That's what the U.S. "war on drugs" and billions of dollars in our tax money has been used for, in Colombia--killing hundreds of union leaders and other advocates of the poor. Looks like Honduras is going that way, too.
This is so corrupt, so murderous and so bloody wrong that it makes you weep. And it isn't over--more billions of our tax dollars are being poured through the Pentagon and the agencies of the U.S. police state, to kill yet more leftists and to create the social and civil mayhem and disruption--for instance, FIVE MILLION peasant farmers brutally displaced from their lands in Colombia--that makes exploitation by transglobal corporations easy and hugely profitable.
If people can't organize, if people are too afraid to engage in political advocacy, if rightwing thugs are looking over their shoulders at the polling booth, if workers suffer slave wages, and the poor majority is exhausted by efforts to feed their families, and taking care of the young, the ill and the old, and other hardships--losing their little plots of land by which they feed their families, forced into urban squalor, oppressed by U.S.-armed/trained police and militaries and associated rightwing death squads--civic life, too, becomes nearly impossible, and the electorate CANNOT elect representatives to attend to their interests. For one thing, many of those leaders are dead.
That's what the U.S. "war on drugs" has done wherever it has shown its ugly, ugly face. It is a lie. It is an excuse. It is the necessary preliminary to Corporate Rule, especially in a region like Latin America, where democracy is being reborn in countries such as Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador. Countries under the U.S. thumb MUST suppress leftist democracy movements, because, believe me, the people in Colombia know what's happening in Venezuela and these other countries. Indeed, tens of thousands of Colombians have fled into Venezuela--for jobs, for health care, for education and for human and civil rights--most of them in flight from the U.S. armed/trained Colombian military and its closely tied paramilitary death squads.
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