Impossible that Uribe did not know about phone hacking: Durant (U.S. ally)

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Colombia Reports

Impossible that Uribe did not know about phone hacking: Durant
Friday, 15 July 2011 15:47
Alexander Stone

The vice president of the European Parliament has said that it is impossible that ex-President Alvaro Uribe did not know about the illegal telephone interceptions carried out by the Colombian intelligence agency (DAS).

"It is impossible to think that (Uribe) didn't know," said Isabelle Durant during a press conference in Bogota on Friday, reported El Espectador.

Durant has been in Colombia for five days, having been invited by the International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) and the delegation of the European Union (EU) to meet with people involved in the case.

At the end of November 2010, a total of 43 people including the ex-Senator Piedad Cordoba and politician Ivan Cepeda, accused Uribe, who governed the country for two consecutive terms from 2002 to 2010, of initiating "crimes against humanity, psychological torture, and political persecution."

Read more: http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/17684-impossible-that-uribe-didnt-know-about-phone-hacking-durant.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. Food for thought: Colombia: The Truth behind the Poll Figures

Colombia: The Truth behind the Poll Figures
News from Colombia | on: Friday, 15 July 2011


Colombian media have greeted the latest polls showing President Santos’ approval rating and the country’s economic growth with great fanfare. According to a recent poll, Santos’ approval ratings stand at 75%. Other figures show economic growth in the last trimester hit 5.3%. However, the economic growth figures say nothing about the distribution of that growth, and the approval ratings are open to question.

Opinion polls in Colombia, as elsewhere, are conducted in calls to household telephones. Colombian telecommunications networks mainly cover the larger towns and cities. Just three cities account for half of the country’s phone lines – Bogota, Cali and Medellin. Overall, Colombia has an average telephone line density of 17%, but in many rural areas this drops to less than 10%.<1> Therefore polls are heavily skewed towards the populations of the three main cities. Moreover, since they are conducted by fixed-line telephones, they cannot reach the more than 7 million Colombians who live on less than a dollar a day, and who cannot afford telephone lines.

Therefore the polls are really only an accurate indicator of the opinions of the population of Colombia’s three biggest cities with access to a fixed line telephone. They largely exclude the rural population and those too poor to have a fixed telephone line. According to ECLAC 39.7% of the urban population lives in poverty.

Some critics also point out that in a country with a high level of targeted violence against voices critical of the government, where there is a large network of paid informants, and where the intelligence services are known to have tapped telephones and pass information to paramilitary death squads, many people are unlikely to want to give their true opinions about political matters. Furthermore, threats against journalists mean that the media is largely uncritical of the substance of government policy reducing how much people know about the truth of the economic and political situation in the country.

More:
http://www.justiceforcolombia.org/news/article/1040/Colombia:-The-Truth-behind-the-Poll-Figures