Hey! Remember this guy? The one who’s so obsessed with waging war against the FARC in Colombia that he got up his own right-wing paramilitary army to murder local campesinos and blame it on the guerrillas? Yeah. HIM. Well, guess what. He’s still not in jail. He’s still not in The Hague. And he’s still stirring the shit by whatever means he can get his grubby little blood-stained and cocaine-dusted fingies on:
With the support of the ex-president of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe, a nationwide campaign has begun in Medellín to gather signatures opposing the peace process which the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC-EP guerrillas have initiated to put an end to a half-century of armed conflict.
With a call to reject peace accords, the politician was the first to put down his signature at one of 27 tables, installed in the 25 municipalities of Medellín. He called upon the citizens to get on the Internet and sign the manifesto, available until August 4, rejecting the peace dialogue of Havana.
Delegates of the FARC-EP and the Colombian government have been in dialogue for more than three years in Havana, Cuba, seeking a peaceful exit from the armed conflict in Colombia, which has gone on for more than 50 years and has left some 600,000 dead.
According to the United Nations Agency for Refugees (ACNUR), between 1997 and 2013 there have officially been 5,185,406 persons officially registered as displaced, with a large impact on the Afro-Colombian and indigenous populations.
In their negotiations, which are based on five points, the government and the FARC have approached agreements on land ownership, political participation, eradication of illicit [coca] cultivation, and recognition and reparations to seven million victims of the armed conflict.
The only consensus lacking is on the final point, which includes the disarmament and demobilization of the guerrillas.
Uribe, now a senator, said that in his opinion, even though Colombians want peace, they don’t want an accord with the insurgents, much less for them to go free. However, the ex-president also opposes referenda, such as the plebiscite proposed by Santos, to survey the will of the people regarding the incorporation of the final peace accord into the Constitution, in the category of Special Accord, as a mechanism for juridical protection of the peace process.
According to Uribe, the pact is one of “total impunity” for the FARC-EP, because the transitional justice mechanisms place the Colombian armed forces “on a level with terrorism, so they will have be submitted to the same tribunal”.
For that reason, the senator called on Tuesday, May 10, for “civil resistance” against the accords.
Faced with this action, president Santos stated that “there are some who cannot resist this advance, there are some who are desperate because they are running out of oxygen, which is fear, which is warfare, and they have joined in all sorts of attacks, including calling for ‘civil resistance’, the same that Carlos Castaño once proposed”. In fact, this term, “Civil Resistance”, is much used by the fascist right-wing of Venezuela, a close friend of Uribe.
Meanwhile, Alfredo Ramos, a senator of the Democratic Centre party led by Uribe, stated that in all of Antioquia, including the municipalities of Las Luces, El Poblado and Envigado, they are calling for civil resistance against the accord pursued by the government and the guerrillas.
Translation mine.
El Narco Uribe’s insistence on perpetual war is so typical of the far Colombian right. They’ve been opposed to real democracy in the land since forever. When Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was assassinated in 1948, the Colombian right was behind that; the liberal populist was on his second campaign for the Colombian presidency, and was considered likely to win. That couldn’t be allowed to happen; the Colombian oligarchy, overwhelmingly right-wing for centuries, wasn’t about to stand for it. They enlisted the help of their gringo sponsors to make sure they maintained their uncontested monopoly on power. Gaitán died — officially at the hands of a “lone nut” assassin, but not really. The CIA is widely believed to be behind that assassination, just as they were behind that of John F. Kennedy 15 years later. One might say that Gaitán’s murder was a kind of dress rehearsal for CIA dirty-work to come.
Gaitán’s death marked the start of the more than half-century of struggles by various leftist sectors in Colombia, and also of the harsh perpetual crackdown by the Colombian right. La Violencia began with Gaitán’s death, but it has never really ended; at best there have been only brief lulls in the outrage. George Orwell was right; their goal is perpetual war, and a boot stomping on a human face, forever. The military-industrial complex must have its pound of flesh, as must the spook-industrial complex and the coke-industrial complex.
After all, cocaine production and trafficking is only evil when leftists do it, and do it to finance guerrilla campaigns against a right wing that won’t let them run a progressive candidate legitimately. The right does it too, with absolute impunity. And ask any gringo twit of the middle and upper classes if they’d give up their nose candy and just go back to drinking beer at parties; the answer is a resounding NO. Crack is only bad because black folks do it, and because Ollie North and his Nicaraguan amigos got caught financing the Contras with the proceeds. Powder cocaine? That’s quite all right, and still (unbelievably) fashionable, even though it gets smuggled inside people’s asses. Ask the Mexican drug cartels if you don’t believe me.
And ask the people of Colombia. After this many decades of living with it, they don’t know how to live without it anymore. Little wonder they can never get rid of El Narco Uribe, either.
