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thousands of union leaders--carnage that Amnesty International assigns 95% of to Colombian security forces and their paras (2% to FARC). They have, as well, slaughtered thousands of peasant farmers, political leftists, human rights workers and journalists. These "hostages of death" cannot be bargained for. They can't even be given funerals. Their chainsawed body parts, decapitated heads and rotting corpses lie in mass graves, where the brutes of the Colombian military tossed them.
You require FARC to do the right thing. But you don't require that the bastards running the Colombian government--propped up with $5 billion in U.S. tax dollars--be held accountable for their FAR WORSE crimes, or even to stop committing their far worse crimes.
The last time FARC tried to demobilize and participate in the country's political process, the government paramilitary death squads killed 4,000 of their political candidates, office holders and supporters. And FARC returned to the jungle and took up arms again.
The only way to stop this kind of cycle of violence, that has gone on for 40 years, is to STOP IT. You don't stop it with MORE violence. You stop it with negotiation. You stop it with diplomacy. You stop it with PEACE. You bring in objective parties, who understand that there are injuries, and hatred, and crimes on both sides, and you STOP THE VIOLENCE, and work for a POLITICAL settlement that will end the suffering of innocent parties, and permit normal social and political life to be created.
And THAT is what Alvaro Uribe and George Bush just tried to destroy with UNNECESSARY violence--a negotiated peace.
Your one-sided view--that only FARC has to be lawful, that only FARC is in the wrong, that only FARC can unilaterally end this 40+ year civil war--is why wars happen, and why wars continue. To end war, you have to understand why there IS a war, why there IS a FARC. Because for more than 40 years now, the rightwing rulers of Colombia have NOT permitted the vast poor majority to take their rightful place in the political life of the country--as is happening now in OTHER South American countries--and to achieve legitimate power in their government. The Colombian rightwing has held onto ILLEGITIMATE power by violence, intimidation, torture, brutality, murder and exploitation of every kind--now supported with billions of dollars of our money. They have permitted foreign corporations--Drummond Coal, Occidental Petroleum, Chiquita--to operate in their country using Colombians as slave labor, and hiring paramilitary death squads to kill their workers when they try to organize.
This massive injustice is WHY there is a FARC. And they may well be political dinosaurs--armed leftist guerrillas--like the fascist dinosaurs they are fighting--the heinous, greedy Bushite bastards running Colombia-- while the rest of the continent goes democratic and pursues social justice--but OUR opinion of this conflict DOESN'T MATTER. What matters is how to end it.
Yes, FARC should release the hostages. And they WERE releasing hostages--unconditionally. And they were about to release MORE hostages--unconditionally. And Uribe/Bush STOPPED that process by DELIBERATELY targeting and killing the hostage negotiator--the man whom the presidents of France, Ecuador, Venezuela, Argentina and others WERE IN CONTACT WITH. Using U.S. bombs, U.S. surveillance and probably U.S. aircraft! The U.S. should have been doing the opposite--aiding the peacemakers! It is only with the support of the war criminals and the shredders of our Constitution, and destroyers of our democracy, in the White House, and the billions of our non-existent tax dollars that they are pouring into Colombia, that Colombia was able to do this: destroy the best hope for peace that has come along in twenty years.
It is utterly disgusting and reprehensible. Yes, tell FARC to release all the hostages unconditionally--and to thus unleash the pogrom that Bush and Uribe intend for the Colombian countryside. And then tell Colombia to restore to life the thousands of innocents they have killed, and tell Bush to restore the 1.2 million innocent Iraqis HE has killed, and pay back the billions his pals, and Uribe's pals, have stolen from all of us. But no, you want the FARC to do all the peacemaking, and put itself and its members and the 20% of Colombia that it represents at the mercy of George Bush.
You take Bush/Uribe's narrow legalistic view--based on lies and propaganda. Like the WMDs in Iraq! The narrow legalistic view that twists a UN resolution into the slaughter of 1.2 million innocents to get their oil.
That view does not want peace. It wants the oil! It wants slave labor! That is what you are really advocating when put all the blame on FARC and haughtily insist that THEY are the criminals, and completely ignore the horrors of their adversaries. You want their adversaries--these illegitimate and violent powers, Bush and Uribe, and their corporate puppetmasters--to WIN.
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