Play Democracy and Hide the Corpses for Good Business in Colombia

[Judi Lynn]

Play Democracy and Hide the Corpses for Good Business in Colombia
by Jose David Torrenegra / July 29th, 2011

Not a week goes in Colombia without reports of assassinations and persecution of labor and political activists. Ana Fabricia Cordoba, gender activist and leader of displaced peasants, was shot dead on June 7th inside a street bus, after she foretold her own death due to constant threats and abuses against her family;1 Manuel Antonio Garces, community leader, afro-descendent activist and candidate for local office in southwestern Colombia received on July 18th a disturbing warning that read “we told you to drop the campaign, next time we’ll blow it in your house” next to an inactive hand grenade;2 Keyla Berrios, leader of Displaced Women’s League was murdered last July 22nd , after continuous intimidation of her organization and threats on behalf of death squads linked to Colombian authorities,3 a fact so publicly known after hundreds of former congressman, police and military personnel are either jailed or investigated for colluding with Paramilitaries to steal elections, murder and disappear dissidents, forcefully displace peasants and defraud public treasury, in a criminal network that extends all the way up to former president Alvaro Uribe and his closest aides.4

The official explanation to these crimes is also well known; Bacrim, an acronym which stands for “Criminal Gangs”, a term created from the Colombia establishment including its omnipresent corporate media apparatus to depoliticize the constant violence unleashed against union leaders, peasants and community activists, Human Rights defenders or anyone humane enough to point at the extremely unequal and unjust structures of power and wealth which rely heavily on repression. However, no matter how much effort is put into misleading public opinion about the nature of this violence, the crimes are so systematic and their effects always turning out for the benefit of the elite that a simple class analysis debunks the façade of these “gangs” supposedly acting on their own, and expose the mutual benefit relation between armed thugs and political power in Colombia, an acute representation of present-day fascism in Latin America.

In a country overwhelmed with unemployment and poverty — nearly 70% — and 8 million people living on less than U$2 a day who daily look for their subsistence in garbage among stray dogs or selling candies at street lights and city buses, is also shockingly common and surreal to see fancy cars — Hummers, Porsches — million dollar apartments, country clubs and a whole bubble of opulence just in front of over-exploited workers, ordinary people struggling merely to make ends meet, or at worst, children, single mothers, elderly, and people with disabilities, without social security and salaries, much less higher education and decent housing. For instance, in Cartagena, a Colombian Caribbean colonial city plagued with extreme poverty, beggars, child prostitution and U$400 a night resorts, you can pretend to feel in Miami Beach or a Mediterranean paradise, and in less than five minutes away you can also visit slums which would make devastated Haiti look like suburbia. The same shockingly contrast can be experienced in all major cities in Colombia. Thus, in order to keep vast privileges of a few amidst infrahuman conditions of the majority, the elite needs to have an iron grip on political power, and once its power is contested or mildly threatened by the collective action of social movements, democratic parties and conscious individuals, a selective burst of state violence is unleashed effectively dismantling any kind of peaceful organizing by fear and demoralization. The high levels of attrition suffered by activists raising moderate democratic banners such as the right to assembly, collective bargaining, freedom of expression and reparation from political violence, are the result of decentralized state repression carried out by death squads led by high state officers5 who supply them with intelligence and economic resources extracted from defrauding public treasury and money laundry in the narcotics chain, where social investigators claim that most of the profit accounts for institutional economy, the banks and the state.6

This elaborated repressive strategy differs from the one perpetrated by the military juntas the ruled Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, among others, where public forces exercised directly the political violence against dissidents without pretentious democratic credentials, such as the ones constantly regurgitated by the Colombian establishment, making it more difficult to expose its deep dictatorial mechanisms that have disappeared more than 30000 Colombians7 in the last years of US backed “counterinsurgency” policies, far surpassing Pinochet’s reign of terror.

More:
http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/07/play-democracy-and-hide-the-corpses-for-good-business-in-colombia/

Editorials:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x617112

[gbscar]

1. Torrenegra's rhetoric is passionate, but sadly selective and silent about far too many details

Before writing anything else, it would be almost cruelly insulting to deny that this opinion piece is right to reference many of the brutal crimes, abuses and painful or unfair situations we can all identify as part of the current Colombian status quo. That is indeed so.

