Political Killings in Colombia

[Judi Lynn]

Political Killings in Colombia
Submitted by Stephen Lendman on Mon, 2010-08-23 09:42

Political Killings in Colombia - by Stephen Lendman

Colombia, America's closest South American ally, is a corrupted narco-state, a repressive death squad faux democracy, threatening regional neighbors, and reigning terror against trade unionists, human rights workers, campesinos, pro-democracy organizations, independent journalists, and legitimate resistance groups like the FARC-EP. Established in 1964, James Petras calls it the "longest standing, largest peasant-based guerrilla movement in the world," persisting valiantly for decades.

Thanks to Plan Colombia and other support, the state is heavily militarized, more than ever now serving as Washington's land-based aircraft carrier against regional targets, including neighboring Venezuela.

The Pentagon got expanded access, former President Alvaro Uribe agreeing to US forces on seven more military bases (three airfields, two naval installations, and two army facilities), as well as unrestricted use of the entire country as-needed for internal and external belligerency, including out-of-control violence and human rights abuses, the region's most extreme to keep two-thirds of Colombians impoverished, millions displaced, corruption endemic, wealth concentration growing, and corporate predators freed to exploit and plunder.

Also to facilitate record amounts of Colombian cocaine from government-controlled areas reaching US and world markets, new President Juan Manuel Santos embracing the "Uribe Doctrine," now his. It's extremist, hard right, corrupt, brutal, corporate-friendly, and militarized in lockstep with Washington.

More:
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/54528

[Judi Lynn]

1. Anniversary of a Political Murder in Colombia

Anniversary of a Political Murder in Colombia
by COHA Senior Research Fellow W. John Green

The one thing that those living outside of Latin America are likely to know about Colombia, besides its association with the illegal drug trade, is its unremitting violence. The country evokes images of ruthless drug lords, merciless paramilitary killers, and militant guerrilla armies, piles of bloody corpses and despairing kidnapped hostages.

The Colombia of today is directly linked to these antecedents. Colombia is a “managed” democracy,—free, but not necessarily fair—with the far right government of Álvaro Uribe largely trusting its political future to the aid and goodwill of the Bush Administration, as well as acting as a bulwark against the Latin American left-leaning movement led by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez.

Historians, however, can point out that this Andean template did not always exist. In the 1930s and early 1940s, during the so-called “Liberal Republic,” Colombia stood out as a relatively stable and democratic nation—one of the most respectable in the hemisphere. In fact, Colombia’s political culture spawned a massive populist movement led by prominent labor lawyer and politician on the Liberal left, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán.

Gaitánismo, as the movement came to be called, embodied a powerful call for social justice and increased democracy, and attracted large numbers of progressive Colombians to its banner. Though he was spurned by the Liberal party leadership in the 1946 presidential election (a decision that split its vote and cost the party the presidency), Gaitán outmaneuvered his rivals and became party leader in 1947. At the head of a reunited Liberal party, he would easily have been elected president in 1950.

Yet sixty years ago, three shots from a .38 caliber revolver helped create the chaotic Colombia, scenes of which can be witnessed daily. On April 9, 1948, an assassin murdered Gaitán outside his office in downtown Bogotá as he went to lunch. Over the following two decades, during the aptly-named period known as Violencia, thousands of his supporters and opponents were also killed as Colombia cycled through a vicious civil war pitting Liberal and Communist guerrillas against government forces and rightist partisans of the ruling Conservative party. The pattern of political murders established during the 1940s and 1950s has dominated Colombian politics ever since, and greatly influenced the region’s various other “dirty wars” in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Political assassinations also blossomed elsewhere in the hemisphere through the indiscriminate employment of bargain basement hit men known in Colombia as sicarios.

The tradition of political murder which Colombia exemplifies to this day is a style of repression that targets all messengers of change—not just armed revolutionaries, but also popular civilian political leaders, labor organizers, intellectuals, journalists, activist lawyers, academics, students, church men and women, and even progressive military officers.

More:
http://www.coha.org/anniversary-of-a-political-murder-in-colombia/

http://www.cambio.com.co.nyud.net:8090/portadacambio/769/IMAGEN/IMAGEN-4038327-2.jpg http://es.comunicas.org.nyud.net:8090/files/2010/04/gaitan.jpg

Jorge Eliécer Gaitán