Has Incoming Colombian President Santos Inherited a "Captured State"?

[Judi Lynn]

Has Incoming Colombian President Santos Inherited a "Captured State"?
By Coletta Youngers, August 6, 2010

On Saturday August 7, 2010, former defense minister Juan Manual Santos will be sworn in as Colombia’s next president, surrounded by an estimated 380,000 members of the police and military and an array of foreign dignitaries. If all goes according to plan, one of those dignitaries will be Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa. However, Santos’ initial efforts at rapprochement with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, also invited to the inauguration, were nipped in the bud by sitting president Alvaro Uribe, whose dramatic accusations on July 21 of Venezuelan government tolerance of the FARC (including key leaders) in its territory led to a complete rupture in diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Uribe’s legacy will no doubt be contested for some time. His admirers claim that he finally broke the back of the guerrillas, reigned in the paramilitaries through a demobilization program, and has made the country a safer place to live overall. Some go so far to say that Colombia is now in a post-conflict situation.

That would not be the view, however, of the country's estimated 4.5 million internally displaced persons or the Afro-Colombians and indigenous communities being pushed off their land by right-wing paramilitaries (now conveniently called “criminal gangs at the service of narco-trafficking”) to make way for large-scale economic projects like the monoculture of palm oil and commercial gold mining or those in the squalid urban areas where crime has always been rampant. (And it is worth noting that even in cities like Medellín, crime is on the rise again.)

According to Uribe’s critics (myself among them), his eight-year legacy includes:

•An estimated 16,000 politically-motivated killings, including 4,000 by the “demobilized” paramilitaries.

•A doubling in the number of annual killings by the Colombian security forces, including a “false positives” scandal in which more than 2,000 poor Colombians were presented as guerrillas killed in combat.

•The second highest number of internally displaced persons in the world (the Sudan is first) with ethnic minorities disproportionately affected and with over 40 displaced leaders killed in recent years for advocating for their rights.

•A total of one – just one – paramilitary leader convicted as a result of the Justice and Peace Law.

•A scandal that Washington-based human rights groups call “Worse than Watergate,” in which the notorious DAS security agency was spying on everyone from the children of human rights activists to Constitutional Court judges – and eavesdropping in on the Court’s confidential sessions and sabotaging their activities, including by trying to link them to terrorist groups.

•A complete lack of respect of judicial autonomy and full support for continued impunity for human rights violators.

•Increased inequality, poverty, and unemployment.

More:
http://www.fpif.org/blog/Colombia_alvaro_uribe_juan_santos?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FPIF+%28Foreign+Policy+In+Focus+%28All+News%29%29

[Peace Patriot]

1. I think this writer is whistling in the dark.

FPIF does have some good writers, among them Antonia Juhasz (one of the very best on globalization and democracy issues). But this article strikes me as similar to the one penned by the former USAID Director in Colombia, the other day, in the Los Angeles Times, saying (my transliteration), 'By God, we need to think about all these little brown people slaughtered by the Colombian military, and then we need to forget about it and move on; it's a "new day" in Colombia. slaughter out; democracy cosmetics in; on with free trade for the rich!'

I think this is the new CIA line on Colombia. Consider the final paragraph in this article:

"In the end, there will likely be more continuity than change with the Santos government and some fear that the kinder, gentler approach will serve to mask the ongoing problems listed above. However, any movement away from the hard-line, authoritarian practices of the Uribe government is welcome. For its part, the Obama administration should take advantage of the change in government to broaden bilateral relations beyond the nearly myopic focus on drugs and security. Most importantly, it should put promoting human rights in Colombia at the center of its policies toward that country until measurable improvements are made, first and foremost in confronting the countries’ legacy of impunity that will be passed from one president to the next on Saturday." --from the OP

"kinder, gentler..."? Where have we heard that before? And its brother--"compassionate conservatism"? Beware, beware of "kinder, gentler" war criminals!

Does this writer not know who Santos is?

