I believe soon the World will have second thoughts about Uribe. As an
example I bring to you the following article that came in *Upside Down
World*. Read it and reach your own conclusions.
"If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn't we have to
turn it over to get it to stand up straight?" -Eduardo Galeano
Uribe's Colombia Destabilizing Latin America
A few weeks after the Ecuadorian and Venezuelan state called on the
Colombian government to respect the need for peace and negotiation
with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People's Army (FARC-
EP), the administration of =C1lvaro Uribe V=E9lez (2002-2010) sup****ted an
extensive armed air and land assault against the insurgency movement -
not within Colombia's borders but rather on the sovereign territory of
Ecuadorian soil.
On 1 March, 2008 the Colombian state, under the leader****p of Uribe
and Vice-President Francisco Santos Calder=F3n (and his cousin Defence
Minister Juan Manuel Santos), illegally deployed a military campaign
within Ecuador, which resulted in the deaths of Ra=FAl Reyes, Julian
Conrado, and fifteen other combatants associated with the FARC-EP.
Such actions are a clear display of the (US-backed) Colombian state's
open negation of international codes of conduct, law, and social
justice.
The actions of Saturday 1 March took place days before a major
international demonstration scheduled for 6 March, 2008. Promoted by
The National Movement of Victims of State-Sponsored Crimes (MOVICE),
the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), and countless
social justice-based organizations, March 6th has been set as an
international day of protest against those tortured, murdered, and
disappeared by the Colombian state, their allies within the
paramilitary United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC) and the
newly reformed Black Eagles. Recently, President Uribe's top political
adviser, Jos=E9 Obdulio Gaviria, proclaimed that the protest and
protesters should be criminalized. In addition, paramilitaries in the
southwestern department of Nari=F1o (not far from where the illegal
incursions were carried out in Ecuador), have threatened to attack any
organization or person associated with the activities scheduled for
Thursday.
The Uribe and Santos administration is utilizing the slaughter of
Comandante Ra=FAl Reyes and others as a method to deter activists and
socially conscious peoples within and outside Colombia from
participating in the March 6th events. Numerous state-controlled or
connected media outlets, such as El Tiempo (which has long-standing
ties to the Santos family), have been parading photographs of the
bullet ridden and mutilated corpse of Ra=FAl Reyes throughout the
country's communications mediums. Such propaganda is clearly a tool to
psychologically intimidate those preparing to demonstrate against the
atrocities perpetrated by the state over the past seven years.
Over the past two months, numerous researchers, scholars, and lawyers
have sup****ted the call to declare the FARC-EP a legitimate force
fighting against the corrupt Colombian state. In January 2008,
Ecuador's Foreign Minister Maria Isabel Salvador argued that the FARC-
EP should no longer be depicted as a terrorist organization.
Venezuelan President Hugo Ch=E1vez too announced that the FARC-EP are
far from a terrorist force but are rather a real army, which occupies
Colombian territory and shares in a Bolivarian vision for a new Latin
America. Mexican deputy Ricardo Cantu Garza also has promoted the
recognition of the FARC-EP as a belligerent force legitimately
fighting against a corrupt and unequal sociopolitical system. As
prominent US attorney Paul Wolf argued,
the FARC-EP are a belligerent army of national liberation, as
evidenced by their sustained military campaign and sovereignty over a
large part of Colombian territory, and their conduct of hostilities by
organized troops kept under military discipline and complying with the
laws and customs of war, at least to the same extent as other parties
to the conflict. Members of the FARC-EP are therefore entitled to the
rights of belligerents under international law ... there is no rule of
international law prohibiting revolution, and, if a revolution
succeeds, there is nothing in international law prohibiting the
acceptance of the outcome, even though it was achieved by force.
=46rom Copenhagen to Caracas, numerous state officials have denounced
the description of the FARC-EP as a terrorist organization.
