(from my e-mail)
Only a few days remain until Colombia’s presidential election. This Sunday, May 28, President Uribe – the best friend of the country’s rightwing paramilitaries who has his own history of links to drug trafficking and who has waged a total war against the country’s impoverished peasantry in the name of the “war on drugs” – faces, primarily, leftwing candidate Carlos Gaviria, who for years – first as a justice of the Colombian Supreme Court and then as a national senator – has been a fierce opponent of the country’s drug policies and of prohibition in general.
From Bogotá, Laura del Castillo brings us a look into the mentality of the social and political elite of her native country. She demonstrates the reality that lies behind Colombia’s electoral politics and especially the reelection campaign of President Alvaro Uribe, which has been characterized by corruption and the demonization of his opponents. This lies behind the current wave of repression against the historic campesino and indigenous mobilizations across the country this month, in protest of the Free Trade Agreement, inadequate land distribution and the crop fumigations carried out in their territories. Del Castillo takes these events to make a comparison between Colombia’s situation and that of the repression in Atenco and upcoming elections in Mexico.
Read the full story, here.
From somewhere in a country called América,
Dan Feder
Managing Editor
The Narco News Bulletin