Economic inequality threatens stability of Colombia

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Washington Post

Economic inequality threatens stability of Colombia
By Juan Forero
Washington Post
Updated: 05/15/2010 10:36:15 PM CDT

ALGARROBO, Colombia — Eight years after President Alvaro Uribe took office and began harnessing billions in U.S. aid to pummel Marxist guerrillas, Colombia is safer for this country's 45 million people and for the foreign investors who have flocked here. But stubbornly high levels of poverty expose a harsh reality: Despite better security and strong economic growth, Colombia has been unable to significantly alleviate the misery that helps fuel a 46-year-old conflict and the drug trafficking behind it.

What social scientists here call lackluster results in fighting poverty have become a campaign issue ahead of this month's elections, in which Colombian voters will elect a president to succeed Uribe, Washington's closest ally on the continent. Unless a 43 percent poverty rate can be steadily reduced, experts on the conflict contend, Colombia could regress even as the United States continues to provide military assistance. "There is not only significant poverty, but some of the poverty is stunning in its extreme," said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., who has traveled extensively in Colombia since 2001. "It really is at the root of so much of the unrest that occurs."

That poverty, and Colombia's big gap between rich and poor, is particularly evident in towns along the Caribbean coast, such as this community of dirt roads and forlorn farms. Here in Algarrobo (population 12,000), a wealthy and influential family, the Davilas, received $1 million in grants through an Agriculture Ministry program that provided tens of millions to affluent farmers nationwide. Critics here say it made no difference that the Davilas own one of the most productive and lucrative oil-producing palm groves for miles.

The subsistence farmers in the surrounding countryside, meanwhile, have remained desperately poor, among the millions of rural Colombians left behind even as Latin America has grown richer in the past decade's commodities boom. Those farmers, scratching out a living in a stretch of northern savannah that fired the imagination of the Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, said they received nothing from the state.

"To the contrary, they charged me taxes," said Beatriz Mesa, 44, who recently gave up farming.


Read more: http://www.twincities.com/national/ci_15090629

[bulloney]

1. The WP is worried about other countries' economic inequalities while the U.S.

has developed into a country of haves and have nots, thanks to tax policies skewed to the benefit of the uber wealthy, socializing liabilities for big business, dismantling social programs that have provided a safety net for the lower and middle class, and throwing our military might in any country that doesn't behave the way we think they should.

No, we're too damned worried about other countries. Like, we might just have to invade them if they don't shape up and fly right.

Meanwhile, the concentration of wealth in this country is the highest in 80 years. And we know what things were like in the late-20s and 30s, don't we?

[proudohioan]

2. Yeah, that irony was not lost on me, either.....

Are the folks at WP so totally clueless?

[Peace Patriot]

3. This is less like a Washington Pest and more like a New York Slimes article, in the slimey

covert messages hidden beneath the false veneer of concern for the poor. I don't click on Pest articles (--don't want to give them on-line hits to help them sell their crapola to others) so I will just address the Slime-like covert messages in the quoted text.

--

"Eight years after President Alvaro Uribe took office and began harnessing billions in U.S. aid to pummel Marxist guerrillas, Colombia is safer for this country's 45 million people and for the foreign investors who have flocked here."--the Pestilence

--

"Pummeling Marxist guerrillas" was not how the $7 BILLION in U.S. military aid to Colombia was sold to the American people. It was sold as part of the U.S. "war on drugs." The Bushwhacks added "terrorism" to the justifications late in their junta (in 2008, I believe), thus sanctioning a killing spree in Colombia that is only exceeded by the Bushwhack killing sprees in Irag and Afghanistan, and which has included the slaughter of tens of thousands of union leaders, human rights workers, teachers, community organizers, journalists, political leftists and peasant farmers, and the cruel and blood-soaked displacement of 3 to 4 million peasant farmers--the worst human displacement crisis on earth, outside of Sudan. According to Amnesty International, about half of the murders of union leaders were committed by the Colombian military itself, and the other half were committed by their closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads. Together--the Colombian military and its death squads--are responsible for 92% of the murders of union leaders in Colombia. According to a UN report, the Colombian military and its death squads are responsible for 70% of all extrajudicial killings in Colombia (union leaders and all others), in about the same proportions (half military, half death squads). "Pummeling Marxist guerrillas" was only part of this Bushwhack policy of mass murder. Destroying the political left was the other. And neither thing had anything whatever to do with drug interdiction. The drug trade continues unabated, with the little coca leaf farmers (who also produce food) brutally shoved out and the big, well-connected drug lords never bigger, with little difference between them and Colombia's political establishment.

