Uribe: Farewell performance

By Atilio A. Borón

From Página 12 (Argentina)

An unconditional pawn of the empire, Álvaro Uribe says goodbye to the presidency of Colombia with a new provocation: the allegation of the existence of FARC camps on Venezuelan soil.

Not missing a beat, the State Department came out to unreservedly support the accusation made by Bogotá at the O.A.S., encouraged by the alleged “forcefulness” of the evidence submitted by Uribe to denounce Chávez’s government for allowing the installation of FARC camps and the implementation of various military training programs for about 1,500 members of the guerrilla on Venezuelan territory.

U.S. State Department spokesman Philip Crowley declared with remarkable insolence “Venezuela has displayed an unfortunate and insolent behavior” toward its neighbor and threatened that “if that country does not cooperate, the U.S. and other countries obviously will take that into account.”

Along the same line, Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, Arturo Valenzuela, stated that the complaint made by Uribe was “very serious.” Both statements speak eloquently about the moral caliber of both officials.

It was the imperial administrators who asked Uribe for a final “proof of love” a few days before leaving office. As is well known, the dossier that the DEA, CIA and FBI have built on Uribe for his close and long ties to drug traffickers does not permit him to disobey any order that originates in Washington, lest he experiences the same fate as former Panamanian President Manuel A. Noriega and ends his days in a maximum security prison in the United States.

Uribe lies, because, first, if the FARC control about 30 percent of the country (as the Colombian government itself has recognized more than once) it makes no sense to divert as many as 1,500 men from the theater of operations in Colombia and organize 85 guerrilla camps in Venezuela.

It is in Colombia itself where the crisis and putrefaction of the oligarchic state allows large swathes of its territory, especially in the jungle areas, to be controlled by the guerrillas, drug traffickers and paramilitaries. Several Ecuadorean authorities commented after the attack that Colombian forces carried out on their territory that Ecuador is not bounded to the north with Colombia but with a no-man’s-land controlled by the organizations described above.

With boundless stupidity, Uribe accused his neighbors of not doing what he himself has given ample signs of being unable to do: controlling their own country. Closing its eyes to this reality, the United States hops on this false claim to harass the Bolivarian government for its lack of cooperation in the fight against drug trafficking, sidestepping the annoying fact that the world’s largest exporter of cocaine – and now of drug traffickers – is Uribe’s militarized Colombia, now turned, thanks to his invaluable cooperation, into an American protectorate.

Given such a picture of political decay, to complain that the FARC are installed in Venezuela –  and to top it all off, with the endorsement and complicity of the government of Hugo Chavez! – is a gross deceit in the service of empire. It completely lacks believability and cannot be taken seriously in the least.

Secondly, how can we forget that Uribe was the man who treacherously lied when his forces, backed by the U.S., entered Ecuadorean territory claiming that they were in pursuit of a column of the FARC. The evidence showed that the guerrillas who allegedly were chased after a clash in Colombia were sleeping, even clad in pajamas, at the moment of the attack and that, consequently, which took place in Santa Rosa de Sucumbíos not was a combat but plainly an indiscriminate slaughter.

Third, how can you believe a man who, from the presidency, validated the action of the paramilitaries and state terrorism? On Feb. 16 of this year, the Justice and Peace unit of the Colombian Attorney General’s Office issued a report that revealed that more than 4,000 paramilitaries of the AUC, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, said they had committed 30,470 murders in the period since the mid-1980s to the “demobilization” in 2003-2006.

Add to this the fact that only in 2009 the paramilitaries and the “security forces” assassinated 40 trade unionists, making Colombia the most dangerous country in the world for that kind of activity.

Fourth, the complainant is none other than the intellectual and political culprit of the serial slaughter known as “false positives.” During the last three years of the Uribe government, it was found that, pressured by the government to show tangible results in fighting the guerrillas, the army designed and executed a criminal plan.

Soldiers toured the country’s poorest communities and villages offering work to the large masses of the unemployed and recruited large numbers of homeless and helpless peasants and marginalized young people. Then they murdered them in cold blood and passed their corpses off as members of the guerrillas killed in combat to collect the rewards set by the government or get incentives or promotions in their careers. According to very conservative estimates, these crimes of state exceed one thousand.

As with all cases of state terrorism that struck the region, the crimes against humanity also had a financial background. In the case of Uribe’s Colombia, the corrupt armed forces, paramilitaries and narcos seized and shared millions of hectares of land that were left behind by the desperate farmers, displaced by the bombing and indiscriminate massacres they endured. The displaced farmers numbered 4.5 million and their land – at least six million hectares – was later transferred, with great benefit to the evictors, to the landowners and agribusiness who were the sponsors and financial partners of the paramilitaries.

This is the man who now points his finger at the Bolivarian revolution. It is clear that this is another maneuver, dictated by the strategists of the empire, to harass the government of Hugo Chávez and legitimize the violent militarization of U.S. foreign policy.

That is why Washington insists on deploying its impressive military apparatus: there are seven bases in Colombia, Aruba and Curacao, a few miles from the Venezuelan coastline, in El Salvador and Honduras, and now a green light has been given to introduce no less than 7,000 Marines and all kinds of weapons in neighboring Costa Rica. Also the Fourth Fleet.

Uribe’s government thus performs an extremely important service trying to create the conditions to justify U.S. military intervention in South America and, in the immediate future, keeping alive the tension between Colombia and Venezuela after the presidential turnover, so as to damage Chávez’s electoral chances.

Concerned about his future and overwhelmed by the specter of Noriega rotting in jail, Uribe strives until the last day in office to show his total submission to the dictates of the imperialists. It is therefore important to expose and denounce the complainant, and demand a prompt intervention by UNASUR to thwart Washington’s plans in our America. This is not a topic for the O.A.S., which did not know how to handle Uribe’s provocation, but for UNASUR, for which this incident will be a test.

Atilio Borón is a professor of social and political theory at the University of Buenos Aires. He has published numerous books. He is head of PLED, Latin American Program of Distance Education in Social Sciences. He is also former Executive Secretary of Latin American Council on Social Science (CLACSO), 1997-2006.