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peace activists, political leftists, teachers, community organizers, journalists, peasant farmers and others, by the Colombian military (about half of these 'extrajudicial' murders in Colombia) and its closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads (the other half), and the forced displacement, by state terror, of 5 MILLION peasant farmers and the gifting of their lands to beauty queens, political cronies, drug lords, multinational corporations, etc.?
Colombia has one of the worst rich/poor discrepancies in Latin America. It has some of the very poorest people in Latin America. It has the second worst human displacement crisis in the world, and one of the worst human rights records in the world.
Uribe said in public that everyone who opposes him is a "terrorist"--a tacit permission to the death squads to kill academics, journalists and all of the above. He was spying on everybody--judges, prosecutors, congress people, NGOs, labor unions, and was known to be creating "lists" from the spying information. "List" for what? We can only imagine. The "dots" will not likely ever be "connected," and like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove & brethren, he is free to run around and create more lies, disinformation, propaganda and mayhem in the world. He is "a made man"-protected by the Bush Cartel or the CIA or both.
You cannot create security by killing people. You only create walled fortresses, with the rich and the privileged barricaded behind lock and key. That is Colombia--the rich walled off from the poor, mostly in the urban areas, preparing to benefit from U.S. "free trade for the rich," protected by the Colombian and U.S. militaries and attendant death squads, and with mayhem, terror and death in the countryside. It is a tragic country. That is Uribe's legacy.
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