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Judi Lynn Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-10-10 04:31 AM
Original message
Churches call on Obama to abandon "Plan Colombia"
Source: Ekklesia

Churches call on Obama to abandon "Plan Colombia"
By staff writers
9 Mar 2010

The World Council of Churches (WCC) has urged its members in the United States to lobby President Barack Obama for a change in the country’s attitude towards Colombia.

Saying that Colombia has “one of the world’s most serious humanitarian crises”, the WCC called for “prayers and actions of concrete solidarity” from its member churches worldwide.

Meeting at Bossey in Switzerland, the WCC executive committee called for a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Colombia, the full respect of human rights and the cessation of the so called 'Plan Colombia'.

'Plan Colombia' is a package of financial aid and military assistance from the USA to Colombia’s right-wing government. Former US President George Bush justified it by emphasising the need to tackle drug production, but it is alleged that he was more concerned with suppressing armed left-wing groups in Latin America.

Read more: http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/11462
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truedelphi Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-10-10 04:54 AM
Response to Original message
1. Obama Administration is too firmly under the Puppet Master Monsanto
To ever consider being more liberal with regards to Colombia.

Monsanto has to have somewhere to dump its "should-be-illegal" herbicide RoundUp, and where better than third world nations where the poor farmer and his family can die from ingesting this shit.<sarcasm intended>

RoundUp has a formaldehyde or other aldehyde contained within it; the company never mentioned this fact to the EPA when applying for its original licensing back in the seventies. Without an aldehyde, the glyposate would be solid as a rock.
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Judi Lynn Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-10-10 05:13 AM
Response to Reply #1
3. Have you ever seen children's school pictures made illustrating the effects of this lethal spraying?
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Fumesucker Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-10-10 05:19 AM
Response to Reply #3
5. I haven't seen those before, they are horrifying and heartbreaking..
Out of the mouths of babes, eh?
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truedelphi Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-10-10 04:26 PM
Response to Reply #3
11. Oh Lordy - how awful And if the kids are portraying skin eruptions
All over their bodies, like there seem to be, then perhaps Monsanto is adding dioxin to the mix, as dioxin is what causes those types of reactions.

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Echo In Light Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-10-10 04:26 PM
Response to Reply #1
12. Thanks for the info
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Ken Burch Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-10-10 05:12 AM
Response to Original message
2. We elected this administration to break from the foreign policy status quo
There is NOTHING in the pre-2009 foreign policy of this country that should be retained. All that was in place before that was reactionary and solely in the interest of the rich.
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Fumesucker Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-10-10 05:17 AM
Response to Reply #2
4. No one who wasn't approved by the rich in the first place would have ever survived to be elected..
Anyone who didn't meet the criteria of the powers that be would have been destroyed either politically or physically if it had to come to that.

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Wilms Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-10-10 05:37 AM
Response to Reply #4
6. .
:(
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boppers Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-10-10 06:00 AM
Response to Original message
7. Won't somebody think of drug lord children!
Leftist drug-lords should be able to provide for their families, while exploiting the actual working class, no?
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Peace Patriot Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-10-10 10:40 AM
Response to Reply #7
8. Yes, humans who may be 'drug lords,' traffickers, growers should be able to provide
for their families, without suffering torture, death, toxic pollution or jail.

First of all, all drugs should be legalized for adult use, which would eliminate the criminal networks overnight--including the high placed Colombian government and military and CIA/Bush Cartel criminal networks. (Then we just have to worry about the other really big criminals--like Monsanto, Chiquita, Dyncorp and Blackwater.)

