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Edited on Tue Mar-20-07 09:43 AM by Peace Patriot
Chavez, and other rightwing paramilitary horror. The Bolivarian revolution is very popular and a very powerful influence, and it is succeeding. Yes, democracy and social justice are better for people, and for economies, and for regions. The Chavez government--with its great popular support, and, even more important, great civic participation--has been pivotal in establishing that. Democracy works, on all levels! It's better for the economy as well as for human life in general (not to mention the environment). And the success of ideas of social justice, and Latin American self-determination, are spreading like wildfire--the elections in Bolivia and Ecuador being especially important. So, Uribe finds himself surrounded by neighbor governments on all three borders with leftist presidents committed to social justice (Venezuela to the north, Ecuador to the south, and Brazil to the east), and with a new Andean region rejection of the US "war on drugs" (war on peasants and leftists).
Ecuador wants to the US "drug war" military base removed from its soil. Evo Morales in Bolivia campaigned with a wreath of coca leaves around his neck--to emphasize that coca is a sacred plant to the indigenous, essential to survival in the high elevations and icy climates of the Andes, and the US-funded militarism around eradication efforts has greatly harmed, not helped, peasant populations, and has done nothing to impact the drug trade, probably because the rightwing paramilitaries that benefit most from US military aid are themselves drug traffickers. I suspect that what is happening is that US planes and guns and military "advisers" and military bases are being used to push small peasant farmers off of good farmland and bring the drug lords in. The small peasant farmers may grow a small amount of coca for personal use and trade, as they always have, for thousands of years, but they are also growing food to feed their families and villages. Drug lords are like corporations--they create monoculture in order to enrich a few with maximum profits, and to hell with local communities and cultural/economic diversity. And I can also imagine that, under Bush, whatever good intentions there may have been, among US anti-drug enforcement cops--and there could have been some--have been totally drowned in corruption. That's what the Bush Junta does: corrupts everything it touches. And, of course, the stupidity of the program--and its essential nature as a filthy boondoggle for war profiteers--would be greatly exacerbated by Bushites being in charge.
This common sense view of peasant coca growing--that the remedy is worse than the "crime"--is now the PREVALENT view among the Andean democracies, who are rejecting US militarism. Uribe's government is therefore isolated--a rightwing dinosaur--in South America. MOST of the governments are leftist (Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. In Peru, there is a corrupt "free trade" leftist in charge, but the real leftist--Ollanta Humala--gave him a run for his money in the last election--and there are strong leftist movements in both Peru and Paraguay, which will likely win future elections.)
South America has become unfriendly territory for Bush and his rightwing pals--and for any future Democratic president as well, who pushes the murderous US "war on drugs" and ruinous "free trade" agreements (and World Bank/IMF debt, which go hand in hand). This is the reality for Uribe. "The times they are a-changin'." Will he survive?
I don't know much about Colombian politics--for instance, Senator Petro's story, or how Colombian prosecutors and judges are managing to actually conduct honest investigations and hold people to account, in these very dangerous circumstances. When I first heard of this investigation, my first thought was that there must be some very brave folks involved. In the Bush Junta, they may purge you and ruin your career, if you are a US citizen (no bullets to the head, among US attorneys or CIA agents, that we know of*). In Colombia, political murder has been more open. I imagine that the Bolivarian revolution, and possibly also the OAS (which now has many leftist governments as members), are creating a climate in which the pursuit of the truth and accountability are possible. I don't know if Uribe will survive. Possibly he was shrewd enough to pull himself away from the rightwing plotters and their great corruption, so as to escape prosecution himself. But this exposure of rightwing lawlessness--which extends to elections fraud (as it does here)--will surely help the left (the majorityists) win elections in Colombia--which, like the US, has had the name of democracy but not the substance.
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*(The outing of Valerie Plame and the Brewster-Jennings WMD counter-proliferation network may well have resulted in the deaths of US agents/contacts in other countries. These were deep cover people, whose well-being cannot be easily investigated, and the CIA damage report is top secret. David Kelly's death--the British WMD expert and whistleblower who was found dead, under highly suspicious circumstances, four days after Plame was outed--may well have been a Bush/Blair hit. FBI agent John O'Neill--who had been following the Yemen 9/11 money trail--also suffered an odd death--purged by the Bush Junta, then went to work as security head for the WTC, the week of 9/11--and died there during the attack. There is also suspicion around the death of Senator Paul Wellstone--a highly popular politician who had pledged to lead the fight against the Iraq invasion in the Senate, in 2002. His mysterious plane crash--no reason for it--just before his reelection, has never been investigated. The man who would have been in charge of an investigation--AG John Ashcroft--had a political opponent, Democrat Mel Carnahan, whose plane also fell out of the sky, just prior to an election that Ashcroft lost. The voters voted for the dead guy, in preference to Ashcroft. Bush then appointed Ashcroft as AG. I've read the book about Wellstone's plane crash--and there are so many big mysteries about it, there should be a public investigation--and there should have been one at the time. But that was, perhaps, the darkest hour in American history--the runup to the Iraq War. The Democrats were in full retreat, after Wellstone's death. That was the Anthrax Congress. And we still don't know who was sending anthrax envelopes to Democratic politicians. Upshot: If the truth were known, maybe we ARE Colombia.)
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