so many good people--thousands--have been murdered by the U.S.-funded/trained Colombian military or its closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads. And where there is political murder on this scale, there are, of course, many other kinds of brutality and oppression--for instance, the military and their death squads have driven FIVE MILLION peasants from their lands over the last decade. Organized efforts of small farmers and farm workers have been particularly targeted. Anyone who raises their head as an advocate of the poor in Colombia--whether in a rural or urban setting--can be deprived of their livelihoods, as well as their lives.

And still good people try! It is a lesson to us all. We have seen amazing courage in the leftist democracy movements in other countries--the tens of thousands of Venezuelans who risked their lives to support their constitution and their elected president in 2002, the tens of thousands in Bolivia who risked their lives to change Bolivia's "apartheid" system of vicious white racism and U.S. corporate oppression, including yet another U.S.-supported coup attempt in 2008, and much more--numerous current and recent former presidents in Latin America were themselves jailed and tortured by fascist regimes among the horrors that their countries suffered under U.S.-supported dictatorships. The current and former presidents of Brazil. The current president of Uruguay. The recent former president of Chile. All imprisoned and horribly tortured. Some of them belonged to leftist guerrilla groups in their youths--one, the current president of Nicaragua, led the armed resistance--because, for many people, there seemed to be no other response possible to these U.S.-supported horrors than to take up arms against them. But even more courageous, in my opinion, have been the members of the numerous peaceful movements for change of the last decade, often led by the same people. As Gandhi understood, you literally yield up your life to the brutal forces who are beating, torturing and even killing you, to bring about change--within the oppressors themselves and within the society. It is not cowardice to refuse to respond violently--it is a higher courage.

And that is what we have seen, time and again, in Latin America, in country after country--the truly amazing courage of peaceful change--such as we are seeing now in the most U.S.-oppressed country of all, Colombia, in the Marcha Patriotica movement.

I am awed. And I fervently wish that more of our people could be informed about struggles like this one-- courageous struggles for democracy in our own hemisphere, but I know why they are NOT informed. The last thing in the world that the corpo-fascist press wants our people to know is how evil U.S. government actions have been (and continue to be) in LatAm--how subservient to transglobal corporate and war profiteer interests, and how costly to us (billions of our tax dollars used to brutalize and oppress others; our name as a country dragged through the mud and blood)--and the largely successful democracy movement that has opposed U.S. domination. The corpo-fascist press--which is as bad in LatAm as it is here--goes out of its way to slander democracy as tyranny, not because people are being tyrannized--they have never been so liberated as in the countries with Leftist governments--but because corporations and the wealthy are finally being put in their place. The 1% are not allowed to rule in these countries any more. Their interests have been made subservient to the interests of the whole--to the good of the country and the society--as it should be. And the corpo-fascist press does not want our people to know that this is possible and, indeed, that it is happening on a large scale in the Americas.

I salute you, Judi Lynn, for your awesome efforts to keep us informed about movements like this--and I also salute the alternative news sources that you cite, which are themselves awesome entities fighting the good fight against the disinformation of the corporate press.