What does Obama have planned next for Latin America?

clipped from: onlinejournal.com

Obama’s Latin American policy resembles Richard Nixon’s Operation Condor and its assassinations and covert operations.

He has deploy thousands of Marines and dozens of Coast Guard vessels to Costa Rica, more military bases in Colombia and Honduras, authorized a coup against Zelaya. He is more threatening than the benign George W. Bush.

Thee are increasing reports of political assassinations, illegal detention of opposition figures and journalists in Colombia, Panama, and Honduras.

Pinochet supporters of the Chilean Senate recently charged by Venezuela with interference in elections. Under President Sebastian Pinera, Chile has become
with Colombia, Panama, and Costa Rica U.S. base to destabilize progressive-led governments.

The current doctrine is found in CIA manuals for “PBSuccess,”

Brazil’s leftist President Joao Goulart, overthrown in a 1964 coup, died.

Chile’s Eduardo Frei Montalva. PBSuccess’s “Study of Assassination” talks about the machine gun option, to kill Allende.

renewed low-key Operation Condor appears to have taken shape under Obama

And Obama’s decision not to rescind George W. Bush’s re-establishment of the U.S. Navy’s Fourth Fleet as part of the US Southern Command means that the United States can always resort to its old “gunboat diplomacy” to enforce its military might and will in Latin America.

For Obama, whose Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, was a top officer in the armed forces of General Suharto, who carried out the CIA’s 1965-66 coup against President Sukarno and the Indonesian Communist Party, which saw almost one million accused Communists, as well as ethnic Chinese, systematically genocided, such re-imposition of covert activities in Latin America presents no moral dilemma to Obama, who first witnessed the CIA’s repression as an impressionable young boy of 7 and 8 years old while living in Jakarta. Soetoro was still a senior officer in Suharto’s army when Soetoro enrolled Barack Obama in 1967 as Barry Soetoro in Jakarta’s Fransiskus Assisi Catholic school. In 1967, the Indonesian army and its CIA handlers were still mopping up Indonesia’s left-wing opposition forces. Obama has studiously refrained from mentioning Indonesia’s CIA coup and has twice canceled presidential visits to the country.

2010 Global Drug Trafficking Map – Most Drugs in the World are Produced in Non-White Countries

CARVILLE'S BRAND

James Carville has backed political candidates in Latin America identifying with Bill Clinton’s militaristic and free market approach to the region.

Carville is also a virtual kingmaker in Latin America, Mexico’s Ernesto Zedillo, Brazil’s Fernando Enrique Cardoso

Colombia, Carville has offered his consulting services to Juan Manuel Santos, a former Minister of Defense and member of the governing Social Party of National Unity or Party of the U. Santos is sullied as Minister of Defense, armed forces killed
civilians and passed off as rebels

Santos, a militarist, favored U.S. free trade agenda. Bill Clinton supported the Colombian elite to the hilt, Plan Colombia, $1.3 billion aid package which waived human rights conditions. out of office Bill met with Uribe personally.

Carville advised Honduran Manuel Zelaya but was not aware and would not have agreed with Zelaya’s post-election turn to the left

Argentina, Carville advised Peronist Daniel Scioli who is linked to Kirchner. Kirchner was a critic of neo-liberal economic. Scioli doesn’t fit

Carville also advised Domingo Cavallo. Cavallo, a supply-side economist commitment to free-market and huge profits to foreign investors. His first stint in charge of Argenine economy was 1991 to 1996. He linked the Argentine peso to the American dollar, which in the beginning eliminated inflation, encouraged foreign investment, and spurred middle-class to splurge on overseas spending. eventually made for exporters harder to sell, unemployment and deficits rose.

In his second stint, he froze bank deposits which lead to a huge devaluation and increased his country’s indebtedness and inflate commissions to banks in exchange for agreement to renegotiate bonds.

Panama, advised Ernesto Pérez Balladares, former CEO at Citibank. Strategy to sell off state industries and reduce labor laws. unions demanded an end to the privatization protests erupted, rubber bullets.

Ecuadoran President Jamil Mahuad, dollarizing currency. prompted Indians civil disobedience. In January, 2000, he was forced out.

