BoRev.Net

The Economist would like you to know that even though all the headlines are about "Uribe's Vice President met with the Paras to destabilize the government"-this and "Uribe's favorite General and the Paras depopulated the Uraba"-that, Colombia's President is getting a bad rap.

You may have heard that in Colombia, impunity is the norm in cases of murdered union activists. But you should know that Uribe is a man of action, and he's knocked some heads together and demanded results and so on, and the problem has improved:

"In 98.8% of cases, nobody has been punished, according to Domingo Tovar of the CUT, the main trade-union confederation - though that is down from 99.9% last year."

Fair enough.

SIR - BoRev takes due note of the improvement in the impunity rate from a clearly unsatisfactory .1% to a robust 1.2%. But wasn't it George W. Bush who said something once about "the soft bigotry of low expectations?"

Wow, just as our fearless editor heads off for vacation, things start to heat up! Not that they were ever that cooled down over here at BoRev.Net. The AP reports:

Lawmakers have called for the dismissal of the head of the Organization of American States' peace mission in Colombia, accusing him of standing by as paramilitary warlords held orgies in a government-granted safe haven set aside for peace talks...

Jose Castro Caycedo, the pro-government legislator who sponsored the nonbinding resolution, told The Associated Press that paramilitaries made a mockery of the peace talks by "holding orgies on the negotiating table," excesses which he said Caramagna should have denounced.

The resolution referred to media reports that paramilitaries held all-night, whiskey-fueled orgies with costly prostitutes and which soccer players and famous Mexican mariachi bands also attended.

Revelations made by respected weekly newsmagazine Semana earlier this month also describe how the warlords — who are accused of being among Colombia's biggest drug-traffickers — spent their days motocross racing, caring for exotic pet tigers and tending to business with unidentified Mexican partners.

Hmm, I had always wondered what the link was between the paracos and Michael Jackson.
Now I know.

Colombia! Colombia! This is YOU!

Forget the cute puppies riding a dustmop. No precocious rugrats, either. This is Colombia, muthafuckas. This week, an entire nation gets comically kicked in the nads when it turns out that America’s favorite foreigner has been lying all along about his death squad connections!

Tightly wound Colombian mob boss/president Alvaro Uribe’s popularity has taken a blow in light of recent revelations that he is a fucking psychopathic killing machine, according to pollsters. But wait! We exaggerate. According to a soon-to-be-executed government spokesman, Uribe was never all that popular to being with. It was all “a trick” by scheming polling firms to artificially inflate his numbers so that this week’s crash would make him look like a jackass.

True Fact:

"President (Alvaro) Uribe said he would consider having Colombian workers have microchips implanted into their bodies before they are permitted to enter the United States to work on a seasonal basis. I doubted whether the implantation of microchips would be effective since the immigrant worker might be able to remove them." — Sen. Arlen Specter, Republican, April 26, 2006, after returning from an official visit to Colombia.

Oh for crying out…The Washington Post today confirms that the vast mob-based killing machine that runs the Colombian government goes far beyond President Psycho McShortypants. Far, far beyond.

Guess who knew about U.S. businesses employing known terrorist cells to “protect” themselves by assassinating union leaders, raping their wives and strangling their babies? Justice official Michael freaking Chertoff, who is now of course in charge of Securing our Homeland and protecting our (snort) civil liberties. He was all very concerned about the “complexity” of the situation at the time before winking and skipping away to listen in on our phone conversations so that we can all go to jail for talking to foreigners.

Remember how a couple of weeks ago Alvaro Uribe’s staff explained that he actually wasn’t ever very popular to begin with? They weren’t kidding! Armed with this new information, the Colombian public isn’t holding back anymore. From the Latin Americanist:

Colombian president Alvaro Uribe was jeered during a speech yesterday where he defended his security policy. "I won't hand over one millimeter to the criminals" declared Uribe while part of a crowd booed and called him an “assassin” as well as a friend of right-wing paramilitary groups.

Uribe was mocked while speaking at Bogota’s main square to welcome Gustavo Moncayo- a 55-year-old teacher who spent seven weeks walking all over the Colombia in a campaign for the freeing of kidnap victims. (Moncayo’s son has been held hostage for ten years by leftist guerillas). Yet Moncayo engaged in a debate with Uribe after the president claimed that he would set aside a special zone for negotiations with guerillas.