Just as well, it would be equally unfortunate to ignore the role played by the Colombian elite in both fostering and allowing this to happen, through the ongoing use and tolerance of unmentionable paramilitary atrocities, together with the knowing support provided by the U.S. government throughout the years. Those responsible have their hands soaked in blood and thus it is more than justified to oppose such criminal efforts.

If the gist of those basic facts and principles is accurate, as I've acknowledged, then what is the problem with this article?

In essence, what Torrenegra hides and prefers to not say, because it would complicate and ostensibly detract from his conclusion.

In order to both explicitly and implicitly justify the guerrilla struggle as the only option for those who do not want to be killed or oppressed, the author needs to paint a picture that allows no room for exceptions, alternatives, contradictions or annotations.

Torrenegra admits that he is relying on a "simple class analysis" and centers many of his arguments around it. While I believe that type of analysis does have a certain amount of usefulness, it cannot possibly hope to replace a far more comprehensive review of a complex situation. It is, in my opinion, a double-edged sword that must be wielded together with a host of other weaponry in the context of proper research, for the sake of obtaining the best possible results.

Great simplifications are always popular, particularly when some of their supporting arguments are in fact as absolutely and tragically real as they are in Colombia, but I do not believe that such a perspective can provide us with a greater understanding of reality if this involves relying on incomplete and simplified or even outright inaccurate descriptions.

For Torrenegra, you are apparently either with the armed poor fighting against oppression or with the armed oppressors fighting against the unarmed poor. If you believe this dilemma is not partial or false but completely correct and all there is to the Colombia tragedy, then I suggest you stop reading the rest of this comment lest it overly inconvenience your line of thinking.

For instance, we see Torrenegra mention the evident fact that many of Uribe's friends and allies have been investigated or jailed for their apparent links to paramilitaries, death squads and other crimes, but he assigns no inherent or positive value to this turn of events. For him, it just provides us with an ever increasing number of crooks.

But if, as one of the quotes he employs explicitly suggests, the conflict is essentially reduced to a polarization between the military and oligarchy on one side against guerrillas and peasants on the other...what possible benefit could there be for the oligarchy by allowing its own flesh and blood to be publicly shamed and humiliated, if not punished with jail time or political bans? Perhaps it would be wise to consider that the oligarchy is not monolithic and that Colombia's class make-up -and the conflict it has given birth to- is not exclusively reduced to its nominal extremes? Just by doing so, I believe additional doors would also be opened and any investigation or debate should become a lot less narrowminded.

For example, it would be possible to notice that there is an active legal opposition in Colombia made up of overwhelmingly unarmed civilians and even many government officials, who carry on despite all of the state and non-state right-wing terror, and there have been certain judicial and political developments favoring said opposition or at least going against the interests of the darkest sectors of the elite from time to time, regardless of all the bloodshed. Sometimes the trend has been to move one step forward and two steps back, no doubt, but at other times the trend has attempted to be far more positive if also relatively fleeting and clearly fragile.

Colombian history is something of a painful paradox, because progress towards modernity has often been followed by violent reactions that slow or sabotage, but never truly stop, the march of history. This was true back in 1991, for example, with the new progressive Constitution, and it is true right now, with numerous judicial decisions in favor of minorities and discriminated sectors and against the Colombian right-wing or even the state. They haven't endured such setbacks by sitting down, no, but they haven't reverted them either, and the fact that poverty and inequality have continued or even worsened isn't automatically incompatible with progress in other areas.

If it could well be considered naive to only see the bright side and ignore all of the brutality throughout Colombian history, then it should also be disingenious -though often understandably so as I do not expect victims of right-wing violence to smile and take a step back- to see nothing but continuing brutality and pay no mind to any other events.

Then comes the matter of the U.S. role in the conflict. Torrenegra says that the class confrontation is "mostly" funded by the U.S. but...is this really the case? The issue has come up numerous times before and it should be, of course, reiterated that the U.S. government has in fact provided more than 7 billion USD to the Colombian government from 2000 to date, most of which has been spent directly or indirectly on the war effort under the pretext of counter-narcotics or counter-terrorism, with little or no consideration at all for the resulting murders and abuses. In fact, it is hard to argue these developments haven't been at least partially intentional.

