Source:
BBCSaturday, 27 February 2010
The Colombian constitutional court has rejected a referendum which could have led to President Alvaro Uribe running for a third term in office.
The court voted 7-2 against a proposal backed by parliament to hold a vote on amending the constitution to allow for three terms.(SNIP)
Former Defence Minister Juan Manuel Santos leads in opinion polls, reports say, but Sergio Fajardo, an independent praised for his performance as mayor of Medellin, is making ground.(MORE)
Read more:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8539784.stm
There is a lot of disinformation in this BBCon article, which I won't go into here. I want to comment instead on the person waiting in the wings, to benefit from Colombia's blood drenched political system and who ran the Colombian military during its bloodiest, Bush Junta years--former Defense Minister Manuel Santos, who, in my opinion, is worse than Uribe (and Uribe is quite bad).
You can get your head shot off in Colombia if you dare to raise it in a leftist, humanitarian or labor cause, and your body 'disappeared' into a mass grave. Many thousands have been killed and many regions terrorized by the Colombian military and its death squads. Conditions for a fair election therefore do not exist. And prime conditions do exist for installation of the CIA/Pentagon's candidate, which, in my opinion, is Santos (who has been waiting for this ruling to announce his candidacy). I suspect that this court ruling is direct from Langley. And what their purpose is I'm not sure, but I think covering up U.S./U.K. involvement in mass murders* may be part of it, and the bigger part may be a Pentagon war plan against Venezuela.
Uribe, I think, has reached the end of his usefulness. I think it's possible that he signed the new U.S./Colombia military agreement-- which, among other things, signs, seals and delivers total diplomatic immunity for all U.S. soldiers and U.S. 'contractors' in Colombia--in a bargain with the CIA to remain in power. And if my read on this is right, the CIA has treacherously abandoned him. He is too dirty--or too obviously dirty--for the U.S./Colombia "free trade for the rich" agreement and has too much of an inclination to want trade and cooperation with other Latin American leaders to be in charge if the war plan proceeds. Santos, on the other hand, is chafing at the bit to invade Venezuela, kill all the leftists and delivered Venezuela's oil--the biggest reserves on earth (twice Saudi Arabia's)--to Exxon Mobil and the U.S. war machine. He is the 'Donald Rumsfeld' of South America.
I tend to prefer no term limit on the president because Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and other Founders opposed a presidential term limit as undemocratic, and because we got our best president ever--FDR--for almost 4 terms. The people have a right to choose whomever they want and need as president. This is, of course, dependent on there being honest, transparent elections, such as they have in Venezuela. Here, I wouldn't want it until we get rid of the 'TRADE SECRET' voting system, which is so manipulable by the far rightwing corporation, ES&S, which just bought out Diebold and now has an 85% monopoly on U.S. voting systems. We are in for very big trouble because of this. And I'd just as soon not have Sarah Palin as president for 16 years or to the end of her life. In the horror scenario of Palin or someone of that ilk getting ES&Sed into the White House, our corporate overlords might still try to keep a facade of the rule of law and enforce the two term limit
I would also oppose lifting the term limit in Colombia, because, a) Uribe got the one term limit in Colombia changed to two, by bribery and stealth; and 2) the same goes for Santos, as for Palin--the term limit at least provides the hope that they can be gotten out.
But as I said, this is a deep, tangled, bloody CIA/Pentagon mess, with, I suspect, Panetta (who visited Bogota this week) trying to cover Junior's dirty trail and the Pentagon's "South Vietnamization" of Colombia proceeding apace, with the U.S. military now at SEVEN bases in Colombia--including U.S. spy and fighter planes, and their pilots, the U.S. Navy and crews and (if this number can be believed) some 1,600 U.S. soldiers and U.S. 'contractors,' all with total diplomatic immunity--described, as in Vietnam, as "just a few military advisers"--and also U.S. military use of all civilian airports and other infrastructure. What is all this FOR? Good question. To stop the drug traffic out of Colombia? Har-har. To merely intimidate the region? Maybe. But, considering other facts--such as the reconstitution of the U.S. 4th Fleet in the Caribbean, the U.S.-sneakily supported rightwing military coup in Honduras and the intense, longstanding psyops/disinformation campaign against the Chavez government in Venezuela--I think it's a war plan.
-----------------------------------
*A mass grave with
2,000 bodies, with grave dates (but no names) from 2005 through 2009, was recently discovered in La Macarena, Colombia, a region of special interest and activity by the U.S. military. Local people say the bodies are of local 'disappeared' community activists (human rights workers, union leaders, peasant farmers):
The La Macarena massacre (includes a description of, and links to docs about, U.S. ops in La Macarena)
http://www.cipcol.org/?p=1303The UK military connection
http://www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/2010/02/04/silence-on-british-army-link-to-colombian-mass-grave/
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