and straight back to the big annual US taxpayer-financed Colombian gov't military aid, which already is well over $9 billion since 2000.

Making Colombia "great" again by reinstating lethal doses of industrial strength Monsanto's Roundup which has always drifted all over the place, destroying crops in ordinary Colombian farmers' fields, devastating the domestic livestock, and fish, birds, other animals throughout the areas.

Images created by Colombian school children when their teachers assigned them the project of showing the effects of US-financed aerial spraying, claimed to be destroying "coca" planted in Colombia, as it has been for thousand of years, just as it has throughout the Andes in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile....

















Bush Policy of Spraying Poison on Children

redstatehatemonitor
Community
Wednesday February 27, 2008 · 6:38 AM CST

School children from both Colombia and neighboring Ecuador actually drew these pictures included in this diary. The United States government's primary strategy for combating the narcotics industry and the leftist FARC guerillas that control an area of Colombia the size of SWITERLAND involves aerial crop spraying with a deadly poison sold on the market as Roundup weedkiller. The spray not only kills coca plants, but any other, legal, crops in the vicinity. Sadly it also kills livestock and far worse it has also killed many children.

. . .

Over 2.5 million people have now fled from the fighting and the aerial fumigation of their farms. These internal refugees, unemployed, living in squatters' communities in the cities to which they have fled, are the principal result of the war so far. Many Colombians believe that they are its intended result, that the real aim of the war against insurgents and against drugs is really to get small farmers off their land in order to make room for development. Under Colombia's coca fields is oil. Paramilitaries terrorize people into leaving their land, and labor organizers are the group most targeted for assassination. More than 3,000 have been killed in the past 15 years.

Colombia is a prime example of U.S. Military clout being used to serve the interests of big oil corporations . Plan Colombia is real bad news for the poor of Colombia because it increases the level of terror in their country. The Whitehouse fails to mention the group responsible for 70 percent of that violence is the government of Colombia and the right wing paramilitary forces which receive aid and full cooperation from Colombia's army.

. . .

The combination is thought to increase the danger to animal and human life. Even the regular formula sold in the U.S. Carries a label warning against possible damage to aquatic organisms, pets, grazing animals, rabbits, tortoises, fowl--and people. The label warns that one must not eat the fruit or nuts of trees that have been in the area sprayed with the chemical for 21 days. But these safety standards are not applied to the aerial spraying in Colombia.

More:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2008/02/27/464886/-Bush-Policy-of-Spraying-Poison-on-Children







Drawing by Colombian children in Putumayo of the before
and after effects of fumigation on their lands
(photo courtesy of Witness for Peace-Colombia).

The thing is, Plan Colombia's Roundup spraying seems to kill every manner of crop except coca - thereby driving more and more otherwise honest farmers into cultivating it out of desperation.

Accidentally on purpose?

The farmers who grow that crop, themselves, remain poor, as always, too.

The Colombian children, and the Ecuadorean children, whose areas get flooded with souped-up Roundup which lays waste to everything, including people and animals, fish and birds, as well as the crops, clearly experience enough trauma in their early years to drive anyone completely mad. So much death everywhere.

It's just wrong, from every angle. Everyone associated with the "war on drugs" game makes out like a bandit except for the poor.

It is obvious that there were electoral fraud at different levels. @IvanDuque had neither the preparation nor the true support of the Colombians. The electoral system is the same through which Uribe was elected. Now who is in charge of investigating in Colombia if they are corrupt? NHM?

-Puzzler

they'd likely join the 150+ lawyers and activists killed in the last 18 months (plus many more exiled after receiving threats).

If it was this bad under the relatively progressive Santos, you can imagine what conditions are likely to be under a known narco-puppet like Duque.

COLOMBIA: "Mark Him on the Ballot - The One
Wearing Glasses"
Constanza Vieira
IPS
May 8, 2008

. . .

The odd thing was that in both the 2002 and 2006 elections, despite the fact that the
villagers had already decided to vote for Uribe, the far-right paramilitaries, who had
committed a number of murders since 1998, when they appeared in the region that was
previously dominated by the leftwing guerrillas, pressured the local residents to vote for
Uribe anyway.

The paramilitaries did not kill people to pressure the rest to vote for Uribe, as they did in
other communities, but merely used "threats," said L.

"If you don't vote for Uribe, you know what the consequences will be," the villagers were
told ominously.

. . .

The odd thing was that in both the 2002 and 2006 elections, despite the fact that the
villagers had already decided to vote for Uribe, the far-right paramilitaries, who had
committed a number of murders since 1998, when they appeared in the region that was
previously dominated by the leftwing guerrillas, pressured the local residents to vote for
Uribe anyway.

The paramilitaries did not kill people to pressure the rest to vote for Uribe, as they did in
other communities, but merely used "threats," said L.

"If you don't vote for Uribe, you know what the consequences will be," the villagers were
told ominously.

And on election day, they breathed down voters’ necks: "This is the candidate you’re
going to vote for. You’re going to put your mark by this one. The one wearing glasses,"
they would say, pointing to Uribe’s photo on the ballot, L. recalled.

