Colombia: Uribe’s spectacular criminal rule ends

[Judi Lynn]

Colombia: Uribe’s spectacular criminal rule ends
Sunday, August 1, 2010
By Daryl Davies
On August 7, Alvaro Uribe will complete his reign as president of Colombia — eight years of spectacular government criminality and corruption, even by Colombian standards. A brief review of just his second term illustrates this.

The Washington Post reported on November 18, 2006 that the Uribe administration was in crisis. Investigations revealed that members of Congress collaborated with right-wing death squads to fix elections and assassinate opponents. That was the tip of the iceberg.

By April 9, 2008, Colombia Reports was saying that half of the Colombian Senate's members were suspected of being involved with paramilitary forces and almost one third of the lawmakers were in jail awaiting trial.

Perhaps the highlight was in September 2009 when Colombia Reports revealed that 40,000 government officials, including 800 mayors and 30 governors, were under investigation for corruption.

During the same period, the Colombian intelligence service, DAS, was implicated in helping paramilitary drug trafficking.

Former paramilitaries spilled their guts about their relationships to high ranking government officials, including Uribe's cousin Mario. Senator Alirio Villamizar, who had been under investigation for receiving bribes, was found with 1 billion pesos (about US$500,000) in his home.

In late 2009, a mass grave was discovered in the village of La Macarena containing about 2000 victims of the Colombian military, killed between 2005 and 2009. The army admitted having buried the bodies, claiming they were insurgents from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

However, human rights activists have said they were what are termed in Colombia “false positives”: journalists, human rights workers, trade unionists and other civilian victims of extrajudicial executions reported as insurgents killed in combat.

One of the human rights activists making these claims, Jhonny Hurtado, who took a delegation of British MPs to the site in December, was himself assassinated on March 15.

More:
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/44991

[Imajika]

1. The Columbian people would have re-elected him...

...if they could have.

They couldn't, so they elected his Defense Minister.

Right or wrong, most Columbians approve of Uribe's rule - in fact, they do so overwhelmingly by virtually every poll taken.

[The Magistrate]

2. Too Many Guns To Treat That Seriously, Sir

Anyone's guess what an unarmed politics might have produced.

[Ken Burch]

3. Well yeah, except for the fact that the guy who ran to succeed him promising "more of the same"

"Won" with almost 70% of the "vote"(or at least, the vote as announced by the people with most of the guns). It's amazing that 30% felt they could risk their lives by saying "no more".

Hopefully, Colombian voters will feel free to vote for a non-authoritarian president SOMEDAY-right now, they can't do so without risking getting killed by the army. It's going to go on being an elected police state for the next four years or so...And then, Uribe might be able to run again so it might STILL not be over.

[laughingliberal]

4. With the US in there building military bases & supporting the RW assassins, it would be hard to...

offer up much resistance. :(

[Ken Burch]

5. Indeed.

Colombia is truly the Vietnam of the Americas.

And it's sickening that any of our leaders would think we NEEDED one.