Secondly, instead of larding Colombia's military and its closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads with $7 BILLION in U.S. taxpayer dollars, and the U.S. military basically occupying Colombia with U.S. military use of ALL civilian airports and other infrastructure, U.S. military use of SEVEN military bases--including U.S. fighter and spy planes and their pilots, U.S. Navy ships and their crews, and (if this number can be believed) 1,600 U.S. soldiers and U.S. 'contractors' (hauntingly described as "just a few military advisers")--all with total diplomatic immunity, no matter what they do in Colombia--that money should go to restoring farm land to the 4 MILLION displaced campesinos in Colombia, to organic agriculture, to education, health care and other bootstrapping of the huge, poverty-stricken poor majority, and to compensation to the survivors of the tens of thousands of union leaders, human rights workers, community organizers, political leftists and others who have been murdered by the Colombian military and its death squads, in a reign of terror paid for by you and me, and instigated in Washington DC.*

The hugely corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs" should be ENDED NOW! Even the head of the Mexican anti-drug agency has said that it is a failure. Former presidents of Mexico have called for the legalization of marijuana and a new and more constructive approach to the drug problem. Bolivia has banned the U.S. "war on drugs" entirely and has legalized coca leaf production and use. (The U.S. ambassador to Bolivia and the DEA were funding a white separatist insurrection in Bolivia.) Ecuador kicked the U.S. military base out of Ecuador (which was used ostensibly for the U.S. "war on drugs" but was actually being used to spy on Ecuador and other countries and to bomb Ecuador with a load of U.S. "smart bombs" in 2008, to kill the FARC guerilla hostage and peace negotiator and 24 other sleeping people camped just inside Ecuador's border.) Paraguay has refused to allow the U.S. military on its soil. Mercosur, the South American trade group, has made it a condition of membership that member countries rescind any laws giving immunity to the U.S. military (or other foreign militaries), as well as rescinding any non-extradition laws. More and more, Latin American countries are realizing that they have been had--that the U.S. "war on drugs" has been used to occupy, spy on and control their countries, to militarize their societies and to support rightwing political and criminal organizations.

The answer is the decriminalization of drugs and a concerted effort by all the countries of the western hemisphere to end poverty and to provide all human beings with a decent living. Our country doesn't need this huge military albatross that war profiteers have inflicted on us. We can defend this country, if necessary, with 10% of the Pentagon's budget and the rest should be poured into help for the poor, creating new (non-murderous) industries, and saving the planet. There is plenty for everyone if we would just STOP this militarization of our country, our region and the world. We have military bases and war assets everywhere, all over the planet. Why? It is a corrupt, self-perpetuating, huge, huge ALBATROSS that is destroying our democracy, other peoples' democracies, and ours and others' peace and prosperity.

Your snotty reference to "the actual working class" ignores the reality that MOST coca leaf and marijuana growers are SMALL farmers who also grow FOOD--feeding their families and communities--and who work VERY HARD in hard-scrabble lives, and, in places where the U.S. "war on drugs" reigns, at constant risk of toxic pollution and death. And even many 'drug lords'--who have taken the opportunity of the U.S. "war on drugs" to organize illicit networks for the manufacture and transport of the more dangerous substances like cocaine (a highly manufactured product of the coca leaf), in order to get rich, work hard at it and do so at great risk. And have you not seen the docudrama, "The Wire," which reveals the intelligence and industry of even young children, in running the drug business in their ghetto neighborhoods? That is one fabulous series in every way, but most particularly because it reveals the how's and why's of the response of poor people to the U.S. "war on drugs" at this end of it.

Why can't all of these good intentions--to feed people, to make a living, to prosper--be directed along more positive lines? Because the criminalization of drugs has made that impossible! It is too lucrative a business. And because we have allowed U.S. based multinational corporations and World Bank/IMF loan sharks to destroy economies and impoverish multi-millions of people in Latin America--corporate tyranny that has finally hit home here as well, creating a vast underclass, in our own land, who live without any hope of a better life, and that is now destroying the middle class as well.

Didn't we learn this lesson back in the 1920s with Prohibition? Well, our police and war profiteers did learn one thing--they learned how lucrative it is to be pretending to stop a lucrative illicit trade! And that is all that it is--a bullshitting pretense for robbing us blind.

