Uribe’s Attack on Obama
The Far Right’s Spokesman in Latin America Is Worried About What Could Be Long Overdue Changes in US Policy
By Al Giordano
Special to The Narco News Bulletin
April 3, 2008
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe with former US
president Bill Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative
in New York, September 2007.
D.R. 2007 Reuters
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe revealed his worry about the US presidential contest this week to the Bogotá daily El Tiempo: “I deplore that Senator Obama, aspiring to be president of the US, ignores Colombia’s efforts.”
By “efforts,” Uribe referred to his administration’s public relations campaign to improve Colombia’s deserved reputation as the hemisphere’s worst abuser of human rights, particularly as they apply to workers and unions. Senator Barack Obama, on Wednesday, had cited “the violence against unions in Colombia” as his primary reason for opposing a proposed US-Colombia “free trade” agreement.
That Uribe singled-out Obama is revealing: the Illinois senator’s rival for the Democratic nomination for president in the United States, Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, also says she opposes the US-Colombia “free trade” pact. That clearly doesn’t worry Uribe: the Clinton organization has a long history of backing – politically and economically – the Colombian far right, its narco-politicians and paramilitary death squads, of whom Uribe is supreme leader. In 2000, then-US president Bill Clinton went on Colombian national TV to announce “Plan Colombia,” the multi-billion dollar US military intervention that keeps Uribe and his repressive regime in power to this day.
The Associated Press has now run with the story in English, a reaction to Obama’s statement yesterday before the AFL-CIO of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia:
”I will oppose the Colombia Free Trade Agreement if President Bush insists on sending it to Congress because the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements.”
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