Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalColombia trained 22,000 foreign troops since 2009: Report
Colombia trained 22,000 foreign troops since 2009: Report
Mar 19, 2014 posted by Philip Acuña
The Colombian military has provided training for 21,949 foreign troops between 2009-2013, a report released by the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) revealed.
Citing statistics from the International Affairs Office of the Colombian National Police (CNP), the report shows that the CNP trained individuals from 47 different countries throughout the four year period.
A majority of the countries involved are heavily invested in the fight against drug trafficking; Nearly half the participants were from Mexico.
Other nations with large numbers of trainees were Panama, Honduras, and Guatemala.
Colombia’s New Role
In recent years, Colombia has increased its military and police training services in Central America, the Caribbean, and West Africa.
More:
http://colombiareports.co/colombian-military-trains-21949-foreign-troops-2009-2013/
Colombia minister of justice asks US to shift from aerial drug fumigation efforts
Source: Colombia Reports
Colombia minister of justice asks US to shift from aerial drug fumigation efforts
Mar 19, 2014 posted by Alexandra Jolly
Colombia’s Ministry of Justice is hoping to use US aid previously directed to the aerial fumigation of coca and poppy fields toward alternative crop incentives and other preventative measures.
Colombian Minister of Justice Alfonso Gomez has requested that his counterpart in the United States, Attorney General Eric Holder, divert funding in the countries’ joint efforts against the illicit drug trade toward less combative strategies.
According to a Ministry of Justice statement, Gomez would prefer that some of the substantial aid money Colombia receives from its northern ally be invested in programs that encourage farmers to grow other crops, rather than punish them for a predicament in many cases outside of their control.
“In the case of illicit crops there is a need to attack the causes, i.e. what makes a farmer engage in the growing of illicit crops; and if we direct some of our resources which are currently dedicated to aerial fumigation, we have resources to attack the causes,” said the minister.
Read more: http://colombiareports.co/colombia-ministry-defense-asks-restribution-us-aerial-fumigation-funds/#prettyPhoto
U.S. congressman appeals for change in Cuba policy
Source: Xinhua
U.S. congressman appeals for change in Cuba policy
Mar 19,2014
HAVANA, March 18 (Xinhua) -- Visiting U.S. Democratic Congressman James McGovern on Tuesday urged the U.S. government to normalize relations with Cuba and called on President Barack Obama to change its policy toward the island country.
"I cannot imagine that there is any reason in the world why the United States and Cuba cannot have normal relations ," McGovern told reporters in Havana.
The Massachusetts Democrat, along with a delegation of the U.S. Finca Vigia Foundation, traveled to the island to renew an agreement with the Council of Cultural Heritage of Cuba to preserve the legacy of the American writer Ernest Hemingway in the Caribbean nation.
He visited Hemingway's former home, Finca Vigia, outside the Cuban capital, which now houses a museum.
"I keep urging President Obama to change policy," said McGovern, adding that the U.S. government should remove travel restrictions and begin to normalize trade relations between the two countries.
Read more: http://www.shanghaidaily.com/article/article_xinhua.aspx?id=207426
Former ‘economic hitman’: U.S. ‘death economy’ brought world to brink of destruction
Former ‘economic hitman’: U.S. ‘death economy’ brought world to brink of destruction
By Travis Gettys
Monday, March 17, 2014 13:10 EDT
A former “economic hitman” explained that the United States model for global domination cannot be repeated – and should not be attempted.
Author John Perkins explained last week on the David Pakman Show how American corporations extorted natural resources from developing nations in a process that sounds very similar to domestic privatization schemes.
Perkins, who wrote the 2004 book “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” about his experience working as a chief economist for the engineering company Chas. T. Main, said corporations would identify countries that had resources sought by the U.S. and arrange for them to obtain large loans from the World Bank and similar organizations.
“But the money never actually went to the country,” Perkins said. “Instead, it went to our own corporations to build infrastructure projects in that country. They made a great deal of profit from that.”
More:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/03/17/former-economic-hitman-u-s-death-economy-has-brought-world-to-brink-of-destruction/
Brazil President's Appeal to Poor and Unschooled Voter Bodes Well for Her Reelection
Brazil President's Appeal to Poor and Unschooled Voter Bodes Well for Her Reelection
2014 - January 2014
Written by Newsroom
Monday, 17 March 2014 16:04
Brazil's average voter for the coming presidential election in October is between 25 and 34 years old, has on average a high school education and a low monthly family income, equivalent to US$ 618. He lives in the Southeast region of the country, in a small town with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants.
Candidates who manage to convince the average voter are very likely to reach their objective and currently president Dilma Rousseff, the Workers' Party, PT, candidate for reelection, comes the closest to this average voter profile aspirations.
That helps to explain why Dilma leads in vote intention, with 47% in the most likely scenario, which is enough to win in the first round. This conclusion was drawn from data surveyed by pollster DataFolha on, with a two percentage points margin of error. The survey polled 2,614 people nationwide.
The data show each candidate's strengths and weaknesses. "It's a map to let them know where they should attack and what they should protect," says DataFolha's general director, Mauro Paulino.
More:
http://www.brazzilmag.com/component/content/article/131-january-2014/13070-brazil-presidents-appeal-to-poor-and-unschooled-voter-bodes-well-for-her-reelection.html
On Democracy and Orchestrated Overthrows in Venezuela and Ukraine
Published on Monday, March 17, 2014 by Common Dreams
On Democracy and Orchestrated Overthrows in Venezuela and Ukraine
by Howard Friel
On April 11, 2002, the democratically elected president of Venezuela was overthrown by a group of military officers who installed a prominent Venezuelan businessman as president. The Bush administration announced that day that it supported the coup. Two days later, on April 13, the lead editorial in the New York Times announced that it also supported the coup, claiming that it was a victory for “Venezuelan democracy”:
With yesterday’s resignation of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader, Pedro Carmona…. Rightly, [Chávez’s] removal was a purely Venezuelan affair.
Since nearly every state in Latin America, from Mexico to Chile, denounced the coup and criticized the Bush administration for supporting it, the Times’ editorial backing the coup was to the right of every official statement given by every government throughout the Western hemisphere.
The Times’ editorial also accepted the claim made by Venezuelan military plotters and the Bush administration that Chávez had resigned. However, when Chávez returned to power on April 14 — after only three days and following mass protests and a counter-coup to reinstall the elected president — it was clear that Chávez had not resigned, and that the Times’ April 13 editorial, in addition to supporting a military coup, had misreported an important fact pertaining to the status of the elected Venezuelan president.
More:
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/17-0
Marching Out Of a Dictator's Nightmare: Student Movement Paves Way For Chilean President
AlterNet / By Benjamin Dangl
Marching Out Of a Dictator's Nightmare: Student Movement Paves Way For Chilean President
The left-leaning leader Michelle Bachelet has pledged to tackle income inequality and make quality higher education free.
March 14, 2014 |
“I want to pay special homage to my father and to all those who gave their lives in the fight to recover democracy,” an emotional Isabel Allende said upon taking office as the Senate President this Tuesday. Allende is the daughter of Salvador Allende, the former socialist president of Chile who died during a US-backed military coup in 1973. “I know he’d be proud to see his daughter in this role.”
Later that day, Allende passed the presidential sash to left-leaning President Michelle Bachelet as she entered her second term in office. The two embraced warmly; it was the first time in Chilean history the sash had been passed between two women.
This historic event marks a crack in the legacy of dictator Augusto Pinochet, an event he and his allies probably believed would never be possible when they oversaw the bombing of Allende’s presidential palace, the systematic torture and murdering of thousands of people, and the application of a disastrous neoliberal economy.
Bachelet’s return to the presidency, and her promise for structural changes to Chile’s educational and political system, is the result of a decades-long struggle to move out of the shadow of the Pinochet dictatorship, and is one of the fruits of the more recent student movement for a better society.