-----------------------------


*2,000 bodies found in a recent mass grave, with grave dates (but no names) of 2005 through 2009, in La Macarena, Colombia, an area of particular interest and activity by the U.S. military. Local people say the bodies are of 'disappeared' local political/community leaders.

The La Macarena massacre (includes a description of, and links to docs about, U.S. ops in La Macarena)
http://www.cipcol.org/?p=1303

The UK military connection
http://www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/2010/02/04/silence-on-british-army-link-to-colombian-mass-grave/


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truedelphi Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-10-10 04:24 PM
Response to Reply #8
10. Thank you for this information Peace Patriot. n/t
Edited on Wed Mar-10-10 04:24 PM by truedelphi
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Judi Lynn Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-10-10 04:48 PM
Response to Reply #8
14. Colombian farmers have been begging for help against the total destruction of their farms
from the beginning. Also, as mentioned years ago, the same aircraft also destroy farms/animals/people along bordering areas in other countries, and THOSE people have been begging for help as well, all this time.

http://nadir.org.nyud.net:8090/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/colombia/megaprojects/plancol_3.jpg http://nadir.org.nyud.net:8090/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/colombia/megaprojects/plancol_1.jpg http://nadir.org.nyud.net:8090/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/colombia/megaprojects/plancol_2.jpg
AMAZON WATCH MARCH 2002
Report On:

Civil Conflict and Indigenous Peoples in Colombia

~snip~
Firstly devastated by coca production, the Cofán and other indigenous and rural communities of southeastern Colombia are now suffering the impacts of government attempts at coca eradication. Indigenous communities of the region have been affected disproportionately by crop fumigation practices involving the aerial spraying of the herbicide Roundup Ultra.

The St. Louis-based chemical and biotechnology giant, Monsanto who manufactured Agent Orange, a controversial defoliant used during the Vietnam War, is also the maker of Roundup, Ultra. Roundup's active ingredient, glyphosate, was ranked third out of 25 chemicals harmful to humans in a 1993 EPA study.

According to a CorpWatch report, an estimated 70,000 gallons of Roundup Ultra have been sprayed in Colombia in the first six months of 2001. In 2000, roughly 145,750 gallons were sprayed covering over 131,000 acres. 18

U.S. private aircraft companies and the Colombian air force spray this lethal chemical over the region's impoverished villages and farms contaminating drinking water sources, destroying food crops and poisoning and killing livestock. Observers report that aerial spraying is conducted from too high of an altitude to accurately target the drug crops; hence many subsistence crops and bodies of water are contaminated. In November 2000, 10 successive days of aerial spraying over Inga indigenous reserves in Nariño left 80 per cent of children ill. A local doctor spoke of an epidemic of fever, diarrhea and severe skin and eye complaints. 19

A Colombian agronomist, Elsa Nivia, has stated that in the first two months of 2001 alone, local authorities reported 4,289 humans suffering skin or gastric disorders, while 178,377 creatures, including cattle, horses, pigs, dogs, ducks, hens and fish, were killed by the spraying. 20

Even Monsanto labels warn about toxicity: "Roundup will kill almost any green plant that is actively growing. Roundup should not be applied to bodies of water such as ponds, lakes or streams as Roundup can be harmful to certain aquatic organisms." Labels goes on to recommend that animals should stay out of treated areas for two weeks and that in the case that fruits or nuts from trees have been sprayed, these should not be consumed for twenty-one days. Even so, the US State Department denies Roundup Ultra is harmful.

Recent evidence suggests that the health impacts of the aerial spraying in Colombia may be related to the use the additive Cosmo Flux 411F, a surfactant to Roundup Ultra. In May 2001, Dr. Nivia said: "the mixture with the Cosmo Flux 411 F surfactant can increase the herbicide's biological action fourfold, producing relative exposure levels which are 104 times higher than the recommended doses for normal agricultural applications in the United States; doses which, according to the study mentioned, can intoxicate and even kill ruminants." Authorities acknowledge that the mixture has not been fully tested.