A rule of thumb: Any time Hugo Chavez is criticized in the international press for anything, you can pretty much be sure that his Colombian counterpart has had similar plans in the works for quite some time. This week, Colombia contemplates amending its constitution again to allow Alvaro Uribe to run for a third term.

Zogby feigns shock (shock!) that most Americans can’t name the presidents of Brazil or Mexico. I mean…have these people met an American lately? Personally I’d be startled if a decisive majority could rattle off the names of a dozen foreign countries. Do you have any idea how many of our compatriots ask me what state Washington DC is in?

So I was actually quite encouraged that most Americans name Colombia as one of America’s biggest adversaries in Latin America. Zogby claims that it’s a further sign of American ignorance, of course. But really, I’m pleasantly surprised that no matter what Condi Rice or Jackson Diehl say, people sort of intuitively get that a government that siphons off the largest chunk of our foreign spending to kill its own people and is responsible for, you know, the drug war, is probably not looking out for our best interests.

But then a reader jolted me back to reality, passing on this little article about the Zogby poll, in which the “reporter” points out that the non-existent nation of “Columbia” must be our best ally because we send billions of dollars there every year to “assist them in fighting drugs and the bands of gorillas.”

In a sad way, it’s like everything is right in the world again. Wooga wooga.

An American journalist was forced to flee Colombia over the weekend after pissing off President Alvaro Uribe by documenting his vast and totally obvious connections with Colombian drug cartels. Uribe responded by unleashing said cartels on the journalist and implying that the reporter impugned the name of Colombian hero/druglord/psychopathic murderer Pablo Escobar, who as we all know, used to employ Alvaro Uribe. The journalist decided it was time to leave after receiving 24 death threats in 48 hours, which may be some sort of record even for Colombia.

It’s sort of confusing, but I’m guessing this only proves why we’ve got to send zillions more dollars to Colombia or give them a favorable trade deal or something in order to stave off the growing march toward single-payer health care or whatever it is we’re fighting in the region.

Oh, And: Also this weekend, Uribe’s Cousin Mario resigned from the Senate over his “alleged” collaboration with Colombian death squads, so it's an extra super double model democracy.

Another compelling explanation, from America’s favorite puppet ally:

“[Colombian] President Alvaro Uribe publicly accused a Supreme Court judge of bribing a jailed warlord into testifying that Uribe plotted to murder another paramilitary chief.”

Just another day in the model democracy.

The Colombian army has murdered nearly 1,000 civilians for no apparent reason in the last few years, and “In many cases, soldiers dressed corpses of their victims as guerrillas in order to get credit for killing rebels in combat…”

Oh and just in case you don’t subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, their inversely gifted editorial board was all bummed out yesterday that President Uribe wasn’t considered for the Nobel Fawking Peace Prize.

Did you know that in 1991, then-Senator Alvaro Uribe was listed by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency as one of the top drug dealers in the world? Well now you do.

Hat Tip: Francesc Relea

Remember how we used to go around caring about which countries sold children, jailed reporters, “gassed their own people” and such? Haha that’s so day before yesterday. Talking about trade with Colombia, Nick Burns laid out the State Department’s new human rights priorities yesterday:

Burns called the agreement a "fundamental base of our relations in Latin America," and said that human rights issues should not stand in the way of cooperation between the countries.

Colombia’s President continues to be a whack job. As AP reports:

President Alvaro Uribe said Tuesday his armed forces will kill the commander of Colombia's largest rebel group if the octogenarian leader emerges from the jungles to negotiate a swap of rebel-held hostages for jailed guerrillas.

Uribe, in a fiery speech to graduating police cadets, said Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia commander Manuel Marulanda "sends messages that he can't attend meetings because if he comes out of hiding he'll be killed. Well, he guesses correctly."

The president's speech was the clearest indication to date that he believes attempts by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to broker a deal to release 45 high-profile rebel-held hostages, including three Americans, are doomed to failure.

Hey remember that kid in Colombia that was born into captivity and magically may have turned up at a Bogota orphanage just in time for Uribe to scuttle the hostage negotiations right after the U.S. embassy called? That was weird! Unfortunately, we may never know if he’s is the real Emmanuel or not on account of the kid’s fundamental right to privacy, so we’re just going to have to trust them on this, k? So please stop paying attention or otherwise asking questions.