Bolivian Gonzalo Sánchez de Losada “Goni.” In 2002 against Evo Morales. In Goni's prior term, pursuing partial privatization of state enterprises. After Goni’s win, he decides to ship gas through Chile, sparking riots. Goni crumbled, fled.

Carville's latest stint is as environmental gadfly of BP. Carville’s associates have had ties to BP. Stanley Greenberg, during Goni, BP was at the center of the gas transmission deal involving Chile.

In Colombia, energy loom large

BP is a key player in Colombia. It is thinking about commencing exploratory drilling in offshore Colombian oil blocs. Colombia needs to give BP the boot. Antanas Mockus, is no radical either but he would be the first Green Party president in the world.

QUESTIONS OF VENEZUELA

Venezuelan government
US is pursuing
war of attrition
Nicaragua in the 1980s
Chile under Allende
destabilization
political warfare
counterrevolutionary strategy
military threats
with psychological operations, disinformation campaigns, black propaganda, economic sabotage, diplomatic pressures, the mobilization of political opposition forces inside the country, carrying out provocations and sparking violent confrontations in the cities, manipulation of disaffected sectors and the exploitation of legitimate grievances among the population.
deft at taking
mistakes and limitations, such as corruption, clientalism, and opportunism
deft at aggravating and manipulating material problems, such as shortages, price inflation
to destroy
by making it unworkable
exhausting the population's will to
forge a new society
undermine the revolution's mass social base
collapse it in on itself
by undermining the remarkable hegemony
provoke
a crackdown
transform
democratic socialist process
into an authoritarian one
Chavez
removed

by constant war of attribution
through elections, a military putsch from within, an uprising, mass defections from the revolutionary camp, or a combination
military bases in Colombia
crucial platform for intelligence and reconnaissance operations
infiltration of counterrevolutionary military, economic sabotage, and terrorist groups
to harass
to provoke reactions
to synchronize armed provocation
mere threat
bases represent
powerful US psychological operatio
heighten tensions
force
extremist positions
"crying wolf,"
to embolden internal anti-Chavista and counterrevolutionary forces.
the military bases
part of the larger U.S. strategy
all of Latin America
a counteroffensive to
the
"Pink Tide."
Venezuela is the epicenter of an emergent counter-hegemonic bloc
Bolivia and Ecuador
region's burgeoning social movements
left political forces are
targets
coup in Honduras
provided impetus
Colombia
epicenter
bastion of 21st century fascism

CONTRAS, COCAINE AND COVERT OPERATIONS

An August, 1996, series in the San Jose Mercury News by reporter Gary Webb linked the origins of crack cocaine in California to the contras, a guerrilla force backed by the Reagan administration that attacked Nicaragua's Sandinista government during the 1980s. Webb's series, "The Dark Alliance," has been the subject of intense media debate, and has focused attention on a foreign policy drug scandal that leaves many questions unanswered.

This electronic briefing book is compiled from declassified documents obtained by the National Security Archive, including the notebooks kept by NSC aide and Iran-contra figure Oliver North, electronic mail messages written by high-ranking Reagan administration officials, memos detailing the contra war effort, and FBI and DEA reports. The documents demonstrate official knowledge of drug operations, and collaboration with and protection of known drug traffickers. Court and hearing transcripts are also included.

Special thanks to the Arca Foundation, the Ruth Mott Fund, the Samuel Rubin Foundation, and the Fund for Constitutional Government for their support.

COLOMBIA VENEZUELA WAR

US builds up its bases in oil-rich South America

From the Caribbean to Brazil, political opposition to US plans for 'full-spectrum operations' is escalating rapidly

By Hugh O'Shaughnessy

Sunday, 22 November 2009

The United States is massively building up its potential for nuclear and non-nuclear strikes in Latin America and the Caribbean by acquiring unprecedented freedom of action in seven new military, naval and air bases in Colombia.
part of an effort to counter the loss of influence it has suffered recently at the hands of a new generation of Latin American leaders no longer willing to accept Washington's political and economic tutelage.
Hugo Chavez of Venezuela
bases agreement could mean the possibility of war with Colombia.
Evo Morales of Bolivia
called for the outlawing of foreign military bases in the region.
President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras
that US forces stationed at the Honduran base of Palmerola collaborated with Roberto Micheletti,
Brazil had already expressed its unhappiness at the presence of US naval vessels in its massive new offshore oilfields off Rio de Janeiro,
US gets half its oil from Latin America
US Fourth Fleet was re-established in the region's waters in 2008.

