Friend of Colombian Uribe's sons, David Murcia, flown to US for money laundering charges.

[Judi Lynn]

You'll probably remember this Colombian criminal and his employees who burned so many Colombians with his crooked investment companies, they rioted in the streets, tore up the offices, and someone killed one of the managers.

One of the papers dared to mention his name had been connected to Uribe's two sons. Luckily for them, their connection to this scandal didn't seem to burnish their sterling reputations.

~~~~~~~
Colombia extradites financial conman to U.S.
Tue Jan 5, 2010 3:13pm EST

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Colombia on Tuesday sent the country's best-known financial swindler, whose pyramid schemes sparked riots by victims, to the United States to face charges he laundered millions of dollars of cocaine proceeds.

David Murcia, mastermind of a financial scandal that cost thousands of Colombian families their savings, wore a bullet-proof vest and was heavily guarded as he boarded a plane to the United States.

"We are guaranteeing that he will answer to U.S. authorities," Luis Ramirez, head of Colombia's Judicial Police, told reporters.

Murcia, 28, was due to appear later on Tuesday in a U.S. district court in Florida before being transferred to New York for prosecution.

An indictment unsealed in a Manhattan federal court charges Murcia and six others with laundering millions of dollars of proceeds from cocaine trafficking in Mexico through Murcia's DMG finance company.

More:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60446D20100105

http://www.cambio.com.co.nyud.net:8090/paiscambio/816/IMAGEN/IMAGEN-4826062-2.gif

Never knew a ponytail and facial hair could make such a difference on a face!

~~~~~~~~~~~~
Uribe sons allegedly engaged in insider trading
Monday, 20 April 2009 13:27
Adriaan Alsema

http://colombiareports.com.nyud.net:8090/pics/uribe/sons_uribe.jpg

In the article, columnist Daniel Coronel alleges that President Alvaro Uribe’s two sons got rich with the help of top government officials. According to the report, the value of property owned by the Uribe sons suspiciously grew from 33 million pesos to three billion pesos in two years.

Coronel, known for his opposing government views, stated that the two plots of land bought by Tomas and Jeronimo Uribe in Mosquera increased their value when they went from being considered rural land to industrial lots and the property changed from being quoted in hectares to meters.

In December of last year, the director of the Office of Taxes and Customs declared the brother’s 32-hectar property in western Colombian a free-trade zone. Coronel points out that leading government officials like the minister of the Treasury, the director of the National Planning Department, and the advising minister to the president had to approve the project.

“The problem is that the official decision ends up favoring the sons of the head of state,” affirmed Coronel.

More:
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/3677-uribe-sons-allegedly-engaged-in-insider-trading.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. I think the CIA is tightening the noose around Uribe, in favor of Colombia's Donald Rumsfeld, Manuel

Santos.

The price of being a U.S. puppet is that you can and will be replaced when your usefulness is over.

Santos, the former Defense Minister, is as cold-eyed and evil as they come, and he is chafing at the bit to invade Venezuela, topple the Chavez government, personally lynch Chavez, torture and kill all the leftists and start doling out the oil concessions to Exxon Mobil & brethren.

Uribe has tried to play a double game, cozying up to Chavez at times, other times stabbing him in the back, and acting like he cares what other leaders of South America think. Santos will not do this. He will say, "Fuck you" to them all, and I believe has already made his own pact with the Devil, to cordon Colombia and northern Venezuela (where the oil is) off from the rest of the Continent, in this "circle the wagons" thing that the Pentagon seems to be designing in the Caribbean/Central America--a "free trade for the rich zone," or, with Santos as Roman prefect of the region, a "free fire zone against union leaders and uppity peasants," enforced by the US military. The US military (denied Iran) will be able to fill up its big gas tank. And US corpos will have a big pool of desperately poor workers, as they reinstall fascist governments in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, like they did in Honduras, and sharpen their knives for Cuba when the Castros finally die.

This may explain why/how any news at all about Uribe's 60 political cohorts who are under investigation, indicted or in jail for their ties to rightwing death squads and drug trafficking, or news of the death squads, gets published here. And it does--more often than you'd think, considering US complicity in Colombia's horrors. Uribe is their boy, but they don't black-hole this news. Why? It turns up from time to time in Associated Pukes, New York Slimes and Rotters articles, and in other such places.

I think the reason may be to build background noise for the CIA dumping Uribe and installing Santos for the war they have planned against Venezuela.

Looks like a two-year time frame to me, to coincide with the return of the Bush junta here--easily accomplished now that the far, far rightwing voting machine corporation, ES&S, has (by swallowing up Diebold) gained control of 70% of US 'TRADE SECRET' voting systems. They are already writing the narrative in the corpo-fascist press.

Sorry to be so gloomy today, but it's raining and I can't work in my garden.

[Judi Lynn]

2. There's one more reason the US would be happy to see Uribe out, and Santos IN.

Uribe's decision to bribe the Senate and get them to change the constitution, and re-elect him, even though the bribery part sent the witness to prison after the testimony, followed by his wish to run for a THIRD time is making it hard for them to keep hammering away at Chavez publicly for running for multiple re-elections, and it causes them to logically lose their internet war against him waged in discussion groups and in their bogus "news" reports. (No doubt they despise good students of history who point out our own founding fathers believed a fixed term limit wasn't democratic, and that Franklin D. Roosevelt died during his FOURTH elected term and then our own rabid right-wingers tried to prevent this from ever happening again (a beloved populist staying in office through democratic support) and forced the Presidential term limits on us here.)

It's important to them that nothing deflects the constant stream of venom, public character assination they pursue as part of their propaganda program attempt to hack away at Chavez support base. As long as Uribe keeps running *(always supported at ground level by the paramilitaries, even pursuing Colombians into the voting booth, terrorizing them even as they try to vote) and winning, it will be hard to batter Chavez with the old "President for life" bogus charges.

~~~~~~~~~
* COLOMBIA: "Mark Him on the Ballot - The One Wearing Glasses"
By Constanza Vieira

Credit:Procuraduría General

BOGOTA, May 8 , 2008 (IPS) - "With Uribe, we thought: this is the guy who is going to change the country," the 41-year-old fisherwoman told IPS.

That is why her fishing and farming village of 800 people in the central Colombian region of Magdalena Medio decided overwhelmingly to vote for current President Álvaro Uribe in the 2002 presidential elections, when he first ran.

The woman agreed to talk to IPS on the condition that she be asked neither her name (we will call her "L.") nor the name of her village.

The main city in the fertile region of Magdalena Medio is Barrancabermeja, an oil port on the Magdalena River, which runs across Colombia from south to north before emptying into the Caribbean Sea.

What convinced the villagers to vote for Uribe? "Because the region where we live is poor, very poor, it’s so difficult to find work, and when I heard him say ‘I am going to work for the poor, I am going to help them,’ I thought ‘this is a good president’."

When the rightwing president’s first four-year term came to an end in 2006, most of the villagers decided again to vote for him, reasoning that he just needed more time to reduce poverty.

The odd thing was that in both the 2002 and 2006 elections, despite the fact that the villagers had already decided to vote for Uribe, the far-right paramilitaries, who had committed a number of murders since 1998, when they appeared in the region that was previously dominated by the leftwing guerrillas, pressured the local residents to vote for Uribe anyway.

The paramilitaries did not kill people to pressure the rest to vote for Uribe, as they did in other communities, but merely used "threats," said L.

"If you don't vote for Uribe, you know what the consequences will be," the villagers were told ominously.

And on election day, they breathed down voters’ necks: "This is the candidate you’re going to vote for. You’re going to put your mark by this one. The one wearing glasses," they would say, pointing to Uribe’s photo on the ballot, L. recalled.

"One (of the paramilitaries) was on the precinct board, another one was standing next to the table, and another was a little way off, all of them watching to see if you voted for Uribe," she added, referring to the less than subtle way that the death squads commanded by drug traffickers and allies of the army ensured that L.’s village voted en masse for the current president in both elections.

"We form part of a municipality where there is corruption, from the mayor to town councillors, the police, the army and the justice officials - in a word, everyone. They are just one single corrupt mass. So what are you supposed to do?" said L., who added that the paramilitaries "control everything."

More:
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42290

~~~~~~~~~
Undoubtedly the paras will always go with the right-wing candidate.

[Peace Patriot]

3. Very true about the campaign against Chavez

"It's important to them that nothing deflects the constant stream of venom, public character assination they pursue as part of their propaganda program attempt to hack away at Chavez support base. As long as Uribe keeps running *(always supported at ground level by the paramilitaries, even pursuing Colombians into the voting booth, terrorizing them even as they try to vote) and winning, it will be hard to batter Chavez with the old "President for life" bogus charges."

I agree. This has been such a mainstay of the psyops/disinformation campaign against Chavez, they would love to be rid of the counter to it, that their boy Uribe is doing the same thing (--Chavez, legally and legitimately, of course, by a vote of the people in a transparent election system, and Uribe by bribery, bullying, death squads and terror!).

Santos would be a "fresh face" (ye gods) to foist upon the world, and he'll get a good polish from Lanny Davis or brethren, to tone down that leering sarcasm and arrogance a la Rumsfeld, and try to turn him into "god's gift" to the Roman prefecture of the Caribbean.

Ugh. I'm certainly having dire thoughts this evening. But it's difficult not to predict the worst, after Honduras and Haiti, and considering who's really running the USA.

[rabs]

4. More of the same from uribito

As if Colombia does not have a judicial system or prisons, send Murcia to the United States on money laundering charges. Deport the paramilitary honchos on charges of narco-trafficking. Send captured FARC to U.S. prisons on narco charges.

So, what happens? People like Murcia and the paras are muzzled about their prior connections with the uribistas. The Colombian public is kept in the dark.

The United States gets to house Colombian para killers and narco traffickers in U.S. prisons.

Colombia gets another half-billion dollars for its never-ending (and profitable) war on drugs.

Btw, uribito still has not announced whether he will run for re-re-election. His bid for a third term has not been given the green light by the Constitutional Court, and were the court to allow it, there still would have to be national referendum, which alavrito could conceivable lose.

The presidential elections is schedule in May, which allows little time for a referendum and for potentional candidates to campaign in case alvarito throws in the towel. That includes M. Santos.

[Judi Lynn]

5. I had wondered about why they sent him north, when he screwed so many, many people in Colombia.

Your comments on this sound EXACTLY on target. He DOES have a lot of information which will be staying with him here, and not revealed when they'll try him on the money laundering charges, instead. A slick side step around the chance he'd tell anyone his Uribe-connected secrets.

So sneaky. He actually LOOKS (without his beard, moustache) more like Uribe than Tom and Jerry, the sons.

Thanks for mentioning the election date looming so closely. Had no idea it would be that soon. Now we'll be watching for more on this, too.

Your familiarity with Latin American events helps so much here. :hi: Thank you, again.