"Safer"? Not for the millions murdered, terrorized and displaced!

The Pest asserts that Colombia "IS safer"--not that the blood-soaked Uribe government ASSERTS that it is "safer" (say by quoting a Colombian official). No, they are selling the bullshit that it IS "safer" because the Bushwhacks hijacked the U.S. "war on drugs" to the purpose of "pummeling Marxist guerrillas" (i. e., killing human rights workers, union leaders and advocates of the poor!)

Again, it is NOT SAFER for the poor majority! Hundreds of thousands of the poor have fled into neighboring Venezuela and Ecuador for safe haven from the Colombian military and its death squads--creating a huge human rights burden for those countries. And this reign of terror has been paid for by you and me and has been conducted in our name, with the U.S. military present all over Colombia.

--

"What social scientists here call lackluster results in fighting poverty have become a campaign issue ahead of this month's elections..."."

"Results" implies effort. What are the Uribe regime's efforts to "fight poverty" in Colombia? Killing thousands of the poor would be one. Terrorizing the poor would be another. Stealing vast amounts of land from poor peasants and giving them to Monsanto, Chiquita, Occidental Petroleum and other multinational corporations and to the super-rich Colombian elite, and to the favored drug lords, would be another. Displaced campesinos tend to become invisible. There are reports that displaced campesinos fear to register with the government as displaced people for fear of government repercussions. THAT is the sum total of Uribe's "fight" against "poverty": 'disappearing' the poor, one way or another.

And they have a lot of nerve quoting Jim McGovern--one of the few decent Congresspersons in our Diebolded country--amidst these goddamned lies. Here, we see the Pest out-sliming the Slimes.

--

"Unless a 43 percent poverty rate can be steadily reduced, experts on the conflict contend, Colombia could regress even as the United States continues to provide military assistance."

This is so "Alice in Wonderlandish" that it's hard to know where to begin analyzing the sentence. First of all, Colombia could not be MORE regressed--regressed to a fascist state of OFFICIAL murder and mayhem against the poor--BECAUSE OF the $7 BILLION of our taxpayer dollars larded on these criminals! The sentence implies that the U.S. billions are for "fighting poverty." Colombia could "regress"--i.e., suffer more poverty--"even as the United States continues to provide military assistance." The twisted lie here is that U.S. military assistance is not for killing the poor--the reality of what is happening--but is somehow meant to straighten out the Colombian elite's priorities. The money--our money--was/is INTENDED for killing the poor, terrorizing the poor, creating more poverty and enriching the rich, here and in Colombia!

So this lament that Colombia remains MOSTLY a poverty-stricken country, in danger of becoming even more poverty-stricken, is just about as hypocritical and twisted as it could get. The U.S. billions go to war profiteers and mass murderers, and are also part of a Pentagon war plan for "full spectrum" military activities throughout Latin America--with SEVEN new U.S. military bases in Colombia and "total diplomatic immunity" for U.S. soldiers and U.S. military 'contractors' no matter what they do in Colombia.