The fleet's vessels can include Polaris nuclear-armed submarines – a deployment seen by some experts as a violation of the 1967 Tlatelolco Treaty, which bans nuclear weapons from the continent.
Indications of US willingness to envisage the stationing of nuclear weapons in Colombia are seen as an additional threat to the spirit of nuclear disarmament.
four more nuclear-weapon-free zones were set up in Africa, the South Pacific, South-east Asia and Central Asia.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI),
the bilateral agreement on the seven Colombian bases,
risks a costly new arms race in a region.
rising arms expenditure in Latin America draining resources from social programmes that the poor of the region need.
US strategy
set out in May
US Air Force (USAF) proposal for its military construction programme for the fiscal year 2010.
Palanquero,
"in a critical sub-region of our hemisphere where security and stability is under constant threat from... anti-US governments".

Palanquero which, the USAF says, offers an opportunity for conducting "full-spectrum operations throughout South America.... It also supports mobility missions by providing access to the entire continent
if fuel is available
over half the continent if un-refuelled". ("Full-spectrum operations" is the Pentagon's jargon for its long-established goal of securing crushing military superiority with atomic and conventional weapons across the globe and in space.)

Palanquero could also be useful in ferrying arms and personnel to Africa via the British mid-Atlantic island of Ascension, French Guiana and Aruba, the Dutch island off Venezuela. The US has access to them all.
The USAF proposal contradicted the assurances
That USAF proposal was hastily reissued
without the reference to "anti-US governments".
Civil strife in Colombia meant
number of displaced since 1985 to 4.6 million,
much-publicised one in Islamist-ruled Sudan where 2.7 million have fled from their homes.

Palanquero, which adjoins the town of Puerto Salgar on the broad Magdalena river north-west of the capital, Bogota,

USA AND COLOMBIA PREPARE FOR WAR

The ideological operation is simple: to put a smokescreen in front of the unfortunate decision of the Colombian government to increase the shameful presence of North American troops and mercenaries in our territory, which puts regional security in grave danger, and at the same time caricaturing the legitimate protests of the Venezuelan government against the expansion of the bases and its denunciation of the threat they represent. They want to confuse the victim with the aggressor.

For more than a century, the countries of America have been victims of

• the direct interventions of the U.S. army (Dominican Republic, Panama, Haiti, Puerto Rico…);

• the promotion, financing and training of local mercenaries and death squads to destablise adverse governments or revolutionary processes (Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Colombia...);

• the financing of opposition parties, terrorist acts and massive destabilisation campaigns (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador...);

• and the support of coup d’états and military or civilian dictatorships (Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Honduras...).

Today, facing the world crisis and the relative decline of its economic power, the U.S. needs to guarantee its control with a strong military presence in the region. Seven Colombian bases, airports to land warplanes, the deployment of intelligence, ultimately a force of occupation in our territory, added to what has already existed since the 1962 doctrine of National Security, convert our country into a true beachhead of U.S. military deployment and bury any hope of building a democratic nation.

It’s no secret to anybody that Venezuela is trying to promote a different model of development to neo-liberalism,

• with social reforms,

• large state investments,

• improvement of the productive apparatus and sustainable growth;

• policies which are intolerable for the Colombian and U.S. ruling classes.

BRAZIL VERSUS USA

Brazilian diplomats denied Thursday that there is a crisis in relations with the U.S.,
such as Iran's nuclear ambitions and relations with post-coup Honduras.
Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said he spoke more than an hour by telephone with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

"We believe that no one should recognize Sunday's election as legitimate because we believe it is an attempt to erase the coup," Garcia said.

Amorim and Garcia cited another area of disagreement — the deal between Washington and Colombia allowing U.S. troops access to Colombian military bases.

"Having foreign bases in the region, whether from the United States, China, Russia, Iran or whoever, is not something we see as positive," Amorim said.

