Colombia govt will consider reinstating Patriotic Union party .

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Colombia Reports

Colombia govt will consider reinstating Patriotic Union party .
Monday, 01 April 2013 08:54 Benjy Hansen-Bundy

The Commission of Peace will discuss the possibility of reintegrating the Patriotic Union (UP), which suffered a state-sponsored genocide in the late 1980s and early 1990s, into Colombian politics by returning the defunct party's legal status.

The UP has endured political "exile" since 2002 after the government took away their legal status to function as a political party.

"If there is a restitution of legal status, it is possible that other posts of public office that were lost in the genocide (could be reinstated)," Ivan Cepeda, whose father, Senator Manuel Cepeda, was murdered while in office in 1994, told Colombia Reports.

Nelda Forero, a UP spokesperson, sent a letter in mid-March to the negotiators at the peace talks between the government and the FARC in Havana, Cuba, requesting legal recognition for the party so that they might participate in the 2014 elections. Now the Commission of Peace, a body within Congress, is poised to meet separately with the High Commissioner of Peace, Sergio Jaramillo Caro, and the remaining members of the UP to discuss the party's legal status.

"For us the legal status is only one element of an integral reparation for the genocide of our members committed by the state," Omer Calderon, president of the UP, told Colombia Reports. "Today the Patriotic Union as a party is outlawed from the national stage of politics, refusing its members all fundamental rights to political participation."

Read more: http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/peace-talks/28760-colombia-govt-will-consider-reinstating-patriotic-union-party.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. 2002. Hm. Year the Bush Junta was planning to invade Iraq,...

...slaughter a hundred thousand innocent people and steal their oil, along with bankrupting the United States and throwing the poor majority, here, there and everywhere, "off the island."

Around the same time, they were handing SEVEN BILLION DOLLARS of U.S. taxpayer money to their preferred criminal organization in Colombia, Alvaro Uribe & co., and starting to use Colombia as their experimental ground for drones (USAF), for "pacification" plans (USAID/Pentagon), probably for "turkey shoot" trainings of death squads "for use in Iraq and Afghanistan" (Blackwater and maybe U.S. military), for spying, even on judges and prosecutors (U.S. embassy support), for live action vid of various joint Colombia/U.S. horrors (U.S. embassy), for bombing a FARC camp to prevent peace talks (Dyncorp), for infiltrating death squads into Venezuela (the "Black Eagles," successor to the AUC, very likely in Uribe's control), and for God knows what else (oh, yes, consolidating the trillion-plus cocaine revenue stream into few hands and better directing its profits).

The outlawing of the Leftist political party in Colombia is part of this picture of crime and horror and lies and propaganda. The poor majority have few or no advocates within the political system. That is a fascist (Bush Junta/Uribe) plan to drive the poor to join the FARC in taking up arms or to provide the FARC with succor, so that the combined U.S. and Colombian military forces can slaughter them at will, claiming to be for "law and order."

Argh! Our people have NO IDEA what has gone down in Colombia, and the culpability of the Bush Junta in particular (though the Democrats, as with the Iraq War and almost everything else, are colluders--even in the privatization of our vote counting system, which is why WE, the poor majority in the U.S., have few or no advocates among our elected officials).

I hope that the UP succeeds at getting re-established as a legitimate political party in Colombia. I'm sure they represent the majority of Colombians. But I don't know if Manuel Santos will go that far--to give the poor back their political voice and actual public office. Though he has done some good things--for instance, his peace talks with the FARC--he is a rightwinger, in the same political party as Uribe. Rightwingers and corporatists FEAR the poor majority, because, in honest and fair elections, the Left will win--as they are doing throughout South America. How much of a rightwinger is he? Hard to tell, given the problems he has to deal with, which I'm sure include constant danger of his own assassination and a military/fascist coup d'etat. We shall see how serious his make-over of Colombia is. It's likely cosmetics, for the U.S.-Colombia "free trade for the rich" Agreement. Have enough labor union leaders and other advocates of the poor been murdered for these "free traders" to risk a little "liberalism" and let the poor be represented? Santos could be more serious than this, as to reform--but I don't think it's knowable yet. (He did come out for legalization of all drugs--but that could just be Big Pharma's plan to monopolize the huge drug market, post-legalization.)