Uribe’s Heir Santos Seeks Landslide Win in Colombia

[Joanne98]

Source: Bloomberg

June 20 (Bloomberg) -- Colombians may hand a landslide victory today to presidential candidate Juan Manuel Santos, won over by his pledges to build on Alvaro Uribe’s successes in boosting investment and beating back Marxist rebels.

Santos, Uribe’s former defense minister, was favored by 66.5 percent of those surveyed in a Gallup Colombia poll taken June 5 to June 7, compared with 27.4 percent for the Green Party’s Antanas Mockus. The next president will take over Aug. 7 from Uribe, who brought record growth and slashed by half the number of murders while in office since 2002.

Turnout may be low as voters expecting Santos to coast to victory stay home to watch the World Cup soccer tournament. Santos, who won 47 percent in the first round, has capitalized on Uribe’s 63 percent popularity while pledging to create jobs. Mockus, a former Bogota mayor who garnered 21 percent of the vote on May 30, is pledging to improve the education system and eliminate corruption associated with Uribe’s administration.

“This will be an historic election in terms of margin between the two candidates,” said Monica Pachon, a political analyst at Bogota’s Universidad de los Andes. “It’s going to be a huge win for Santos.”


Read more: http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ahfRDa8mMgRk&pos=8

[Ken Burch]

1. Disgustingly, he will probably get it.

Colombia desperately needs a break from government of, by, and for the wealthy thugs. Santos will make sure this doesn't happen.

The people of Colombia had nothing to lose by voting the Uribe mob out.

[Peace Patriot]

2. Conditions for a free and fair election do not exist in Colombia,

where thousands of union leaders, human rights workers, teachers, community organizers, journalists, peasant farmers and others have been murdered for their political activity, 3 to 4 million peasant farmers have been displaced, and about half a million have fled into Venezuela and Ecuador, mostly in flight from the Colombian military and its closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads. AI attributes about half the murders of union leaders to the Colombian military itself, the other half to its closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads. Much of this carnage has been on our dime--$7 BILLION in U.S. military aid to Colombia--the biggest U.S. military aid package on earth outside of Israel, and with similar results: military repression.

Raise your head in defense of the poor, in Colombia, and you risk getting it shot off.

By lobbying the corpo-fascists in this country, as Sec of Defense, Santos bought himself the ideal country for a corpo-fascist--the 'Donald Rumsfeld' of Latin America--to run for president in. Just think how Rumsfeld would run an election, and a country. That's what is happening in Colombia. Filthy murderous corruption on a vast scale funded by billions of our tax dollars; near total impunity for murder and terror by the rich and powerful against the poor and the unpowerful and their advocates.

Here's one mass murder story that Bloombomb has not reported on, with a possible U.S. military connection. (Oh, yeah, and the U.S. military is basically occupying Colombia--with U.S. military use of at least seven military bases in Colombia and all civilian infrastructure, and total diplomatic immunity for all U.S. soldiers and U.S. 'contractors' no matter what they do in Colombia):

The La Macarena massacre: recent mass grave discovered, containing up to 2,000 bodies whom local people say were local, 'disappeared' community activists, nearby to a U.S. military base; includes a description of, and links to docs about, USAID/Colombian military ops in La Macarena)
http://www.cipcol.org/?p=1303

The UK military connection
http://www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/2010/02/04/silence-on-british-army-link-to-colombian-mass-grave/

U.S. and Colombia Cover Up Atrocities Through Mass Graves, by Dan Kovalik 4/1/10
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-kovalik/us-colombia-cover-up-atro_b_521402.html

Colombia: Mass Grave Discovered In La Macarena
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO1005/S00001.htm

[David__77]

3. The is a secondary point.

It's no excuse for the sorry state of the left in Colombia. There is indeed a strong right-wing current that influences not just the elite and middle class minority, but the broad working people as well. They buy the lie that the right will bring prosperity and "peace" to the country. It's the same program as Francisco Franco, and many bought it there as well.

I am not saying the left is one single force; obviously it is not. But there must be a strategic decision to really support FARC or not; to pursue a strategy of armed struggle or not. If it's the former, than electoral politics are not so important, and the battle should be for abstention.

[Peace Patriot]

12. Death is "no excuse"?

Tens of thousands have been killed, mostly by the Colombian military and its death squads. 3 to 4 million people have been displaced, and many don't register as displaced people for fear of government reprisals. With the half a million refugees who have fled into Venezuela and Ecuador, that's about 5 million people, out of a population of about 42 million, whose right and ability to vote are in serious question. Then there is the state of terror of large sections of the population--the poor and their advocates, the friends, family and community members of the 'disappeared.' Many would surely hesitate to advocate for any opposition candidate or policy.

