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Judi Lynn

(160,542 posts)
Tue Apr 9, 2019, 10:10 PM Apr 2019

Duque bails on meeting with native Colombians


by Adriaan Alsema April 9, 2019



President Ivan Duque arrived in southwest Colombia on Tuesday, but failed to meet with regional indigenous authorities as promised.

Instead of meeting with the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC) and Afrocolombian leaders from the region as part of an agreement with the community, Duque made a statement and left.

According to the CRIC, “the president was suspicious of his own security scheme that was in charge of the military forces.”

“Although the social ‘minga’ offered him all the guarantees of security with the indigenous guard, the president did not accept the dialogue, leaving the people waiting,” the native Colombian organization said.



Locals and press waiting in vain for the president (Image: CRIC)

More:
https://colombiareports.com/duque-bails-out-on-meeting-with-native-colombians/

Duque knows the whole world knows he hates everyone who can't do him any important favors, among the European-descended people, and that he despises all people of color.
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denverbill

(11,489 posts)
1. Thanks for all your posts on Central and South America Judy.
Tue Apr 9, 2019, 10:26 PM
Apr 2019

I don't often post on them but I feel like the American media is completely one-sided when it comes to those countries. If it's a right-winger, they'll accept the state media's accounts. If it's a left-winger, they accept the opposition. No mainstream in the US is balanced when it comes to Central and South America.

Judi Lynn

(160,542 posts)
2. You're so right. I don't think most U.S. Americans will ever grasp this.
Wed Apr 10, 2019, 12:37 AM
Apr 2019

The perception managers have done such a thorough job, kids grow up believing everything they read is real, and that's sad.

I didn't start catching on, myself, until well into my adult years. People can preoccupy themselves with so many other things, often stupid stuff, they never suspect a thing until they get an insight, or a sudden realization that they need to check out, get more information, and everything can start changing immediately.

As soon as you realize what has actually happened you know you have reached a point of no return, that you can never go back to the ignorance you grew up with, never see things the same way again.

Don't know if you have ever read information on the man involved in the overthrow of Guatemala, in 1954, called the "father of propaganda," and "the father of spin," but so much can be explained when you realize he may have started a lot of the deception, but there are many, many more involved in keeping this apparatus running which keeps us in the dark:

Wikipedia:

Edward Bernays

Edward Louis Bernays (/bərˈneɪz/; German: [bɛɐ̯ˈnaɪs]; November 22, 1891 ? March 9, 1995) was an Austrian-American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations".[3] Bernays was named one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century by Life.[4] He was the subject of a full length biography by Larry Tye called The Father of Spin (1999) and later an award-winning 2002 documentary for the BBC by Adam Curtis called The Century of the Self. More recently, Bernays is noted as the great-uncle of Netflix co-founder, Marc Randolph.

His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom" and his work for the United Fruit Company connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. He worked for dozens of major American corporations including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and for government agencies, politicians, and non-profit organizations.

Of his many books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928) gained special attention as early efforts to define and theorize the field of public relations. Citing works of writers such as Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Walter Lippmann, and his own double uncle Sigmund Freud, he described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct—and outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desirable ways.

. . .

United Fruit and Guatemala
See also: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état
The United Fruit Company (today's Chiquita Brands International) hired Bernays in the early 1940s for the purpose of promoting banana sales within the United States. Promote them he did, by linking bananas to good health and to American interests, and by placing them strategically in the hands of celebrities, in hotels, and other conspicuous places. Bernays also argued that United Fruit needed to put a positive spin on the banana-growing countries themselves, and for this purpose created a front group called the Middle America Information Bureau, which supplied information to journalists and academics.[50]

United Fruit shut down the Middle America Information Bureau in 1948 under the new presidency of Thomas Dudley Cabot. Bernays resented this change but stayed on with the company, for a reported annual fee of more than $100,000.[51] Bernays worked on the national press and successfully drummed up coverage of Guatemala's Communist menace.[52]

The company became alarmed about the political situation in Guatemala after Jacobo Árbenz Guzman became president in March 1951. On March 21, 1951, Bernays told United Fruit's head of publicity, Edmund Whitman, that Guatemala could reprise Iran's recent nationalization of British Petroleum:

We recommend that immediate steps be undertaken to safeguard American business interests in Latin American countries against comparable action there. News knows no boundaries today. . . . To disregard the possibilities of the impact of events one upon another is to adopt a head-in-the-sand-ostrich policy.

He recommended a campaign in which universities, lawyers, and the US government would all condemn expropriation as immoral and illegal; the company should use media pressure "to induce the President and State Department to issue a policy pronouncement comparable to the Monroe Doctrine concerning expropriation." In the following months, The New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, Time, Newsweek, and the Atlantic Monthly had all published articles describing the threat of Communism in Guatemala. A Bernays memo in July 1951 recommended that this wave of media attention should be translated into action by promoting:

(a) a change in present U.S. ambassadorial and consular representation, (b) the imposition of congressional sanctions in this country against government aid to pro-Communist regimes, (c) U.S. government subsidizing of research by disinterested groups like the Brookings Institution into various phases of the problem.

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

(I hope you will find this entry interesting. I think it is an insult to everyone in the country who cares about the truth.)

denverbill

(11,489 posts)
3. I hadn't heard of Bernays before but United Fruit Company I certainly have.
Sun Apr 14, 2019, 09:53 AM
Apr 2019

They are probably more responsible than anyone for the economies of Central and South America being such a shambles so they could maintain their quite literal 'banana republics'.

If there is a 'deep state' in the United States, it's the folks in the CIA and media who keep this crap going. What troubles me the most is that even people like Barack Obama, who I thought pretty highly of, seemed perfectly content to accept the situation and jump right in on the anti-Chavez boat. And you don't hear hardly any Democratic voices against it either, whether it's Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador, etc.

They condemn Maduro as a dictator who needs to be removed from office, and say not one damned word about the dictator of Saudi Arabia who murders reporters and jails and tortures dissidents.

Sorry for the delay in replying. I just saw this today.

Judi Lynn

(160,542 posts)
4. There have been a few Democratic Congresspeople over the years who seemed to get the picture,
Sun Apr 14, 2019, 04:29 PM
Apr 2019

but they have the total country to awaken from the misinformation first, and they probably realize it's going to take more than their solitary efforts during one term to start hacking through the lies to get people's attention, and focus them on the truth.

At times they rise above the crowd and make statements that prove they know what has happened, what continues to happen, and support healthy dialogue, not death, greed, torture, terrorism, but mature, honest, open relations with Latin Americans, and moving beyond the filthy history which has been controlling all relationships, and keeping the corrupt, unscrupulous, vicious politicians in charge as they betray their countries to indulge the interests of brutal corporations.

Truly painful to watch, and maddening, seeing the criminals holding entire countries prisoner to soulless foreign interests.

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