Colombia’s democracy an ‘embarrassment’: FARC leader
Colombia’s democracy an ‘embarrassment’: FARC leader
posted by Marcus Sales
Jul 9, 2013
The leader of rebel group FARC heavily criticized Colombia’s democracy in an open letter to President Juan Manuel Santos on Tuesday.
In the open letter that was published on the guserrillas’ website, “Timochenko” stated that Colombia’s democracy “had been exhausted” and is “an embarrassment.”
The letter was dedicated to Santos on the rebel groups website and signed “Timoleon Jimenez”, another nom de guerre of the guerrilla groups leader.
Timochenko chose to demonstrate his argument with news stories emanating from Saturday. The guerrilla chief referred to a news story regarding three soldiers sentenced to 32 years in prison for involvement in the extrajudicial killing of civilians, Colombia’s ambassador to the US being a case of land theft and ongoing protests in the Catatumbo region, in which four have died.
More:
http://colombiareports.com/farc-leader-brands-colombia-democracy-embarrassment/
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in Colombia, according to Amnesty International and other human rights groups. The FARC is responsible for only a tiny percentage of such murders. The military and its death squads targets labor leaders, teachers, community activists, peasant farmers, political leftists, academics and journalists. They furthermore have brutally displaced FIVE MILLION peasant farmers from their lands.
It is a CIVIL WAR, with the U.S. government funding, training and supporting one side of it ($7 BILLION in military aid), as prep for U.S. "free trade for the rich" (kill off the labor leaders and other opposition; "cleanse" the countryside--drive the poor majority from its small farms into urban squalor, as a slave labor pool--oil, gas, coal, gold and ag land thus become totally lootable by transnational corporations, and the displaced urban poor cannot feed itself and becomes desperate for any job whatsoever).
A nasty business for the U.S. government to be involved in, up to its ears.
As for drug-running, all I can do is laugh.
The U.S. "war on drugs" is a mafia protection racket, with the favored drug lords in the military and the fascist political establishment eliminating their rivals, on our dime. That is why the cocaine never stops flowing out of Colombia. And that may be why--or part of why--the current rightwing president of Colombia, Manual Santos (who appears to be cleaner than their prior leader, Alvaro Uribe, who ran Colombia as a criminal organization for the Bush Junta) has called for the complete legalization of drugs! (As a rightwinger, he may also have the motive of opening the drug market for Big Pharma, Monsanto, Chiquita, et al.)
Your view of the FARC as bad and the rightwing political establishment in Colombia as good is ridiculous. I don't approve of ANY FARC murders, even a tiny percentage, nor of their kidnapping of innocents. But when you have a military that murders youngsters and dresses their bodies up as FARC guerrillas, in order to up their "body count" to earn bonuses and impress U.S. senators, you know something is very, very, VERY wrong. And when you have THE worst human displacement crisis on earth, bar none, in Colombia, you know something is very, very, VERY wrong. And when you have THE worst rich/poor discrepancy in Latin America (right next door to the best--Venezuela), you know something is very, very, VERY wrong. For one thing, you know that the poor majority in Colombia is NOT being represented in the political establishment! And that is the result of, a) decades of extremely corrupt and stolen elections, and b) decades of brutal military repression of grass roots activists and normal democratic organizing.
It is not at all easy to choose between the warring sides of this civil war. If I was a peasant farmer in Colombia, and saw members of my family and community slaughtered by the military, and my family driven from its tiny bit of farm, I might take up arms myself, as the FARC guerrillas have done. Hard to say. It's easy to avow peace when you are not personally affected by violence. But to dismiss the FARC's viewpoint as "criminal" while failing to mention the gross criminality of the other side is Tea Party-ish (blind to facts).
Colombia has desperately needed political reform for many decades. The FARC leader is absolutely right about that. And many of the OTHER people who would say it are DEAD--murdered by the military and its death squads, funded and trained by the USA. And many of the potential leaders of political reform who are not dead have been silenced by intimidation and death THREATS. Uribe, for instance, was spying on judges, prosecutors, leftist politicians and labor leaders, and drawing up "hit lists" for assassination or for death threats, along with monitoring the legal system to protect his criminal organization. He publicly stated that everyone who opposes him is a "terrorist." What kind of democracy is THAT? Uribe is still at large, protected by the U.S. government. What kind of democracy is THAT? Uribe is furthermore threatening to return to power in Colombia. What kind of democracy is THAT? And what does it say about the "peaceful population" of Colombia, that that is a possibility. The murdering, lying, spying, drug running, war mongering, mafia boss of Colombia--the most corrupt politician in history--is quite popular in Colombia. This "peaceful population" of which you speak has its head up its ass.
