Modern example of blatant misuse of Red Cross logo, Colombia 2008:
Illicit use of Red Cross symbol in ColombiaBasically, an opposition presidential election candidate was kidnapped by rebels during the 2002 election campaign of the hard-line President (Uribe = Colombian Putin), then when the government was face with all sorts of scandals in 2008 they rescued the kidnapped candidate. At first they claimed they'd fought a daring rescue mission with commandos, but later it turns out they flew a fake Red Cross helicopter into the jungle and the rebels were waiting to hand the prisoner over without a fight.
Their after-the-fact rationale once it leaked how the rescue took place was, "oh we have agents within the rebels who can
give commands to the other rebels". The question now, seeing as how convenient it was for the rebels to only kidnap leftist candidates (the rebels ARE leftists but only target fellow-leftist politicians for some weird reason :/ ), is how long has the right-wing government faction had these commanders implanted in the rebels, was it more than 6 years? Their double-agents were senior enough to order rebels to
release the politician, the rebel group has been around 40 years and, given how paranoid the rebels are, it seems unlikely that they'd trust a new recruit with giving orders, so were the double-agents also senior enough to
order her initial capture?What's even more suspicious is that the Colombian government has apparently completely infiltrated the rebels organization, yet they don't shut them down. The only rebels they seem to kill are the peace negotiators. In fact, they killed the top rebel peace negotiator a couple of months before the rescue. He had in fact been organizing her peaceful release. Clearly they couldn't have that when they
could fly in guns blazing for the publicity. But, they were too chicken to
actually fly in guns-blazing so they "tricked" the rebels into releasing someone who they were planning to release anyway, then
claimed it was a daring guns-blazing mission.
The Colombian government often accuse international human rights organizations as being in league with the rebels. Their "story" about the Red Cross thing was that the Red Cross were only meant to be "transporting" the prisoners for the rebels, i.e. for a checkup at a Red Cross hospital after which they'd just hand the prisoners BACK to the rebels. Of course, the Red Cross would
never operate in this manner, it only makes sense from the paranoid right-wing worldview of the Colombian military / political bloc. So, the Colombian government would have us believe that their fake Red Cross helicopter saved the hostages from not only the FARC rebels, but that evil Red Cross who is in league with terrorists.
This is permanent war, Bush-style. They use the threat of the rebels to denounce Human Rights organizations, trade unions, troublesome (i.e. asking questions) journalists, and the likes as being in league with the evil rebels.
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