Oh except that “IPS found out that voices within the Democratic Party in the United States and in Europe have called for a European commission to carry out independent DNA tests on ‘Emmanuel II’ and the Rojas family” because nobody actually trusts the Colombian authorities.

Ever since like, Scarface, the story of cocaine industry has been some variation of this: poor brown Colombians grow it and rich white Americans snort it and the whole thing is always the fault of people from neither of those countries. Sometimes it is the Nicaraguans and other times it is the Cubans but today of course it’s clear that the Venezuelans are at fault because they hate America and called our president the devil and we can’t let the next smoking pipe be a mushroom cloud now can we.

Anyway yesterday The Observer revealed all this in a story titled “Revealed! Chávez role in cocaine trail to Europe” only the revealing was done by a slew of anonymous government sources who refused to even reveal which governments they worked for but I’ll bet you a dime bag that they are “Colombia” and “The United States.”

And within hours writer/activist Toni Solo had revealed that the Observer’s revelations hadn’t been backed up by any relevant evidence but will probably “ooze into political processes like foreign policy committee deliberations in EU country parliaments and US Congress, greasing the way for Colombia’s narco-terrorist government to sustain foreign military aid,” ‘n stuff anyway, which is revelatory.

Raul Reyes’ Miracle Laptop inexplicably survived a scorched earth bombing campaign over the weekend, and now humanity must find a new way to destroy it before it implicates us all. ABC News revealed all the terrible, terrible details from the thirteen documents the Colombian government made public last night, and we are all going to rot in The Hague. Details after the jump!

What a relief! Latin America's littlest strongman decided to “revise” his pledge bring Hugo Chavez up on charges of “genocide” and/or “terrorism” before the International Criminal Court. Venezuelan newspapers chalk it up to Uribe’s “democratic spirit,” but it probably had a bit more to do with “lawyers” and “dictionaries” and "a super dubious past."

Anyway it got us thinking: What if the shoe were on the other foot? I mean, sure, back in the day Senator Uribe was considered to be one of the world’s top drug dealers, working for the Medellin cartel and being—how did U.S. intelligence put it?— “a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar.” But that was 1991, this is now, and surely we couldn’t hold a grudge going back to the early 90s (sorry just a little laptop humor!) Haha here at BoRev, we don’t need any miracle computer to tell you what a liberal democracy is made of. We’re kicking it analog after the jump.

So now that every Latin American leader has denounced Colombia, Nicaragua’s cut off diplomatic ties and Cristina flew to Caracas to stand against Uribe, they’re all going to be sequestered on the same Caribbean Island for the weekend. Awkward.

Greg Palast has published (and translated) the FARC documents related to the supposed $300 million dollars from Chavez. And he’s determined that they are “fake.” So nice going on this one, international media! The evil laptop wins the round.

Is David Lynch directing this shit? So it’s been just a few hours since Greg Palast thoroughly obliterated the Colombian government’s “evidence” linking the FARC to Venezuela and Ecuador from the old laptop and all of the sudden a new one shows up. Like magic…

Thursday night, he said, a guerrilla known as Rojas came to the troops with [Colombian guerilla Ivan] Rios' severed right hand, laptop computer and ID, saying he had killed his boss three days earlier.

With all this talk of the FARC in the papers lately you may have forgotten that Colombia’s right wing paramilitaries are also listed as a terrorist organization by the United States. Well maybe “forgotten” is not the right word and “told they no longer exist” may be more accurate, considering that today our dumbass president told Americans, again, that the paramilitaries had “demobilized,” which is to say they “changed their name to get off that list.”

Anyway two weeks ago a million people marched in Bogota and around the world to protest all those poor fuckers who’ve been killed by the Colombian government and those nonexistent paramilitaries. A million people. Naturally you didn’t read about it in the U.S. because nobody covered it, even though the marchers came up with the best chant ever uttered by a human being ever: “Uribe, Gonorrea - La Gente esta con Correa!” Nicely put.

