Uribe's cabinet members, family members, political party members, senate members, head of his spy agency have been found in the later years to have had strong ties to the paras who intimidated voters throughout Colombia, committed massacres, unbelievably brutal seizures of entire towns, with public torture of the citizens, dismembering citizens with chain saws, slaughtering indigenous Colombians, priests who served the people, teachers, union members, poor farmers, stole their lands, sold their land to multinational corporations, murdered innocent people and claimed they were rebels, and sometimes got assisted by the Colombian military itself.

If you want to find humor, Colombia, and the people around former President Uribe probably won't be the place to look for it.

His brother, as testified by former paras was very connected to these brutal narcotrafficking criminals, along with his cousin, who tried to seek refuge in Panama, IIRC.

It's a very big thing the Colombian government is finally getting more evidence against this man, considering how much power he has had with such support from the U.S. dirty right-wing, and even certain Democrats.

even if the joke couldn't possibly offend anyone. this country was built on that principal. thank you for putting that poster in his/her place for making mildly humorous and almost entirely innocuous joke about a world news event. I'm sure the Columbian people are better off for your humorlessness about the capture of a criminal (and your stern rebukes to someone on the internet).

...as an effort to trivialize the horrors in Colombia committed by the U.S.-backed, U.S.-funded Uribe Mob. We gave them $7 BILLION (and counting) in military aid and told them to...well, what did the Bush Junta tell Uribe to do? We know that murdering trade unionists and other advocates of the poor was a top priority (prep for U.S. "free trade for the rich&quot . We know that clearing FIVE MILLION peasant farmers off their lands--THE worst human displacement crisis on earth--was also quite important (and quite brutal). But these benefits to Monsanto, et al--that is, to U.S. transglobal corporations greedy for land, resources and slave labor--with side-benefits to Uribe's rich supporters (in land theft)--likely hide a deeper set of beneficiaries: the big, protected drug lords, quite possibly including the Bush Cartel, the CIA, U.S. banksters and others. Were Uribe's instructions to consolidate the trillion-plus dollar cocaine revenue stream into fewer hands? That is my educated guess.

To dismiss all this because a reporter got a bit tangled up, as to verbiage, on the spider web of Uribe relationships, doesn't seem right. I noticed the slightly clotted language, too. But I've followed this story a long time and it is quite typical of the way Uribe did things--using the mother of a niece by a late brother, etc.--to run cocaine (or to give orders to rightwing death squads, or to fix elections, or to confer stolen lands on cohorts, or to spy on judges and prosecutors). Like the Bush's and the House of Saud, the Uribe's are a crime family.

I don't mind jokes--but this didn't strike me as a joke. It struck me, at best, as a dumb remark--and at worst as rightwing propaganda. Maybe it wasn't meant that way. In fact, "Six Degrees of Separation" may be an apt metaphor for U.S./Colombia relations during the Bush Junta (--from our taxpayers' pockets to the death squads in Colombia and back to New York in cocaine shipments that, in turn, fund the master thieves and mobsters who were running our own government). But Jberryhill was too cryptic to know if this was his/her intent (a serious comment in the form of a joke?).

There are some VERY SERIOUS questions in all this--as Judi Lynn pointed out. URIBE WAS RUNNING THE U.S. 'WAR ON DRUGS' IN COLOMBIA! WTF?--is one of them. Thousands were murdered and millions robbed and oppressed during his criminal regime. We have some very grave things to investigate and figure out--among them, why has the Obama administration (and Leon Panetta, in particular--a crony of Bush Senior)--been protecting Uribe, up to this point, and has that protection policy changed, and why? (For instance, is it that they've only just gotten a handle on the VAST corruption of the Bush/Uribe criminal network, have now managed to cover up the Bush Junta part of it, to protect Junior, and are ready to jettison the notoriously dirty Uribe*?).

Dark humor might be appropriate. Casual, rather pointless jokes--not so much.

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*(It's quite interesting that Panetta's first visible travel as CIA Director was to Bogota, amidst rumors of a Uribe coup to stay in power. It appears that Panetta yanked Uribe from the stage and vetted and approved a much milder rightwinger, Manual Santos, as president of Colombia. And Santos recently proposed legalizing drugs! How's that for mind-boggling? We spend $7 BILLION (at least) on the "war on drugs" then the Colombian government flips over and calls for legalization? My thesis: Big Pharma plan to monopolize the trade, through legalization, now that all the small players have been--or are being--eliminated (including not only the five million peasant farmers in Colombia and the lesser, "non-player" cartels--in Mexico, for instance--but also all the little marijuana clinics in California--which the FBI is taking care of). This certainly fits with U.S. "free trade for the rich." But Obama/Panetta have quite a lot of "dirty linen" to launder before this clever scheme can be played out, and they have had to do it quite carefully possibly because of what Uribe knows about Junior. It's taken four years but maybe they finally have things set up--um, covered up--so that they can begin cooperating with the Colombian prosecutors, who have created quite a net around Uribe, some 70 of whose closest associates are already in jail or under investigation for ties to drug trafficking, the death squads and other crimes.)