That being the case, careful observers would still notice this conflict significantly predates the visible and unprecedented increase in U.S. involvement we have seen over the past decade. And, perhaps more to the point, the little considered fact that the Colombia government's own military and defense budget regularly dwarfs U.S. aid on a yearly basis by an order of magnitude. Or, to put things in far more blatant terms, let's stop to seriously think about how many foreign resources are really all that necessary in order to fund the Colombian conflict when both legal and illegal sources of income are widespread in the country, obviously including but not limited to the drug trade itself and its related activities.

This doesn't mean the U.S. hasn't had plenty of direct and indirect influence in these and other affairs, beyond the mere statistical figures involved, but if we are to allow incorrect generalizations to survive unchallenged then I fear the misguided idea that simply stopping the flow of U.S. dollars will automatically lead to the end of the conflict is what we are ultimately going to be left with. And believing that, in my humble opinion, is a grave mistake. The end of U.S. funding could help, but it requires a comprehensive anti-war and pro-peace effort at the same time. Otherwise, the conflict will still find numerous ways to drag on.

Finally, it is at least worth mentioning that the Libyan debacle is a completely different can of worms, to put it lightly, but not in the way Torrenegra appears to suggest by tacitly indicating Gaddafi is innocent or unjustly punished, regardless of the admitted hypocrisy of the "humanitarian" intervention of the U.S. and NATO. That is, however, a topic best left to those familiar with the subject.

I haven't even addressed all the potential issues with the article, to be quite honest, but I believe this should be enough to at least introduce some dissent and fodder for further debate through the use of critical thinking.

[naaman fletcher]

3. great post, thanks

"For Torrenegra, you are apparently either with the armed poor fighting against oppression or with the armed oppressors fighting against the unarmed poor. If you believe this dilemma is not partial or false but completely correct and all there is to the Colombia tragedy, then I suggest you stop reading the rest of this comment lest it overly inconvenience your line of thinking."

I'll bet that quite a few of the people who post here read no further than that.

[joshcryer]

5. Heh, actually, there's irony there.

If he really did care about the unarmed oppressed he'd certainly more likely identify the Libyan rebels. This critique has nothing to do with a consistent defense.

[Bacchus39]

2. wow, this opinion piece is total crap

Colombia is a midlevel income country and while abject poverty is certainly a reality it is no where near as horrible as Haiti.


the peasantry does NOT support the FARC. just look at the last 3 elections at least and you'll see that and the woeful polling of POLO party that is sympathetic to the FARC.


"Modernity hasn’t arrived in Colombia, where few can enjoy excesses and vices of promised ‘civilization’ in fancy restaurants and country clubs, and most still live in 1789."

what???? Colombia is quite well developed. more so than Bolivia and Ecuador, at least as much as Venezuela.

the author is a moron.

[joshcryer]

4. Santos came down on the AUC* as FARC was mostly eliminated, but no credit where it is due.

As far as anyone who bashes Colombia is concerned the AUC is representative of the Colombia government in total and there is no attempt to equalize the paramilitary presence in Colombia. Fact is they've been working on it, they know it's a problem and they've been working on it.

As far as I'm concerned, the 2008 extraditions of the AUC paramilitary leaders is full evidence that Colombia is trying to solve the issues that were internally created (before US aid ever ramped up).

* Santos was the defense minister when AUC was "disbanded" and when the extraditions happened. It will take time before AUC is fully removed, but crime in Colombia is a far sight better than, say, Venezuela, which is supposed to be immune from any criticism here.

[Peace Patriot]

6. Excellent article! it makes the crucial point that the crime wave in Colombia is against LEFTISTS!

--political leftists, teachers, community activists, human rights workers, labor leaders, peasant farmer leaders and all who advocate for the poor majority, try to empower the poor majority or even just try to alleviate their suffering.

This is mostly NOT random crime, or merely "drug gangs". It is the kind of crime we saw in Norway--the insane rightwing trying to enforce their will by means of MURDER. And while we don't know if Breitvik was acting for some rightwing, Murdoch-like cabal, we CAN know this about Colombia, that the paramilitaries are RIGHTWING operatives, closely associated with the Colombian military, which has received $7 BILLION in U.S. military aid, and with crime boss, Alvario Uribe, who was supported by the Bush Junta, and is now protected and even coddled by the Obama administration (very likely because of what he knows about Bush Junta crimes in Colombia).