More:
http://www.alternet.org/world/marching-out-dictators-nightmare-student-movement-paves-way-chilean-president
Mainstream US Media Is Lost in Ukraine
Mainstream US Media Is Lost in Ukraine
March 16, 2014
Exclusive: The U.S. mainstream news media is reaching a new professional low point as it covers the Ukraine crisis by brazenly touting Official Washington’s propaganda themes, blatantly ignoring contrary facts and leading the American public into another geopolitical blind alley, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
As the Ukraine crisis continues to deepen, the mainstream U.S. news media is sinking to new lows of propaganda and incompetence. Somehow, a violent neo-Nazi-spearheaded putsch overthrowing a democratically elected president was refashioned into a “legitimate” regime, then the “interim” government and now simply “Ukraine.”
The Washington Post’s screaming headline on Sunday is “Ukraine decries Russian ‘invasion,’” treating the coup regime in Kiev as if it speaks for the entire country when it clearly speaks for only a subset of the population, mostly from western Ukraine. The regime’s “legitimacy” comes not from a democratic election but from a coup that was quickly embraced by the U.S. government and the European Union.
Objective U.S. journalists would insist on a truthful narrative that conveys these nuances to the American people, not simply behave as clumsy propagandists determined to glue “white hats” on the side favored by the State Department and “black hats” on everyone that the U.S. government disdains. But virtually the entire mainstream press corps has opted for the propaganda role, much as it has in the past. Think Iraq 2002-03.
You also might remember the mainstream media’s rush to judgment over the Sarin attack in Syria on Aug. 21, 2013. The State Department rashly blamed the incident on the Syrian government despite serious doubts inside the U.S. intelligence community.
More:
http://consortiumnews.com/2014/03/16/mainstream-us-media-is-lost-in-ukraine/
Venezuelan opposition strategy based on provocation, manipulation
Venezuelan opposition strategy based on provocation, manipulation
Friday, March 14, 2014
By Steve Ellner, Puerto La Cruz
The strategy and tactics of the Venezuelan opposition is a replay of events that took place leading up to the coup against Hugo Chavez on April 11, 2002.
The blatant distortions and in some cases lies of the media — CNN in Spanish playing a lead role — represent an essential element in the strategy.
There are two main groups that the United States-funded right-wing opposition has mobilised. From all appearances, the two act in coordination even though their style, and even social background, differs.
One group is non-violent and the other engages in acts of aggression — in some cases endangering lives.
On the one hand, students and other young people carry out protests that the media and the opposition deceptively call “peaceful”. These mobilisations involve, to a disproportionate extent, students from private universities and operate almost exclusively in wealthy areas whose mayors (and in some cases governors) belong to the opposition.
More:
https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/56072
How Florida Reactionaries Undermine Venezuelan Democracy
March 12, 2014
The Anti-Cuba Privateers
How Florida Reactionaries Undermine Venezuelan Democracy
by W.T. WHITNEY
Remember the Tonkin Gulf Resolution? In 1964 that joint congressional resolution propelled the United States into war lasting nine years. Resolution 488, passed by House of Representatives by a 393 – 1 vote on March 4, is a moral and practical equivalent. Its title was “Supporting the people of Venezuela as they protest peacefully for democracy, a reduction in violent crime and calling for an end to recent violence.”
The vote took place under a provision known as “suspension of the rules” which Congress uses for “legislation of non-controversial bills.” The sole dissenter was a Kentucky Republican. Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen introduced R 488. In Florida she represents the 27th congressional district, part of Miami-Dade County. All but unanimous backing for the resolution is reprehensible – for three reasons.
One, the resolution did not tell the truth. It speaks of Venezuelans “protesting peacefully.” Actually as of March 7 protesters had shot five people dead. Three were soldiers. Six deaths are attributed to opposition roadblocks, 30 more because roadblocks prevented access to emergency services. Soldiers had killed three people, one a government supporter. When protests started in Táchira, Mérida, and Caracas in early February, police did not intervene until government offices and police cars were being attacked and burned and until food and medical supply trucks were blocked. The government arrested officers who violated orders to to act with restraint.
The resolution suggests Venezuela is undemocratic. Over 15 years, however, governments there have won 17 out of 18 national elections. They are elections that for fairness and efficiency are “the best in the world,” according to the Carter Center in Georgia. Press freedom abounds: Venezuela’ predominately privately-owned newspapers and television outlets disseminate opposition viewpoints. Their television broadcasts reach 90 percent of viewers nationally.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/12/how-florida-reactionaries-undermine-venezuelan-democracy/
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