Since the move by the US House of Representatives to table consideration of the Colombian Free Trade Agreement (since renamed "Colombian Trade Promotion,") many things have happened as the paramilitary regime of Alvaro Uribe reacts to the bad news. The bulk of the reaction has been to say that the Democrats acted because of the presidential primaries, (1) or in other words, because of political-electoral reasons.
Besides the direct attack on Obama by Uribe, (2) who called Obama ignorant of the situation in Colombia, and the macabre bean-counting argument with the victims of paramilitary violence that Uribe displayed saying "oh, last year there were only 29 unionists dead, a number of them were not really trade unionists but only members of unions, or teachers affiliated to the unions" etc., which has been parroted repeatedly in the press, the regimes’ Wurlitzer has been working at full speed to try and counteract what they perceive as the result of the work of Colombian traitors, communists and terrorists who have unduly influenced the malleable and naïve minds of the Democratic leadership in the American Congress.
But a mayor crisis is taking place that looms large for the legitimacy of Uribe’s regime and its intentions of perpetuating itself n power: the "para-politics scandal," originating in the political and electoral deal that Colombia’s political and economic classes made with the death-squad murderers and thieves known as the paramilitaries, and that, so far, has about 62 Colombian congressmen and senators under investigation, in jail or condemned (32 in jail, 30 more being investigated), a number that grows every day, and that is getting closer and closer to Uribe. Uribe and his colleagues in power, as a reaction, are calling for "political reform" that can save the institution of Congress in Colombia. The cancer is so pervasive that some call for new elections (opposed by Uribe) or for a ridiculous change to a parliamentary system. It is obvious that the deal made with theparamilitaries, intended to legitimate and absolve their crimes is apparently getting out of Uribe’s control, an unintended consequence for which the para-president and the gang of paramilitary accomplices that were elected to the Colombian congress were not well prepared.
To try to regain control of the process, Uribe himself called for the creation of a "special tribunal" to judge the politicians involved in the para-politics scandal, as well as to set up a new court to supervise the supreme court and approve or disapprove its determinations; this is an obvious response to the fact that the current system that is investigating the para-politicians is not working in the regime’s favor, because it seems, in a signal that not all is lost with Colombian people, that there still exist jurists and judges with a sense of duty, morality and that act according to principle and hopefully, for the good of the nation. In the current system congressmen are judged by the supreme court, an instance without appeal, or by the justice system (if the congressmen quit, give up their rank as congressmen in order to be judged by the justice system, with the right to appeal and to be investigated in their regions, were they have more influence).
In the latest twists, a former congresswoman (Yidis Medina) testified (initially through a video aired in one of the TV channels, later when she was detained) (3) that Uribe himself promised to her administrative and diplomatic positions in exchange for her hold-out vote in favor of the constitutional reform that allowed for Uribe’s re-election. This kind of trading positions and privileges in exchange for votes, however customary, is a crime punishable by law, and if Uribe’s participation is established his regime could be at risk. Recently, on the basis of the testimony of demobilized paramilitaries and of one of their former leaders, Uribe’s second cousin and co-founder with the para-president of the political party that gained power with him (Mario Uribe), was ordered detained to be investigated; but weakening the case for his innocence, Mario Uribe fled to the Costa Rican embassy to ask for political asylum, which was denied. Costa Rica is, a country that in previous administrations has been very lax in granting asylum to all kinds of Colombian criminals and narco-traffickers. Mario Uribe, now residing at least temporarily in Bogotá’s main jail, met with the paramilitaries many times, according to the testimony that implicates him, to negotiate land "acquisitions." El Espectador’s report says that Mario Uribe "acquired 5,000 hectares of land with the help of paramilitary pressure" (4) ; and also, that Salvatore Mancuso, one of the leaders of the paramilitaries now in prison, stated that Mario Uribe met with him in order to agree how the paramilitaries would support the president’s party in the 2002 elections.
Part of the "law of peace and justice" is a "free version" confession on the part of those who took resource to it. These confessions are increasingly implicating Uribe’s government in deals with the paramilitaries. The crisis this created, as noted above, provoked many reactions, among them the proposed reform of congress; it was proposed, for example, that those accused would lose their seat in congress upon being accused; the Uribists proposed instead that they loose the seat once condemned, which would take, at the pace justice works, about ten years; the reform was passed in the lower house of congress with immediate removal upon accusation. Given that this would deprive Uribe of his majorities in congress, it was immediately proposed by an Uribe surrogate that the parties created to support Uribe, the political structure of paramilitarism, be dissolved. The parties did not accept it.