Amnesty International provided a very important study on who was committing the murders of trade unionists in Colombia. In the mid-2000s, 92% of the murders of trade unionists in Colombia were committed by the Colombia military itself--about half--and by its closely tied rightwing paramiltary death squads--the other half; only 2% were committed by the FARC guerrillas and the rest (3%!) was ordinary street crime.

This tells us, among other things, that ordinary street crime, that you might expect from a major drug trafficking country, is minimal, and violence targeted against leftists is the major problem. It also provides some perspective on the FARC guerrillas, as to their minimal part in the violence compared to the Colombian military and its rightwing death squads.

NINETY-TWO PERCENT of the murders of trade unionists committed by government forces in collusion with these former AUC death squads now called the "Black Eagles"--and we are now finding out that Uribe was conducting a massive illegal domestic spying operation--spying on trade unionists and other organizers of the poor, as per the above, as well as on judges and prosecutors. Clearly the spying was used to feed "lists" to the death squads and to operatives in the military for the commission of murders and threats of murder, as well as to monitor and anticipate investigations. This was very likely why Uribe and the U.S. (Bush Junta) ambassador to Colombia colluded to REMOVE death squad witnesses from Colombia, with sudden, overnight extraditions on mere drug charges, and to 'bury' them in the U.S. federal prison system by complete sealing of their cases in U.S. federal court in Washington DC, out of the reach of Colombian prosecutors and over their objection--an outrage that has occurred during the Obama administration.

Uribe is running around free and talking about "running for president" again. His criminal organization is still in place, in the form of networks of "Black Eagle" death squads whose purpose is to PREVENT the poor from gaining any political power and to protect the power of the rich---using murder and mayhem as their weapons--and no doubt controlling the trillion+ dollar cocaine revenue stream.

Our RW commenters here at DU claim that this article writer, Jose David Torrenegra, is trying to justify armed rebellion--that is, to justify the actions of the FARC guerrillas. That is not true. Here is what Torrengra says:


---

"Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law. (9)

"In the light of the exposure of the Colombian hybrid state which pits formal democracy and excessive privileges for a few against brutal repression and poverty for the majority, (it) is also feasible to comprehend the existence of an armed conflict, beyond the official construct of terrorism. This class confrontation has resulted in a 'polarization of civil war proportions between the oligarchy and the military, on one side, and the guerrilla and the peasantry, on the other,' (10) , and is mostly funded by US government using taxpayers money to back a rogue state and a comprador elite that prefers to wage dirty war against its own population rather than yield some political power and moderate social reforms. Modernity hasn’t arrived in Colombia, where few can enjoy excesses and vices of promised ‘civilization’ in fancy restaurants and country clubs, and most still live in 1789."

http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/07/play-democracy-and-hide-the-corpses-for-good-business-in-colombia/

----

Is it "feasible to comprehend" that some people will feel compelled to rebel against tyranny and oppression, where human rights are NOT protected by the law? It sure as hell is. Doesn't mean you condone the comparatively minor violence of the FARC guerrillas (minor compared to the Colombian military and its death squads). This writer, in my opinion, is merely stating that it is understandable. Indeed, our own Founders resorted to armed rebellion for far less cause than the poor in Colombia have--which brings me to a second point, about those who are trying to stop the rightwing violence in Colombia.

Another RW commenter above tries to defend the Colombian elite by saying that it is not monolithic--for instance, citing the investigations and prosecutions of Uribe's cronies. First of all, this judicial activity has not extended to solving the murders of Colombia's poor and their advocates. The survivors of these thousands of unsolved murders and their advocates have themselves been threatened, terrorized and some of them murdered as well. That there are some Colombians trying to seek justice for these victims--and some courageous judges and prosecutors--does not exonerate the country's rightwing political elite, whose wealth is built on a mountain of dead union leaders and other advocates of the poor!

Secondly, Uribe's crime network is very powerful and very hidden. The murders, terror and intimidation CONTINUE. And the rich continue to benefit from those crimes. And thirdly, the U.S. government has interfered with the Colombian justice system--in the death squad extraditions, likely also in the asylum given to the chief spying witness against Uribe, in the U.S. client state of Panama, and in helping to "launder" Uribe's image, so that he can plan his return to power. Besides a probable coverup of U.S. (Bush Junta) crimes in Colombia, U.S. corporate and war profiteer interests are being served by these murders, and the rich rightwing elite in Colombia is colluding in serving those interests.

