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did for Colombia!
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"Although corruption and violence are rampant in other ports, Buenaventura’s own realities worsen these problems. For instance, 80 percent of the population lives in poverty, 25 percent is illiterate and 30 percent is unemployed. If this was not enough, armed group (guerrilla, emergent bands and drug gangs) fight for the control of a strategic port that is the exit point of approximately 40 percent of Colombia’s cocaine and entrance of arms and smuggled goods"
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Too much of it wasted on murdering trade unionists, human rights workers, teachers, community activists, journalists, political opponents, peasant farmers and anybody who looked like a Leftist. Too much of it wasted on displacing 5 MILLION peasant farmers, with state terror--THE worst human displacement crisis on earth--and giving their lands to Alvaro Uribe's pals, U.S. corporations and the big, protected drug lords. Too much of it wasted on perpetuating a 70-year civil war that should have been settled long ago. Too much of it wasted on bonuses to the Colombian military for upping their body counts by enticing boys with jobs, murdering them and dressing their bodies up like FARC guerillas. Too much of it wasted on U.S. and Colombian war profiteers and spreading more weapons around and "training" "foreign persons" IN COLOMBIA "for use in Iraq and Afghanistan." Too much of it wasted on spying technology--to spy on judges, prosecutors, political opponents and others.
Meanwhile, next door, Venezuela--with no help from the U.S. government and constant bad-mouthing and sabotage--cut poverty in half and extreme poverty by more than 70% throughout the nation, wiped out illiteracy and provided education through college and health care to all Venezuelans, earning Venezuela the title of THE MOST EQUAL COUNTRY IN LATIN AMERICA, on income distribution, in a recent UN Economic Commission report. Venezuela did all this and more while having to deal with a huge refugee problem from Colombia--about a quarter of a million peasant farmers and other poor people fleeing over the border from the Colombian military and its death squads, into Venezuela, in need of immediate and long term assistance.
What Uribe did was to create small enclaves of a protected and secure rich urban elite who are benefiting from the rape and ruin of the country by U.S. multinationals like Drummond Coal, along with perpetrating a "scorched earth" murder and displacement policy against the poor in the rest of the country, including not just military and rightwing death squad savagery but environmental ravages from the toxic agriculture of Chiquita, Monsanto and their ilk, and toxic pesticide spraying of peasant farmers, their children, their animals and their food crops for growing a few coca leaves. The urban elite and the very rich have benefited--including the multinational corporate rich and big drug traffickers--from Uribe/Bush policies, and of course the war profiteers have benefited, and the poor have gotten poorer and poorer and poorer.
It's no wonder there's no money for job creation, infrastructure development, bootstrapping of the poor with education, health care and other assistance such as land reform and Colombia's many other needs. The rich have taken all the profits, including $70 BILLION that wasn't theirs.
$70 BILLION for the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs." And the cocaine just keeps on flowing out of the broken down port on the Atlantic and every other porous exit out of Colombia.
Meanwhile, in Venezuela, the Chavez government just signed up eight oil companies, from as many countries, to develop the Orinico Belt (biggest oil reserve on earth--twice Saudi Arabia's, according to the USGS), on Venezuela's terms, including the major share of profit going to Venezuela's social programs. It took tough bargaining. It took Leftists being elected to run the government. It took staring Exxon Mobil down. It took nerve, guts, FDR-like courage on behalf of the poor majority. It took fending off a U.S.-supported rightwing coup d'etat in 2002 and other plots against Venezuela's elected government, including an assassination plot hatched in the U.S.-funded Colombian military. But it got done. Venezuelans are now hugely benefitting from their own oil, and they have funds for infrastructure--for construction of schools, medical clinics and housing for the poor and other projects--for funding a well thought out land reform program, for improving Venezuela's food sovereignty, for creating a national police academy (to improve professionalism among the police forces) and many other needs.
What's wrong with Colombia? Among many tragic flaws, they got cursed with a government in cahoots with the Bush Junta. The countries with governments that resisted U.S./Bushwhack domination are doing well--Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and others--while most Colombians live in poverty and often in sorrow from the deaths and other brutalities inflicted upon them.
Poverty, sorrow and memories of deaths and brutalities inflicted with the generous aid of the U.S. government.
There is a mass grave in La Macarena, Colombia--a region of particular interest and activity by the U.S. military and the USAID--where up to 2,000 bodies have been found. The local children became sick from drinking the local water. That's how the grave was discovered. The decaying bodies were polluting the local water supply. The graves have dates (but no names) ranging through the last half decade of the Bush Junta through 2009. Local people say that the bodies are of local 'disappeareds'--community activists and other community members who went missing. Investigations are on-going.
Uribe, by the way, is now teaching at Harvard and Georgetown, and the Obama administration has given him a prestigious appointment to an international legal commission. And various witnesses against him have been extradited to the U.S. or given weirdly fast asylum in Panama. The rewards for laying waste to his country, in the interest of the U.S.
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