Progressive officials and administrations in Mexico, Ecuador, and
Venezuela have rather opted for the status of belligerent or irregular
forces to more accurately depict the FARC-EP domestic and geo-
political stance. Disturbingly, in the face of this evidence and the
FARC-EP's consistent promotion for a humanitarian prisoner exchange
and peace negotiations with the state in a demilitarized zone in
southwestern Colombia, the Uribe and Santos administration has moved
ever farther away from sup****ting an end to the civil war within
Colombia by opting for systemic violence.
Over the past several years, different aspects of the FARC-EP's real
social, political, and cultural activities for progressive social
change have been censored or marginalized by the private press or
governments in sup****t of the Colombian state. Nevertheless, after
researching the FARC-EP and the country of Colombia for years, Garry
Leech argued that "while there is little doubt regarding the global
reach of terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda, there is no
evidence that the FARC is anything but one of the armed actors in
Colombia's long and tragic domestic conflict."
In actuality, the FARC-EP are actors within the strategic confines of
Colombian society that aim their directives at domestic social change.
In light of such realities, how can this insurgency be a terrorist
threat to external nation-states? Coletta A. Youngers responds to this
question by describing the way in which
. . . the U.S. government now views the Latin American region almost
exclusively through the counterterrorist lens, though the region poses
no serious national security threat to the United States ... little
evidence has been put forward to substantiate such claims, and
whatever activity is taking place there appears to be minimal.
While Youngers does not trivialize its revolutionary tactics, she
clearly argues that the FARC-EP cannot be correctly framed within the
concept and rhetoric of global terrorism. Youngers argues that the
insurgency is not a direct political threat to administrations within
the United States, Canada, the European Union and any other foreign
nation-state in the fact that the FARC-EP activities "are targeted
inward, not outward," hence, "applying the terrorism concept to these
groups negates their political projects."
Characterizing the FARC-EP as a foreign terrorist organization
dramatically alters the dynamics of the peace process in favour of a
killer state. Stipulating that the FARC-EP is terrorist results in the
inability for legal peace negotiations to take place between the FARC-
EP and any government that subscribes to the categorization. Promoting
the FARC-EP (and their sup****ters) as terrorists "puts them on the
list of targets to be assaulted by the US military machine" and "thus
subject to total war," according to James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer.
The terminology of terrorism is perfect for imperialist ideology and
expansionism. It is a very open-ended reference that "allows maximum
intervention in all regions against any opposition" and "that any
group engaged in opposing militarism, imperialism (so-called
"globalization") or local authoritarian regimes could be labelled
"terrorist" and targeted", thus legitimizing external invasion or
attack.
Internal and external condemnation of the Colombian state has fallen
upon the deaf ears of the Uribe and Santos administration. After years
of increased violations of civilian human rights, the ongoing
suppression of trade-unionism, assassinations of left-of-centre
activists and politicians, and a political reality that has witnessed
75 governors, mayors, and Congressional politicians alleged or found
guilty of having direct links to the paramilitary - including Vice-
President Francisco Santos Calder=F3n and his cousin Defense Minister
Juan Manuel Santos and President Uribe's brother Santiago and their
cousin Senator Mario Uribe - now the Colombian state has deemed it
necessary to illegally encroach upon those nations that deviate from
their ideological model of political and economic centralization. Not
only has the Uribe administration criticized their neighbours but
after the actions realized on 1 March, 2008 it is clear that the
Colombian state, with the full backing of the United States, will
impose its own ideological goals and values, through force, regardless
of the democratic rights and privileges of conventional electoral law
and procedure.
While the neighbouring states of Ecuador and Venezuela struggle for
peace and try to assist the people of Colombia in the quest for an end
to the civil war, the Uribe and Santos administration has bypassed
judicial realities and governance to impose its own objectives.
Careful analysts of the Colombian situation continue to debate whether
the Colombian state is pre-fascist or actually fascist. It is
certainly neither humane nor actually democratic. The current
Colombian state must be transformed, sooner rather than later. Those
fighting for peace must condemn the action of this regime. In
solidarity, we must protest the policies of the Colombian state and
raise our voices in sup****t for a New Colombia which stands for Peace
with Social Justice.
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1158/1/
|
