By FRANK BAJAK
Associated Press Writer

LA LOMA, Colombia - The bus had just left Drummond Co. Inc.’s coal mine carrying about 50 workers when gunmen halted it and forced two union leaders off. They shot one on the spot, pumping four bullets into his head, and dragged the other one off to be tortured and killed.

In a civil trial set to begin Monday before a federal jury in Birmingham, Ala., union lawyers have presented affidavits from two people who allege that Drummond ordered those killings, a charge the company denies.

The Chiquita banana company admitted paying right-wing militias known as paramilitaries to protect its Colombia operations. Human rights activists claim such practices were widespread among multinationals in Colombia, and that Drummond went even further, using the fighters to violently keep its labor costs down.

The Drummond case, they say, is their best chance yet of seeing those allegations heard in court.

The union has presented affidavits to the Alabama court from two people who say they were present when Drummond’s chief executive in Colombia, Augusto Jimenez, handed over a large sum of cash to representatives of the local paramilitary warlord. They claim the money was for the March 10, 2001, killings of Sintramienergetica union local president Valmore Locarno and his deputy, Victor Orcasita.

Union leaders, former army soldiers and ex-paramilitary fighters also allege that family-owned Drummond, which shifted most of its operations to northern Colombia in the 1990s as its Alabama veins gave out, paid and provisioned the paramilitaries as a matter of policy.

Drummond says neither charge is true.

read more at YAHOO! NEWS

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SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Thousands of protesters marched through Brazil’s largest city on Thursday calling President Bush a warmonger and planet polluter as he started a tour aimed at winning friends in Latin America.

“No. 1 Enemy of Humanity” and “Get out Bush!” read signs carried by workers, students, peasants and other activists.

To the beat of Afro-Brazilian drums, they demanded an end to the war in Iraq and what they called state’sponsored torture, U.S. imperialism and growing economic inequality.

Bush was due to arrive on Thursday night in Brazil, a country Washington sees as a potential counterweight to the influence of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez and his plans for a socialist revolution in Latin America.

The five-country tour aims to repair Bush’s standing in Latin America, where polls show widespread opposition to the Iraq war and U.S. trade and immigration policies. After Brazil, he will travel to Uruguay, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico.

“It’s nothing more than to say we want to be your friends,” Bush said in an interview with Colombian television before he set out. “My trip is a chance to tell the people … that the United States cares deeply about the human condition.”

Story continues at Reuters

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SAO PAULO - US President George W Bush - biting the dust in Iraq, contested at home, despised around the world - is taking a break and heading south on a five’stop tour of Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico. He is not visiting the 100,000-hectare family ranch his daughter Barbara bought last autumn in the Paraguayan chaco. He might be tempted to stay in.

The Bush reception won’t be exactly of the Rolling Stones variety. Massive protests are scheduled everywhere - even in countries where he is not showing up. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez - Bush’s continental nemesis - will address a huge crowd in Buenos Aires, probably in a soccer stadium, as US Secret Service paranoia turns Sao Paulo into an immense Green Zone.

This had to be, fundamentally, a Bush-against-Chavez tour. Inevitably, it is also a Bush-against-Ahmadinejad tour. Last month, strengthening ties with Latin America, the Iranian president visited Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua, which in the neo-con scheme of things qualify, along with gas-rich Bolivia, as the southern “axis of evil”.

For the Bush visit, the White House/State Department tactic is once again imperial “divide and rule’. Mercosur - the South American common market that is evolving as a true, indigenous integration model - will be actively bombarded, via different strategies targeting Brazil and Uruguay. Venezuela became a full Mercosur member last year.

Read more at AsiaTimes

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BOGOTÁ — Just two weeks ahead of a high-profile visit by President Bush to Latin America, the United States’ key partner on the continent is engulfed in an extraordinary scandal that threatens to undermine the credibility of US alliances and policy priorities from Mexico to Argentina.

The widening probe linking dozens of political allies of Colombia’s president, Al-varo Uribe, to the country’s right-wing death squads and drug traffickers has started to erode support on Capitol Hill for Colombia, the biggest recipient of US aid outside the Middle East and Afghanistan.

The United States has spent $4.7 billion since 2000 fighting drugs and the insurgency in Colombia. In a show of support for his center-right ally, President Bush is scheduled next month to be the first US president since John F. Kennedy to visit the Colombian capital of Bogot.

But after a week that saw the ouster of Uribe’s foreign minister over her family’s ties to paramilitary militias and the arrest of his hand picked former secret police chief for murder, the next casualty of the scandal could be America’s reputation. The region feels forgotten by and estranged from Washington, D.C., since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and a string of victories by leftist presidents.

Bush is not expected to offer significant new aid or trade in his March 8-14 tour, his nemesis Hugo Chavez of oil-rich Venezuela is traversing the continent with an open checkbook.

Read more at Boston.com

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So let’s see…..we have Iran courting the countries of Cuba, Venezuela, Bolvia, Nicaragua, and now Ecuador. This is where we’ve ended up in Latin America with Bush at the helm. Diplomacy? We don’t need no stinkin diplomacy!

Monday, January 15, 2007 - Updated: 09:38 AM EST

QUITO, Ecuador - Leftist Rafael Correa is promising to battle Ecuador’s widely discredited political establishment after taking office Monday in a ceremony that is drawing some of Washington’s fiercest critics.

U.S. foes including Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Bolivian President Evo Morales and Iran’s hardline leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were gathering to welcome the U.S.-educated economist into Latin America’s club of left-leaning leaders.

Correa, 43, won a November election runoff as a charismatic outsider who pledged to lead a “citizens- revolution” to make the country’s democracy responsive to its poor majority.

Correa says his first act as president will be to call a national referendum on a special assembly to rewrite the constitution _ a move he says is vital to limiting the power of the traditional parties that he blames for the country’s problems.

That could quickly put him on a collision course with Congress, which is dominated by those same parties. Lawmakers have dismissed the last three elected presidents, violating impeachment proceedings, after huge street protests demanding their ousters.

During his campaign, Correa attacked Congress as a “sewer” of corruption and ran no candidates for the legislature. And he said last week that the newly installed congressmen “do not represent anyone other than their own interests and the bosses of their political parties and that is not democracy.”

Read more here

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