[News] New Investigation Reveals Role of Israeli Operatives in Colombia’s “Political Genocide”

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://orinocotribune.com/new-investigation-reveals-role-of-israeli-operatives-in-colombias-political-genocide/
New
Investigation Reveals Role of Israeli Operatives in Colombia’s “Political
Genocide”By Dan Cohen – Jun 2, 2021

*Known as the “Red Dance,” the systematic murder of the Patriotic Union
remains one of the most extreme cases of political violence in Latin
America and new evidence suggests that it was concocted by one of the most
decorated spies in Israeli history.*

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA — 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
<http://centromemoria.gov.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/UP-Expedientes-contra-el-olvido.pdf>.
>From 1984-2002, at least 4,153 UP members – including
<http://centromemoria.gov.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/UP-Expedientes-contra-el-olvido.pdf>
two
presidential candidates, 14 parliamentarians, 15 mayors, nine mayoral
candidates, three members of the House of Representatives and three
senators – were murdered or dissapeared
<https://centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Todo-paso-frente-a-nuestros.pdf>,
in what a Colombian court deemed was a “political genocide.” According to
data presented <https://corteidh.or.cr/docs/comunicados/cp_07_2021_eng.pdf> 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
<https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/more-than-a-mexican-problem-how-the-us-can-adapt-plan-colombia-to-mexico>
 to Afghanistan
<https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/03/a-plan-colombia-for-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* <https://youtu.be/AMQng34vHJc> (The
Red Dance) – took place in an ostensible “democracy.”

*‘All intelligence work is a partnership with crime’*
Involved in Israeli espionage since the estalbishment of the state, Eitan
is primarily remembered for capturing the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann
in Argentina. However, he also played a central role in several of the
Mossad’s most unsavory operations. “All intelligence work is a partnership
with crime. Morals are put aside,” Eitan once remarked
<https://www.jpost.com/jerusalem-report/the-spymasters-tale-415725>.

In 1965, Eitan advised
<http://www.archivodelosddhh.gov.co/saia_release1/almacenamiento/ACTIVO/2017-01-26/250640/anexos/1_1485432891.pdf>
Moroccan
King Hassan II on how to abduct and murder the leftist politician Mehdi Ben
Barka.

During a 1983 Mossad mission
<https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/oct/12/promis-israel/> in the
United States, he disguised himself as an assistant prosecutor in the
Israeli Ministry of Justice and met with the inventor of the PROMIS
surveillance software. After a visit to the Department of Justice, Eitan
obtained
<https://www.wrmea.org/003-september/book-review-robert-maxwell-israel-s-superspy.html>
the
software and had an Israeli working in Silicon Valley install a backdoor in
the program. Fellow Mossad agent Robert Maxwell, (father of Ghislaine
Maxwell, the notorious child sex trafficker and partner-in-crime of Jeffrey
Epstein), sold the PROMIS technology to dozens of countries around the
world, including Colombia. This gave Israel unfettered access to
intelligence the program collected in every country using it, friend and
foe alike.
[image: Israel spies]Eitan, center, speaks with Benjamin Netanyahu and
other Israeli leaders at an Knesset exhibition about his life. Sebastian
Scheiner | AP

In 1985, Eitan initiated a spying operation on Israel’s top ally, the
United States. Eitan’s team recruited Jonathan Pollard, the Jewish-American
Naval Intelligence Service analyst, who went on to deliver 800 classified
military intelligence documents relating to military capabilities of Arab
states, Pakistan and the Soviet Union. Seymour Hersh reported that the
documents on U.S. intelligence capabilities were passed on to the Soviet
Union in exchange
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/01/18/the-traitor> for release of
Soviet Jewry.

According to a declassified CIA damage assessment
<https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/dc.html?doc=7332518-National-Security-Archive-Doc-13b-Foreign-Denial>,
Eitan urged Pollard to obtain material on signals intelligence and “dirt on
Israeli political figures, any information that would identify Israeli
officials who were providing information to the United States, and any
information on U.S. intelligence operations targeted against Israel.”
According to a court document
<https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/dc.html?doc=7332512-National-Security-Archive-Doc-08b-Defendant>,
Pollard refused some of Eitan’s requests “because he suspected that Eitan
would use such studies for improper political blackmail.”

