially undermine the government’s story about the Ayotzinapa case. Among the targets were attorneys representing some of the family members of the 43 disappeared students, the GIEI’s international investigators, and two of Mexico’s best-known journalists, Carlos Loret de Mola and Carmen Aristegui, who have both reported extensively on the case. Citizen Lab found that, while the GIEI was preparing its final report on Ayotzinapa, at least two attempts were made to infect a cell phone belonging to the group. The cyberattacks occurred just over a week after the GIEI held a press conference asserting that their investigation was being deliberately hampered by the Mexican government, and specifically by the NSO Group’s client, the office of the attorney general.

“The Ayotzinapa case has received high levels of national and international attention and has had a substantial political cost, so the level of espionage deployed may be higher than that seen in other cases,” Brewer said. “But it’s not the only example of the use of spyware against human rights defenders and others. Investigations into this practice have shown that Mexico stood out as a massive consumer of spyware, and there still hasn’t been full transparency and accountability for the spying that went on.”
...

quote:

Ríos Montt was president from 1982 to 1983, a period marked by intense state violence against the indigenous Mayan peoples. The violence included the destruction of entire villages, resulting in mass displacement.

Mayans were repeatedly targeted during the period of repression that lasted from 1954 – when the US engineered a military coup – to 1996. More than 200,000 people were killed in Guatemala during that period, 83 percent of whom were Mayans.

The crimes committed by the Guatemalan state were carried out with foreign – particularly US – assistance. One key party to these crimes has so far eluded any mention inside the courts: Israel.

Proxy for US
From the 1980s to today, Israel’s extensive military role in Guatemala remains an open secret that is well-documented but receives scant criticism.

Discussing the military coup which installed him as president in 1982, Ríos Montt told an ABC News reporter that his regime takeover went so smoothly “because many of our soldiers were trained by Israelis.” In Israel, the press reported that 300 Israeli advisers were on the ground training Ríos Montt’s soldiers.

One Israeli adviser in Guatemala at the time, Lieutenant Colonel Amatzia Shuali, said: “I don’t care what the Gentiles do with the arms. The main thing is that the Jews profit,” as recounted in Dangerous Liaison by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn.

Some years earlier, when Congressional restrictions under the Carter administration limited US military aid to Guatemala due to human rights violations, Israeli economic and military technology leaders saw a golden opportunity to enter the market.

Yaakov Meridor, then an Israeli minister of economy, indicated in the early 1980s that Israel wished to be a proxy for the US in countries where it had decided not to openly sell weapons. Meridor said: “We will say to the Americans: Don’t compete with us in Taiwan; don’t compete with us in South Africa; don’t compete with us in the Caribbean or in other places where you cannot sell arms directly. Let us do it … Israel will be your intermediary.”

kecske posted:

Dreylad posted:

always thought it was wild that the israeli right-wing aligned itself with its fundamentalists who basically don't participate in any of the civic institutions of israel but still get to dictate what happens and how to best accommodate their genocidal views. seems bad

Rigged Death Trap posted:

(but its much more vulgar like oval office is)

quote:

Cooze is a vulgar slang term for vagina, of unknown origin. It is used mainly in the US and Canadian slang and has a similar term, cooter.

Honky Mao posted:

Can we get a hezbollah goon to confirm this?

fits my needs posted:

https://x.com/CAIRNational/status/1713629072843030969?s=20

webcams for christ posted:

full statement from President Gustavo Petro:

e: wrong hyperlink

mags posted:

only posting from “verified” (western) sources

apatheticman posted:

Keep getting the youtube block thing so I unblocked it for like 20 seconds to see what they'd serve me.

IDF ads.

This feels like a Verhoven pastiche of genocide fomenting.

apatheticman posted:

Keep getting the youtube block thing so I unblocked it for like 20 seconds to see what they'd serve me.

IDF ads.

This feels like a Verhoven pastiche of genocide fomenting.

apatheticman posted:

Keep getting the youtube block thing so I unblocked it for like 20 seconds to see what they'd serve me.

IDF ads.

This feels like a Verhoven pastiche of genocide fomenting.

quote:

Egypt’s leader incorrectly claims his country never persecuted Jewish people
President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s comments to Secretary of State Antony Blinken directly contradict history.

Frosted Flake posted:

I can't tell if talk about trying to rebuild the temple for their sake is people being ironic or taking what conservatives say literally, or if this is a real policy agenda that has led the Israeli right to steer their country directly onto the rocks.

mila kunis posted:

norm is ice cold

https://twitter.com/normfinkelstein/status/1713573867543838732

i say swears online posted:

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/15/egyptian-president-egypt-jewish-people-00121631

the US media is starting to finally do some thorough journalism

fits my needs posted:

https://x.com/CAIRNational/status/1713629072843030969?s=20

Sheng-Ji Yang posted: