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their farms, their communities and their particular environment which they may love--the forest, the birds, the streams, the fish...Mother Earth--what happens then, hm?
Transglobal mining corporations and their "bought and paid for" local governments, militaries and paramilitary death squads don't take "no" for an answer.
This man's stated worship of filthy lucre is bad enough. And that he is President Santos' brother is very telling, indeed. But far, far worse things have happened, and are happening, to millions of poor people in Colombia, who are in the way of "free trade for the rich"--including massive displacement of 5 MILLION peasant farmers from their lands, using state terror (paid for by you and me--$7 BILLION in U.S. military aid to Colombia) and mass murder. In one area--La Macarena--500 to 2,000 bodies have been found because their corpses were polluting the local drinking water and local children became sick from it. This was an area of particular interest and activity by the USAID and the U.S. military, where the USAID designed a "pacification" program (similar to Afghanistan) and the U.S. military, at the very least, provided the Colombian military with "technical assistance" and "training" to carry it out. I don't know if this is gold mining land, but clearly somebody with a whole lot of money to buy governments wanted it for something...biofuel production, banana production, coal mining, the trillion+ dollar cocaine trade? Terrorizing and murdering masses of local poor people in Colombia has been standard operating procedure in the interest of the super rich, the criminal and the transnational.
Massive displacement of small farmers--by murder, by terror, by deliberate destruction of their markets, and, in the case of the U.S. "war on drugs," deliberate destruction of their food crops with toxic pesticides--has been a huge problem--and very possibly an insane planet-killing war--in numerous "global south" countries. There are examples all over Latin America. Indeed, it is the common story in Latin America, and is quite specifically the result of U.S. domination, with countries run by U.S.-supported fascist dictators and fascist elites, who create a malevolent culture, in which a tiny elite not only owns all the land, and drives peasant farmers off the land, and into urban squalor (as a slave labor force), but who also sell off the country's rich natural resources to multinational corporations, skim off some profit for themselves, and utterly neglect their country and their people, leaving most people in dire poverty, with no hope of advancement. This has been the "model" in country after country after country, in Latin America. We are seeing the result in the masses of very poor people crowded into urban slums. THIS is the syndrome that the New Left in Latin America has been trying to address--for instance, by using the profits from resources, such as oil, to greatly expand educational opportunities and health care, to provide pensions for the elderly, to foster local business development, to institute land reform and other social programs, and--vital to reform--public participation (for instance, the "community councils" in Venezuela--local community groups given grants by the government to implement their own development projects).
Canada's rightwing has been a partner-in-crime with the U.S. in all of these Diaspora-like, pogrom-like, activities in Latin America--massive displacement of campesinos, mass murder--of campesino organizers, of the advocates of the poor--teachers, trade unionists, political leftists, human rights workers, journalists--and oppression of every kind, in the interest of multinational corporations, war profiteers and the super-rich. It is sad but true. Like Great Britain, Canada has become a sort of troll that rides on the back of the great U.S. war machine, ghoulishly grabbing what it can--in resources, in bits of gold--from the peasants who are mercilessly mowed down directly by U.S. bombs or by U.S. proxy armies.
Ugly, ugly, ugly! And this asshole--Medero's corporate director Juan Carlos Santos--inadvertently points to the sea of blood beneath the "money."
"...it ends up being basically a matter of money, as well as history and a lot of other things, but basically, money."
History and a lot of other things.
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