There has been some courage and tenacity in the justice system, though this has yet to curtail the violence against the poor and their advocates and has yet to result in justice for the poor, and there has been virtually no redress on conditions of dire poverty, including one of the worst rich/poor discrepancies in Latin America and there has been little redress on the brutal displacement of 5 MILLION peasant farmers from their lands. In fact, advocates of the displaced have been murdered!

The Colombian elite wants a better image. They don't want justice for the poor and it suits them quite well to have the poor in a terrorized state and to have political leftists living in fear for the lives. And I don't see any great movement for justice among the elite. I don't think they believe in democracy. I think they are fascists, and that includes Santos. They think the super-rich should rule on behalf of big corporations backed by military power. That is the definition of fascism and that is how they have behaved. Some of them are kind of uncomfortable with their reputation for murder and mayhem. THAT'S what they would like to change--not the substance, the image.

CLEARLY armed rebellion is not the answer, is not the choice of the vast majority of Colombia's poor, and has not worked. This civil war in Colombia has been going on for 70 years! And it has lately been greatly exacerbated by the infusion of $7 BILLION by the U.S. on the rightwing side of this conflict. Further, the rest of Latin America is undergoing a vast and historic leftist democracy revolution--with leftist governments elected in Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and other places. Colombians have an example right next door in Venezuela, of a government which just earned designation as "THE most equal country in Latin America" on income distribution (by the UN Economic Commission of Latin America and the Caribbean). Poverty CAN be solved and MUST be solved for everyone's good--for the good of society.

That is another point of Torrenegra's article--that great rich/poor discrepancies create instability and invite violent rebellion. Greed destroys societies. It is destroying our own, as we speak. I HOPE that Colombia doesn't just fall off the cliff as a failed state--but that appears to be the fate of countries that let their rightwing get out of control, and it also appears to be the fate of any country that U.S. corporations and war profiteers get their vulture talons into.

I HOPE that Colombia somehow achieves democracy and is able to create a country that benefits all of its citizens, but I don't think that can happen with the U.S. military in the country using it as a "lily pad" and corporations like Drummond Coal, Chiquita, Monsanto, Dyncorp, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Occidental Petroleum and others exploiting it, not to mention the hidden beneficiaries of the cocaine trade (U.S. banksters, the Bush Cartel, the CIA, etc.).

Maybe it will take a leftist democracy rebellion HERE to free Colombia--but we've got the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines and other corpo-fascist systems blockading reform here, so that ain't gonna happen any time soon.

[joshcryer]

7. FARC is authoritarian left.

[gbscar]

8. I'm sorry, but disagreeing with Torrenegra does not make one "right-wing"...

...unless you want to suggest that there is only "my way or the highway" and thus anyone who doesn't share all of the same exact beliefs, assumptions, readings, philosophies and points of view about every single issue discussed here is a right-winger and therefore against social, political or economic progress.

Both personally and intellectually, I find your implication to be rather misleading if not outright insulting, because in spite of my occasional objections here I definitely disagree with the core set of right-wing policies and values in terms of both domestic and international affairs. In most of those, I am far more likely to entirely or at least partially agree with the left-wing perspective, even if this doesn't lead me to your same exact conclusions in every single case.

If you must automatically put a sweeping political label on people, then by all means do so, but suffice to say that I don't believe that is necessary, convenient, useful or fair. Nevertheless, I will drop that subject and address the central topic at hand in my next post.

[naaman fletcher]

9. I think a good question here is "who is right wing"?

That is:

Who supports suppression of opposition political opponents and journalists on the "whatever it takes" theory?

Who is allied with Iran, Belarus, and other gross human rights violaters?

Who supports leaders that suppress indigenous populations?

Who supports increased military budgets?

Who supports prison overcrowding and its resultant consequences?

Who supports inflation that causes food baskets for the poor to go up faster than wages?

Who does nothing about the crime that effects the poor the most?

[Bacchus39]

10. I think what you really have is a conservative autocratic left leadership in these countries

Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador is going down that road, Danny in Nicaragua, Evo would like to be. Certainly not progressive or liberal. More like the Soviet Union or China of yesteryear than say Sweden or France or Brazil under Lula. these countries certainly are more conservative than the US with regards to press and societal freedoms even when we have a moron like Bush.