The discovery of the spying operation landed Pollard in prison. U.S.
federal prosecutors named
<https://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/05/us/darker-side-of-us-israeli-ties-revealed-israeli-in-case-few-facts-known.html>Eitan
as one of four co-conspirators but declined to file charges. With Eitan at
the center of a national embarrassment, he returned to Israel, never to set
foot again in the U.S.

Nevertheless, Eitan’s elite status ensured he landed in a comfortable
position. In the 1970s, he had served as deputy to Ariel Sharon, then
national security advisor to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Sharon, then a
general in the army, arranged for Eitan to be appointed as president of
Israel Chemicals, the largest state-owned company in the country. This new
position left Eitan with ample free time to leverage his experience in
black ops into a position as a clandestine national security adviser to
Colombia’s president, Virgilio Barco Vargas. With the Patriotic Union
beginning to coalesce into a formidable political party, Barco looked for
any way to stop them. And Eitan’s lifetime of experience waging war against
the Palestinian peasant population made him the perfect man for the job.

*Eitan goes to Colombia*
In 1985, Colombian President Belisario Betancourt and the FARC rebels
negotiated a peace accord to end nearly three decades of armed conflict.
The agreement formalized the creation of the Patriotic Union and saw
ex-guerrillas join with communists, trade unionists, communal action boards
and leftwing intellectuals to form a party that would integrate the FARC
into the electoral political system. As negotiations were underway,
Patriotic Union members were being killed. In May 1986, Liberal Party
leader Virgilio Barco won the presidency. Shortly after he took office, the
pace of assassinations of UP members skyrocketed. A whopping 400 members
were assassinated in the first 14 months of his term.

According to an investigation
<https://losdanieles.com/columnista-invitado/virgilio-barco-y-el-exterminio-de-la-up/>
by
Donadio, Barco secretly brought the veteran Mossad agent Rafi Eitan to
Colombia on August 7, 1986, seeking advice on how to defeat the FARC. After
an initial clandestine meeting in Colombia’s presidential palace, Eitan
spent months touring the country with Colombian advisors, secretly funded
by the Colombian energy giant Ecopetrol.

During the second meeting, President Barco explained Eitan’s recommendation
to Secretary General Germán Montoya and a figure from the high military
command present. Eitan even offered to preside over the killings himself in
exchange for another honorarium, but the military commander rejected his
offer, insisting that an all-Colombian force carry it out

For decades, Eitan’s role in the Colombian genocide sat in plain sight,
even as his presence flew under the media’s radar. The February 1, 1987
edition of the Colombian newspaper *El Espectador* featured a buried report
<http://www.archivodelosddhh.gov.co/saia_release1/almacenamiento/ACTIVO/2017-01-26/250640/anexos/1_1485432891.pdf>
on
the hiring of Eitan, noting he was brought in for his expertise in
“counterinsurgency.”  In 1989, veteran journalists Yossi Melman and Dan
Raviv reported
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1989/09/03/israeli-consultants-should-be-more-careful/721160fa-00df-4d24-9657-c7468617f82c/>
 in *The Washington Post* that the Israeli had been hired as a national
security advisor to Colombia’s government.
[image: Colombia Paramilitaries Israel]A now-buried report from the Feb,
1987 edition of the Spanish language El Espectador on the hiring of Eitan

When Donadio began searching for documentation of Eitan’s role, he found
<https://www.elespectador.com/noticias/politica/un-cazador-de-nazis-contratado-por-el-presidente-virgilio-barco/&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1618439433413000&usg=AOvVaw28fEr-P200lIQrw9mBJOxc/>
a
memo and contract draft with an Israeli security firm called “Ktalav
Promotion and Investment Ltd” in the files of Barco’s legal secretary,
Fernán Bejarano Arias, who is today the vice president of legal affairs at
Ecopetrol. The document valued the deal at almost $1 million, including a
fee of $535,714, which covered “up to 50 tickets for air transport
purposes, round trip, on the Tel Aviv-Bogotá route,” amnog other expenses.
The memo indicates that portions of the contract were agreed upon with the
lawyer Ernesto Villamizar Cajiao.