My read on this article is that it is part of a "cleansing" or cover-up, designed in Langley, to now make us believe that the era of death squads and official murder is over in Colombia, in order to push the U.S./Colombia "free trade for the rich" deal through Congress. (Labor Democrats have been blocking it, due to the short life spans of union leaders in Colombia.) Obama's AG, Eric Holder, was deeply involved in covering up Chiquita's hiring of rightwing death squads to murder thousands of union leaders on Chiquita's slave labor farms in Colombia. Obama's Sec of State's husband began this horror in Colombia with "Plan Colombia" (the initial billions), and she herself has had John "death squad" Negroponte as an adviser on Latin America, and Mark Penn, a paid agent of the bloodsoaked Colombian government, as her chief campaign adviser. And Obama's appointee to head the CIA, Leon Panetta, visited Colombia recently to engineer this illusion--to "retire" Uribe, sweep the murder, mayhem and drug dealing under the carpet (much like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld's crimes have been swept under the Oval Office carpet--the carpet where Iraq's WMDs can be found, in Junior's little joke), and push this Green Party guy forward as the "new face of Colombia." He supports "pummeling Marxist guerrillas" (the euphemism) and "free trade for the rich" but doesn't have 70 political cohorts under investigation, indicted or in jail for their ties to death squads and drug trafficking, like Uribe does. Like Obama, he will very likely have some "notches" in his belt before his tenure is over ("notches" = dead civilians). And, believe me, the DESIGNED poverty, there and here, will continue. There is absolutely nothing that these type of fronticepiece "liberal" leaders can or will do about it. They are powerless. The foreign and domestic corporate/war profiteer cabal rules both countries.

So-called elections, so-called opinion polls, the controlled press--everything about Colombia's political life is highly manipulated and illusory. It is even more of a "Wonderland" than this country is (where the rich/poor discrepancy is also huge and growing). And how cute of this Slimesian Washington Pest writer to mention Gabriel Marquez, the Nobel prize winning Colombian writer who was banned for many years from traveling in the U.S., who is close friends with Fidel Castro and who is a champion of THE LEFT--of the poor majority and their advocates! Pest writers no doubt think that "magic realism" is a sort of seance indulged in by the idle rich to forget their many cares. Such as kultchid reference in such a slimeball article! Quite worthy of the National Public Rumormongers as well.

I DON'T CARE what else the Pest has to say. It will go on like this, cleverly weaving a cloth of lies from the sufferings of Colombia's poor--to get us to buy more bullshit about the vast majority of Colombians being poor "despite" U.S. military spending and about "pummeling Marxist guerrillas."

I will only suggest these links, for perspective--about the RECENT mass grave in La Macarena, Colombia, nearby to a U.S. military base, that contains up to 2,000 rotting stinking corpses, with grave dates (but no names) from 2003 through 2009. The Colombian military say these are the bodies of FARC guerrillas. Local people say they are the bodies of 'disappeared' local community activists. How the mass grave was discovered is that local children got sick from drinking the water that was polluted by this U.S. legacy in Colombia: the dead.

The La Macarena massacre (includes a description of, and links to docs about, U.S. ops in La Macarena)
http://www.cipcol.org/?p=1303

The UK military connection
http://www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/2010/02/04/silence-on-british-army-link-to-colombian-mass-grave/

U.S. and Colombia Cover Up Atrocities Through Mass Graves, by Dan Kovalik 4/1/10
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-kovalik/us-colombia-cover-up-atro_b_521402.html

[protocol rv]

4. Colombian economy is growing

And there's a fairly free judiciary, which seems to be quite lively. They have free and fair elections, and their President isn't allowed to perpetuate himself in power. Overall, warts and all, it's a much better run country than its next door neighbor, Venezuela :-)

[lib2DaBone]

5. I agree. That first line jumped out at me... what utter propaganda...

"Eight years after President Alvaro Uribe took office and began harnessing billions in U.S. aid to pummel Marxist guerrillas, Colombia is safer for this country's 45 million people and for the foreign investors who have flocked here"


Apache attack helicopters, thousands of CIA Dirty Tricksters, Right-Wing Death Squards, arms and ammunition... all happily provided by the United States.

And they call this a .."good business climate"?

[MisterP]

6. the diagnosis, of course, will be INSUFFICIENT capitalism... nt