Uribe mounts Twitter defense of policies

[Judi Lynn]

Uribe mounts Twitter defense of policies
Thursday, 14 October 2010 14:25
Teresa Welsh

Former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe makes a spirited defense of the policies of his administration via social networking website Twitter.

Uribe's first Tweet in a series of statements said "We avoided allowing the guerrillas and paramilitaries who took the country to turn Colombia into a failing state." He went on to list several achievements of his administration, such as doubling the rate of investment, lifting 6 million people out of poverty, and extraditing 1,140 drug traffickers.

The former president's statements follow the announcement this week that the Colombian House of Representatives is opening an investigation into his involvement in the illegal wiretapping of government critics.

Many officials who served in Uribe's government are currently also being investigated, but Uribe himself has always denied any responsibility for the illegal surveillance.

http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/12385-uribe-defends-policies-twitter.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. How about the slaughter of thousands of trade unionists, human rights workers,

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.