"One (of the paramilitaries) was on the precinct board, another one was standing next to
the table, and another was a little way off, all of them watching to see if you voted for
Uribe," she added, referring to the less than subtle way that the death squads commanded
by drug traffickers and allies of the army ensured that L.’s village voted en masse for the
current president in both elections.

More:
https://www.citizenstrade.org/ctc/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ips_guywithglasses_05082008.pdf

No doubt you are aware that Alvaro Uribe, and his entire family have been deeply involved with and connected to the paramilitary death squads for decades. This information has been available from former paramilitary members in testimony during trials, many of whom were murdered directly afterward. Uribe's brother started a deathsquad on his own property years ago. These paramilitaries are also involved in narcotrafficking, as well as horrific political assassinations, and massacres of farmers and villagers, and union organizers, and indigenous people trying to live on their own lands who have refused to move and allow the paras to sell their land to others, as in mine-owners, or agricultural industrialists, etc.

Paras are well known for approaching small farmers, demanding the man sell them his land for a tiny, tiny sum, then, if the man refused, telling him it's o.k., they will take the matter up with his widow. They are responsible for turning so many people out of their own property, owned by their families for generations, and making them homeless, turning Colombia into a country with the world's 3rd largest displaced populations for year after year, with former farmers ending up lost in the cities, with no where to go.

The wealthy landowners and industrialists have owned Colombia since forever after the Spanish invaded and took the land, and they damned well intend to keep it that way, regardless of the price the poor have to pay.

150 lawyers and activists in the last 18 months alone - and that was during the moderate Santos administration.

This narco-puppet Duque will probably make Cheeto look like Olof Palme.

His entire mega-criminal family behind him, he's been personally handled by a sadistic, greedy, hate-driven Teflon fascist.

Great imagery, by the way.

Couldn't resist adding, at no charge the following pictures:











Looks as if Uribe goes everywhere with Duque, doesn't it? What a show.
Uribe wants everyone to know who really is going to be in charge, again.

Now that's the name of a man who will bring peace and prosperity while respecting human rights!

Do I really need to use the emoji here?

especially in English, I would be most grateful if they could post them.

Much of the world (especially the US media) will simply ignore all of this, move on, and/or do the usual false equivalency

Thank you,

-Puzzler/Martin

At: https://colombiareports.com/

The host of DU's Latin America group, Judi Lynn, is also great to consult with on all news from south of the border, as well as science and other topics.

You're right, Puzzler: there is, generally speaking, much too little interest in foreign news these days (except royal weddings). The days of Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather bringing the world to our living rooms are long gone, sadly.

-Martin

I'd keep an eye on Argentina as well.

Trump's old pal Macri adopted Bushonomics, allowed a speculative bubble to build up - and, as anyone could have told him, it's now popping.

Sad, as Cheeto would say.

Throughout Latin America, what has happened in Venezuela has been a big influence in terms of people not wanting similar things to happen in their countries. I am sure this is going to depress the vote for any far left candidates. I can't say I blame the voters.

This video made the rounds not too long ago via some other medium but I also found it on Youtube so I can post it here:

These are the kind of jokes being made. If you don't speak Spanish, the joke is, the guy repeatedly telling the lion not to mess with him and that he is breaking his sneaker, then finally, the guy saying if you don't stop, I am going to send you to Venezuela. The lion then reacts in horror.

Sorry, the facts have very little to do with lions, or with Chavez, or with Maduro.

Summary of the violent conflict which has lasted so long in Colombia:

La Violencia in Colombia
The transfer of power in 1946 ignited tensions between the Liberal and Conservative parties, resulting in violent political conflict, particularly in rural areas. The loss of peace foreboded the return to competitive and exclusionary politics, similar to the situation preceding the War of a Thousand Days. In the 1940s and 1950s, however, violence and exclusion more than threatened the political system; they ruptured it. A democratically elected administration became repressive and dictatorial, which led to its overthrow by the sole military coup in the twentieth century. Only by having the reins of power taken from both of their hands did the traditional elites recognize that the most effective way to avoid interparty civil wars and possible military dictatorships was to join forces and restrain their competitive tendencies.

In 1946 Conservative Mariano Ospina Pérez assumed office and was faced with the difficult task of ruling from a minority position, as Liberals had received the majority of all presidential votes and continued to control Congress. Ospina tried to confront this situation by incorporating Liberals into a coalition government. Meanwhile, the level of political rivalry intensified in the countryside, where Conservatives pursued a course of violence in an attempt to consolidate power after sixteen years out of office. Liberals retaliated and, under Jorge Eliecer Gaitán's leadership, became highly mobilized in their demands that the Ospina government confront the social needs of the modernizing and urbanizing nation.

Gaitanism, the populist social movement led by Gaitán as a faction of the Liberal Party, increased dramatically between 1946 and 1948. Gaitán supported the democratic rather than the revolutionary path to reforms. By advocating the passage of more socially liberal policies, he appealed to the masses and he united urban workers and campesinos. As the movement grew, observers believed that Gaitán would be elected president, which may have happened had he lived to see the next election.