She apparently hasn't been paying much attention here either. Obama is supposed to end "a legacy of impunity that will be passed from one president to the next," in Colombia? Doesn't she know that "we need to look forward not backward" as to war criminals who are too powerful to prosecute or even to investigate? (Or is just that Uribe, a "little Bush," a wannabe Bush, has become expendable?)

Santos himself is a war criminal. He and the CIA may have decided to jettison Uribe, who may not have quite made it into the Bush-level criminal class (the protected "players" in our multinational corporate/war profiteer world game), so as to put the bloodbath in Colombia "behind us." This does not mean that the war on the poor and their advocates is over, nor that a regional oil war has been taken "off the table." And it may well mean the opposite: That there is worse to come.

The Economist--a corpo-fascist rag--recently described Uribe as "erratic." They did not explain. But I think what they meant is this: When the U.S./Colombia bombed/raided a FARC guerilla camp just over the border in Ecuador, in March 2008, Uribe eventually, under pressure from numerous Latin American leaders, apologized to Ecuador and promised never to do such a thing again. His Defense Minister--SANTOS!--however, publicly contradicted Uribe and said that HE would not hesitate to do the same thing again! He is not "erratic." The Pentagon can count on him to UNAPOLOGETICALLY break international law and invade Venezuela, without its permission, in pursuit of FARC guerillas. And, in fact, Uribe seems to be setting up just such a war provocation FOR Santos, by complaining to the OAS and the Hague, in his last weeks in office, that Venezuela is 'harboring' FARC guerrillas.

We may not be able to guess, just yet, how all this is going to fall out. But we should not be naive about U.S. intentions in Colombia and Latin America. There is plenty of evidence that the Pentagon has an oil war plan for South America. There is plenty of evidence also that Hillary Clinton wants some democracy cosmetics in order to ram the U.S./Colombia "free trade for the rich" deal through Congress. (It has been held up by labor Democrats who object to the murder of thousands of trade unionists by the Colombian military--about half--and its closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads--the other half). There may be tension between these two U.S. goals. Or they may be a continuum: "free trade for the rich" used to make economic war on Venezuela, to weaken its democracy, then war. Or some combination: war of attrition on Venezuela's border with Colombia (that never quite goes full scale), combined with economic warfare. Goal: to install an Exxon Mobil-friendly government in Venezuela. But, because we don't know for sure how all this will go, we shouldn't be naive about where is has gone and where it is likely to go.

"...any movement away from the hard-line, authoritarian practices of the Uribe government is welcome."

This is kind of like saying, "any movement away from killing tens of thousands of people in Iraq to killing only thousands of people in Afghanistan is welcome," or "any movement away from torturing thousands of prisoners to torturing only a few prisoners is welcome." The writer seems to have lost perspective on basic principles of human rights, democracy and common decency--much like our own government has done. And she furthermore seems to be blind to who is really running things in Washington DC--multinational corporations and war profiteers.

Is this just weak-minded, sloppy thinking? I really don't know. I am not at all familiar with this writer. But I've seen considerable signs that this is the new CIA propaganda line about Colombia, in the face of increasing revelations about what the $7 BILLION in U.S. military aid to Colombia has been used for, and the probability, in my opinion, of direct U.S. involvement in atrocities, and also in view of the U.S. military buildup in Colombia and the region (focused particularly around Venezuela). What the U.S. has done is to fund the political "cleansing" of Colombia, with the murder of thousands of political activists, human rights advocates, trade unionists, journalists, teachers, peasant farmers and others, by the Colombian military, and the deliberate displacement of 5 MILLION poor farmers by means of state terror. The new 'president' of Colombia was Defense Minister while this happened. To expect that very same person--Santos--to be "kinder" and "gentler," to be the leader of a New Age in Colombia, is rather like expecting Richard Nixon to end the war on Vietnam. In short, it is a lie. What may lay in store for South America at the hands of such liars, we don't know. We can only guess. Our government lies to us as well. But "kinder and gentler" ain't in it. And to promote the notion that it MIGHT BE, even with dozens of caveats and hedges--to express that notion as a realistic hope---is to spread disinformation, if not to create it.

[StevieM]

2. I would think that Iraq has the most internally displaced persons in the world (eom)