|
is TOO POOR to have landlines. ~snip~
Mockus’ defeat may be seen as a combination of several factors. For one, opinion polls are unreliable in Colombia. Pollsters tend to reach only middle and upper class urban residents. Poor and rural Colombians, who tend to not have access to landlines or other standard survey methods, are rarely surveyed. More: http://thewip.net/contributors/2010/06/fundamental_change_in_colombia.html~snip~
the opinion polls so regularly quoted in both national and international media are suspect, being based on landline interviews with 1000 or so inhabitants of the four largest cities. In the context of widespread paramilitary terror it would be foolish to assume respondents being honest in a telephone interview with an unknown interlocutor. That most Colombians do not own landlines is another factor making these polls unreliable, according to the author, in addition to the fact that the polling companies refuse to poll in rural areas. More: http://lse-ideas.blogspot.com/2010/04/book-review-revolutionary-social-change.html~snip~
The polls are conducted only in the cities and using landline telephones. This eliminates many families in the lower stratas and all people in the pueblos and out in the country. The people who are polled are the ones who have most to win with Uribe's policies and who are constantly exposed to Uribe-supporting media. The polls are only showing that a 60% of those who are polled support Uribe....not that a 60% of the polutation as a WHOLE support Uribe... More: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:T49fhagjpl4J:poorbuthappy.com/colombia/post/delegative-democracy-the-case-of-colombia1/+Colombia+polls+unreliable+poor+not+polled+no+phones+landlines&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=usOn 13 March 2008, Colombia’s biggest-selling daily newspaper, El Tiempo, reported that Uribe had won a record 84 per cent approval rating in a Gallup poll. The poll was extensive, with one thousand Colombians in different parts of the country being interviewed. However, an examination of how such samples are conducted and tallied casts doubt on whether they supply an accurate picture of public sentiment in Colombia.
What is seldom understood about the vast majority of these polls is that the opinions are gathered through telephone interviews via landlines. This methodology is highly problematic for several reasons.
First, many Colombians do not have landlines. While cell-phone use is widespread in Colombia, simple infrastructures such as landlines are not. Not only villages and medium-sized towns, but also some major cities, lack the infrastructure to ensure even electricity on a daily basis, let alone fixed-line optical networks.
Second, interviewees can easily be identified through their landline status. This lack of anonymity inevitably counts against the expression of negative opinions of the president and government.
Third, polls such as the above claim to represent the opinions of a diverse range of Colombians from around the country, yet interviewees are frequently drawn only from the wealthier districts of Colombia’s four largest cities—Bogotá, Cali, Medellín, and Barranquilla. Unwarranted prominence is given to the views of a minute percentage of the population who have access to landlines. Since Uribe’s election as president, opinion polls in Colombia have focused on a handful of dominant urban centres, ignoring the countryside, where many of his most committed opponents live. As one media outlet so brazenly put it, “Colombian pollsters rarely survey the whole country because they consider responses in war-afflicted rural areas unreliable.”13
Lastly, it must be noted that the timing of March’s Gallup poll was convenient as regards promoting an impression of popular support for the state. Polling took place within a forty-eight-hour period immediately preceding one of the largest anti-state rallies in Colombia’s recent history. The interviews were conducted between 4 and 6 March, shortly after the killing of one of the FARC’s most prominent leaders, Comandante Raúl Reyes, during a Colombian military incursion into Ecuadorian territory—a significant victory in the eyes of the elite. Ironically, as polling ended, a quarter of a million Colombians, many of whom defied death threats, held marches and rallies around the country on 6 March in a nationwide day of protest against state and paramilitary atrocities under the Uribe administration.