It doesn't have nearly the news penetration of Iran Contra. Wonder why, not.

even enlisting the services of Burson-Barsteller to present a better image for him to the U.S. public, while Congressional Democrats were rejecting _{George W. Bush's} determined efforts to bring in the FTA with Colombia. At one time, Uribe actually had six P.R. firms in the U.S. working for him.

Burson-Marsteller distinguished itself for posterity fighting against the truth of the Argentinian lethal junta:

~snip~
Lobbying Washington

The Foreign Agents Registration Unit of the U.S. Department of Justice details a $300,000 contract between the Colombian government and Burson-Marsteller, one of the world’s larger public relations firms. Its mission is to lobby Washington opinion makers for the passage of the FTA with Colombia. Other U.S. firms which were contracted to work to advance Bogotá’s interests in the U.S. were the lobbying firm Glover Park Group ($40,000 per month) and Johnson, Madigan, Peck, Boland & Stewart (who have been paid $35,000 per month). Regarding Burson-Marsteller, this international public relations firm was a favorite Washington feed bag for some of the worst human rights violators in the Americas who visited the U.S. Capital during the 1970s and 1980s. Of all the military juntas that seized power during this period, demonstrably, the very worst was Argentina (which became one of Burson-Marsteller’s prime clients). It is estimated that the ruling military state killed upwards of 30,000 innocent civilians during its period of rule (1976 -1983). Burson-Marsteller, along with its co-equal during this era (when it came to nurturing brutal hemispheric regimes) – Patton Boggs – high ethical standards were not their trademark. This was the case even after Burson was repeatedly informed of the butcheries being routinely performed by the ruling Argentine military junta against a variety of the nation’s social sectors, including liberal Catholic priests, as well as Jewish students and faculty members at major Argentine universities. Rather than acknowledge the unsavory nature of their clients, Burson scornfully rejected such claims that their clients were little better than psychopaths, and enthusiastically fulfilled the terms of their representational contract with the Argentine military authorities, with their American account supervisors accusing the firm’s critics of being “Marxist agitators.”

Lobbying in favor of the Colombian FTA has been both intensive and expensive, and has spawned a bulldog effort to enthrone half truths on the part of Bogotá and U.S. authorities. The current campaign includes high officials of the U.S. State Department, as well as hired lobbying sources working to enact the FTA project, even though Colombia today demonstrably has one of the worst human rights violation records in the entire hemisphere. These providers can be counted on to supply the U.S. Congress with highly questionable ex parte, if not entirely self-serving evidence, about the situation in Colombia in order to advance the prospects that the FTA eventually will be approved. On April 24, 2007, Charles Shapiro, principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, told the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere that the Escuela Nacional Sindical (ENS), a major Colombian NGO, reported a decline to 38 murders in recent months. Nevertheless, what Mr. Shapiro did not bring to the attention of the U.S. legislators was that the same organization previously had reported that 72 trade union figures had been murdered in 2006, which marked an increase over the previous year.

High Rates of Political Assassinations
President Uribe has used a different custom set of tailored figures to argue that only 25 trade unionists were killed in Colombia in 2006, but Human Rights Watch (HRW) maintains that the number is considerably higher. According to HRW, “the only way to create [Uribe’s] artificially low numbers is by excluding unionized teachers from trade unionist categories. In fact, according to official Colombian statistics, if you include unionized teachers, 58 trade unionists were killed last year, a substantial increase over the 40 murdered the previous year.” It is shocking that with so many statistics coming from respectable organizations, CSIS, echoing its client’s previously cited figures, states that a “positive trend continued in 2006,” without even bothering to acknowledge HRW’s objection to this manipulation of numbers. At this point, the question can be seriously posed whether the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Unit should consider adding CSIS to its list of those prepared to do checkbook research for their clients and require it to list its name and officers with that office.

DU'ers most certainly know about the FTA. We're Democrats. The ones who don't know #### are Republicans, of course.

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so that makes you a what??

Yeah, yeah, I get it, Uribe's brother and the lady weren't married. So she's the partner of the late brother. But what a stupid headline. Does the niece even have anything to do with it? It's practically designed to allow Jberryhill's dismissive trivialization of the US-backed Colombian narco-junta under Uribe and the death squads.