Ok. I found this:
http://biz.yahoo.com/ibd/070502/issues01.html?.v=1
Al Gore, Ugly American
Wednesday May 2, 7:00 pm ET
“Gore justified his lack of class by making wild accusations that Uribe has ties to Colombia’s paramilitary guerrillas and is thus a human rights violator.
Gore’s hypocrisy in this was obvious enough, since he attended a conference at the 2006 Clinton Global Initiative in New York with Bolivia’s anti-American president, Evo Morales, whose violent actions and human rights violations are no secret.”
Well, basically the problem in Colombia is you have FARC and another leftist rebel group whose name escapes me, both of which have largely lost their ideology and are basically organized crime groups who are beyond vicious and supremely evil. Then you have the government. And then you have various right-wing militia groups, who are not boy scouts, and will from time to time kill innocent people, torture the leftist guerillas, and otherwise get out of control.
Problem is people trying to see black and white (and getting who is black and who is right reversed to boot, like Gore) when there’s black and medium-gray. The government does indeed have links to the right-wing militias to some degree, but the key thing is they’re not nearly as bad as FARC, and the key to things getting better there (as they have been) is annihilating FARC.
If you read Rick Kaplan’s book “Imperial Grunts” there’s a long chapter about US Army Special Forces in Colombia explaining the whole thing. Those guys considered parts of Southern Colombia more dangerous than Afghanistan or Iraq.