Colombia Burns: It's Not About "tax Reform", It's About Hunger And Dignity
Tuesday, 6 July 2021, 1:30 pm
Article: Lateinamerika Nachrichten
The millions of poor in an enormously rich country can no longer bear to choose between very little and nothing. They have very little to lose. The tax reform proposal of 2021 was the straw that broke the camel’s back. A commentary by the Colombian journalist Hernando Calvo Ospina.
Colombia’s system of government has been at permanent war with its people since the beginning of the 19th century.
It began as soon as the Venezuelan Simón Bolivar left power in Bogotá, when he found himself betrayed and to be assassinated. Among other things, he had brought freedom to Colombia, fighting with his troops of ragged braves, almost all of them Venezuelans, until the Spanish crown was driven out. Prior to any other state in Latin America, Colombia’s political leadership and Catholic Church began to enact repressive laws to persecute “communism.” I am talking about the year 1920.
Colombia: eliminating internal enemies
But even if we start only from the 1960s, we can say that Colombia, without needing dictatorships and always under the patronage of the United States, has enforced the doctrine of National Security like no other nation in the region. President Kennedy, whose administration conceived and expanded the doctrine, congratulated the Colombians with admiration for their ability to implement it.
This strategy of eliminating the “internal enemy,” the political opposition, is still going on. And under this doctrine – read carefully and excuse the comparison – each Colombian president, after four years in office, leaves more dead and disappeared for political reasons than all the dictatorships that the United States has established in Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina, combined and in the period of 16 years.
Crematoria to crocodile farms were created to make communitarian leaders disappear. There is no other country in the world where mass graves have been found with over 2,000 people in each.
More:
www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO2107/S00065/colombia-burns-its-not-about-tax-reform-its-about-hunger-and-dignity.htm
