Colombia: Uribe’s spectacular criminal rule ends

[Judi Lynn]

Colombia: Uribe’s spectacular criminal rule ends
Sunday, August 1, 2010
By Daryl Davies
On August 7, Alvaro Uribe will complete his reign as president of Colombia — eight years of spectacular government criminality and corruption, even by Colombian standards. A brief review of just his second term illustrates this.

The Washington Post reported on November 18, 2006 that the Uribe administration was in crisis. Investigations revealed that members of Congress collaborated with right-wing death squads to fix elections and assassinate opponents. That was the tip of the iceberg.

By April 9, 2008, Colombia Reports was saying that half of the Colombian Senate's members were suspected of being involved with paramilitary forces and almost one third of the lawmakers were in jail awaiting trial.

Perhaps the highlight was in September 2009 when Colombia Reports revealed that 40,000 government officials, including 800 mayors and 30 governors, were under investigation for corruption.

During the same period, the Colombian intelligence service, DAS, was implicated in helping paramilitary drug trafficking.

Former paramilitaries spilled their guts about their relationships to high ranking government officials, including Uribe's cousin Mario. Senator Alirio Villamizar, who had been under investigation for receiving bribes, was found with 1 billion pesos (about US$500,000) in his home.

In late 2009, a mass grave was discovered in the village of La Macarena containing about 2000 victims of the Colombian military, killed between 2005 and 2009. The army admitted having buried the bodies, claiming they were insurgents from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

However, human rights activists have said they were what are termed in Colombia “false positives”: journalists, human rights workers, trade unionists and other civilian victims of extrajudicial executions reported as insurgents killed in combat.

One of the human rights activists making these claims, Jhonny Hurtado, who took a delegation of British MPs to the site in December, was himself assassinated on March 15.

More:
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/44991

[naaman fletcher]

1. Urine going out with high popularity

Some here question the polls, yet these were the same polling techniques they lauded when they showed mockus doing well. Crime has plummeted under uribe and his successor one a landslde victory. Crime and corruption continue to grow in Venezuela.

[Peace Patriot]

2. "Crime has plummeted under Uribe...". LOL!

And the enemies of your rightwing views are running all together in your mind, all kind of smooshed up into one big, leftwing glob. I am the one who has said, time and again, that conditions for democracy do not exist in Colombia, neither for polls nor voting. I never had any faith in the polls about Uribe, Santos or Mockus. And I did not consider Mockus as anything other than a possible CIA choice, depending on how their vetting of him went, how they wanted to dump Uribe and what their plans are for their client state. Nothing else is possible in Colombia. The U.S. calls the shots, in a country whose government is propped up by $7 BILLION in U.S. military aid, and now has the U.S. military itself ensconced in at least seven military bases. You think they'd risk all that by letting a candidate who wasn't fully "with the program" win the presidency? That would be naive.

Others thought Mockus was pretty good--certainly a refreshing change from the RAMPANT OFFICIAL CRIMINALITY under Uribe and his Defense Minister Manuel Santos (now president)--and they found the polls that had Mockus dead even--and I think at one point edging ahead--encouraging. Maybe Colombia was going to get some relief from its government's truly horrendous human rights crimes and vast corruption. I didn't say much about it, as that...ahem...election unfolded, because I worry about being too much of a naysayer, and depressing and demoralizing people, at a time when good people need hope and energy. Mockus ahead in the polls to me meant that the U.S. government had likely vetted and approved him and had spread the word among Colombia's ruling class and military. And if he won it would mean nothing more than that our corporate rulers had decided to prioritize "free trade for the rich" and democracy cosmetics, over outright fascist rule and war. Time to "look forward not backward," as our war criminals, and Colombia's, slip into their lives of luxury.

The war machine, here and there, may have stolen it from Mockus. Maybe he didn't vet well. Maybe, when it came down to it--the final vetting--he balked at being Washington's puppet. Maybe that's why the polls showed one thing and the vote another. How can anybody know? There are FIVE MILLION DISPLACED people in Colombia, mostly poor peasants, who might have voted for honest government (Mockus' signature). Many more don't register as displaced, for fear of government reprisal. A half a million poor Colombians have fled into Venezuela and Ecuador, for fear of the Colombian military and its death squads. That's a whole lot of people, in Colombia, or fleeing from Colombia, whose lives may have been too disrupted to vote, or who were denied the right to vote--and who certainly were in no position to back candidates, organize and get out the vote. Thousands of trade unionists and other community organizers are dead, murdered by the military and its death squads. Peaceful protestors have been targeted and shot. Journalists, academics, judges--suffer death threats from rightwing hit squads. This is just NOT democracy, and you cannot trust any poll or vote in these circumstances.

You leer at the left, with your beady little eyes, and catch them out, in your 'aha!' little way. Inconsistent! "Some here question the polls, yet these were the same polling techniques they lauded when they showed mockus doing well." You are so rightwing you can't even stand a centrist like Mockus!

Nobody here "lauded" the "polling techniques" in Colombia. "Some here" felt a bit of hope, for once, that the fascists and militarists would be ousted, hope that Colombia might become a normal country again, and not a fascist dreamscape of blood and gore, ruled from Washington DC. I felt sad that their hopes were dashed, not triumphant that my dark view of it was closer to the truth. I tried to hope with them. And you sneer and leer--and lie. "The same polling techniques they lauded!" "The same polling techniques they lauded!" "The same polling techniques they lauded!"

