The Secret History of Israel’s Role in Genocide in Colombia

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As a diplomatic row erupts between the former allies, Dan Cohen republishes his 2021 MintPress News exposé on the role of Israeli agents in training death squads and devising plans for genocide in Colombia.

Gustavo Petro at North-South Schism session at World Economic Forum in January 2024. (WEP/Flickr)

By Dan Cohen
Uncaptured Media

On Oct. 16 last year, Colombia demanded that Israel’s ambassador Gali Dagan depart the country. “At the very least, apologize and leave,” foreign minister Álvaro Leyva said.

This came one day after Israel halted weapons exports to Colombia.

“If we have to suspend foreign relations with Israel we will suspend them. We don’t support genocides,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro tweeted.

The diplomatic row erupted in response to Petro’s scathing criticism of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, in which he compared Israeli military to Nazis.

This prompted Israel’s foreign ministry to summon Colombia’s ambassador Margarita Manjarez, where she was dressed down.

“’At the meeting, it was made clear to the ambassador that her president’s statements were received in Israel with shock given Hamas’s barbaric terrorist attack, in which more than 1,300 Israelis were murdered and over 150 innocent civilians were kidnapped,” said Israel foreign ministry spokesperson Lior Hayat,'” The Times of Israel reported on Oct. 10.

Colombia and Israel have long shared close ties, Israel providing military equipment, training and more.  The late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez famously called Colombia “The Israel of Latin America” for its role as a U.S. proxy and platform for maintenance of control throughout the region.

Successive Colombian heads of state embraced the relationship. In 2013, then-president Juan Manuel Santos boasting that “If somebody called my country the Israel of Latin America, I would be very proud. I admire the Israelis, and I would consider that as a compliment.”

However, Israel played a key role in turning Colombia into a narco-state terrorized by paramilitary death squads that, in collaboration with the military, committed what a Colombian court ruled was a “political genocide” of a left wing party known as the Patriotic Union.

Petro directly referred to this bloody history in his tweets denouncing Israel.

“Neither the Yair Klein nor the Raifal Eithan will be able to say what the history of peace in Colombia is. They unleashed the massacre and genocide in Colombia,” he wrote. “Someday the army and government of Israel will ask us for forgiveness for what their men did in our land, unleashing the genocide. I will hug them and they will cry for the murder of Auschwitz and Gaza, and for the Colombian Auschwitz.”

[Yair Klein, a former lieutenant colonel in the Israeli army, established the private mercenary outfit Spearhead Ltd., which provided arms and training to South America militaries. Raifal Eithan was an Israeli general, former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces and a member of the Knesset.]

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to Petro:

I investigated Israel, Klein and Eitan’s role in the decades-long Colombian bloodbath for MintPress News in 2021, republished here. 

By Dan Cohen
MintPress News

June 2, 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.

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