Colombia Leader Seeks Wide-Ranging Changes, and Looks Beyond the U.

[Judi Lynn]

Colombia Leader Seeks Wide-Ranging Changes, and Looks Beyond the U.S.
Sunday, March 06, 2011
By SIMON ROMERO, The New York Times

NEIVA, Colombia -- President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia glows when speaking of a plan by Chinese and European investors to build a city for 250,000 people near the Caribbean coast. His foreign minister has circled the globe in the seven months that Mr. Santos has been president, visiting places like Cambodia, but not Washington.

In a reconciliation that has taken many in Latin America by surprise, Mr. Santos is now so friendly with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who just last year was accusing Mr. Santos of plotting to assassinate him, that he takes delight in referring to Mr. Chávez as "my new best friend."

Mr. Santos, in a wide-ranging interview here, insisted that the United States, which has long considered Colombia its top ally in the region, remains a "great partner," even as some in Colombia's establishment grow increasingly frustrated with a stalled trade deal and a steady reduction in American counterinsurgency aid.

But he also emphasized a remarkable foreign policy move under way in which Colombia is shifting its gaze from the United States to Asia, repairing ties with Venezuela and Ecuador and adopting a measured posture within Latin America that stands in stark contrast to the hawkish style of Mr. Santos's conservative predecessor, Álvaro Uribe.

More:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11065/1130181-82.stm

[Peace Patriot]

1. Romero is the slimiest New York Slimes so-called journalist since Judith Miller.

So this article really needs to be analyzed not for what it apparently says but for the slimebag corporate/war profiteer agenda and peccadillos of its writer.

It's interesting that I first gave the article a scan not realizing that it was Simon Romero, and my first hit was that the article was 90% bullcrap but that the 10% might be worth thinking about (the part about Santos' improved relations with Venezuela and Ecuador--whereas Colombia's prior president, mafioso Alvaro Uribe, was fomenting a state of war with those countries).

Romero is so unreliable and so extremely biased against the new left in Latin America that we can apply my Bush Junta rule to him--whatever he asserts, the opposite is true. (It is a pretty infallible rule as to Bushites). So let's take it plank by plank...

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"President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia glows when speaking of a plan by Chinese and European investors to build a city..." (my emphasis)

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He "glows"? Odd word. Romero is trying to make us like Santos, to think of him as a progressive planner. I think we can take that as 99% bullcrap. What is this project really all about? Romero says that Santos' foreign minister has been visiting "places like Cambodia." Then, way down in the article, Romero says...

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"Mr. Santos said his government was evaluating a ... project involving Chinese and European investors to build a city for as many as 250,000 people south of Cartagena. That project, which would be designed by the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill, would include an industrial park to manufacture products for export throughout the Americas." (my emphasis)

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Sweatshop workers in Cambodia make something like 25 cents a day. That is a country to which multinational corporations leap from, say, Mexico, if the workers in Mexico get too uppity. I would guess that Santos' foreign minister was visiting "places like Cambodia" to study techniques for massive abuse of labor in this "industrial park" where they will manufacture products for "the Americas" that undercut prices in the countries with good wages (say, Venezuela). Santos has got FIVE MILLION displaced peasant farmers, brutally displaced from their lands and driven into urban squalor, as a gift from his predecessor and the military, and got a further gift from them in decapitation of labor union leadership in Colombia (thousands killed, including many teachers). So he's got this massive terrified population of people with no work and no skills (other than farming, at which they are very good). This he can sell to foreign multinationals. (And the slaughter of union leaders goes on--fifty more murdered last year.)

One thing to look for in lying scumbag articles like this are the black holes where information should be. What Santos' foreign minister was trawling for in "places like Cambodia" is unstated. He couples it with the Chinese and the investment in the "industrial park" but DOESN'T say that Cambodia is an investor. So why does he throw in Cambodia? Black hole, there.

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"...but not Washington."

