Reply #266: There has been so much information available which would prevent profound ignorance [View All]

[Judi Lynn]

on Latin America, I'm almost convinced there are a few contributors here who almost have to blind themselves to keep from knowing more about US/Latin American history, and policy.

It's painful hearing people yammer about these things while being totally uninformed about everything but what they have heard from sub-standard "news" outlets and corporate sources.

It's not that any of this is new. Here's a good article I just stumbled across from 10 years ago, and things haven't changed at all since then, other than to get far, FAR more deadly:

Extra! May/June 2000
Colombia's Cocaine Shell Game
Media are leading the U.S. into a civil war in the name of the

By Peter Hart

After the crash of a U.S. Army reconnaissance plane in July 1999 that killed seven people (including five U.S. military personnel), the question of U.S. involvement in Colombia re-emerged on the media radar screen. Journalists wondered whether "the U.S. could wind up in a fight it doesn’t want" (NBC Nightly News, 1/16/00), with many reporters acknowledging a certain inattention to the story: "It may not be widely known, but the United States is already engaged in the Colombian civil war," NPR reported (7/26/99).

Early in 2000, Congressional debate has centered on a two-year, $1.7 billion aid package for the Latin American country, what the New York Times (3/10/00) characterized as an attempt "to shore up Colombia's tottering democracy and enable its military to step up its war against narcotics traffickers"--a description that virtually echoes the official White House position on aid to Colombia.

In the minds of supporters in Congress and the White House, the aid package is intended to stem the flow of drugs into the United States, since, as countless media reports point out, Colombia is the origin of between 80 and 90 percent of the cocaine that ends up in the United States, and a majority of the heroin.

But the coverage of Colombia either ignores or distorts the facts on a range of issues: the long-standing relationship between the Colombian military and right-wing paramilitaries, the responsibility of those paramilitaries for the majority of the violence in Colombia, and the real politics of cocaine in Colombia.

More:
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1030

~~~~~
What makes this even more interesting is that all this was known at the time Clinton started Plan Colombia. The Department of Defense even had a report on Colombia's most powerful criminals, and both Alvaro Uribe and his father were named on it. Alvaro Uribe was also mentioned as being connected to Pablo Escobar.

Instead, we get thread after thread of the same tired old crappola on Hugo Chavez, year in, year out. This particular story has been around forever, and the man in question most clearly has had the time to mend his ways and clean up his act, and Zuluaga has chosen to continue his illegal business, and simply shout "He hates me because I'm a critic."

This means anyone who wants to take up a life of crime simply has to start up a news source of some kind and carry on his criminality with no fear whatsoever, as long as he can point his pudgy little fingers and insist he is being politically persecuted.

http://primicias24.com.nyud.net:8090/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/guillermo-zuloaga.jpg

Guillermo "Just call me persecuted" Zuloaga.