Reply #2: Colombian ag minister Restrepo omits the U.S.-funded Colombian military role in land theft [View All]

and the BBC lets him get away with it.

I'm glad you added the SOA Watch article to the thread, because they identify the main force behind the displacement of FIVE MILLION peasant farmers--and that is the Colombian military, using OUR MONEY to murder, torture, beat, rape, threaten and terrify peasant farmers, and OUR MONEY to pay U.S. corporations' toxic pesticide manufacturers to spray and destroy peasant farms, which mostly grow food, and poison children and animals, in which what I believe has been a consolidation of the trillion dollar-plus cocaine revenue stream into fewer hands and direction of that revenue stream to U.S. banksters and others (the Bush Cartel? the CIA?).

I think that that is what this is all about. The U.S. "war on drugs"--segued into the "war on terror" by the Bushwhacks--has been used to get control of--not to stop--the drug trade. And the Colombian military has been key to that effort.

The secondary purpose of clearing the peasants off the land is to prep this bloody ground for U.S. "free trade for the rich" (for transglobal corporations like Monsanto, Chiquita, Drummond Coal and Exxon Mobil) and to create a slave labor force in urban areas (for transglobal retailers), dependent on Burger King for food, while local organic food production is destroyed. This is standard operating procedure for "first world" exploitation of the "third world," but in this case with the U.S. "war on (promotion of) drugs/terror" as handy cover.

And the third purpose is to decapitate labor union and grass roots leadership. According the Amnesty International, 92% of the murders of trade unionists (often farmer workers and miners) in Colombia have been committed by the Colombian military itself (about half) and by its closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads (the other half). They attribute only 2% of these murders to the leftist guerrillas. This gives us an idea of the PROPORTION of violence in Colombia--MOST of it committed by the Colombian military ($7 BILLION in U.S. funding) and its cohorts.

The BBC--in what has become its increasingly rightwing/corporate tone and 'journalistic' methods--is ignoring well-known facts and permitting a Colombian government rep to lie about them--without contradiction, without question, and without citing or quoting knowledgeable sources that could set the record straight.

We also need to ask what the U.S. military and its 'contractors' have been doing in Colombia while all these people were being murdered, terrorized and displaced.

Why did the U.S. (Bushwhack) ambassador William Brownfield seek and obtain a SECRET U.S./Colombia military agreement, in 2009, granting "total diplomatic immunity" to all U.S. military personnel and all U.S. military 'contractors' in Colombia?

And what are the facts behind the U.S. State Department "fining" of Blackwater, early this year, for "unauthorized" "trainings" of "foreign persons" IN COLOMBIA "for use in Iraq and Afghanistan"?

The fascists running Colombia may, indeed, be intending to restore some of the peasant land--although you gotta wonder how that's going to go in a country that has been run as a criminal enterprise for more than a decade--but, just as here, the real culprits--the constructors of this criminal enterprise--will go free. "We need to look forward not backward" on the crimes of the very rich and the very powerful is the operative principle in Colombia, as here. Alvaro Uribe--like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld--is still running around free, with protections from prosecution provided by the U.S. government, along with academic honors and prestigious appointments to "launder" his image.

This massive land theft in Colombia was NOT primarily the work of "paramilitaries, rebels and drug dealers." It was OFFICIAL policy--implemented in "pacification" programs designed by the Pentagon and the USAID. Where is the accountability for U.S. military funding, training, provision of "technical assistance," provision of high tech surveillance and drone aircraft, design of "pacification" programs and other aid to the Colombian military? Where is accountability for what U.S. military personnel and 'contractors' were DOING during this bloodbath in Colombia?

The BBC--like the rest of the corpo-fascist press--is whitewashing this tremendous scandal.