When a geographically wider poll sample was taken weeks later, Uribe’s support fell markedly. In May 2008, one thousand citizens were polled in not four but seventeen of Colombia’s primary urban centres; Uribe’s support dropped by almost 20 per cent. This slump in approval corroborated the research of myself and others. I have repeatedly found that the further one travels away from the handful of Colombia’s more affluent urban centres—and the closer one gets to the barrios, rural communities, villages, and territories—greater opposition is expressed towards the state and the current administration. The activist and economist Héctor Mondragón has consistently maintained that Colombians throughout the country have remained opposed to Uribe during his time in office. While it cannot be argued that there is mass opposition to the state, the overwhelming support for Uribe indicated in opinion polls is highly questionable. More: http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=433~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~For you to maintain it's FARC driving people out of their homes leaves everyone aware you know NOTHING about Colombian events, nor politics, nor have you bothered to spend ANY respectable time looking for the answers. You haven't even made it to the starting line, sadly. Uribe's OWN COUSIN, Mario Uribe Escobar was recently discovered to have been buying properties from the paramilitaries which they had stolen from poor Colombians, and it has been going on a long time. You don't even READ the material people have posted here, with links. My God. You should have the good sense to make a superficial effort to grasp the subject first before dreaming of discussing it. ~snip~
Founded in Urabá twelve years ago, the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó has attempted to resist this dispossession through a declaration of neutrality and intense community organizing. Even though the Peace Community has suffered nearly 200 deaths and dozens of displacements since its founding, its members remain steadfast in their efforts. As Community member Sandra told me, “we continue resisting what the government does against the civilian population to vacate the land.” Sandra recognizes that not just the government is behind the displacement. “This is a strategic area for all of the armed actors,” she explains. “We say that the war in Colombia has a name: natural resources – water, coal, gold, nickel, wood and others. The war exists in order to steal land from the campesino (peasant farmer).” More: http://www.thewip.net/contributors/2009/09/colombias_war_hes_giving_our_c.htmlPush to Produce More Palm-Oil for Biodiesel Fuels Violence in Colombia
Sunday June 10, 2007
The Middle East is not the only place where the battle to control fuel and energy sources has turned deadly. In Colombia, a governmental initiative to produce more palm oil for biodiesel has led to widespread violence, illegal seizures of family farms, and clear-cutting of tropical forests in an effort to secure more acreage for palm-oil plantations.
According to aid organizations working in Colombia, paramilitary gangs are seizing land for biofuel conglomerates that are seeking “green” profits, and using threats and violence to evict the legitimate owners.
"The paramilitaries are not subtle when it comes to taking land," said Dominic Nutt of Christian Aid, in an interview with The Times of London. "They simply visit a community and tell landowners, 'If you don't sell to us, we will negotiate with your widow.'
More: http://environment.about.com/b/2007/06/10/colombias-push-to-produce-more-palm-oil-for-biodiesel-fuels-violence-land-grabs.htmNew gangs run Colombians off their land
The government says paramilitary groups no longer exist. But more and more people are being displaced.
THE WORLDDecember 03, 2008|Chris Kraul, Kraul is a Times staff writer.
TUMACO, COLOMBIA — The Colombian government insists that paramilitary gangs are extinct. Try telling that to Antonio Domingo, a poor Afro-Colombian who was rousted from his home in the dead of night in August and told to leave town or be killed.
Antonio, 30, who declined to give his last name for fear of reprisal, said armed and uniformed fighters who identified themselves as members of a paramilitary force called the Black Eagles gave residents minutes to leave San Jose, their Pacific coast hamlet.
"We had furniture, chickens, yucca and plantains, but lost it all," said Antonio, interviewed at a camp for displaced people outside this port town in the southwestern state of Narino. "They killed a friend of mine in front of us for no reason, maybe to make a point."
Antonio, his wife and infant son are part of an alarming upsurge this year of displaced people in Colombia. According to CODHES, a human rights group based in Bogota, the capital, 270,675 additional internal refugees were documented in the first half of this year, 41% more than during the same period last year.
The wave of uprooted humanity is matched by a parallel surge in the number of fighters, according to a study released last week by the New Rainbow Coalition, a peace group also based in Bogota. More than 100 new gangs have been formed, including as many as 10,000 fighters, and have a presence in one out of five Colombian counties, mostly rural ones.
Paramilitary groups proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s as defensive forces financed by farmers and cattlemen to battle leftist guerrillas. Many of the fighters turned to crime, seizing land and trafficking in drugs, before laying down their arms in a government-brokered demobilization completed in 2006.