[gbscar]

11. I don't disagree with the AI figures on trade union murders carried out by the Colombian right

For a start, I actually agree that the Amnesty International figures you have repeatedly employed in this and other debates, despite the formal lack of a citation, do reflect an underlying reality. Yes, the Colombian right-wing is in fact responsible for the vast majority of brutal crimes against unionists and leftists in general. I find that about as shameful and horrible as any reasonable human being would.

However, I cannot share your resulting generalization about using specific statistics concerning responsibility for crimes against trade unionists in order to extrapolate and reach wider conclusions about all violent crime in Colombia, both political and otherwise.

It would be far too dishonest to say that trade unionists in particular or even leftists in general are primarily killed as a result of ordinary street crime, but your statement implying that all non-political violence in Colombia is "minimal" does not follow. In fact, it is almost a logical fallacy.

If 92% of trade unionists have been killed by the paramilitaries or by government agents, can you then simply extrapolate that into assuming equal percentages or proportions of responsibility for a broad range of other offenses across the board?

Not necessarily. More than 15,000 people or so tend to regularly die a violent death Colombia every year from all causes, with less than 100 of those being trade unionists in recent years. That doesn't make their plight any less horrific, on both a moral and political level it is objectionable to the point of certainly justifying the outrage against the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement regardless of its additional issues, but it does directly question your argument about non-political violence being almost an afterthought. Even if you added all of the politically motivated murders against progressives, such as peasants, teachers and human rights workers, there would still be thousands of murders left with no such political content.

Overwhelming violence against left-wingers by the right is in fact a major and inescapable part of the Colombian tragedy, to the point I would even classify it as one of the main historical roots of the conflict, but that does not explain all of the violence in Colombia. No, not by a long shot.

I'm not just talking about "ordinary street crime" when, among other things, there are highly sophisticated criminal and drug trafficking organizations in Colombia with no lack of involvement in all manner of violent and corrupt affairs, including but not limited to operating independently and in complex alliances with paramilitaries, government forces and other private individuals or national and multinational corporations. Rather than making the situation any better, that even makes things worse.

In addition, you can't really assume that if FARC guerrillas are only responsible for 2% of trade unionist deaths then they are only responsible for 2% of all other murders, crimes and human rights violations. Not only does that not make much logical sense, it is also contradicted by figures -which I have posted and properly cited before- about the guerrilla groups being responsible for about a third or so of yearly forced displacement in Colombia according to the human rights NGO CODHES, which focuses on displacement and is the source of the "OVER 5 MILLION" accumulated total you have repeatedly employed. In other words, they are not blindly repeating government propaganda but doing actual research and investigation on the ground.

Of course, even taking this into consideration, you can say that the guerrillas aren't the main culprits for most of the current and historical violence in Colombia and I would absolutely agree. They are not. But this doesn't make them insignificant. In this specific case, since forced displacement is a major violation but I wouldn't necessarily want to extrapolate much further, 33% is considerably larger than 2%.

Can you say that is minor? Yes. Can you say that is forgettable? No. Their responsibility for other crimes and offenses has also varied throughout the years, even if we can agree about the guerrillas not being the main offenders. Yes, they shouldn't be the main target of human rights criticism -and they aren't as far as most specialized NGOs are concerned- but they should not be a mere footnote either.

To say the least, FARC violence also plays a role in promoting and fueling -though never justifying, not even if the proportions were hypothetically reversed- right-wing reaction and oppression. What we have in 2011 Colombia is a vicious cycle where violence creates more violence, even if most of it does come from the right as opposed to the left.

By extension, when Torrenegra and you say that it is "feasible to comprehend" that people will be compelled to rebel against tyranny and oppression and join FARC, I could even agree with that statement in and of itself. Yes, this is indeed true. On a personal level, I do not condemn those who are forced to join the guerrillas as a result of right-wing terror. I condemn their violent activities and the resulting tragic consequences as part of the armed struggle of a larger organization, not their own individual choice. It is a choice I disagree with, mind you, even if I can understand it.

But making that isolated argument while simultaneously failing to both notice and mention the rest of the nuances surrounding this situation -including what I have already posted here and in my original reply from a few days ago- suggests that armed rebellion is the only alternative left. At the very least, no others are considered. Torrenegra, in particular, does not care about properly representing the historical struggle of leftists or progressives as anything other than their status as victims of violence, period, neglecting that only a few of them have resorted to violence, with the author having absolutely no consideration for anything else...let alone the counter-productive effects of the armed struggle after almost half a century of suffering and death.

