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Bacchus39's 12-word "hit and run" posts).
If you had seen your mother or father, or other family members, or neighbors, or union leaders, or local teachers or elders, chainsawed by Uribe's fascist paramilitaries, and their parts thrown into mass graves, or you had seen your corn crop or your animals or your kids sprayed by Super-Roundup, time and again, to drive you from your land and into urban squalor, where you are lucky to get some slave labor job of 14 hour a day, 7 days a week, repetitive misery at pittance wages, you, too, might be tempted to take up arms. I've often thought about these armed FARC leftists, and what must drive them into exile in the jungle, for what has to be a very hard life. Most people wouldn't choose this. Who wants to be hunted? Who wants to live hand to mouth fighting the well-armed (supported by billions in US tax dollars) Colombian military and their spinoffs, the rightwing paramilitaries who torture and chainsaw their captives? No doubt some have bad motives. No doubt some have become corrupt and uncaring, living a life of armed rebellion. But desperation and rage at what they've seen, of rightwing horror and oppression, more than likely motivates most FARC guerrillas. They are dinosaurs, like their rightwing paramilitary counterparts, and like the Bushite/Uribe murderous "war on drugs". Violence breed violence. In only rare cases has violence resulted in BETTER conditions. And the rest of Latin American has learned this lesson, and are creating a leftist revolution peacefully through democratic institutions (--with leftist governments elected in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile and Nicaragua, and strong leftist movements in Peru, Paraguay and Mexico, likely to win future elections). But it is nevertheless understandable what may drive young people in particular into violent revolution. Also, it has been well documented by human rights groups and unions that the bulk of the deaths in the Colombian civil war (in the 80% range) have been caused by the rightwing paramilitaries and the rightwing government, not by FARC. And the death toll isn't the whole toll. The "war on drug" devastation to small peasant farmers, including DNA damage to people and animals, ruination of farmland and water sources, and the dislocation of tens of thousands of poor people driven from rural areas (so their lands can be taken over by the big drug lords who are protected by the government, and by Monsanto and Chiquita Banana and Drummond, and by Bush "free trade" biofuel producers) are a huge additional impact of Bush/US military aid to Colombia.
That child's drawing that Judi Lynn posted above says it all. Children don't lie. The U.S. brings death and devastation. Torture, murder and the poisoning of everything is a our name. That helicopter and that airplane dropping toxic pesticides on all living things were paid for by the U.S. of A.
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