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The Colombian military has displaced 5 MILLION peasant farmers--the second worst human displacement crisis on earth--using state terror, funded by U.S. taxpayers. Their stolen lands have been distributed to rich rightwing cronies of Mr. Alvaro Uribe, a Bush Jr. pal and similar criminal, who is being protected by the U.S. government. Now the U.S. government throws $30 million at 'land reform,' which will probably end up in the pockets of the people who stole the land in the first place, and KEEPS shoveling billions at the Colombian military. What a ponzi scheme!
This article states that, "Most of Colombia's internal refugees were forced from their land by violence committed by guerrillas or paramilitary groups." I don't agree with this characterization. For one thing, the Colombian military and the Uribe government (of which current president Manuel Santos was a member, as Defense Minister) are notorious for their ties to the rightwing paramilitary death squads, described in the article merely as "paramilitary groups." The situation in Colombia is a government-military-rightwing death squad "axis of evil." For instance, Amnesty International attributes about HALF of the murders of trade unionists in Colombia to the Colombian military itself and the other half to their closely tied rightwing death squads--for a total of 92% of trade unionist murders--and only 2% to the armed leftist guerrillas (the FARC). Those proportions hold up for other extrajudicial murders. So WHO is creating all this mayhem in Colombia--the murders of innocents, the massive displacement? Also, one of the chief factors pushing peasants off their land--in addition to outright murder and terror committed by the military and its death squads--is U.S. corporate toxic pesticide spraying of peasant farmers, their children, their animals and their food crops--as a policy of the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs."
This $30 million is inadequate, to say the least, compared to the $7 BILLION that is funding the displacement, and it is extremely unlikely to end up actually helping (5 million) displaced people. And, frankly, I suspect that it is a cosmetic project, and possibly a "little boondoggle" project for groups that work with the USAID/CIA to control the Colombian government, to write Colombia's laws and to enforce U.S. military/economic domination. This amount--the $30,000--is a drop in the bucket, compared to the staggering problem, and it will probably end up in the pockets of bureaucrats, politicians, administrators, report writers, lawyers and the land thieves themselves. But it's important to understand the overall context in which this particular fund is embedded.
The U.S. has not just been shoveling billions to the Colombian military, it is also shoveling billions to the Pentagon and its private 'contractors' to maintain a large U.S. military presence in Colombia, at at least seven Colombian military bases, part of a Pentagon strategy for "full spectrum" military operations in Latin America. I have not seen a total figure for the U.S. military and associated U.S. taxpayer costs in Colombia, Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico, the Caribbean (the US 4th Fleet) and other places in Latin America, where the alleged U.S. "war on drugs" is masking the Pentagon militarization of the region, but I would guestimate half a trillion dollars, some portion of which we cannot see--CIA and other secret ops, bribes, private contractors of various kinds, illicit high tech surveillance, "message" control (manipulating the media, propaganda), etc., and including items like extraditing key death squad witnesses and burying them in the U.S. federal prison system, out of the reach of Colombian prosecutors, things like that--hidden costs of the general U.S. militarization and control of the region.
The purpose of all this is to control Latin American resources and slave labor. That is why official and semi-official murders of trade unionists are such a huge and scandalous problem in Colombia. (Nearly 40 trade unionists have been murdered in Colombia this year alone. And our own Attorney General, Eric Holder, was Chiquita International's lawyer--the one who got Chiquita execs a handslap for their hiring rightwing death squads to take care of their "labor problem" on Chiquita farms in Colombia.) U.S. taxpayer billions are being used to OPPRESS Colombians, not to free them from violence and poverty nor to give 5 MILLION peasants their lands back. The bulk of the lands will remain in the hands of the thieves and used to make them richer or sold off to multinationals--like Chiquita, Monsanto, Occidental Petroleum and Exxon Mobil. And the bulk of the 5 million peasants who have been displaced will never farm again on their own lands--they will become the cheap labor pool, mostly crammed into poverty-stricken urban barrios, for U.S. "free for the rich" sweatshops, with some portion condemned to non-union slave labor on corporate ag land.
The U.S. "war on drugs" is a ruse for these other purposes, and a total failure as to controlling or stopping drug traffic. The latter has never been its purpose.
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