Facing the utter rout of congress, and the growing indications coming from the paramilitaries' confessions about Uribe’s involvement, including direct authorization, when governor of a province, to carry out a massacre, Uribe yesterday decided to cut short the judicial process of the jailed paramilitaries, and to extradite 13-14 of their main chiefs to the US. With this, the process of ascertaining the truth about the criminal activities of the paramilitaries (massacres, assassinations of unionists and opponents, expropriation of land, appropriation of institutions of the state, corruption of the electoral process, and narco-trafficking, etc., etc., etc.) and of returning their expropriated wealth to compensate the victims, is short-circuited. The paramilitaries will go to the United States, where they will negotiate with prosecutors and will be judged but strictly upon their involvement in the drug trade. The process of "justice and peace," a main component of which is learning the truth and compensating victims, is thus dealt a death blow. All in the name of saving Mr. Uribe’s face.
In the meantime. Trade Unionists still dying.
Contradicting Alvaro Uribe’s assertion in the recent past to the effect that trade unionists in Colombia are among the best protected classes in Colombia, so far this year about 23 trade unionists have been assassinated. (5) The latest victim of violence against trade unionists, according to the magazine Semana, "presented signs of torture, machete wounds, and was shot in the head." The report continues, "the last trade unionists assassinated in 2008 have been assassinated in a similar manner. The killers are using knifes {probably to escape detection by ballistics], and many had not received threats before dying.... but Caballero’s (the victim reported) death was predictable; he was an instructor of human rights in his union, had participated as an organizer in the March 6 mobilization.... with his death, 23 trade unionists have been assassinated in 2008..."
Recently, El Espectador reports the disappearance of another trade unionist, a member of the Polo Democratico Alternativo (PDA), the party of the left that is really a coalition of left of center groups.
The latest of the Free Trade Agreement
Regarding the Colombian Free Trade Agreement, according to Uribe, the opposition of the US Democratic party in Congress would be easily corrected by his own powers of persuasion. To that effect Uribe invited the 60-odd congressmen who wrote a letter protesting the statements by his main advisor and ideologue, the infamous Jose Obdulio Gaviria, to visit with him in Colombia. Jose Obdulio Gaviria motivated the US Congressmen letter when he condemned a mass mobilization organized to protest the crimes of Uribe’s main allies, the extreme right-wing paramilitary groups and death squads, as a mobilization organized by the FARC. This statement may have triggered a wave of violence against the march’s organizers that left about six of them dead. (6)
In another development, Colombia’s vice-president, Francisco Santos (brother of the Defense minister, grandson of a former president of Colombia and a prominent member of the family who up to until recently owned Colombia’s main governmental media outlet, El Tiempo) was sent to the US to pursue a Public Relations offensive; he began by calling the 60 congressmen and the president of the AFL-CIO lying ignoramuses. (7) According to Santos they all colluded with the president of Human Rights Watch to coordinate a campaign to personally attack Uribe and to derail the FTA. Already scores of furious commentators in the Colombian press’ forums called the American congressmen narco-terrorists and many other names, and are probably, by Colombian standards, already marked as "military objectives" of the supposedly demobilized paramilitaries. Recently, Colombian cities were papered with huge signs with Alvaro Uribe’s picture, the Colombian flag, and a legend that read "you are with Colombia or you are with the terrorists." So, American congressmen, you know where you stand after you cross Uribe.
The latest slant comes from a crypto-right winger who writes in El Tiempo, and accuses "the left" of inconsistency, because while they always call for the US to stay out of Colombian affairs, they now went to "ask for the help of the imperial forces... to fight for them the battles they lost here;" according to the columnist, this gang of imperialists are led by "Nancy Pelosi, a moderated right-winger who like all US congressmen looks to Colombia as a colony." This line of argument conflates every sign of opposition to the para-Uribista regime’s designs with "the left" and with "terrorism," and now that the American Democrats have derailed their FTA, conflates the democrats with "the imperial forces" who are complicit in the Bush regime’s "barbarism in Iraq and Guantanamo" (the last part of which may be true, for a change.) According to this logic, soon the United States "staunchest ally" in Latin-America, Colombia, which for years has been well-behaved and very subservient, will accuse the Bush regime of being themselves a cabal of colonialists, commies and terrorists. (8)
The "para-politics scandal."
Together with the debacle in terms of the foreign relations (9) of Colombia and of the para-Uribista regime with other Latin-American countries, that ensued from the attack on the FARC encampment on the 29 of February, which has resulted in the international isolation of the regime, Alvaro Uribe currently confronts a mayor institutional crisis that is on the brink of tainting (even more) his own legitimacy and may derail Uribe’s ambition of pushing yet again for another "small reform" of a "little article" of the Colombian constitution in order to be approved for a third term, something never seen in Colombia for many-many years. Thus the price of the "victory" (as it was claimed) that the death of the FARC’s second in command (assumed by many to really the first in command) may soon show its true character as a phyrric victory.
