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Latin America: Colombia's Controversial Transition: Uribe's Parting Shot
Thursday, August 26 @ 18:03:16 UTC |  By Laura Carlsen
August 26, 2010 - counterpunch.org
The rupture of diplomatic relations between Venezuela and Colombia after a special session of the OAS on July 22 marks increased animosity between the outgoing Colombian president Alvaro Uribe and Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez.
The dispute between the two bombastic leaders from opposite political poles is nothing new. What creates the drama—and the possibilities—of this new turn of events is the backdrop.
Uribe is a lame duck, since being denied a constitutional amendment to run for a third term. His successor, Juan Manuel Santos, took office on August 7. Santos’ inauguration marks the end of the eight-year reign of Uribe, whose military strategies to counter drug runners and guerrilla groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) have been backed by the U.S. government to the tune of some $7 billion dollars. While leading to some advances in reducing assassinations and kidnappings in Colombia, these strategies failed to achieve peace, and the Colombian conflict continues to take lives and cause tension throughout the region.
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Latin America: Obama's base pact with Colombia accelerates 'dangerous trend'
Tuesday, February 02 @ 21:48:12 UTC | By Sherwood Ross
February 02, 2010
The Obama administration’s pact to use seven Colombian military bases accelerates “a dangerous trend in U.S. hemispheric policy,” an article in The Nation magazine warns.
The White House claims the deal merely formalizes existing military cooperation but the Pentagon’s 2009 budget request said it needed funds to improve one of the bases in order to conduct “full spectrum operations throughout South America” and to “expand expeditionary warfare capability.”
“With a hodgepodge of treaties and projects, such as the International Law Enforcement Academy and the Merida Initiative, Obama is continuing the policies of his predecessors, spending millions to integrate the region’s military, policy, intelligence and even, through Patriot Act-like legislation, judicial systems,” writes historian Greg Grandin, a New York University professor.
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World Focus: Devil's on the Loose: Evil Hour in Colombia
Tuesday, October 10 @ 07:45:32 UTC | By Ron Jacobs, counterpunch.org
There was a period in the 1990s when I honestly thought that Colombia would become Washington's next Vietnam. Instead, it turns out that the counterinsurgency assisted financially and militarily by Washington is more like the so-called low-intensity conflicts waged by Washington and its host clients in Central America during the 1980s. Forrest Hylton's new book Evil Hour in Colombia not only documents the essential truth of this, it also provides one of the most coherent and honest histories of Colombia's last one hundred or so years. With the understanding that the two party system in Colombia is mostly a system that serves the country's elites (with occasional inclusion of the non-white and peasant members of the population), Hylton details the relationship of the rest of Colombian society--the Afro-Colombians, indigenous and other disenfranchised groups to the bourgeois democracy that is Colombia. He begins his telling in the late 19th century and ends it in early 2006--almost yesterday.
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Latin America: Colombian and Peruvian Elections Prove Stalin Was Right
Thursday, June 08 @ 20:47:42 UTC | by Stephen Lendman, sjlendman.blogspot.com
Joe Stalin wasn't just an ordinary dictator, he was a very savvy one. He had to have been to have held on to power for over 30 years, succeed in outfoxing his rivals, and even be able to break the back of the vaunted Nazi Wehrmacht that turned the tide of the war in Europe and led to Hitler's demise. His political control at home and over his allied Warsaw Pact countries was best explained by the philosophy he reportedly once expressed: "It's not the people who vote that count; it's the people who count the votes."
That Stalinist wisdom and modus operandi surely applies to the elections just concluded in Colombia and Peru. Both nations have a majority of poor and indigenous people who want no part of a US imposed neoliberal "free market" way of doing things, and in a free and open election would never elect any candidate who did. So how come that's exactly what happened? On May 28, we're supposed to believe the Colombian people rejected a more moderate or democratic alternative and instead chose to reelect right wing hard-liner and close Bush ally Alvaro Uribe Velez who had to arrange for the constitution to be changed to allow him to run in the first place. And on June 4, lightning seemed to strike twice in one week as the people of Peru for some unexplained reason elected former disgraced president and economy-wrecker while he held office Alan Garcia who also happens to support the Washington Consensus and will dutifully surrender his nation's sovereignty to the Bush administration.
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Latin America: Will Colombia Be the Proxy in a US Attack on Venezuela?
Saturday, April 30 @ 07:27:17 UTC | By Sean Donahue, narconews.com
04/29/05 - The U.S. is gearing up its rhetoric against Venezuela again as Condaleeza Rice barnstorms through Latin America -- and there are subtle indications that the U.S. may be ready to increase Colombia's role in undermining the government of Hugo Chavez.
Our old friend Juan Forero wrote in Tuesday's New York Times that: "As President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela veers toward greater confrontation with Washington, the Bush administration is weighing a tougher approach, including funneling more money to foundations and business and political groups opposed to his leftist government, American officials say."
But, he notes:
"A main problem for the United States is that Washington has little, if any, influence over Caracas. The high price of oil has left Venezuela with no need for the loans or other aid that the United States could use as leverage.
"Nor does the Bush administration have much support in Latin America, where left-leaning leaders now govern two-thirds of the continent."
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Latin America: Colombian President accused of heading brutal killer network
Sunday, October 27 @ 10:07:22 UTC | By Luis Ernesto, ANNCOL Sydney
www.anncol.com, 08.10.2002
President Alvaro Uribe is the top leader of Colombia's paramilitary death squads, says exiled politician Gustavo Montealegre
The exiled left-wing leader and former member of the Colombian parliament Dr. Gustavo Montealegre Almario is openly accusing President Uribe of being the main man behind the paramilitary killers that are spreading havoc in the South American country.
The attacks against by right-wing death squads against key opposition leaders have escalated after Uribe in August declared "a state of
unrest". Even before, Colombia had become infamous as the deadliest country in the world for trade unionists and other social organizers.
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