New Investigation Reveals Role of Israeli Operatives in Colombias
Political Genocide
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.
by Dan Cohen
June 02nd, 2021
Mint Press News
By Dan Cohen
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. 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 partys legal status.
According to a recent investigation by renowned Colombian journalist Alberto
Donadio, the extermination of the Patriotic Union was devised by
Betancourts 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. governments 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 worlds 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.
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 Mossads
most unsavory operations. All intelligence work is a partnership with
crime. Morals are put aside, Eitan once remarked.
In 1965, Eitan advised Moroccan King Hassan II on how to abduct and murder
the leftist politician Mehdi Ben Barka.
During a 1983 Mossad mission 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 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.
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 Israels top ally, the United
States. Eitans 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 for release of Soviet Jewry.
According to a declassified CIA damage assessment, 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, Pollard refused some of Eitans 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 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, Eitans 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 Colombias
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 Eitans 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 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 Colombias
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 Eitans 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, Eitans role in the Colombian genocide sat in plain sight, even
as his presence flew under the medias radar. The February 1, 1987 edition
of the Colombian newspaper El Espectador featured a buried report 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 in The Washington Post that the Israeli had been hired as a
national security advisor to Colombias government.
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 Eitans role, he found a
memo and contract draft with an Israeli security firm called Ktalav
Promotion and Investment Ltd in the files of Barcos 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.
When Donadio contacted Villamizar and asked him about the contract with KPI,
though not mentioning the Mossad spys name, Villamizar answered him with a
question. Rafi Eitan?
While Eitan sought to keep his activities in Colombia discreet, a profile 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 several pilots to Israel for
training. The jets were flown 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 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.
Israel spies
Yair Klein appears in n Israeli court in 1989. Rachamim Shaul | The National
Library of Israel
According to the book 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 the main conduit between Klein and his
Colombian customers.
In 1990, Afeks decomposing body was found 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 Colombias 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 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 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 cant do anything without permission from the Ministry of
Defense, he said.
Kleins statement upends the claim of then-Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin,
who told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Israeli Defense Ministry had
denied Kleins 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 to murder
and dismember peasants, all aimed at terrorizing communities into fleeing
from their land. The United Nations estimated 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.
Colombia Paramilitaries Israel
Members of the Isaeli-trained AUC attend a 2005 demobilization ceremony in
Cristales, Colombia. Luis Benavides | AP
But Israels influence in Colombias death squads is not only through
Kleins training. In his autobiography, AUC founder Carlos Castaño wrote
that he had studied from 1983-1984 in Jerusalems 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
paramiltarisms 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 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.
(In 2016, Miguel Alfredo Maza Márquez, head of Colombias 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 that top-ranking members of the military plotted Galans
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 ECHRs ruling and released Klein, allowing him
to return to Israel. Colombia has since requested his extradition, but the
Israeli government has refused.
Kleins company, Hod Hahanit, remains active to this day.
A joint effort?
While Donadios groundbreaking investigation has created a controversy in
Colombia, it does not answer whether Rafi Eitan and Yair Kleins
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 Donadio that Eitan and
Klein had nothing to do with each other.
Klein corroborated his claim, saying that he was unaware of any of Eitans
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 released by WikiLeaks. But as Plan Colombia was
implemented, Israel and Colombia once again ramped up collaboration.
In December 2006, Colombias 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, 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 Israels 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 the Colombian government in assassinating. The
resulting fallout, combined with pressure 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 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 Colombias ties with
Israel. In March 2020, he appeared at the American Israel Political Action
Conference, boasting about his ties with Israel. Months later, Duque and
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced 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 a
Colombian military base to reinforce ties between the two countries. Amid a
spate of massacres in September 2020, Israel dispatched 10 instructors to
train Colombian Special Forces in counter-terrorism.
With the recent assassination 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.