The disproportionate impact of fumigation on indigenous peoples led the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon (OPIAC), with support from the Colombian government's own Human Rights Ombudsman's Office, to take legal action calling for a ban on aerial spraying in indigenous territories. An initial court ruling suspended fumigations in July 2001 but was overturned shortly thereafter.21

Crop eradication practices are threatening the aquatic life of Amazon waterways as toxic chemicals flow downstream from farmlands. It is also estimated that for every acre fumigated, three acres of rainforest are cut down as coca growers are pushed into more remote areas infringing on Amazonian indigenous territories.
More:
http://nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/colombia/megaprojects/index.htm
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Ken Burch Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-10-10 02:39 PM
Response to Reply #7
9.  Nothing we're doing in Colombia is good for the workers
Edited on Wed Mar-10-10 02:40 PM by Ken Burch
All the "drug war" does is keep Uribe in power forever. There's no pro "plan Colombia" left position.

You can't back right-wing paramilitaries and say you're on the side of the people.
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MisterP Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-10-10 04:42 PM
Response to Original message
13. watch out: "cassocks aren't bulletproof," as the Salvadoran National Guard told Romero in 1975
and those sorts of people haven't disappeared--neither from Latin America or the U.S. Sure, one can blame "stay-behinds" for all of Obama's enormities--but Holder defended big banana over its hiring of death squads, and he's one of the more liberal members of the WH.

"Y ante una orden de matar que dé un hombre, debe prevalecer la Ley de Dios que dice: 'No matar.' Ningún soldado está obligado a obedecer una orden contra la Ley de Dios. Una ley inmoral, nadie tiene que cumplirla. Ya es tiempo de que recuperen su conciencia, y que obedezcan antes a su conciencia que a la orden del pecado."
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Judi Lynn Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-10-10 05:18 PM
Response to Reply #13
15. So sad to learn the sniper who shot Archbishop Romero was trained at the S.O.A.
Also so sad to know the company Holder has served, Chiquita, was known as the United Fruit Company, and major personel at United Fruit company were the Dulles brothers who also worked in the Eisenhower administration,which violently overthrew the democratically elected President of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz who was working hard to improve the desperate struggle of the banana plantation workers and other exploited people of his country.

The corruption and total, lethal disrespect toward less powerful people seem endless, but one way or another they are going to meet with correction.

Here's a copy of the last sermon of Archbishop Romero given before the right-wing government military sniper shot him through the heart as he performed mass. I post the whole paragraph you have cited, and the link:

I would like to make a special appeal to the men of the army, and specifically to the ranks of the National Guard, the police and the military. Brothers, you come from our own people. You are killing your own brother peasants when any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God which says, "Thou shalt not kill." No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you recovered your consciences and obeyed your consciences rather than a sinful order. The church, the defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, of the person, cannot remain silent before such an abomination. We want the government to face the fact that reforms are valueless if they are to be carried out at the cost of so much blood. In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.


Archbishop Oscar Romero
The Last Sermon (1980)
http://www.haverford.edu/relg/faculty/amcguire/romero.html

http://bradcorban.files.wordpress.com.nyud.net:8090/2009/02/oscarromero.jpg

Archbishop Romero

http://cjrarchive.org.nyud.net:8090/img/posts/Mattison21.jpg

Interior of the Metropolitan Cathedral after the killing of mourners at Archbishop Romero’s funeral, San Salvador, March 30. 1980. (Credit: Harry Mattison)


Published on Thursday, March 24, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Oscar Romero, Presente!
by John Dear

�I have often been threatened with death,� Archbishop Oscar Romero told a Guatemalan reporter two weeks before his assassination on March 24, 1980. �If they kill me, I shall arise in the Salvadoran people. If the threats come to be fulfilled, from this moment I offer my blood to God for the redemption and resurrection of El Salvador. Let my blood be a seed of freedom and the sign that hope will soon be reality.�

