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Alvaro Uribe, current occupant of the presidential palace in Colombia, who was elected with the substantial help of the paramilitary death squads he helped create and which he promoted and defended when he was governor of the province of Antioquia, is feeling the heat in the ongoing "para-politics" scandal, which has more than 60 Colombian congressmen/women under investigation or in jail for their involvement with the paramilitary death squads in corrupting the electoral process and in attempting to take over every political institution in Colombia.
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All these senators and representatives were elected with and supported Uribe and include the current occupant’s second cousin, para-Senator Mario Uribe, the para-president’s main political partner.
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Thrown against the wall because the judicial system got out of his control and decided to really apply the Justice and Peace Law proposed by Uribe to absolve and legitimize the paramilitaries, he has recently attacked members of the Supreme Court, which his vice-president accused of being recipients of narcotics money. It is well known that it was Uribe whom the US government signaled as one of the main supporters and political operatives of Colombian narco-traffickers, including the infamous narcotics trafficker Pablo Escobar, who was a cousin of Uribe’s adviser, and who according to Escobar’s lover, held Uribe in warm esteem.
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The latest strategy in reaction to the para-politics scandal is the attempt to smear the opposition with the imminent and so-far-non-existent "farco-politics" scandal. Today, El Espectador reports that Uribe challenged politicians of the opposition to say "who were their accomplices in politics." The challenge was directed at Gustavo Petro, a valiant senator of the Polo Democrático Alternativo, who helped unleash the para-politics scandal with his presentations in Congress, and to León Valencia, a political analyst, the president of the Nuevo Arco Iris Foundation and who is among the authors of studies on the Colombian conflict and on the ties between the death-squad paramilitaries and Colombian politicians. Petro is a former member of the insurgent group M-19; Valencia was a leader of the CRS (Corriente de Renovación Socialista.) Both Petro and Valencia received amnesty in a peace process during a previous administration.
Petro and Valencia responded to the para-president’s challenge saying that Uribe’s main political adviser and ideologue, José Obdulio Gaviria (who apparently graduated from the Karl Rove school of politics) was one of their accomplices. According to their statements, J. O. Gaviria was "a clandestine militant" of the PCML-EPL (Partido Comunista Marxista Leninista-Ejército Popular de Liberation : Marxist Leninist Communist Party-Popular Army of Liberation), a guerrilla group. According to Petro and Valencia, J. O. Gaviria was the founder of a movement ("Firmes") whose goal was to legally participate in politics, and which counted among its membership the leaders of the M-19 group. Among J. O. Gaviria’s activities (this part of the article is not clear in the report) might have been to collect signatures for the creation of a political party of the left. Nowadays Gaviria is the main ideologue of Uribe’s authoritarian right.
With this latest sally, the current occupant of the Colombian presidential palace gets pie in the face, shows his desperation, and beats the record as the first implicated in both the "para-politics" scandal and the non-extant "farco-politics" scandal. The only thing remaining for the para-president is to quit and ask the Supreme court to investigate Uribe's own administration.
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This small diary attempts to build up interest on Colombian and Latin-American issues as well as to generate interest in an upcomig diary I will publish once the current primary heat diminishes a bit, or probably in the second part of the week, whichever comes sooner.
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The upcoming diary provides background on the "para-politics" scandal in Colombia.
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El Espectador: Uribe hoisted by his own petard