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of the Colombian military's murders of trade unionists, from UN human rights reports on the prevalence of extrajudicial murders by government forces, and from widespread reading about the "false positives" scandal and other Colombian military and death squad scandals, about the scandal of the close ties of so many government officials to the death squads, the bribery scandals, the massive spying scandal, the huge scandal of the displacement of five million peasant farmers. That alone would screw up polls and elections. Do they have cell phones? They can't even afford food! They are abandoned people, consigned to urban squalor--or to slave labor on Chiquita and other corporate and rich landowners' farms. They don't count. And if these farmers try to organize to keep their lands, they get shot. You think the survivors are going to form a union, organize to get out the vote, back candidates, advocate for their cause? How many people are living in conditions of extreme poverty, squalor, fear and despair, whom we don't even know about, because a lot of them don't register as displaced for fear of government reprisals? Colombia has the biggest discrepancy between rich and poor in Latin America. And the poor aren't counted and don't count in the bloody halls of power.
I get my information from many sources. Where does your information come from? The government?
The Colombian government and the military have one of the worst human rights record on earth, and are responsible for the second worst human displacement crisis. They are notorious liars. State terror is endemic in many regions. The government was spying on everybody--judges, legislators, political opponents, the media. Anybody steps out of line, they get death threats. You think people can disclose their views truthfully in these circumstances, and freely engage in political activities? That is simply not so. The pResident of the country called everybody who opposes him "terrorists." And he meant it. Oppose him and you may just get blown away in some dark alley. Honest journalists get death threats and leave the country, for the sakes of their families, or self-censor. The majority of the people in Colombia--the poor and the extremely poor--do NOT have human and civil rights. Advocates of the poor put their own lives in peril. Colombia also has the lowest rate of voter participation in the region. This is a fascist state, and furthermore a client state of the U.S. which has been funding this repression to the tune of $7 BILLION.
Uribe--former go-to guy for the Medellin Cartel, graduated into being the go-to guy for the Bush Cartel--could not have been elected dogcatcher in a real democracy. He may be wildly popular with the have's. So would any dictator who steals from the poor to give to the rich. The poor in Colombia have been the victims of systemic repression, brutality, torture, murder and displacement, and, in the case of millions of small farmers, outright theft of their lands. And until things change in Colombia, and the victims and their survivors can speak, without fear of reprisal, and can organize politically in their own interest, and can exercise their rightful majority power, the bottom line conditions for democracy do not exist in Colombia and polls and vote counts in Colombia cannot be trusted.
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