Colombia's new leader offers talks to Venezuela, FARC

Source: Agence France-Presse

Colombia's new leader offers talks to Venezuela, FARC
NINA NEGRON
August 8, 2010 - 12:09PM

Juan Manuel Santos was sworn in as Colombia's new president and immediately offered talks to heal a diplomatic rift with Venezuela, and to end 40 years of FARC rebel warfare provided they first disarm.

Santos, 58, is the chosen successor of conservative President Alvaro Uribe, who leaves office with an 80-percent approval rating after a major crackdown on rebel violence and an adversarial relation with leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

"I prefer a frank and direct dialogue (with Venezuela), hopefully as soon as possible," Santos said after thanking countries who offered mediation in the row with Caracas over Uribe's accusations that FARC rebels have found safe haven in Venezuela.

And in Caracas, Hugo Chavez said he was ready "to turn the page," and work with Santos. He said he asked his top diplomat to set up a meeting with Santos.

Read more: http://news.brisbanetimes.com.au/breaking-news-world/colombias-new-leader-offers-talks-to-venezuela-farc-20100808-11pwm.html

Something struck me as odd - does Uribe really have a 80% approval rating in Colombia? Or is it another one of those GWB-type approval ratings - that is, pure fiction?

Thousands of trade unionists, human rights workers, community activists, teachers, journalists, peasant farmers and others have been murdered by the Colombian military and its closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads. Five MILLION peasant farmers have been driven from their land by state terror--the second worse human displacement crisis on earth. About a half million poor Colombians have fled into Venezuela and Ecuador for refuge from the Colombian military.

So, some stranger knocks on your door or approaches you on the street, in Colombia, or--if you're wealthy enough to have a telephone, calls you--and asks you, 'Do you like Uribe?", watcha gonna say? Same with Santos. He was Defense Minister during all this carnage. Imagine Donald Rumsfeld's wet dream of a political system. That's Colombia. Bought and paid for with $7 BILLION of your tax dollars and mine, in military aid.

Democratic conditions do not exist in Colombia. No poll or vote in Colombia can be trusted.

It's that kind of "popularity." :(

is remarkable. Since the advent of celphone technology, telephone ownership is widely proliferated among all levels of the Colombian population. You don't have to be "wealthy enough to have a telephone", just as in the U.S. Secondly, there are important news organizations in Colombia that routinely conduct polling. The respondents don't "risk getting their heads shot off". Every poll, national and international (including the most important poll of all, Presidential elections) have demonstrated that Uribe is extremely popular - the figure is generally put at around 70%. These comments are just cheap shots without any foundation in fact.

of the Colombian military's murders of trade unionists, from UN human rights reports on the prevalence of extrajudicial murders by government forces, and from widespread reading about the "false positives" scandal and other Colombian military and death squad scandals, about the scandal of the close ties of so many government officials to the death squads, the bribery scandals, the massive spying scandal, the huge scandal of the displacement of five million peasant farmers. That alone would screw up polls and elections. Do they have cell phones? They can't even afford food! They are abandoned people, consigned to urban squalor--or to slave labor on Chiquita and other corporate and rich landowners' farms. They don't count. And if these farmers try to organize to keep their lands, they get shot. You think the survivors are going to form a union, organize to get out the vote, back candidates, advocate for their cause? How many people are living in conditions of extreme poverty, squalor, fear and despair, whom we don't even know about, because a lot of them don't register as displaced for fear of government reprisals? Colombia has the biggest discrepancy between rich and poor in Latin America. And the poor aren't counted and don't count in the bloody halls of power.

I get my information from many sources. Where does your information come from? The government?

The Colombian government and the military have one of the worst human rights record on earth, and are responsible for the second worst human displacement crisis. They are notorious liars. State terror is endemic in many regions. The government was spying on everybody--judges, legislators, political opponents, the media. Anybody steps out of line, they get death threats. You think people can disclose their views truthfully in these circumstances, and freely engage in political activities? That is simply not so. The pResident of the country called everybody who opposes him "terrorists." And he meant it. Oppose him and you may just get blown away in some dark alley. Honest journalists get death threats and leave the country, for the sakes of their families, or self-censor. The majority of the people in Colombia--the poor and the extremely poor--do NOT have human and civil rights. Advocates of the poor put their own lives in peril. Colombia also has the lowest rate of voter participation in the region. This is a fascist state, and furthermore a client state of the U.S. which has been funding this repression to the tune of $7 BILLION.