A MEME FOR THE PLAN COLOMBIA

Paul Escobar said... You can be justified in questioning Chavez's evaluation of these men. That's a historical debate.

But Boz did something really despicable in his post: He used Chavez's rhetoric about historical figures to imply Venezuela was the source of aggression.

He calls Chavez's praise for a Palestinian terrorist: "a disturbing sign".

Meanwhile, Colombia is the only Lat-Am nation that has recently used its military to violate a neighbours territory. It's a nation that routinely massacres IT'S OWN citizens, through the army, paramilitaries, & insurgents.

According to Boz, none of this "concerns the analysts". The tunnel vision is astounding.

COLOMBIA DEALS SOME PHONY DOPE

This was simply another unilateral prisoner release by FARC, after FARC was called upon by Chávez to release prisoners and following a FARC's track record of unconditional prisoner releases earlier this year, which was hijacked by the Colombian Military

She was being released just in time for the presidential elections and she is probably the only person in Colombia that can defeat Uribe

The Colombian military swooped in and fabricated it into a rescue operation. The complicit western media, especially CNN, is reporting that the prisoner release today was actually a rescue by the Colombia military.

Uribe's political triumph will lead stratospheric ratings both domestically and internationally.

It will lead to an even more intransigent refusal to negotiate for the release of the hostages, and insisting on a military solution including invasions of neighboring countries and assassinations of “high value targets”

It will eclipse the many scandals that Uribe's administration has been battling, such as the buying of votes for a constitutional amendment to allow for Uribe's re-election,

The Supreme Criminal Court condemned a Colombian Congress Member, Yidis Medina, for accepting a bribe.

It will eclipse the high level government connections with right-wing paramilitaries, and those many investigations connecting the Uribe regime to the paramilitaries.

It will blunt the human rights criticisms that have been an obstacle for one of Uribe's principal policy objectives: The Free Trade Agreement

It will shove the trade deal with the US through the Congress which was already boosted in part at least by the Free Trade Agreement with Canada, which was the logic of the Canadian FTA in the first place.



With the rescue of the three US contractors, the Colombian president will now have a debt to collect which will lead to more billions of US taxpayers money on top of billions already spent to the end of repression of the Colombian people

It will leave Uribe and the Colombian government with an even freer hand to repress peasant movements.

It will drowned out the voices of other leaders, including the Polo Democratico, the indigenous movement, the labor movements and outsiders like Chavez, who have long repudiated kidnapping and have worked for a fair and equitable economy for all Colombians

The fact that his regime is based on purchased votes, paramilitary violence, selling the country's assets to multinationals, will be lost in tales of the heroism of an operation that bloodlessly saved an innocent and long-suffering hostage



The only storm clouds threatening an otherwise bright political horizon appear to be emanating from the prize itself.

One hope is that Ingrid herself, like some of the hostages that were freed in rounds of negotiation through Chavez, might provide some perspective in the days to come

Betancourt has announced that she still hopes to serve her country as president.




.

.

AN OCTOBER "SURPRISE" IN JULY

URIBE COULD HAVE ARRANGED THE RELEASE OF BETANCOURT TO HUGO CHAVEZ MONTHS AGO



BOGOTA, Colombia - Colombian spies tricked leftist rebels into handing over kidnapped presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three U.S. military contractors Wednesday in a daring helicopter rescue so successful that not a single shot was fired.

This would have happened a lot sooner if Uribe had not canceled the humanitarian mediation by President Chavez! He brokered the release of six civilian hostages in January and February of this year.





The United States was involved in the planning of the operation and provided “specific support,” the White House said. But officials there would not describe the nature of that support.

One American official who was briefed on the operation but spoke on the condition of anonymity confirmed the intelligence support to Colombia for the mission, but would not provide details.

The American ambassador to Colombia, William R. Brownfield, and the United States combatant commander in the region, Adm. James G. Stavridis, were “engaged in the planning stages,” according to Gordon D. Johndroe, the deputy White House press secretary.

He said that President Bush was kept apprised of the planning and that he called after the rescue to congratulate President Álvaro Uribe, calling him “a strong leader.”



Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee, released a statement that said Mr. Uribe and Mr. Santos had briefed him (along with his babysitter, Joe Lieberman) about the operation on Tuesday night, during his visit to Colombia.



BETANCOURT SAYS:
"The people who stayed behind there, I forgive them," Betancourt said of her rebel captors. "Nobody is at fault."

She thanked Uribe, against whom she was running when she was kidnapped, and said he "has been a very good president."

However, she said, "I continue to aspire to serve Colombia as president."

ACCORDING TO THE OFFICIAL VERSION:
a military helicopter camouflaged as belonging to a non government organization picked up the rescued at noon near Guaviare department, in southern central Colombia, bound for San Jose, the capital of this territory, to be later taken to the Tolemaida base.

FOLLOW UP

These guys just routinely board copters in the jungle? Yet they are antigovernment rebels?

Antigov types who use helicopters(sounds like they work closely with the government to some degree) and they take potential political rivals on the left hostage?

FARC running short of the items needed to sustain a movement. Thus it splinters into forms of corruption that mirror the drug trafficing and arms shipment deals that are their staple across regional and international borders.

Possible blowback, the disclosure that she was rescued on an NGO false flag. Now such groups may be targeted to the extent it hedges additional negotiations and progress, it could set those back years to come.

...BECAUSE THE "BOGOTA TERRORIST" WAS BOMBING THE HELL OUT OF THEM, THAT'S WHY.

Alvaro Uribe and his financial backers
.


Colombian President Alvaro Uribe (L) and former U.S. president Bill Clinton wave during a meeting in Bogota June 22, 2005. Clinton is in Colombia to participate in 'Expogestion', a seminar for Colombian businessmen. Photo by Daniel Munoz

**President Hugo Chávez stands with Consuelo González de Perdomo, far left, and Clara Rojas, right of him, behind an official. Howard Yanes/Associated Press

Justin Delacour in his Latin American News Review posts an inconvenient truth from the Argentine daily Pagina 12 because Simon Romero, the "reporter" covering Latin America for the NYT cannot be relied on for anything more than propaganda.

The story is about the first failed Colombian hostage release. One of the released hostages, Consuelo Gonzalez, says that the reason she and Clara Rojas were not released before the New Year, as arranged, was that they were under heavy attack, including bombardment, from the Colombian armed forces. This is also what the FARC, Colombian Senator Piedad de Cordoba, and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez claimed at the time.

Justin Delacour translates the key passage from Página 12 here

TEAR GAS MASK FROM A COCA-COLA BOTTLE (2 LITRE)

PROFESSOR GUSTAVO MONCAYO

In an unprecedented public debate in Bogotá’s central Plaza de Bolívar, Colombia’s President Álvaro Uribe was challenged by a schoolteacher who had walked more than 1,200 kilometers across the country to draw attention to the fate of his soldier son, kidnapped by guerrillas for almost ten years.

President Uribe, ... rejected any exchange during a frank and often short-tempered debate on the steps of Colombia’s Congress.

Over the jeers and whistles of thousands of Colombians ... President Uribe refused to ‘give even one millimeter’ in the form of negotiations or concessions to what he called ‘criminals.’

The President demanded that the Farc free, without preconditions, all of the estimated 2,000 hostages it is thought to be holding, and then, and only then, he said, would the government listen to the Farc’s demands for social justice.

‘The families of the kidnapped victims are in the middle of a political game between the Farc and the government,’ Moncayo said

‘Don’t compare the government of a democracy to these terrorists,’ President Uribe retorted.

Meanwhile, President Uribe, ... angrily responded to shouts from the crowd to deny that he was connected to far right paramilitaries and narco-traffickers, saying, ‘I am not a front man for anyone… I don’t have one dollar in a foreign bank.’

The paramilitaries, who had claimed to be patriots fighting the guerillas, are now known to have killed as many as 14,000 Colombians over the last 20 years, including trade union organizers, indigenous activists and campesinos - often in order to steal valuable land to grow cash crops for export and coca for the drug trade.