RELATED CONTENT: Colombia: “The Government Murders with Impunity Because
the US Empire is Behind it.”
<https://orinocotribune.com/colombia-the-government-murders-with-impunity-because-the-us-empire-is-behind-it/>

When Donadio contacted
<https://www.elespectador.com/noticias/politica/el-espia-rafi-eitan-habria-venido-a-proteger-al-presidente-virgilio-barco/>
Villamizar
and asked him about the contract with KPI, though not mentioning the Mossad
spy’s name, Villamizar answered him with a question. “Rafi Eitan?”

While Eitan sought to keep his activities in Colombia discreet, a profile
<https://www.makorrishon.co.il/magazine/262065/> in the Israeli magazine *Makor
Rishon* revealed that he played a central role in the March 1989 purchase
of 20 Israeli Kfir fighter jets. Eitan “organized a visit by top army brass
from Colombia – a visit which was followed by the Colombians ordering many
things from the [Israeli] air force, and it brought Israel much benefit –
but he himself was not permitted to participate in the meeting.” Following
the purchase, Colombia sent
<https://www.fac.mil.co/milestones-palanquero-history> several pilots to
Israel for training. The jets were flown
<https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/israels-kfir-jets-going-up-against-swedens-saab-jets-595613>
in
numerous operations against the FARC over three subsequent decades.

*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
<https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-08-30-mn-1305-story.html>
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.
[image: Israel spies]Yair Klein appears in n Israeli court in 1989.
Rachamim Shaul | The National Library of Israel

According to the book
<https://www.amazon.com/All-Clouded-Desire-International-Comparative/dp/0275983307>
 *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
<https://www.jta.org/1989/08/30/archive/behind-the-headlines-israeli-firms-activities-in-colombia-raise-questions-about-military-ties>
the
main conduit between Klein and his Colombian customers.

In 1990, Afek’s decomposing body was found
<https://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/26/us/israeli-tied-to-suspect-colonel-is-discovered-slain-in-miami.html>
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
<https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/chiquita-made-killing-colombias-civil-war>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
<https://pares.com.co/2020/03/03/fedegan-una-historia-de-violencia-y-depredacion/>
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
<https://www.jta.org/1989/08/31/archive/israeli-firm-was-denied-license-and-warned-to-get-out-of-colombia>
 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
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/04/21/colombian-massacre-large-brutal/0ea61a75-0e54-4c47-89a0-f1e139597f3f/>
to
murder and dismember peasants, all aimed at terrorizing communities into
fleeing from their land. The United Nations estimated
<https://thebogotapost.com/its-a-matter-of-perception/15261/> in 2016 that
the AUC was responsible for 80% of the deaths in the conflict.

Eventually Carlos Castaño was killed, allegedly by his brother Vicente,
another powerful paramilitary leader. And, though the AUC officially
demobilized in 2007, the paramilitaries soon enough were reconfigured under
various banners and new formations, remaining closely linked to the state
and business interests.
[image: Colombia Paramilitaries Israel]Members of the Isaeli-trained AUC
attend a 2005 demobilization ceremony in Cristales, Colombia. Luis
Benavides | AP

But Israel’s influence in Colombia’s death squads is not only through
Klein’s training. In his autobiography, AUC founder Carlos Castaño wrote
<https://larrlasa.org/articles/10.25222/larr.111/> that he had studied from
1983-1984 in Jerusalem’s Hebrew University and in Israeli military schools.
Castaño described the training in advanced weaponry and tactics he received
that would become the basis of Colombian paramiltarism’s war against
farmers:

I received instruction in urban strategies, how to protect oneself, how to
kill someone or what to do when someone is trying to kill you. …We learned
how to stop an armored car and use fragmentation grenades to enter a
target. We practiced with multiple grenade launchers, and learned how to
make accurate shots with RPG-7s, or shoot a cannon shell through a window.”

Castaño also “received lectures on how the world arms business operates,
and how to buy arms.”

In addition to the military training he received, Castaño credits his time
in Israel with revolutionizing his entire worldview. During that period,
the soon-to-be mass-murderer became an ardent admirer of Zionism and became
convinced it was possible to stamp out the insurgency at home in Colombia:

I admire the Jews for their bravery in confronting anti-Semitism, their
strategy for survival in the diaspora, the surety of their Zionism, their
mysticism, their religion, and above all for their nationalism… I learned
an infinity of themes in Israel and [to] that country I owe a part of my
culture, my achievements both human and military, and while I repeat
myself, I did not learn only about military training in Israel.