Uribe--former go-to guy for the Medellin Cartel, graduated into being the go-to guy for the Bush Cartel--could not have been elected dogcatcher in a real democracy. He may be wildly popular with the have's. So would any dictator who steals from the poor to give to the rich. The poor in Colombia have been the victims of systemic repression, brutality, torture, murder and displacement, and, in the case of millions of small farmers, outright theft of their lands. And until things change in Colombia, and the victims and their survivors can speak, without fear of reprisal, and can organize politically in their own interest, and can exercise their rightful majority power, the bottom line conditions for democracy do not exist in Colombia and polls and vote counts in Colombia cannot be trusted.

There are more than enough articles dealing with the subject to have allowed you the chance to determine the truth if it had been important to you, as well as personal comments from decent DU posters who have lived there. If it becomes absolutely necessasry you might consider thinking things through if you've got the time to work it into your schedule.

~snip~
opinion polls are unreliable in Colombia. Pollsters tend to reach only middle and upper class urban residents. Poor and rural Colombians, who tend to not have access to landlines or other standard survey methods, are rarely surveyed.

More:
http://thewip.net/contributors/2010/06/fundamental_change_in_colombia.html

~~~~~

~snip~
What is seldom understood about the vast majority of these polls is that the opinions are gathered through telephone interviews via landlines. This methodology is highly problematic for several reasons.

First, many Colombians do not have landlines. While cell-phone use is widespread in Colombia, simple infrastructures such as landlines are not. Not only villages and medium-sized towns, but also some major cities, lack the infrastructure to ensure even electricity on a daily basis, let alone fixed-line optical networks.

Second, interviewees can easily be identified through their landline status. This lack of anonymity inevitably counts against the expression of negative opinions of the president and government.

Third, polls such as the above claim to represent the opinions of a diverse range of Colombians from around the country, yet interviewees are frequently drawn only from the wealthier districts of Colombia’s four largest cities—Bogotá, Cali, Medellín, and Barranquilla. Unwarranted prominence is given to the views of a minute percentage of the population who have access to landlines. Since Uribe’s election as president, opinion polls in Colombia have focused on a handful of dominant urban centres, ignoring the countryside, where many of his most committed opponents live. As one media outlet so brazenly put it, “Colombian pollsters rarely survey the whole country because they consider responses in war-afflicted rural areas unreliable.”

More:
http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=433

~~~~~

~snip~
the opinion polls so regularly quoted in both national and international media are suspect, being based on landline interviews with 1000 or so inhabitants of the four largest cities. In the context of widespread paramilitary terror it would be foolish to assume respondents being honest in a telephone interview with an unknown interlocutor. That most Colombians do not own landlines is another factor making these polls unreliable, according to the author, in addition to the fact that the polling companies refuse to poll in rural areas.

More:
http://lse-ideas.blogspot.com/2010/04/book-review-revolutionary-social-change.html

~~~~~

~snip~
The polls are conducted only in the cities and using landline telephones. This eliminates many families in the lower stratas and all people in the pueblos and out in the country. The people who are polled are the ones who have most to win with Uribe's policies and who are constantly exposed to Uribe-supporting media. The polls are only showing that a 60% of those who are polled support Uribe....not that a 60% of the polutation as a WHOLE support Uribe...

More:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:T49fhagjpl4J:poorbuthappy.com/colombia/post/delegative-democracy-the-case-of-colombia1/+Colombia+polls+unreliable+poor+not+polled+no+phones+landlines&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

They know better than to do that. They'd be at the mercy of right-wing paramilitary death squads.

Santa Marta to host Santos-Chavez summit .
Monday, 09 August 2010 11:07 Adriaan Alsema

The meeting scheduled between Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chavez will not be held in Bogota, but in the Caribbean town of Santa Marta.

According to Colombian media, the newly sworn-in Santos hopes "that in this meeting we can draw conclusions that lead to the normalization of relations between the two countries."

Venezuela's Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro announced the summit on Sunday, the day after Santos' inauguration.

Following claims made in late July by former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe that Venezuela is harboring Colombian guerrillas of the FARC and ELN, Chavez cut all diplomatic ties and vowed to further clamp down on trade between the two neighbors.

Before assuming the presidency Santos said he would seek to normalize relations with Colombia's socialist neighbor.


http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/11246-santos-chavez-summit-to-be-in-santa-marta.html