The reemerging armed gangs are wreaking havoc in Narino state. They are vying with guerrillas and drug traffickers for control of a zone that boasts ideal coca growing conditions as well as a labyrinthine coastline offering hundreds of concealed, mangrove-studded inlets from which to ship drugs to U.S. markets.
The new paramilitary groups, like the rebels and traffickers, often force people such as Antonio from their homes and farms to take possession of land as war booty and to clear the area of potential enemy sympathizers. With an estimated 3 million people having been displaced, Colombia is second only to Sudan in the number of its internal refugees. More: http://articles.latimes.com/2008/dec/03/world/fg-paras3~~~~~COLOMBIA: Paramilitaries Don't Want to Take the Blame Alone
From prison, the eight sent a letter last week to those who were once among their potential military targets: the leaders of the centre-left Alternative Democratic Pole (PDA), Gustavo Petro, former presidential candidate for that party, and Iván Cepeda, congressman-elect and spokesperson for the Movement of Victims of State Crimes (MOVICE).
What prompted the letter was a meeting between Petro and Colombia's conservative president-elect, the former Defence minister Juan Manuel Santos, who has declared he will set up a "government of national unity."
Petro proposed joint efforts to resolve the priority problems from the internal war, such as reparations for the victims and returning the land seized from millions of rural people displaced from their homes - which some private studies estimate to be more than 10 percent of the 42 million Colombians.
--
THE SIGNATORIES
The eight paramilitary leaders who signed the letter carry more than 42,000 crimes on their shoulders. The are: Freddy Rendón, whose nom de guerre is El Alemán, Rodrigo Pérez (Julián Bolívar), Arnubio Triana (Botalón), Jorge Iván Laverde (El Iguano), Álvaro Sepúlveda (Don César), Edwar Cobos (Diego Vecino), Jesús Ignacio Roldán (Monoleche) and Raúl Emilio Hasbún (Pedro Bonito).
--
The ultra-right paramilitary groups reached a pact with President Álvaro Uribe to demobilise and, for a partial confession of their crimes, limiting the maximum prison sentence to eight years, under a legal framework known as the Justice and Peace Law.
But the Constitutional Court ruled that the demobilised paramilitaries could only obtain that legal benefit if they confessed "the complete truth" - and things grew complicated.
Now those former combatants are no longer willing to be the only ones taking the blame. They say they are truly repentant, and want reconciliation, as the law states.
"We are very attentive to and very interested in participating and contributing," they stated in reference to Petro's proposal to Santos.
The former paramilitaries wrote that the "real truth" is not yet known about the war they joined more than 25 years ago. Their archenemies, the leftist guerrillas, emerged 46 years ago.
They write that their demobilisation and disarmament, and "the half truth and half justice," will be "worth nothing" if those who "personify" the paramilitary phenomenon remain invisible in political and economic power, "evading, at any price," their responsibility.
The armed groups are merely "the shock force," "the tip of the iceberg," of the "macro" phenomenon of paramilitarism, they said, noting that as long as the "true scope" remains hidden, "paramilitarism, offspring of consented impunity," will reproduce.
Below their signatures they put their fingerprints, in the style of the messages from the now-dead Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar (1949-1993).
They agree that peace should be built with justice, truth and reparations, but reject a commitment in which the blame falls solely upon those who carried out the actions.
"Land speculation, seizure and concentration of agricultural property, violence and displacement in the countryside, and the consequent social injustice against the rural people, entail and involve situations still unknown," they state.
The men point out that the "small number of two dozen former commanders" of the paramilitary forces cannot be the "shadow owners" of the at least four million hectares "of highest commercial value" today in the hands of the mafia. They add that the land should be returned to the displaced persons.
The former leaders underscore that the people deployed in paramilitarism include "politicians, business leaders, high-level officials, large contractors, foreign investors and members of the public security forces," who should be brought to justice as well. More: http://chauprade.com/general/colombia-paramilitaries-dont-want-to-take-the-blame-alone-11-07-10 |
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