Sadly our patriotic press corps also didn’t cover the follow-up part where march organizers got murdered one by one, which prompted a stern finger wagging (in Spanish) by the United Nations and not much else because we’ve got a trade deal to pass or else socialized health care will win.

IPS News interviewed “A high-level Ecuadorian military officer,” who says that we did it:

The military officer said the bombing raid in Ecuadorian air space was actually led by "U.S. pilots, possibly from DynCorp," a U.S.-based private military contractor that has contracts under Plan Colombia.

So just about every single human rights group in the U.S. sent a joint letter to the Colombian President yesterday basically telling him to stop condoning the assassination of peaceful opposition march organizers, please. This is awesome news because it basically ensures that the English language press can’t ignore the threats and murders anymore! And it’s working too because the Associated Press wrote the story up! And it’s already been picked up! In the International Herald Tribune! So if you want to read about it all you have to do is run down to your corner newsstand France!

Every year the U.S. sends upwards of 600 million dollars to the Colombian military and you will be pleased to hear that they are spending it very economically. Other foreign governments might waste your hard earned cash on expensive new technologies to deal with the “potential future guerilla” threat, but Alvaro Uribe's lean and mean armed forces are pretty much just hacking up small children with machetes.

And naturally they're lying about it: "The government as recently as last year suggested the massacre was the work of Colombia's biggest left-wing rebel group, known as the FARC."

So first Uribe is groping everyone to end the Andean Crisis and then re-instigating tensions a week later. He demands that Ecuador better police their shared border and then intercepts their helicopters when they do. Is this guy schizo or is he deliberately provoking an international catastrophe? Well duh both probably, BUT WHY?

Oh right:

The bespectacled Wall Street favorite shocked supporters and opponents alike by telling members of Congress in a private meeting late on Wednesday that he would be open to a third campaign if there was a "catastrophe."

The Washington Post editorial board usually stays so busy telling the rest of the world what to do that you can forgive them for not keeping up with reading the Washington Post, which is sort of a crap paper to begin with.

Anyway you may remember that way back in YESTERDAY Juan Forero reported a crazy story about how all the poorest Colombians are being murdered by the government and dressed up as terrorists in order to impress the Bush Administration. And then today the Post ed board urges Congress to pass a trade deal with Colombia as a reward for “improving its human rights record and resisting the anti-American populism of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.”

Also don’t miss the argument that there’s been some sort of “dramatic drop” in state sponsored killing and that the systematic assassination of trade unionists is a “bogus” issue because everybody else in Colombia is being murdered harder.

You may have heard, but supporters of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe have been on some sort of deranged killing spree of trade unionists over the past forever. And presidential hopeful Barack Obama is cynically using this technicality as an excuse to oppose a trade deal with the country even though they are our best ally. Can you believe politicians? Well Alvaro Uribe sure can’t. He’s pissed. And Obama is dead meat.

You know who’s not concerned about all those dead trade unionists in Colombia? Bob fucking Novak that’s who. Fact is the old douchenozzle wouldn’t shed a single goddamn tear if all the fat Warshington labor bosses turned up with their own stinking throats slit, know what I mean? Would show Americans who’s really running this goddamn world goddammit.

Every time Novak commits his “thoughts” to paper it’s a treat. Even more so when he starts connecting the dots! Join us down the rabbit hole, after the jump.

If we’ve learned anything about surviving the Bush era, it’s this: As the number of Administration and Washington Post staff reiterating a single message increases, the probability of it all being one big, fat lie approaches one.

Yesterday our dumb president went on the teevee to force the legislative branch into a vote on a trade deal with Colombia within 90 days. And while Congress will be allowed to read and discuss the bill, they will not be permitted to amend it in any way, because of the democracy.

This trade pact is all very crucial, says Bush, because the murder rate of Colombian trade unionists has gone down this year, and you wouldn’t want it to go back up now would you? Condi said basically the same thing in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, and of course the Post ran an editorial saying Obama must be crazy for “believing” the stories of violence at all, and on the right hand side of the same page George Will helpfully explains that last year “The murder rate of unionists was less than one-eighth the murder rate of Colombians generally.”

Clearly we are just one Colin Powell power point presentation away from a never-ending blood spattered Colombian trade quagmire.