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Hm. What is Simon up to here? It's simply NOT credible that "Washington," having made a $7 BILLION deposit on owning Colombia (our tax dollars), is just going to walk away--especially not over the murders of trade unionists, which was one of the main purposes of the $7 BILLION in military aid. (Half the trade union murders in Colombia are attributable to the Colombian military itself, and the other half to their closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads--according to Amnesty International.) Anyway, with the Scumbag Congress that ES&S/Diebold has given us, Hillary can have all the "free trade for the rich" that her heart desires in Colombia.

The truth is that Colombia doesn't need to lobby Washington. Colombia is already bought and paid for. And that is, indeed, the opposite of what Simon says. He lets his interviewee paint Colombia as a sort of neglected "friend." $7 BILLION into that "friend," and counting.

Moving on to paragraph 3...

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"...some in Colombia's establishment grow increasingly frustrated with ... a steady reduction in American counterinsurgency aid." (my emphasis)

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Strange that he doesn't mention the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs." "Counterinsurgency aid." It was the Bush Junta who added the "war on terror" to its alleged purposes in Colombia. And they have, indeed, slaughtered a lot of FARC guerrillas, on our dime. Aside from the utter outrageousness of our tax dollars being used for Colombians to slaughter Colombians in a civil war that has been going on for 70 frigging years, there is something else under the skin of this Romero omission of the U.S. "war on drugs" in describing what "some" in Colombia are "increasingly frustrated with." Whenever a corpo-fascist reporter uses this generic term, "some," I think we can pretty much figure that they are either speaking for their bosses/owners or for the CIA. No quote. No attribution. "Some in Colombia." It's likely somebody here that is all hot for more "terrorism" money (money with which to terrorize) in Colombia.

But there is additional possibility. And that is that the "war on drugs' is of no interest to Colombia's rich elite because they're all making money hand over fist from the trillion-plus dollar cocaine trade. Uribe consolidated the trade into fewer hands, using the US "war on drugs" as cover--whacking rival drug lords, stealing millions of small, campesino coca leaf and food farms, and taking over the FARC's coca leaf farms and operations. So now that that rich revenue stream has been secured, they're worried about somebody ("terrorists") taking it (but they really mean the poor). "Counterinsurgency aid." Trade unionists, teachers, community activists, journalists, political leftists--anybody who might get in the way of the rich getting richer, including by means of this vast illicit trade. That's who our money has been used to whack, in addition to the armed Colombian guerrillas.

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"But he also emphasized a remarkable foreign policy move under way in which Colombia is shifting its gaze from the United States to Asia, repairing ties with Venezuela and Ecuador and adopting a measured posture within Latin America that stands in stark contrast to the hawkish style of Mr. Santos's conservative predecessor, Álvaro Uribe." (my emphasis)

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"Remarkable." "Stark contrast." Whoa! Simon grows even more poetic. Colombia is "shifting its gaze." M-m. I think this may be copy straight from the CIA. I think it is a script. And I think the "opposites" rule is definitely in play here. "Shifting its gaze from the United States...repairing ties with Venezuela...". Far from it: a U.S. script is being carried out. There is no "shift" whatsoever. The U.S. is just using its client state, Colombia, to topple the Chavez government and as many other leftist governments as they can in a different way. The "hawkish style" of Alvaro Uribe WASN'T WORKING. Uribe was grievously alienating not just Chavez but everybody--the presidents of Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay and other countries. He was a nasty, abrasive, treacherous little shit, who encouraged and benefited from death squads and major trouble-making, and was furthermore a Bush Cartel tool in the lucrative cocaine trade. He was hated. And the U.S. simply could not make any corporate/war profiteer inroads with Uribe as its only "friend" in the region. Uribe helped to solidify all these new leftist leaders.

"A measured posture." Now here Romero uses the right word. Posture. It is a posture. And its goal is to loosen leftist ties, to work "divide and conquer" angles for the U.S., and to undermine leftist economies with sweatshop labor and other methods (such as lack of environmental regulation) to make it cheap for multinationals to operate in Colombia, thus to weaken labor, environmental and other regulatory laws in the better governments of the region, along with undercutting prices. Economic warfare.

