FARC didn't murder these, but they did murder thousands of others

by Paul Kinsella - Various Wed Mar 05, 2003 21:18 paulkinsella53 at yahoo dot com 53 Lorcan Grove, Santry, Dublin 9, Eire 087-9748511

By right wing government paramilitaries Joe Ranii you CIA piece of shit.

by Des Wed Mar 05, 2003 21:25

I would not dwell too much on the drugs issue Joe, the boys and girls in Langley could give the FARC lessons on the narcotics "business". Remember Laos?

by Joe Ranii Wed Mar 05, 2003 21:52

Mr Kinsella appears to bw unaware that Colombia is a democracy. President Uribe was elected in a landslide less than a year ago. Does that make Colombians a "CIA etc.." (I won't dignify Knsella's illiterate insult by repeating it.)
A somewhat unimpressive politician, the only thing Uribe had going for him was the Colombian people's disgust at the way their country is under attack from an organization that has no agenda but death and drugs, one which spurned all efforts by Uribe's predeccessor to begin a peace process.
As to AUC paramilitaries, hundreds of these have actually been killed in clashes with the National Army, and thousands more imprisoned, but perhaps Kinsella from his comfortable seat 6000 miles from the Colombian jungle can't manage to keep informed about this.
It is easy, though immature, to romantically idealize the FARC. The sad truth is that even as Kinsella sounds off, even as you read this there are hundreds of lost souls cowering in FARC kidnap dungeons, denied light and liberty and even life itself by the FARC gangsters. Farmers, teachers, doctors, guilty of nothing except existing. It is sickening to see that ignorant people such as Kinsella see nothing wrong with this crime against humanity.

by Seanin Thu Mar 06, 2003 01:59

And we complain about the Yanks being ignorant....

by James McKenna Thu Mar 06, 2003 02:20

John Poindexter who was named in a Costa Rican Government Comittee report as a major cocaine trafficker was appointed head of the Infomation Awareness Office the very day a major imminent "terrorist attack" was pumped out on the US media. People didn't get to focus on the fact that a man who was drummed out of his office as head of the National Security Agency for subverting the constitution had been brought in to run the IAO by the little Bush.

Just another player with a heavy responsibility for the present state of Colombia since he and his US spook friends created and ran the right wing gangs now involved in the trafficking of cocaine.

FARC generally only receives money from the farmers who grow the leaves and have no access to the US markets or actual cocaine .

by Chris Evans Thu Mar 06, 2003 03:57

"Joe Ranii", you obviously do not know what is happening in Colombia. If you put aside your ideological ravings just for one moment, you will notice that the vast majority of murders are committed by the state as a result of class war throughout the country, a well known fact by the human rights groups. The corrupt right wing authoritarian regime does not want peace, it wants to eliminate all opposition to its disasterous US neoliberal agendas! The FARC, ELN and trade unions have repeatedly demanded peace with social justice and dialogue with the government, not the other way around! No insurgency can survive for over 4 decades without widespread support, Latin Americanists claim they have political influence of aproximately 50% of Colombia's municipalities. According to the DEA, the insurgency is not involved in drug trafficking but the right wing paramilitary death squads are! And lastly, it was the FARC who put down the helicopter, that is what revolutionaries fighting fascists do. Your "anti-war" liberal rhetoric and ignorance of the subject does you no credit.

Viva FARC.

by Patricia Thu Mar 06, 2003 04:15

A number of problems arise from the right wing perspective. First of all, Colombia is not a democracy, but a capitalist dictatorship common in the third world enforced by increased U.S. military aid and training designed to be used against its own people, the U.S. counterinsurgency in Colombia is a classic case in point. Alvaro Uribe was elected with only 46% of the 24 million people registered to vote in Colombia, a country of 40 million people, participated in the May ballot, leaving Uribe, who had a media mogul as his running partner, with just 5.8 million votes; less than a quarter of the electorate. Third World "elections" are meaningless as the working class is not represented, this has been well documented, particularly in the Latin American case. As for former president Andres Pastrana, it was he who ended the "peace process" by sending troops into the DMZ, Uribe on the other hand, has eliminated any chance for peace by making the end of the civil war his prime objective. The paramilitaries work hand in glove with the military according to knowledgeable observers and a Human Rights Watch report. It is this gangster- "democracy" U.S. style, which is responsible for crimes against humanity.