It was there that I became convinced that it was possible to defeat the
guerrillas in Colombia. I began to see how a people could defend itself
from the whole world. I understood how to get someone involved who had
something to lose in a war, by making such a person the enemy of my
enemies. In fact, the idea of “autodefensa” [self-defense] weapons I copied
from the Israelis; every citizen of that country is a potential soldier.”

Klein also trained
<https://www.semana.com/nacion/articulo/yair-klein-cuenta-su-historia/255142-3/>
Jaime
Eduardo Rueda Rocha, who in 1989 assassinated Liberal Party presidential
candidate Luis Carlos Galán, the overwhelming favorite to win the upcoming
election. Not only had Klein trained the killer, but the weapon Rueda used
was part of a shipment Klein orchestrated of 500 Israeli-manufactured
machine guns from Miami to the Medellin drug cartel, according to a 1989
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations report
<https://books.google.com/books?id=R_plAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA77&lpg=PA77&dq=nbc+news+yair+klein&source=bl&ots=-wYIN3i54V&sig=ACfU3U0WdQp373757RMbJfZtIDX7hP0vLw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiVkv66paTvAhUIMlkFHRf9Dcs4ChDoATAOegQIDxAD#v=onepage&q=nbc%20news%20yair%20klein&f=false>.
(In 2016, Miguel Alfredo Maza Márquez, head of Colombia’s then
Administrative Department of Security (DAS), was convincted of
participation in the plot to murder Galán and sentenced to 30 years in
prison. He has since testified
<https://www.semana.com/nacion/articulo/la-verdad-del-general-miguel-maza-marquez/643963/>
that
top-ranking members of the military plotted Galan’s assassiation.)

As the revelations that a military reserve officer had been training death
squads created an international scandal, the Israeli government filed
charges, convicting Klein of illegally exporting weapons and military
expertise.

In 2001, the Colombian government tried Klein in absentia, sentencing him
to eleven years in prison. In 2007, Klein was arrested in Moscow on a
warrant issued by Interpol, and spent three years in prison. Colombia
sought his extradition, but in November 2010 the European Court of Human
Rights ruled that Colombia could not guarantee his physical safety. The
Russian government complied with the ECHR’s ruling and released Klein,
allowing him to return to Israel. Colombia has since requested his
extradition, but the Israeli government has refused.

RELATED CONTENT:Mobilizations in Colombia Persevere After Government
Continues Militarization
<https://orinocotribune.com/mobilizations-in-colombia-persevere-after-government-continues-militarization/>

Klein’s company, Hod Hahanit, remains active
<https://441il.com/listco_res/%D7%97%D7%95%D7%93+%D7%94%D7%97%D7%A0%D7%99%D7%AA+%D7%91%D7%99%D7%98%D7%97%D7%95%D7%9F+%D7%91%D7%A2%22%D7%9E/HOD+HAHANIT+SECURITY+LTD/%D7%90%D7%95%D7%A8+%D7%99%D7%94%D7%95%D7%93%D7%94+%D7%94%D7%94%D7%A1%D7%AA%D7%93%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%AA+22+60200+/513030619.html>
to
this day.


*A joint effort? *While Donadio’s groundbreaking investigation has created
a controversy in Colombia, it does not answer whether Rafi Eitan and Yair
Klein’s simultaneous and respective operations advising the government and
death squads were a joint effort or merely coincidental.

For his part, the lawyer Ernesto Villamizar told
<https://www.elespectador.com/noticias/politica/el-espia-rafi-eitan-habria-venido-a-proteger-al-presidente-virgilio-barco/>
Donadio
that Eitan and Klein had nothing to do with each other.

Klein corroborated his claim, saying that he was unaware of any of Eitan’s
activities in Colombia.

However, an *AP *article references an Israeli media report that Rafi Eitan
(spelled Eytan in the article) was in Colombia at the same time as Klein
and left days before the gunman armed and trained by Klein murdered
presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán:

It [the media report] said Rafael Eytan, an Israeli counterterrorism
expert, denied suggestions that he was a consultant to Israeli companies
operating in Colombia and said he had cut all business ties to that country.

According to the report, Eytan confirmed he flew to Colombia a week ago for
private reasons.