Your comments are just short strings of short rightwing "talking points" --always bent far, far to the right, and never with any deep thought or analysis, and characterized, as here, by absurdity. Crime down in Colombia. Crime up in Venezuela. No mention that some 70 of Uribe's closest political cohorts, including family members, are under investigation or in jail for their ties to the death squads or other crimes (bribery, drug trafficking). Colombia is riddled with criminals running the government!

Tea-bagger level "talking points" and blindness.

[naaman fletcher]

3. yes, crime has plummeted under uribe.

That is a simple fact. All statistics show it.

[naaman fletcher]

4. beady little eyes?

"You leer at the left, with your beady little eyes, and catch them out, in your 'aha!' little way. Inconsistent! "Some here question the polls, yet these were the same polling techniques they lauded when they showed mockus doing well." You are so rightwing you can't even stand a centrist like Mockus! "

1. What makes you think I have beady little eyes?
2. Why must you resort to attacks on my physical appearence?
3. what makes you think I was against Mockus? I was for him.
4. Why do you think Mockus campaigned on continuing Uribe's security policies?

[Peace Patriot]

12. "Beady little eyes" was a reference to your attitude. Sorry if you took it as a reference to

your physical appearance. A sneering, contemptuous attitude. I have no idea what your eyes look like. But I do know this: they are metaphorically blind.

[Judi Lynn]

5. What are the chances a President who calls out journalists and journalists are assassinated

to the point Colombia's has a record of being one of the worst places for journalists on earth, and the remaining journalists admit to international reporters they "self-censor" and DON'T touch the explosive stories which could get them killed.

What ARE the chances that President's government would also lie about their statistics for crime-fighting, these people who are criminals THEMSELVES!
me
We have it on record various police departments right here in the U.S. manufacture their crime stats at times. The first one which comes to mind is Miami. Oh, yeah, Miami also kills people and then throws down weapons just like the Colombian military, and the government linked paramilitaries.

Oh, brudda.

Can't believe ANYONE is stupid enough to keep pushing that crime fighter yarn here.

[naaman fletcher]

6. It's easy..

I have been there. Lot's of people I work with have been there. I know lots of Colombians. in 2002 no America in their right mind would go to Medellin. Today it's a great place to visit.

And again, while you do raise plenty of good issues to doubt the figures, you have no real reason to back your claim that crime is higher or the same. What evidence do you have of that? you take it as a matter of faith.

Yes you cite recent atrocities, and those exist (see, I can acknowledge that, whereas you don't acknowledge bad things about Chavez) but that their are atrocities today does not mean that things are a lot better today than they were 8 years ago.

But then again, I have been there. So have tens of thousands of other tourists who now go to Bogota and Medellin and other places where they didn't dare go 8 years ago.

[rabs]

7. Re the poll on uribito's popularity

Perhaps you have forgotten that ONE week before the second round, three private, for profit polling companies reported a statistical Santos-Mockus dead heat. An independent university poll registered the same.

Then on Friday, three days before the election on Sunday June 20, JM Santos was spotted having lunch at a trendy Argentine restaurant in Bogota with the president of the syndicate that did the vote counting for the National Electoral Council. The other presidential candidates were outraged and demanded an explanation but none was or has been forthcoming from the Santos camp.

Then on Sunday, three days later, there was a 25-point shift in favor of Santos.

This favorability poll for Santos was done by Gallup/Colombia, run by a pro-establishment gentleman named Londono. Gallup was one of the three for-profit companies that was so far off the mark in the Santos-Mockus stats -- up until seven days before the vote.

So I for one have to take uribito's popularity figures with a boxcar of salt.

[naaman fletcher]

8. There is an inconsistency here...

Either the polling in Colombia is good or it is bad. Which is it?

[rabs]

9. Next time you are in Medellin

Perhaps you could ask academics, ordinary citizens, professionals and of course the displaced about the methodology used by the for-profit polling companies.

Good question would be if the polling is done in only a certain sector (i.e. those who have land line phones and are listed in phone books) of the population.

Speaking of Medellin, violence has taken a sharp uptick. You will recall that just a couple of months ago uribito was in that city and offered university students the equivalent of U$S 50 a month if they would turn snitches, reporting narco, para, and ordinary criminals. That, you probably know, raised an outcry because it was putting the students in extreme danger from those gangs.

As for traveling there now, it would help to be associated with "The Office." But even then, it would be dicey because over the past year it has split into the "Sebastian" and "Valenciano" factions, who are warring for control of the lucrative narco and extortion business in Medellin.

This happened after alvarito extradited "Don Berma" to the United States about a year ago. When Don Berma was in control of "The Office," things had quieted down. But no more.

Recent article (Feb. 25, 2010) article on Medellin -- source TIME magazine

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1967232,00.html

[naaman fletcher]

10. Yes, I agree violence is on the uptick,

but thanks for the info.

[Bacchus39]

13. if polling is only done with the middle and upper class, then Santos won with the poor

support overwhelmingly.

anyway, I hope to be there in November but I doubt I will inquire about polling.

so as Uribe ends his rule, he (1) leaves as an extremely popular president and (2) there will be no invasion of Venezuela.

[Stevepol]

11. Sounds like the same disparities between polls and election results in the US these days.