Concerning the matter of the Colombian elite not being monolithic, I believe it is precisely because of the sheer brutality of the right-wing's horrifying crimes, and the numerous dangers or threats faced by the victims in the process of solving said crimes, that it is extremely important to identify the real intellectual perpetrators and actually support the more sensible and reasonable human beings within the Colombian establishment, as opposed to merely issuing mass general condemnations of the faceless. That has no real effect other than expressing moral outrage. Does repeatedly saying that the entire Colombia elite is fascist and completely responsible actually punish any of the individual culprits? I don't think so.

If not enough criminals are being punished, or their punishment is considered insufficient, more can be gained by actively supporting those who actually want justice -for whatever reason- by acting in numerous ways as opposed to leaving them to struggle alone because the results aren't good enough. If not enough people are honestly asking for justice right now, then promoting circumstances where this would be possible is also a valid course of action.

Otherwise, it seems implicit that any and all members of the Colombia elite are equally guilty with no such thing as a presumption of individual innocence and, for that matter, picking any random person out of a line-up for judicial or extrajudicial punishment would somehow result in delivering "justice" on behalf of the victims and the poor. It is precisely this sort of implied thinking that also motivates armed rebellion and many of the barbaric practices carried out by FARC guerrillas, as they repeatedly victimize those members of the elite who are the most vulnerable as opposed to those who are the most powerful. Never mind that whoever is actually the most responsible tends to escape even this twisted version of "people's justice" more often than not. I don't think I need to further expose the tragic flaw present in this kind of thought process.

Now, promoting impunity is certainly a maliciously intentional part of the cover-up strategy employed by the murderous sectors of Colombia's elite, but it is often forgotten or ignored that the vast majority of all violent crimes -not just crimes against leftists or progressives- are left unsolved in Colombia. High impunity rates also apply to the rest of the population, regardless of politics, so saying that non-political crimes are "minimal" in Colombia is almost a cruel joke. At this point in time, impunity has also become a structural problem as opposed to something that can be switched "on" or "off" at will by the elite. Call it opening Pandora's Box, if you will. It is much easier to intentionally open the box in the first place than to close it, much less when all the evils of the world have long since dispersed.

That is why international pressure is necessary and demands must be made, using all the means available to eventually force the Colombian elite to punish its culprits or be punished in turn, but far more steps need to be taken and there are valuable allies within the establishment that must be supported, not ignored or insulted. This is precisely what makes the whole situation even more tragically twisted and in need of urgent measures that go beyond effectively condemning everyone and everything with no further distinctions.

In other words, nobody is going to ever dismantle Uribe's criminal network and put him in jail without lots of blood, sweat and tears from both Colombians and foreigners, including people from the more reasonable or simply anti-Uribe sectors of the elite, no matter how much time you spend describing his brutal acts and issuing general condemnations. If we were to assume that the faceless elite is ever-monolithic and deserves nothing but ostracism because it only wants a better image, period, then good luck accomplishing anything!

I'd say that even if we want to assume Santos is only looking out for himself, at the end of the day this doesn't mean some genuine good can't come out of such an effort. Exploit the act and try to turn it into reality for the sake of all the establishment's victims, as opposed to dismissing the whole thing and waiting for a "perfect" or "better" chance that may not come anytime soon if nothing else is done.

Unless, of course, the idea happens to be waiting for the old promises and dreams of armed revolutionary triumph to come true, which has proven to be visibly ineffective and far more counter-productive after over half a century of violence.

I don't fundamentally disagree about your general praise for several countries in Latin America that have, in fact, achieved some greater measure of poverty reduction and equality after many decades when they were little better than Colombia in most respects and were commanded by similarly greedy and egoistical elites, but I believe that also serves to indicate the dynamic and flexible nature of history. Those elites couldn't stop the march of progress forever, no matter what they did. From an external perspective, what would have been thought impossible in yesterday's Brazil or even Venezuela, for example, is akin to what is thought impossible in today's Colombia. Many things need to change before that happens, of course, and the path may not be identical at all. But I believe hope exists and there are tangible actions that can be taken in the meanwhile, including but certainly not limited to opposing U.S. military aid and excessive influence, as I have already indicated elsewhere.