Beyond the vague suggestion of that article, there is no evidence of a
connection between Eitan and Klein. In some ways, it is even more
remarkable that two Israelis advising Colombian government in mass-murder
of its political opponents were operating independent from and unbeknownst
to each other.

*Israel-Colombia relations cool*
After the fallout of Israelis training Colombian paramilitaries, the
relationship between the two top U.S. allies cooled, according to U.S.
diplomatic cables
<https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09BOGOTA3483_a.html> released
by WikiLeaks. But as Plan Colombia was implemented, Israel and Colombia
once again ramped up collaboration.

In December 2006, Colombia’s Ministry of Defense hired another private
Israeli security company known as Global CST to “help the GOC [Government
of Colombia] conduct a strategic assessment of the internal conflict.”
Global CST is headed by Israel Ziv
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/netanyahu-openly-boasts-israels-war-africans/19051>,
a career officer who, like Yair Klein, leveraged his military experience
into a profitable career advising and training despots around the world.

“General Ziv was a personal acquaintance of then-Minister of Defense Juan
Manuel Santos,” the cable notes. William Brownfield, then U.S. ambassador
to Colombia commented that “Ziv worked his way into the confidence of
former Defense Minister Santos by promising a cheaper version of USG
[United States government] assistance without our strings attached.”

Under Santos, Colombia sought to purchase Israel’s Hermes-450, a drone
under development in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and in
wars against neighboring Lebanon.

However, according to the diplomatic cable, Tel Aviv-Bogota relations again
soured after it emerged that Global CST interpreter and Argentine-born
Israeli national Shai Killman “had made copies of classified Colombian
Defense Ministry documents in an unsuccessful attempt to sell them to the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.” These documents contained “high
value target (HVT) database information” – a reference to the FARC
leadership the CIA assisted
<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/world/americas/colombia-cocaine-human-rights.html>
the
Colombian government in assassinating. The resulting fallout, combined with
pressure <https://www.haaretz.com/1.4999020> from the U.S., compelled
Colombia to cancel the contract to buy Israeli drones.

Despite the strains in the decades-old relationship, the two countries have
maintained strong ties. In 2016, then-Israeli Ambassador to Colombia Marco
Sermoneta boasted
<https://caracol.com.co/radio/2016/09/09/internacional/1473437428_779249.html>
that
Colombia is the top recipient of Israeli aid.

The following year, as the extermination of social leaders and
ex-combatants began, Israeli military advisors visited Colombian military
bases to give training courses in “security.”

*Genocide redux*
President Ivan Duque, the handpicked successor of far-right former
President Álvaro Uribe, has worked assiduously to shore up Colombia’s ties
with Israel. In March 2020, he appeared
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDoa-BDQ5yc> at the American Israel
Political Action Conference, boasting about his ties with Israel. Months
later, Duque and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced
<https://www.gov.il/en/departments/news/event_colombia100820> the launch of
the Israel-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

Meanwhile, Duque has undermined and attacked the landmark 2016 peace accord
at every turn, while turning a blind eye to the mass-murder of demobilized
FARC guerrillas, trade unionists, human rights defenders, environmental
activists and social leaders – a scenario eerily reminiscent of the
political genocide of the Patriotic Union. Rather than a veteran spy
advising the Colombian government, Israel now has an official presence. In
January 2020, Israeli military Brigadier General Dan Glodfus visited
<https://cgfm.mil.co/es/blog/ejercito-de-israel-destaca-entrenamiento-militar-colombiano>
a
Colombian military base to reinforce ties between the two countries. Amid a
spate of massacres in September 2020, Israel dispatched
<https://www.cgfm.mil.co/en/blog/colombia-and-israel-strengthen-ties-training-and-military-cooperation>
10
instructors to train Colombian Special Forces in “counter-terrorism.”

With the recent assassination
<https://www.rcnradio.com/colombia/caribe/asesinan-en-santa-marta-uno-de-los-fundadores-de-la-union-patriotica>
of
Francisco Giacometto Gómez, an elder activist and founding member of the
Patriotic Union, it seems that the campaign against the UP and the current
slaughter are indistinguishable.

Dan Cohen

Dan Cohen is a journalist and co-producer of the award-winning documentary,
Killing Gaza. He has produced widely distributed video reports and print
dispatches from across Israel-Palestine, Latin America, the US-Mexico
border and Washington DC. Follow him on Twitter at @DanCohen3000.
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