marjorie says...
I don't write a lot about Latin America here on m-pyre, but over the years I've followed the politics there pretty closely, mainly of Colombia and Venezuela. Colombia is one big human rights tragedy and I fully concur with Justin over at Latin America News Review when he says this regarding why Hugo Chavez is right about Colombian President Alvaro Uribe:
"Chavez is quite right when he says that the "the empire is the one that has an expansionist project, and you [Uribe] are a servile instrument of the US empire in Latin America."
"In fact, I'll go one step further and repeat that Alvaro Uribe is a murderous lying thug with long ties to some of the most brutal death squads in modern Latin American history. How quickly we forget that, under Uribe's watch, Colombia's intelligence service is reported to have "compiled lists of union members, along with details about their security, and handed them over to a coalition of paramilitary groups known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia." (Let's just say that the apparent intent wasn't for the paramilitaries to send the union members flowers, which would have been forthcoming only to the widows).
"From my perspective, there is no insult too great for Colombia's paramilitary president. If any Latin American president ought to be considered a regional pariah, it is Uribe."
Through the links provided in his brief commentary, Justin gives an idea of the brutality of those who have long governed Colombia. None of any of it is news in this country...it's all well-known information to the U.S. government, and has been for decades now at least. I can attest to this personally going back to the pre-911, late nineties when I participated in vigorous lobbying against military funding to Colombia. There is a wealth of information about the routine murder and insecurity among the population there. It's well-known that Colombia has the second largest internally displaced population in the world. It's a human rights catastrophe, and yet as a country we continue decade after decade bolstering the governing class there that is directly at the center of it all.
At the ACLU awards dinner last night, keynote speaker Rachel Maddow made a great point that in this country there is no debate. There's dissent, and a lot of it, but there's no real debate. To have a real debate, those in power would have to really answer the actual charges. They would have to directly address the issue at hand, rather than talk around it. For instance, Bush would have to actually acknowledge that this country is building permanent military installations in Iraq and acknowledge that the U.S. intends to have a permanent presence there. Then we could actually have a real debate in this country about that very real objective. But instead all we have is a lot of dissent and impassive un-responses from the hawks in power.
Similarly, there is no real debate about the U.S. role in bolstering what is really a long history of brutal murder in Colombia. Those in Congress who vote in favor of continued military funding to that country won't address the truth, which is that our military dollars flow directly through the Colombian government to paramilitary activities. It's well-documented, but we can't get to a real debate about our real objectives because they simply won't address it substantively in any fashion. They prefer to couch it all in the "war on drugs" charade.
Why is this? I don't know but I have my suspicions. If we really had a real debate about why we're building permanent military installations in Iraq, why we support brutal murderous thugs in Colombia, why we turn a blind eye to genocide in Africa, why as a country we did nothing for days on end to rescue poor, black Americans from rooftops and attics in New Orleans...we'd have to confront the fact that while our system may cherish civil liberties, it also accommodates the quest for brute power easily and has no qualms about allowing the existence of mass unrelenting poverty (that has a decidedly brown & black color).
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