UPDATES: You won’t know whether to laugh or cry over…today’s AP story on how “Uribe's administration has encouraged assassinations of trade unionists who cause problems for companies”…the NYT piece on the ridiculously extravagant multi-million dollar lobbying campaign the Colombian government is financing…the fact that Mark Penn never actually quit or got fired from the Clinton campaign over all this in the first place...this newly-released report on the human rights tragedy that is Colombia...Dan Kennedy's report on "the Clintons' longstanding tolerance of human-rights abuses in Colombia."

Sure it must be a huge bummer to have your family members killed off one by one for their political beliefs, but did you know that these murders also have implications on a bill currently before Congress? Can NYT headline writers make everything sound retarded? Anyway we’re just psyched that Simon Romero’s editors made him write something useful for a change, because dead Colombians are a “campaign issue.” Check it out:

>>> You know how all those editorials said that trade union murders dropped so much recently? Well they’ve rebounded again hugely.

>>> Remember how these fools said that it’s safer to be a Colombian unionist than to be a regular old Colombian? They deliberately ignore “geographic and socioeconomic factors” and the fact that “union officials continue to be specific targets.”

>>> In the rare cases where the government investigates union murders—like where one guy was tortured and stabbed in his home and his laptop and job-related memory sticks stolen—investigators won’t call it a political killing because it might have been a “crime of passion.”

>>> And naturally the perpetrators work for the government: “Mr. Uribe’s former intelligence chief, is under investigation for handing over lists to paramilitaries of union leaders and other left-wing figures who were singled out for assassination.”

"Jesus Christ was also condemned to death, and I understand that his historical popularity remains intact"

Colombia is now the 4th worst country in the world when it comes to killing journalists and then pretending that it never happened, following close on the heels of notable shitholes “Iraq,” “Sudan,” and “Sierra Leone.” I didn’t check who came in 5th but I’m sure it was probably Jesus.

Warning! the following has no humor value whatsoever. If you so much as smirk, you are sick, because this is not funny at all, not even a little bit:

"A member of Colombia's Congress had a heart attack while debating a transportation bill and died hours later in a hospital after having to be transported in a private car because no ambulances were available. Sixty-year-old Jose Fernando Castro, a member of conservative President Alvaro Uribe's majority coalition, collapsed mid-debate in a committee room.

The gray-haired Castro, his polka-dotted tie loosened from around his neck, spent 20 minutes on the floor of the room before those trying to help him decided to move him without the help of an ambulance, which was called but never arrived."

Hey remember back in May when Colombian prosecutors were getting closer and closer to linking thousands of "extrajudicial killings" to the Uribe administration until the president extradited all the key witnesses to the U.S. in the middle of the night on drug charges? And remember how the Washington Post's ed board at the time praised the extraditions as a "dramatic move" and called it a "paralyzing blow" to drug dealers? And how they went on to mock and bully human rights groups for noting that mass graves might be slightly more important than bagging the guys that sold the blow to their coked up teens?

Well it's three months later and we're allowed to talk about it candidly now because there's no Colombian trade bill before Congress, and so the Post has decided to run this report on its front page today, explaining what a bummer it is that we're never going to know for sure exactly how many deaths Uribe may be responsible for because of those stupid extraditions. Double : (

So yesterday the Post managed to publish a big piece on the ten thousand civilians murdered by Colombia's right-wing paramilitaries without once mentioning President Alvaro Uribe. Now today Reuters manages to run a big feature on the Uribe Administration's thousands of ties to the paramilitaries without mentioning the mass murders. So basically if these two reporters ever comically collide and compare notes there's gonna be one holy mother of a crimes against humanity case there.

It sure isn't easy running the Bush Administration's favorite government ever. Some weeks it seems like nothing goes your way:

On Monday, embarrassing news emerges that Colombian troops had detained a vacationing British MP over the weekend and forced him to ingest "several mouthfuls" of Coffee-Mate. Then when he didn't die they realized it wasn't cocaine and let him go.

Two days later, a Colombian court ordered President Uribe to prison for three days on contempt charges. Eventually the Supreme Court intervened to save him the embarrassment of unflattering horizontal stripes and extrajudicial sexytime.