Uribe’s troubles have to do with what is called in Colombia "the scandal of the PARA-POLITICS". It has to do with those profoundly democratic and honest gangs of right wing death squads that were founded and aided by Uribe throughout his political career, a career which began when the infamous narco-trafficking padrino of the CARTEL DE MEDELLIN, Juan Pablo Escobar, decided to enter politics to better ply his trade. The paramilitaries, gangs of killers, thieves, murderers, marauders and narco-traffickers and the authors of many massacres with the complicity of the Colombian military and police, originated when the early groups of narco-traffickers decided to defend themselves from the attacks of FARC and other rebel groups; eventually they developed into veritable "anticommunist" armies oriented towards defending the interests of the rich, of large landowners and cattle ranchers, and of national and international corporations; more importnatly, they counted with the backing, support and encouragement of the Colombian military and police and of course, of the United States.
During the years of their existence they have managed to commit massacre after massacre, to displace hundreds of thousand of peasants from their landholdings in order to appropriate their lands, to kill many a member of the left and anyone who dares open their mouths, to gain control of national and regional political institutions and agencies, and to control large part of the narco-trafficking enterprises in Colombia. While the FARC throughout its 50 years of existence has committed indeed many acts of violence and mayhem, it is documented that most of the violence registered during the latest 15-20 years has come from he paramilitary armies that Uribe helped found and organize.
As the natural outgrowth of their strategy, the paramilitary gangs decided to diversify into taking political control in their areas of influence (most of the country) and for doing so, arranged with many pro-Uribe politicians to "re-found" the nation and to take control of political and economic power in Colombia. In order to elect their representatives to the national and regional legislatures and to place their agents in positions of power and in control of the public enterprises, they used violence, coercion, extortion, murder, terror, and money. That is how Uribe and the many parties that supported him gained power, and how the leading paramilitary leaders could brag of being received in public audience by a Colombian congress, of which, they bragged, they now controlled about 35% percent of congressmen.
Unfortunately for Uribe, there are still openings for the press to publish the latest twists in Colombian politics, and the Supreme Court and judiciary, despite the sustained attacks received from the regime (including the attempt to eliminate the upper echelons of the justice system as an independent power and its placement under the supervision of the equivalent to the "minister of the interior") have shown a degree of independence that it commendable. It should be emphasized that anyone in Colombia that opens up his/her mouth to criticize the regime or the paramilitaries is immediately the object of death threats, so the work of journalists that write pieces critical of the regime, or judges that act independently of politics do so at great risk.
The "law of peace and justice".
In 2005 the Colombian congress that the paramilitaries and Uribe controlled passed Law 975 of 2005, known as the law of "justicia y paz". In exchange for the demobilization of the paramilitary groups (they apparently demobilized but returned insignificant quantities of armament, and reappeared later with new names) their confession and recognition of their crimes, and the return of their ill-gotten wealth to indemnify their victims, the paramilitaries who sought the benefits of the law would suffer symbolic terms of imprisonment to a maximum of 8 years. This would be the penalty for crimes like carrying out massacres, expropriating land, robbery, murder, genocide, narco-trafficking, etc. As passed, this law amounted to little more than the legalization of the fortunes of the para-militaries, the absolution for their crimes and vicious massacres, their recognition as citizens and political actors, in exchange for a slap in the wrist.
Unfortunately for the death-squad-Uribista regime, as the result of these unexpected consequences that human acts often have, the confessions of the few "paras" who have done so began to implicate members of the regime, especially in the form of senators and representatives to the Colombian congress, of which about 62 are being investigated (32 of them while in jail.) Increasingly uncomfortable with the results of these investigations, Uribe has continually confronted and antagonized the supreme court, accusing their members of being partial and politicized. The latest attempt to take away the investigations from the supreme court and to place the supreme court in a subordinate position to a tribunal more of his liking, give the lie to the claims made by Uribe to the effect that the investigation of the members of his political coalition and his own cousin really reflect the openness and fairness of the political institutions of Colombia.
What is true is that these institutions seem to be working in spite of Mr. Uribe’s efforts to undermine them. (10) Overwhelmed by the circumstances of the imprisonment of his cousin and political partner, Mario Uribe, the head of the regime came up with the idea that just as there exists a case of "para-politics" , there are "cases of "farco-politics". In support of this they haul the magical computers obtained in the February 29th raid in Ecuador. The difference is that , if there is any farco-politicians, they will not be nearly as many as the para-politicians; second they did not control the power of the state. Besides, the FARC were always open in their goal of obtain political power, and were doing so, in my view, under the doctrine of the rights of people to seek to change their destinies, however they may be wrongheaded in the methods used for doing so.