Bush Administration Condoned Supporting Terrorism in Colombia

LOS CRÍMENES DE LA CHIQUITA BRANDS EN COLOMBIA

El 6 de diciembre de 1928 en la plaza municipal de Cienaga Magdalena fueron asesinados cerca de 3000 hombres y mujeres, por exigirle a la transnacional estadounidense UNITED FRUIT COMPANY solución al pliego de peticiones presentado por el sindicato. Ese día el ejercito colombiano al mando del general Carlos Cortés Vargas disparo sus armas contra la multitud para aniquilar la protesta de los trabajadores.

Bush Administration Condoned Supporting Terrorism in Colombia
Written by Cyril Mychalejko
Thursday, 09 August 2007

In April 2003 a former Chiquita executive told Secretary of Homeland Security (who at the time was assistant attorney general) Michael Chertoff that the company was paying off this paramilitary group. Chertoff recognized that the payments were illegal, but wasn't quite sure whether they were really that wrong. It was reported that he told the company to wait to do anything--like possibly stop financing a terrorist group--until he got back to them.

Chiquita's hundred year history in Colombia

Advocates for the families of 173 people murdered inthe banana-growing regions of Colombia filed suit today against Chiquita Brands International, in Federal District Court in Washington, D.C. The families allege that Chiquita paid millions of dollars, and tried to ship thousands of machine guns to the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC. The AUC is a violent, right-wing paramilitary organization supported by the Colombian army. In 2001, the Bush Administration classified the AUC as a "Foreign Terrorist Organization." Its units are often described as "death squads."

Chiquita in Colombia: Terrorism Gone Bananas?
Written by April Howard

When the army fired on strikers during a demonstration in the city of Cienaga, killing a disputed number of workers (between 47 and 2,000), it created waves that contributed to the downfall of the Conservative Party and features in the masterworks of two famous Colombian authors.[13] The Santa Marta Massacre, as it came to be known, appears in Álvaro Cepeda Samudio’s novel "La Casa Grande" (1962), and Gabriel García Márquez’s epic novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (1966). Nobel-awarded Chilean writer Pablo Neruda also recognized the influence of the United Fruit Company with a chapter of the same name in his epic work "Canto General" about the history of Latin America.

COLOMBIAN POET WILLIAM OSPINA: A POEM

This poem is about living with death squads in Colombia

Don't say that you have thirst, they will give you a
glass with your blood.
Don't say that you have hunger, because
they will serve you your chopped fingers
Don't say that you are sleepy, because they will sew
your eyelids with thread.
Don't say that you love someone, because
they will bring you their heart putrified
Don't say you are looking for God, because
they will place a hot coal in your mouth.
Don't say that it is beautiful the dew that
sweetly covers the fields, because
in each heavenly drop they will inject pestilence.

Click on image

KILLER COKE

Isidro Segundo Gil, an employee at a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Colombia, was killed at his workplace by paramilitary thugs. His children, now living in hiding with relatives, understand all too well why their homeland is known as "a country where union work is like carrying a tombstone on your back."

A chilling description of Gil's assassination, based on eyewitness accounts, is the centerpiece of a lawsuit filed in Miami in July 2001 against Coca-Cola, Panamerican Beverages (the largest soft drink bottler in Latin America) and Bebidas y Alimentos (a bottler owned by Richard Kirby of Key Biscayne, Fla., which operates the plant in which Gil was killed.

Campaign to Stop Killer Coke

Dear Brothers and Sisters:

We need your help to stop a gruesome cycle of murders, kidnappings and torture of SINALTRAINAL (National Union of Food Industry Workers) union leaders and organizers involved in daily life-and-death struggles at Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia...

Coca-Cola bottlers “contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces that utilize extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained or otherwise silenced trade union leaders,” the lawsuit states. It also notes that Colombian troops connected with the paramilitaries have trained at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Ga., where trainees were encouraged to torture and murder those who do “union organizing and recruiting;” pass out “propaganda in favor of workers;” and “sympathize with demonstrators or strikes.” This was made public when the Pentagon was forced to reveal the contents of training manuals used at the school. (For more information, see www.soaw.org, the website of SOA Watch.)

