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Uribe decapitates the grass roots leadership of the country--with thousands of murders of trade unionists, human rights workers, community activists, teachers, political leftists, journalists and others, drives 5 MILLION peasants from their lands, many into urban squalor (slave labor force), and drenches the country in U.S. "war on drugs"/"war on terror" murder, mayhem and terror, then Santos gets sanctified as the "good cop" for purpose of the U.S./Colombia "free trade for the rich" agreement. 'Move along here, nothing to see.' 'We need to look forward not backward.'
Uribe was running the country like "Murder, Inc." It was entirely a criminal enterprise, so filthy as to be almost unbelievable. Some 70 of Uribe's closest political cohorts are under investigation or already in jail for bribery, drug trafficking, ties to the rightwing death squads, illegal domestic spying, corruption and other crimes. Lord, they were spying on judges, prosecutors, the political opposition, human rights groups, trade unionists--everybody! In truth, Uribe should be in jail (just as Bush Jr should be) but he has so far been protected by the Obama administration in some kind of deal with the Bushwhacks (implemented by Daddy Bush pal Leon Panetta at the CIA). So it doesn't take much for Santos to look better than Uribe. All he has to do is NOT spy, NOT bribe, NOT traffic in drugs, NOT murder so many people, NOT lie half as much--or be cleverer than Uribe at covering up the dirty deeds that seem to be endemic in rightwing, U.S.-supported government.
What is there to "warm up to"? U.S. "free trade for the rich" and continued U.S. "war on drugs" war profiteering, following a decade of bloody political "cleansing"?
"Warming up to" this is for idiots with short memories.
The Obama administration has been protecting and coddling Uribe partly because he did the dirty work--the needed bloody-handed prep for U.S. "free trade for the rich" and for retaining Colombia as a U.S. war profiteer venue.
However, I think what may be happening, now, is that Uribe is TOO dirty and thus too much of a threat to Bush Junta criminals, and the CIA may therefore be jettisoning his protection package because they believe (or know) that he is going to be nailed. That's a possibility anyway--that the U.S. needs distance from him, so that if he gets indicted and starts to "sing," they can spin it as nutball liar Uribe who will say anything. This may be why Santos has contradicted him on the phantom FARC guerrilla camps in Venezuela--to undermine his credibility. Uribe is most vulnerable at the moment on his vast illegal domestic spying, and that is top candidate for a crime that the Bush Junta helped him commit (but there are other possibilities, including U.S.-involved death squad murders, U.S. involvement with "Black Eagle" infiltration into Venezuela, and the biggie--U.S. involved cocaine profiteering).
I think the "Black Eagles" infiltration into Venezuela may be a rather big Uribe vulnerability, because Uribe/Restrepo are so obsessed with projecting this onto Chavez (by saying that Chavez was "harboring" guerrillas). This Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-like projection is also a cover up--a political ploy. They throw out all this flak and then when it comes out that THEY were ones doing all the "black ops" stuff on the border and within Venezuela, the corporate press has a means by which to muddle it all up.
The U.S. has a lot of "problems" in Latin America (their biggest one being that democracy is succeeding there). And it looks like the U.S. has been told--by someone whom our corporate rulers want to do business with, possibly Dilma Rousseff--that the U.S. has totally botched its influence in the region. Lula da Silva's outgoing words were that "the U.S. has not changed." Latin American democracy is not going to go away. It is in fact getting stronger and more unified. Bushwhack tactics won't work. Honduras backfired in a big way. It may look like a U.S. (corpo-fascist) success, but it wasn't. It has stiffened these leaders' spines even more as to U.S. interference and domination. And Colombia under Uribe had become a pariah. So the U.S. is trying something else--"good cop" Santos. But the threat remains that the corporate/war profiteer forces running the U.S. government will let this play out for a while, then re-install Uribe, whether Obama/Clinton want to or not, or will wait and have the far rightwing do so when ES&S/Diebold ousts Obama in 2012. (Uribe is no doubt colluding with the far rightwing U.S. congress and other such elements to this end.)
Santos was Uribe's Defense Minister for several years. That alone makes me not trust him. The Colombia military has been one of the worst offenders as to murdering trade unionists and others. Maybe he was a sort of "good guy" mole in that criminal government, or maybe he is just a lot smarter, in the criminal way, than Uribe. I don't know the answer to that. But his association with that government--and of all things, the "false positives" murdering military--is one helluva big strike against him. Secondly, all of the above. He is the current darling of Washington DC and its corpo-fascist media propaganda machine--which has murdered millions for corporate gain. Strike 2. I'll hold back on Strike 3 because he made peace with Venezuela and is giving some little bits of land back to the peasants--whose advocates, however, are still being murdered (and we'll see what he does about that).
Overall, I think that Colombia is so drenched in the cocaine trade, and its relations with Washington are so drenched in that trillion dollar-plus revenue stream, on top of (or is it underneath?) corporate/war profiteer activities, that a somewhat less fascist regime isn't going to change things very much. Nothing much will change for the millions of poor in Colombia (and certainly not for their thousands of dead relatives, friends and advocates) though I have to say that peace is a blessing for the region, even if it's temporary. That is another reason I'm holding off on Strike 3 for Santos. Regional war would have been so much worse.
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