Liberal victories in the 1947 congressional elections demonstrated the party's strength among the electorate. Ospina became increasingly concerned with retaining Conservative control and provoked Liberals further by resorting frequently to police enforcement of Conservative
privileges in the rural areas. The Liberal appointees in his government resigned in protest in March 1948.

The following month, the inevitable explosion occurred in the form of the most violent and destructive riot in the country's long history of conflict. On April 9, Gaitán was assassinated at midday in the heart of Bogotá. An angry mob immediately seized and killed the assassin. In the ensuing riot, some 2,000 people were killed, and a large portion of downtown Bogotá was destroyed. The Bogotazo, as the episode came to be called, was an expression of mass social frustration and grief by a people who had lost the man who represented their only potential link to the decision-making process.

More:
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/colombia/la-violencia.htm




Jorge Eliecer Gaitán



Bogota after the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán

Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Biography
Mayor (1902–1948)
Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was a political leader who was considered a champion of the Colombian people and was revered as a martyr after his assassination.

Synopsis
Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was born January 26, 1902 in Bogotá, Colombia. He organized a short-lived party called Union Nacional Izquierdista Revolucionaria (Left Revolutionary National Union). His maiden speech as a congressman was a polemic attack on the plantations owned by the United Fruit Company. Gaitán served as mayor of Bogotá and minister of education. He was assassinated on April 9, 1948.

https://www.biography.com/people/jorge-eli%C3%A9cer-gait%C3%A1n-39091


Wikipedia:

Jorge Eliécer Gaitán

Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Ayala (January 23, 1903 – April 9, 1948) was a politician, a leader of a populist movement in Colombia, a former Education Minister (1940) and Labor Minister (1943–1944), mayor of Bogotá (1936) and one of the most charismatic leaders of the Liberal Party. He was assassinated during his second presidential campaign in 1948, setting off the Bogotazo[2] and leading to a violent period of political unrest in Colombian history known as La Violencia (approx. 1948 to 1958).

. . .

Early political career
Gaitán was active in politics in the early 1920s, when he was part of a protest movement against president Marco Fidel Suárez.

Gaitán increased his nationwide popularity following a banana workers' strike in Magdalena in 1928.

After U.S. officials in Colombia, along with United Fruit representatives, portrayed the worker's strike as "communist" with "subversive tendency", in telegrams to the U.S. Secretary of State,[11] the government of the United States of America threatened to invade with the U.S. Marine Corps if the Colombian government did not act to protect United Fruit’s interests. Strikers were fired upon by the army[12] on the orders of the United Fruit Company, resulting in numerous deaths.

Gaitán used his skills as a lawyer and as an emerging politician in order to defend workers' rights and called for accountability to those involved in the Santa Marta Massacre.[12] Public support soon shifted toward Gaitán, Gaitán's Liberal Party won the 1930 presidential election.[12]

. . .

The assassination provoked a violent riot known as the Bogotazo (loose translation: the sack of Bogotá, or shaking of Bogotá), and a further ten years of violence during which at least 300,000 people died (a period known as La Violencia). Some writers say that this event influenced Castro's views about the viability of an electoral route for political change.

Also in the city that day was another young man who would become a giant of 20th-century Latin-American history: Colombian writer and Nobel Prize Laureate Gabriel García Márquez. A young law student and short story writer at the time, García Márquez was eating lunch near the scene of the assassination. He arrived on the scene shortly after the shooting and witnessed the murder of Gaitán's presumed assassin at the hands of enraged bystanders. García Márquez discusses this day at vivid length in the first volume of his memoirs, Living to Tell the Tale. In his book, he describes a well-dressed man who eggs on the mob before fleeing in a luxurious car that arrived just as the presumed assassin was being dragged away.

Two former CIA officers recognized in the book "The Invisible Government" CIA involvement in the murder of Gaitán.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Eli%C3%A9cer_Gait%C3%A1n

in Latin America right now.

Joshua Goodman and Christine Armario, Associated Press
Updated 5:26 pm, Monday, June 18, 2018



BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Uncertainty loomed over Colombia's fragile peace deal on Monday with the victory of one of its most hawkish critics in a bruising presidential runoff that laid bare deep divisions in the South American nation as it emerges from decades of bloody conflict.

Ivan Duque, a law-and-order disciple of a powerful former president, won Sunday's vote with a commanding 12-point lead over rival Gustavo Petro, a former rebel and ex-Bogota mayor.

On the campaign trail, Duque repeatedly vowed to roll back benefits inscribed in the deal, such as demanding that rebel commanders behind scores of atrocities first confess to their war crimes and compensate victims before they are allowed to take up the congressional seats they have been promised in the accord.

But once he takes office in August from the peace deal's architect, President Juan Manuel Santos, Duque is likely to tread softer if he wants to broaden his base of support and unite the country, analysts said.

More:
https://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/Doubts-looms-over-Colombia-peace-deal-with-hawk-s-13004647.php