Instead, the para-militaries were a creation of the Colombian State, with the very same Mr. Uribe as ideologue and organizer since before ascending to the presidency, to carry out campaigns of murder against all left-leaning political opposition, including the FARC, and charged with a mission of carrying out a dirty war, of doing the work that the legally instituted armed forces cannot do if they wish to remain under the limitations of the law. Ultimately the mission of the paramilitaries, which they may well have achieved, was to take over the Colombian state from the inside. The FARC were an insurgency in its beginnings, the paramilitaries were the expression of a corrupt class wish to hold on to power and to the control of the state. Both the FARC and the paramilitaries ended up taking resource to drug trafficking to finance their activities. However, FARC alleges that they do not traffic drugs themselves, only charge taxes to people who cultivate or trade with them in the areas they control. Feel free to believe otherwise.
At the present moment the FARC are not necessarily destroyed or defeated, but they seem to be weakened by recent losses among their leadership, with consequences for the morale of their troops, and have also suffered severe setbacks in terms of the good will they had built before in some international circles. There is no hope, however, that the FARC will negotiate with a regime that sees them as the reason and origin of all the ills of Colombian society. According to the logic of the regime, poverty, unemployment, corruption, inequality, defective laws, underdevelopment, land concentration, lack of opportunity for the majority of the people, that have been a characteristic of this nation since its founding, are all the fault of the FARC. Let’s say that Uribe, with the continuing support of the US proves successful in weakening the FARC (not necessarily defeating them militarily) to such a point that they cease to be a factor and become no more than a nuisance. If that is the case, all the problems of Colombia, that in large part contributed to the apparition of insurgencies, remain to be solved. The existence of the FARC has been no more than an excuse for the regime’s implantation of a policy of security inspired by the United States and that, as the political forces have realigned in Latin America, has its last bulwark in Colombia.
The question could be asked as to why the FARC does not demobilize like the paramilitaries did. Well, they did so already in 1985, formed a political party, got elected in landslides to many political positions in the country, and then were systematically eliminated by the death squads created by the Colombian oligarchy. So they have reasons why they will not do so again, because, as the Colombian saying goes, "a dog is not neutered twice." So in order for the FARC to demobilize there would have to be enough warranties for their security, which according to their experience, the Colombian state is not able to provide.
This is an ongoing saga that has no end in sight. The regime has been very successful in mobilizing the media and its hegemonic powers to focus the people’s attention away from the structural problems of Colombian society and into a very suitable enemy. Internationally, the media has swallowed whole the story of the 84% support the regime has among the Colombian population, based in defective polling that is limited to those who support the regime.
Friends of the para-Uribista regime argue with king Uribe that indeed, the paramilitary scandal shows the strength of the Colombian institutions and the success of the regime and its "democratic security" policy, and that the paramilitary scandal shows how open and transparent the government is. One critic of the government answers this question. He asks: "How much justice is Colombian justice capable of meting?" And he answers " To judge by the [administration of the law of ] peace and Justice, very little. Let us suppose ... that the law is adequate, but it doesn’t work. According to A. Benedetti’s accounting (continues the article) at the pace the confessions are progressing, it will take until 2017 to hear the last one of the people involved. The wealth returned or repossessed would be enough to indemnify each victim at the rate of $7,000 [Colombian pesos] each [$3,50 US dollars]. The jails where the bosses, in theory, pay their penalties are really logistical centers to continue doing as they please. In other words, the law of truth, justice and reparation has produced neither truth, justice nor reparation." (11) In other words, Uribe's grand creation really leaves little to brag about.
The death-squad-regime of Uribe is thus a mockery of democracy, achieved through the continuing corruption of the political system, through state and state-supported terror, through a masterful manipulation of the media, and by conveniently kneeling before the desires of the United States, which, ever since the Clinton administration, has provided about 5 billion dollars to prop the oligarchical regimes in Colombia, while holding up its nose and ignoring the stench of death they leave behind. As usual, like it was said of Somoza (the Nicaraguan dictator) Uribe may be a son–of-a-bitch, but he is the United States’ son-of-a-bitch.
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References
(1) See for example Moisés Naim "Hipocresía y libre comercio"
(2) See my previous diary "Much Progress..."
(3) See 'Yidis Medina' in "Cousin of Colombian President Arrested in Death Squad Probe"
(4) Uribe's Cousin Implicated in Para-Politics Scandal
(5) Revista Semana, Another Trade Unionist Assasinated (Otro sindicalista silenciado en Colombia)
(6) Article by Ivan Cepeda Castro, originally from El Espectador
(7) Colombian VP acusses American Trade Unions of Lying
(8) Column by Salud Hernandez Mora
(9) Interview with former Colombian chancellor Rodrigo Pardo
(10) See for example César Rodriguez Garavito
(11) Hernando Gomez Buendia
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[Note: This diary was edited May 15/07 1:33 AM to fix broken links and to add a section in the middle that was missing. This new section goes roughly from after Note (4) and up to Note (8)]
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