"Conservative predecessor." First of all, Uribe was/is a radical fascist and a criminal. This use of the word "conservative" to describe criminals like Uribe and Bush is a tactic for legitimizing the worst criminal behavior--mass death, massive theft. It may be that Santos is something of a "conservative," rather than a radical fascist and criminal. We have yet to know him as completely as we do Uribe (or Bush). But "conservative" may be charitable for a leader who capitalizes on the crimes of his predecessor and is likely colluding on his immunity. Secondly, Romero is trying to position Santos as some kind of centrist. He is, at best, a rightwinger and likely a far rightwinger, and we can't know yet if that includes crimes--only that he was Defense Minister while many crimes were committed, by the military and by the Uribe government.

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This following is perhaps the most nauseating part of this article...

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"Smiling broadly, Mr. Santos, the Harvard-educated scion of a Bogotá publishing family that is one of Colombia's most powerful clans, said he would be pleased if these social projects resulted in his being called a "traitor to his class" by the end of his presidency, a nod to the title of the biography of President Franklin D. Roosevelt by H. W. Brands.

"If in four years they are going to call me the small Roosevelt of Colombia, then I would be honored," said Mr. Santos, an unabashed admirer of the New Deal. He said the connection went deeper, explaining that Roosevelt asked his great-uncle, Eduardo Santos, a former president of Colombia, to build support in Latin America for what would become the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Europe after World War II. "

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It is utterly appalling that this shit, Simon Romero, would let Santos get away with such a self-comparison--to FDR! It is the worst kind of mind-fuck of New York Slimes readers. Santos was Defense Minister during the slaughter of thousands of his own people, by the military that he was Defense Minister of. He was Defense Minister during the wretched, murderous "false positives" scandal, and during a criminal enterprise of epic proportions, aka the government of Colombia under Uribe. The CIA script about Santos is bad enough. But this fawning, despicable LIE is really beyond the beyond--that Santos is even remotely comparable to FDR. "Smiling broadly, the Harvard-educated scion...".

:puke: :puke: :puke:

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The rest of the article--all about how Santos thinks that the U.S. is "neglecting" Latin America--is pure CIA script. This IS the CIA script for Latin America--that our multinational corporate monsters and war profiteers should look closer to home for oil and other resources, for slave labor and for democracies that they can destroy. It all fits nicely with the Scumbag Congress and I expect to see it yield results; in fact, it already has in something like a billion dollars of our tax money--combined Pentagon, USAID, State Department and other funds all to rightwing groups in Latin American countries with leftist governments--not to mention billions in U.S. military bases and the unknown CIA budget. There is no "neglect." That is a fucking lie.

[Judi Lynn]

2. You captured slimy little Simon Romero so damned well. Nailed it.

"Glowing" is NEVER a word one would associate with this guy. "Grinning," of course. Like a Cheshire Cat. Like "The Joker."

In "shifting its gaze" the industrial/military people undoubtedly are reflecting upon places like the island sweatshops in Asia where they lterally lock in the workers at night, where they are guarded by men with guns, where women are given abortions because otherwise it would interfere with their ability to maintain their work pace. Places which attract people like Tom DeLay who go there to sing their praises, and to reprsent them in the U.S. Congress, throwing the factory owners all kinds of breaks at the treat of the U.S. taxpayers.

Nice for the owners, pure, living hell for those unfortnate enough to have been born poor, who end up working in these slave camps for almost nothing at all, and treated worse than dirt.

Just as soon as they can knock off the remaining Colombians who even dream of liveable wages, and even the most modest work safety standards, etc.

I am so certain you are fully, and accurately focused on the decision they have decided they must put a new face on things. It IS true Uribe was absolutely loathed by the human leaders in the Americas. He was detested, and for every reason in the world. Hideous little #####. He could NEVER have been used in attempting to seduce the others.

Thank you for penetrating this bag of goo from Simon Romero. He is, indeed, the Latin American Judith Miller, in every sense. Your comments are always very worth reading, and remembering.