Bloombomb and the rest of the corpo-fascist press is treating the situation in Colombia as NORMAL. I was trying to point out that it is NOT normal. Normal democratic guarantees do not exist. There is no free speech, no right of assembly, no right of dissent. Peaceful protesters are shot. Union leaders are shot and their bodies thrown into mass graves. Anyone who raises their voice to advocate for the poor majority is risking death. The election machinery itself is extremely corrupt. The government is absolutely filthy with 'extrajudicial' killings, big drug trafficking, and toadying to the Pentagon and to the likes of Occidental Petroleum, BP, Chiquita and Monsanto.

I don't think it's fair to talk about the "weakness" of the Left in these circumstances. You think it's "weakness" that most people on the left--very likely the majority in the country--don't take up arms and shoot back? Gandhi and M.L. King would disagree with you. Killing yields more killing, especially when the main killers have $7 BILLION in military aid from the U.S. What the U.S. has done is to greatly escalate a bloody civil war that has been going on for more than 40 years. To call people who want to see a peaceful end to this bloodfest "weak" is really off-base, in my view. I can understand taking up arms when you find half your village in a mass grave. Personal rage at such horrible injustice must be very hard to control. But the answer to a civil war is not more civil war, paid for by you and me. The answer is peace. And the reason that there hasn't been a peaceful settlement in Colombia is right here in the U.S.A.--our own government. Bush & Rumsfeld deliberately, bloodily sabotaged the most recent effort at peace--a coordinated effort among many Latin American and other leaders (France, Spain, Switzerland) to segue Chavez's negotiations with the FARC for hostage releases into a general move toward a peaceful settlement. So the biggest problem is right here. Blame the "left" in Colombia, if you will. It seems kind of blind to me, though. It is not "weak" to want peace. It is not "weak" to refuse to kill. And it can be a sign of great strength--certainly inner, personal strength--to refuse to follow the revenge path, a particularly strong temptation in a civil war.

Our own government may try to extend this civil war throughout the region. There are many, many signs that that is what our "military-industrial complex" wants to do. The notion that the "left" is "weak" because it won't take up arms and join the FARC could even feed into this war mentality that the Pentagon and brethren are trying to foster. The region's leaders want peace. So, rather than urging people to kill and be killed, against a military force with overwhelming strength--paid for by you and me--it would be better to bolster those efforts and mechanisms by which other leaders of Latin America are trying to pull together and assert their sovereignty, visa vis the U.S. For instance, they are currently trying to create a new Latin American organization--one without the U.S. as a member--to replace the OAS. And another thing to do would be working on some aspect of restoring our own democracy--casting out these multinational corporations and war profiteers who are oppressing us along with everyone else.

Going off into the jungle, taking up arms and risking your own death, and also risking making mistakes and committing your own crimes, inflicting your own injustices, starting to see innocent people as mere "collateral damage" in your war against the oppressors, is a romantic view of war. War is hell. No truer words were ever spoken. I can understand how someone might do that, with good intentions. I cannot understand urging someone to do it--urging people in another country to solve their horrific problems that way. Killing doesn't solve problems. Killing just leads to more killing, and this is especially true in a civil war and it is especially true with the U.S. war machine moving into Colombia.

The answer is REGIONAL strength--political and economic strength, cooperation, creation of a Latin American "common market" and a Latin American "common defense" (as Brazil has proposed). Until U.S. interference is successfully countered and thrown off in the REGION, the U.S. will continue to attempt to "divide and conquer" the region, and Colombia's long civil war has been a prime U.S. opportunity to do just that. The answer cannot and will not come solely from inside Colombia. There is, for one thing, too much fire power assembled against the people in Colombia. The "left" in Colombia has no chance against the Pentagon, which is now ensconced at SEVEN military bases in Colombia, with "total diplomatic immunity" for all U.S. soldiers and 'contractors.' The U.S. A.F. and the U.S. Navy are moving major assets into Colombia and the Caribbean. Our government SUPPORTS the vicious Colombian military and its death squads (and the one in Honduras as well). The Colombian left cannot defeat them. Only the combined strength of the region can do so, and the other leaders of the region do NOT want that confrontation to take place on the battlefield, with carnage and mayhem everywhere. They might win it--in fact, I think they would--but at what cost?

[David__77]

13. I wasn't urging armed struggle.

That is up to the Colombian people to decide. I was, however, saying that war is not a game, and that if there is to be armed struggle, then there are consequences for the legal political realm. Perhaps dissolution of FARC would be good for the Colombian left.

I think it would be errant, however, to assume that the current government does not have the support of a very large sector of the working class as well as it core privileged classes.