U.S. OUT OF COLOMBIA!

by Seanin Thu Mar 06, 2003 04:47

Stop blaming the US for everything. Don't you think that Colombians themselves have some responsibilty for how they run their country? Do you think that if the US had never been involved there would be less evil in the Americas?

by joe ranii Thu Mar 06, 2003 08:56

There have been several inane responses to my posting (how many of the posters have ever been in Colombia ? or even speak Spanish ???). But I have time only to deal with one of these.

Patricia sloppily uses labels in my case --"the right wing perspective"... Think, Patricia, don't sloganize. I am not a right-winger, nor are the many Colombian leftists who realize that the FARC campaign is literally a dead end and can never bring the social change that Colombia needs.
You can't build justice on a foundation of injustice, it's as simple as that.

Patricia is just patently wrong when she says "Colombia is not a democracy, but a capitalist dictatorship".
I suspect I am wasting my time debating with a person who flatly states a lie like this, but I will try to spell it out once more. Colombia is a democracy. It may be a corrupt and inefficient one, but then again so is Ireland. Does that mean that we in Ireland should start kidnapping people and placing no-warning bombs ?

As to Uribe's mandate ("elected with only 46% of the 24 million people registered to vote in Colombia") that leaves him with pretty much the same proportion of the vote as Bertie Ahern. Does Ahern, like him or not, have no mandate ?

Patricia's long list of absurdities continues
"Third World "elections" are meaningless as the working class is not represented"...

That's wrong too. (I won't get into the case of Brazil, Ecuador etc., where leftist candidates have run and won recently...) But in Colombia also there was a leftist candidate in the 2002 presidential electionsa. He did quite well, almost 10% of the vote, not bad in a country where FARC and ELN atrocities have sullied the term "leftist".

As I don't have all day to give lessons on Colombia, I can deal with just one more inanity from Patricia:

"president Andres Pastrana, ... who ended the "peace process" by sending troops into the DMZ"

First, DMZ is a bad translation of the Spanish, since it stands for De-Militarized Zone. The zone in question was by not at all demilitarized, it was full of armed FARC. Second, it was Pastrana who originally created that zone, so I would think he had every right to end it when he finally saw that it was just being used to cage kidnap victims. Most Colombians wanted him to end it long before he did. The question should be: why did the FARC not avail of the opportunitiy for peace and dialogue offered by the Colombian government ?
And why do naive people like Patricia and others think that kidnapping and mass murder are good things ?

by Ray - (as editor) Thu Mar 06, 2003 09:43

Yahoo News Report
by Joe Ranii Wed, Mar 5 2003, 6:54pm
joeranii@yahoo.com
Colombian ELN blamed for latest bombing atrocity
FARC are not the only murder group in Colombia, though they are probably the most virulent. The Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN) has also strayed far from the idealism of its founders, and is now reduced to kidnappings and bombing of civilian "targets".

BOGOTA, Colombia - Suspected rebels set off a car bomb Wednesday in a shopping center in northeastern Colombia, killing at least seven people and wounding 20 others, authorities said.

Cucuta Mayor Manuel Guillermo Mora told RCN Radio that the number of victims had risen to seven from an initial report of one fatality.

Police Gen. Luis Alfredo Rodriguez blamed rebels of the National Liberation Army, or ELN, for the attack in Cucuta, 250 miles northeast of Bogota.
The car was parked in a basement lot, police said.

Television images showed shocked survivors wandering around the shopping stalls, Ash Wednesday marks still on their foreheads. Firemen, rescue crews and police officers worked their way through the smoke as frightened passers-by looked on.

edit this story | hide this story | delete this story

by kokomero Thu Mar 06, 2003 10:47

I find the deranged postings claiming that Colombia is a democracy hilarious! What passes for democracy in South America bears almost no resemblance to the flawed system we have here, and almost starts to make it look good.

Most countries in South America are ruled by an elite who control the media. As we know who controls the media, controls information, and hence who gets elected.

Just look at what happened recently in Venezuela when a media inspired coup was instigated by the 5 privately owned TV companies when President Chavez tried to nationalise the State oil company and you'll get a taste for what sort of democracy is on offer in South America.

And of course if the US don't like whom you elect "democratically" they can always plot with the military trained in the School of the Americas to bring your government down or invade you outright.

Wake up fools!

by Seanin Fri Mar 07, 2003 04:02

Great to see an open minded person on here. It's often quite disturbing to read the ravings of some the "strangers to reason" who post here.

THey're clearly biased and worse still, their hearts are full of hatred.