This is the Latin American government that receives more USA government aid than any other, and which hosts Latin America's largest USA military force to assist in its efforts to suppress popular uprisings. USA government officials tell us our troops are in Columbia as a part of "war on drugs" and that the insurgents there a communists.
Columbia is but the latest chapter of the USA government's nefarious deeds in Latin America since President Monroe essentially declared that Latin America belongs to the USA.
Those interested in earlier chapters of USA complicity in death squads, coups, and suppressions of popular movements should visit the National Security Archive website hosted at George Washington University in D. C.
Colombian Government Shaken By Lawmakers' Paramilitary Ties
Investigation Leads to Arrest of Current, Former Officials
By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 18, 2006; Page A17
BOGOTA, Colombia, Nov. 17 -- The government of President Álvaro Uribe is being shaken by its most serious political crisis yet, as details emerge about members of Congress who collaborated with right-wing death squads to spread terror and exert political control across Colombia's Caribbean coast.
Two senators, Álvaro García and Jairo Merlano, are in custody, as is a congressman, Eric Morris, and a former congresswoman, Muriel Benito. Four local officials have been arrested, and a warrant has been issued for a former governor, Salvador Arana. All are from the state of Sucre, where the attorney general's office has been exhuming bodies from mass graves -- victims of a paramilitary campaign to erode civilian support for Marxist rebels in Colombia's long conflict.
The investigation, which has revealed how lawmakers and paramilitary commanders rigged elections and planned assassinations, has shaken Colombia's Congress to its core. One powerful senator from Cesar state, Álvaro Araujo, has warned that if he is targeted in the investigation, it would taint relatives of his in the government and, ultimately, the president, whom he has strongly supported.
The arrests and disclosures about the investigation, which is focusing on at least five more members of Congress, come weeks after prosecutors leaked a report revealing how paramilitary fighters have killed hundreds of people, trafficked cocaine to the United States and sacked government institutions while negotiating a disarmament with Uribe's government.
2 comments:
Mexico, like Colombia, is headed down the same road of Drug War failures. So let me pitch to you an alternative idea: Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. It’s comprised of cops, judges, prosecutors and others in the criminal justice system, as well as concerned citizens, who are all opposed to the War on Drugs We believe that the govt should control the manufacture and distribution of all drugs—not the cartels, criminals and international terrorists.
Quite a provocative view for cops to take…but who better to explain the issue than the very people tasked with promulgating the policy?
Sincerely,
Mike Smithson
Speakers Bureau Coordinator
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
http://www.leap.cc speakers@leap.cc
I am in complete agreement. I have been advocating the legalization of all now illegal drugs for over twenty years.
I understand that economic market forces are irresistible. Demand for a product will be supplied, whether the product be legal or otherwise. As USA citizens did in repealing the Volstead Act that prohibition does nothing but raise the price of the prohibited product to the point of enabling a black market and encouraging the crime and violence attendant to black markets.
If now illegal drugs were legalized in the USA the drug cartel would immediately be put out of business and Columbia and other nations beset by drug cartels could return to rule by civil government.
I commend the many law enforcement officials who understand that prohibition is a malignant policy and who are working for a change in that policy.
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