[Peace Patriot]

16. No, you cannot assume ANYTHING about what the Colombian people think.

Conditions for honest elections and for accurate polls do not exist. Up front, some five million people--the displaced and the refugees--have been brutally denied any say in government--not counting the dead. The entire society has been infused with militarism, brutality, big time drug corruption and a climate of complete impunity for the rich and powerful--fat with $7 BILLION in U.S. military aid--in killing and terrorizing the poor. Given this level of fascism, militarism and official crime, the safer assumption is that most Colombians are leftists (want peace, justice and good government). The level of repression = the level support for leftist policies. Why does the Colombian military and its death squads kill people? BECAUSE they are political leftists, union leaders, human rights workers, grass roots activists and peasant farmers who are in the way of the big drug lords and Monsanto/Chiquita. They and the CIA see what has happened in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil and other countries--success of grass roots leftist activism in electing government leaders. They don't want democracy to happen in Colombia.

But even this assumption--that the level of repression points to widespread leftist beliefs--is not confirmable, in these conditions. What IS confirmable is the $7 BILLION in U.S. tax dollars for guns, bullets, helos, high tech surveillance and other means of mass repression and the results of that support for fascist government: the mass graves, the dead, those displaced, those in flight. What IS confirmable is a U.S./Colombia military agreement that effectively destroys Colombian sovereignty. Colombians are not much better off than Iraqis as to having a real choice in their society's future and in how their country is governed. Large areas of Colombia have been "pacified" using USAID/Pentagon "pacification" schemes that are not much different from those in Afghanistan (in La Macarena, for instance, where a mass grave with up to 2,000 bodies has been discovered--whom local people say are the bodies of local community activists). The evidence is overwhelming that U.S. war DOES NOT create fairness, justice and democracy. It creates death and terror and ruling elites who toady to U.S. multinational/war profiteer interests. And the U.S. "war on drugs" (to which the Bushwhacks added exterminating the other side in Colombia's 40+ year civil war) is not that much different from the U.S. oil and lithium wars. And this is what has happened to Colombia: U.S.-funded war.

What do the Colombian people think of it? I would say the "Stockholm Syndrome" prevails. How can we know what Colombians truly think, when a U.S.-funded and corrupted military and fascist elite are running their country, killing thousands of dissidents with impunity?

[David__77]

17. Well, I agree the best thing we can do is fight imperialist intervention.

Aid should be withdrawn and military ties severed. That would certainly help in any case. I certainly hope for victory by the left in Colombia.

[ronnie624]

4. Apparently Bloomberg doesn't consider it murder when the government is doing the killing,

claiming murders have been "slashed by half" under the leadership of Uribe. It seems the murders have just been displaced from the obvious, to the not-so-obvious.

[ronnie624]

5. From the Huffinton Post article:

The grave was discovered when children drank from a nearby stream and started to become seriously ill. These illnesses were traced to runoff from what was discovered to be a mass grave -- a grave marked only with small flags showing the dates (between 2002 and 2009) on which the bodies were buried.

:puke:

[Judi Lynn]

6. Seems like something which could have only happened in the world's worst nightmare.

The conditions under which the dead Colombian people arrived there would be a completely impossibly hideous second nightmare.

[ronnie624]

7. I'm not religious,

but there are surely areas of human behavior that I find 'evil'.

[Judi Lynn]

8. The Colombian government, with coaching and material support and instruction,

has successfully removed a host of brave, heroic Colombian people who tried to make conditions better for the poor and suffering majority of their country, leaving only a traumatized, terrified people behind, steadily informed, day by day that the same fate will befall them if they attempt to seek help for their desperate way of living under the heel of the brutal oligarchy, at the bottom of a hideous, soulless food chain which sees them either as near slave level labor, or someone to be exterminated after leaving behind a public imprint for general instruction, of their torture and suffering before they are murdered for their efforts.

It's an unregulated capitalist's, racist's wee bit of heaven, all kept in motion by boatloads of annual deep funding from the largesse of the U.S. citizens. You must make enough money here to support yourself while also supporting the torture and murder of the innocent, and the brave, heroic, self-sacrificing voluntary, or involuntary martyrs of Colombia. Whatta woild.

[ronnie624]

9. Well said.

:thumbsup:

[Bacchus39]

10. Santos 69% of vote yesterday

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100621/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_colombia_elections

[ronnie624]

11. Yay!

More covert war, military incursions and mass murder for the capitalist oligarchy!

[Braulio]

14. Well, it's the people's decision

I guess the Colombian people voted overwhelmingly for Santos. And Santos seems ready to put the FARC on the run. I wouldn't bet on the FARC from now on.

[ronnie624]

15. You don't read much, do you? n/t