~snip~
As Romero gained strength in his role as spokesperson for justice and truth, and as he exhorted the Salvadoran people to the nonviolent struggle for justice and peace, he never lost his simple faith and pious devotion. From this devotional piety which he shared with all Salvadorans, he paved a new way into active Gospel peacemaking. He preached about God�s preferential option for the poor, justice and peace. In his opposition to the government�s silence, he refused to attend the inauguration of the new Salvadoran president. The church, he announced, is �not to be measured by the government�s support but rather by its own authenticity, its evangelical spirit of prayer, trust, sincerity and justice, its opposition to abuses.�

As more and more people were arrested, tortured, disappeared and murdered, Romero made two prophetic institutional decisions which stand out for their rare Gospel vision. First, on Easter Monday, 1978, he opened the seminary in downtown San Salvador to all displaced victims of violence. Hundreds of homeless, hungry and brutalized people moved into the seminary, transforming the quiet religious retreat into a crowded, noisy shelter, make-shift hospital, and playground. Second, he stopped construction on the Cathedral until, he said, when justice and peace are established. When the war was over and the hungry were fed, he announced, then we can resume building our cathedral. Both moves were unprecedented and historic and cast judgment on the Salvadoran government.

Romero�s preaching escalated each month to new biblical heights. �Like a voice crying in the desert,� he said, �we must continually say No to violence and Yes to peace.� His August 1978 pastoral letter outlined the evils of �institutional violence� and repression, and advocated �the power of nonviolence that today has conspicuous students and followers�The counsel of the Gospel to turn the other cheek to an unjust aggressor, far from being passive or cowardly,� he wrote, �shows great moral force that leaves the aggressor morally overcome and humiliated. The Christian always prefers peace to war.�

Romero lived simply in a three room hermitage on the grounds of a hospital run by a community of nuns. He associated on a daily basis with hundreds of the poorest of the poor. He traveled the countryside constantly, and assisted those who suffered most. He frequently commented that his duty as pastor had become the task of claiming the dead bodies of priests and campesinos and to defend the poor by calling for an end to the killing. One Salvadoran told me, on one of my many visits to El Salvador, how Romero drove out whenever necessary to a large garbage dump where bodies were often discarded by the government death squads. He looked among the trash and the dead bodies for relatives of family members whom he accompanied. �These days I walk the roads gathering up dead friends, listening to widows and orphans, and trying to spread hope,� he said.

His last few Sunday sermons in late 1979 and early 1980 issued strong calls for conversion to justice and bold denunciations of the daily massacres and assassinations. His plea to the wealthy elite who supported the death squads was pointed and prophetic. �To those who bear in their hands or in their conscience, the burden of bloodshed, of outrages, of the victimized, innocent or guilty, but still victimized in their human dignity, I say: Be converted. You cannot find God on the path of torture. God is found on the way of justice, conversion and truth.�

Every day, Romero took time to speak with dozens of persons threatened by government death squads. People came to him to ask for the help or protection, to complain about harassment or murders, or to find some guidance and support in their time of grief and struggle. Romero received and listened to everyone of them. His prophetic voice became stronger and angrier as he learned of their pain and suffering.

~snip~
Romero�s funeral was the largest demonstration in Salvadoran history, some say in the history of Latin America. The government was so afraid that they threw bombs into the crowd and opened fire, killing some thirty people and injuring hundreds. The funeral Mass was never completed and Romero was hastily buried.

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0324-21.htm

~ Click for image ~

View from the cathedral steps at the funeral of murdered Archbishop Oscar Romero. The streets of San Salvador were turned into a bloodbath as bombs exploded and guns fired. Forty people were killed and 450 injured as people rushed to get into the cathedral. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

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