... of Coca-Cola and its key financial ally, SunTrust Banks. As long as SunTrust, “the bank of Killer Coke,”

In solidarity,

Javier Correa, President, Sinaltrainal
William Mendoza, President of SINALTRAINAL, Barrancabermeja.
Ray Rogers, Director, Campaign to Stop Killer CokeCampaign to Stop Killer Coke


OMAL (Observatorio de Multinacionales en América Latina)

Stop Killer Coke, Dollars and Sense

THE REAL TERRORISTS, THE REAL CRIME

Green Left Weekly’s Raul Cienfuegos interviewed Raul Reyes, a member of the leadership of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

The United States and the Colombian government are putting on pressure for the FARC to be included in lists of supposed terrorists. And — to justify its war against the Colombian people and their revolutionary army — the Colombian government has added the narco-terrorist label to the FARC.

• The government does this to hide its dictatorial nature and its known links with the paramilitaries and drug trafficking,

• The FARC expects this from the class enemy.

• The real terrorists, those at the top of the list in world terrorism, are the US administration and their main war allies, including Uribe, who heads a government committed to state terrorism.

• These murderers label those who try to defend people from their aggression as terrorists.

• The aggressors want to appear to be the victims.

• But the real victims are the dispossessed, the people who have the courage to dissent against the government’s bad policies.

• These are the victims of neoliberalism and globalisation, which have been imposed by the United States on all countries throughout the world.

• Dialogue between the paramilitaries and Uribe’s government is the same as dialogue that would occur between father and son.

• Paramilitarism is a child of the [Colombian] state, and Uribe has always been its backer.

• Colombian and international communities remember all that Uribe did as the governor of Antioquia province [in the mid-1990s to establish] “Convivir” to legitimise and promote paramilitary activity

• [According to Amnesty International, Convivir served as government-sanctioned death squads recruiting to the paramilitaries.]

• one of the commitments they are trying to carry out in government is to legitimise the paramilitary gangs, so that the government can go on killing its opponents,

• killing popular, social leaders who disagree with the government.

• All those who protest against human rights abuses or the neoliberal model, or state terrorism, are considered their enemy and are attacked.

• With the legalisation of the paramilitaries, they hope to legitimise impunity for these crimes against the Colombian people.

• What we see with the people in Bolivia, the people of Ecuador, the people of other parts of the region and the world is a struggle against the devastating effects of the neoliberal economic model;

• a model generated by globalisation,

• the imperialist war against the peoples of the world,

• carried out by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.

• There are thousands of millions of human beings from the so-called Third World who have not had breakfast today, nor will they have it tomorrow,

• whose children are dying of malnutrition.

• Some women cannot feed their children because they don’t even have food for themselves.

• The real crime, the real terrorism carried out by the world’s financial institutions is seen in the deaths of men, women and children, from hunger, so that a minority can appropriate the wealth of the majority.

THE CENTER FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY

Colombia is the third largest recipient of U.S. aid, after Israel and Egypt. The U.S. military mission in Colombia is by far the largest in Latin America. Under the terms of Plan Colombia, as many as 500 U.S. military advisers and 300 civilian contract employees may be in the country at any given time. The CIA, which had some significant tactical successes in fighting drug cartel leaders in the mid-1990s, has its largest Latin American branch in Bogotá. And at the School of the Americas, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, Colombia ranked second in 1999, behind Chile, in the number of soldiers trained there, and third behind Chile and Peru in 2000.

Northern Cauca, the Occupied Territory

Then in 1910, Manuel Quintin Lame appeared on the scene, again struggling for the land, this time using a mix of nonviolent political struggle, education, and the laws of the independent Colombian state. Quintin Lame laid the foundations for today's indigenous movement with patient underground organizing over decades, for which he was punished: by the time he died in 1968, he had been in jail 100 times.


A battle between the Colombian social movements and the government is being played out in local spheres all over Colombia. One of the arenas of battle is Cauca, a highly strategic corridor in southwestern Colombia through which the Pan-American highway carries the commerce of the South American continent. The northern zone of Cauca, mountainous and neglected by the state, has long been a stronghold of the FARC. In the valleys and cities, the sugar barons, drug cartels, and ranchers continue to wield their traditional money power, trying to forge alliances with multinational capital for megaprojects to exploit the vast natural resources of the region (Cauca, for example, has tremendous water resources).

PLUS
The battle for Colombia
JUSTIN PODUR