Later that afternoon Uribe started dropping hints that he might not ram through a Constitutional change allowing him to run for a third term, after all. : (

On Thursday, Venezuelan authorities arrested former Uribe official Alvaro Araujo, who had fled the country rather than face charges of "kidnapping a political rival," among other craziness. The ensuing press coverage brought up other fun details, like: "Mr Araujo is the father of Maria Consuelo Araujo, who quit as Colombia's foreign minister last year when her brother was jailed on charges of using right-wing paramilitary thugs to intimidate voters."

Then on Friday, the United Nations came to town to investigate allegations that Uribe himself has been intimidating his own judicial branch in a ham-handed effort to stymie an ongoing investigation linking his political allies to terrorism.

Finally yesterday even the LA Times ed board weighs in , admitting maybe for the first time in the US press that "it's becoming increasingly clear that the [FARC] are not the only murderous thugs on the loose. Colombia needs to turn its attention to the growing number of murders allegedly committed by its armed forces." That would be Uribe's own army.

Meet General Mario Montoya. Our man in Bogota. Trusted overseer of eleventy zillion US tax dollars a year, and close personal friend with just about everybody on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Dude is Patton with a cell phone.
 
Also: Meet General Mario Montoya, the jackass now under criminal investigation for his long-standing collaboration with death squads that, according to today's Washington Post, "massacred thousands of villagers, carried out assassinations of political leaders and union members, and funded its operations through cocaine smuggling."
 
Um, ok, I know this looks bad. But seriously, if we'd've known this guy was some sort of mass murdering cocaine terrorist, we would have totally shut down that Plan Colombia deal a long time ago, right? I mean we certainly wouldn't be scrambling to reward this crazy government with a preferential trade agreement if this "massacring villagers" thingy had been public before now, right? Right?

Um, well, um...here is an extensive LA Times story from March 2007 explaining how the CIA had just "obtained new intelligence alleging that [Gen. Montoya] collaborated extensively with right-wing militias that Washington considers terrorist organizations."

Sigh. Well I suppose all this helps to explain this new report, which details how Colombian cocaleros "planted almost exactly twice as much coca as they had in 2000, the year Plan Colombia began." Sigh.

Ha ha, the terrorists finally got to Chris Dodd, because of his support for Colombian death squads in Mexico or something. Also, the yelly guy mentions "this fake group WOLA," which is kinda funny too. For the record, "WOLA" is a "real" group, they're just sort of wieners sometimes.

Fun Fact: Colombia has seen a 41 percent increase in internally displaced people this year, and now boasts the world's "second-highest number of internally displaced citizens after Sudan." Heck of a job, Uribe!

I'll admit I was pretty drunk during the debate last night because, really, you sort of have to be. But as far as I could make out it was mostly about some millionaire plumber guy. Also discussed: crazy-ass Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. Obama was like "Stop killing all the union people" and McCain was all "eye-roll tariff cocaine terror." Naturally this morning the Washington Post finds Obama's pro-not-killing-people position "disappointing," because it would disrupt the duty free cocaine trade or something. Anyway, watch John McCain look like a dick in this video.

Explain to me again how the country with the most ridiculously atrocious human rights record in the hemisphere remains so popular among US politicos.

There is one thing that is very important to mention. Colombia has never before received such support from the American press. During one month there were more than 25 editorials from the mainstream media in favor of Colombia.

By Revolter

On Monday, Jackson Diehl and the rest of the Washington Post editorial board took a "there's nothing to see here folks, move along" stance in regards to the US/Colombia base deal. Because, hey, it's only Hugo Chavez and other leftist dead-enders who are freaking out about the benign purposes the US has for the 7 military bases throughout Narcolandia, right?

Guess the WaPo didn't hear about Lula inviting Obama to explain US intentions during this week's emergency UNASUR conference on the US/Colombian military bases. Forget about how all South American countries (except Peru) intend on voicing their alarm over the deal at the summit. Never mind that 69% of Latin Americans no likey the plan.

But maybe that's not good enough for you either, dear reader. Perhaps you need to be convinced by the world's top intellectual? Well, you're in luck, because Noam Chomsky was in Caracas for the first time eva to show support for Venezuela, as well as UNASUR's unified (almost) stance against the new US taxpayer-funded War on Drugs fiasco.

UPDATE: Hugo means business. Venezuela intends to cut off all ties with Colombia over the US base deal.