viernes, julio 06, 2007

A weak defense

Colombian chancellorship foreign ministry web site has published this dateless response to press articles about an inconvenient video showing a paramilitary leader among the people that attended to a political meeting, supporting current president’s campaign; and a statement of a famous drug-trafficker about a supposed financial support from another one to the same campaign. Using the “myth-fact” format, chancellorship the ministry states feeble excuses.
The first one is that the candidate’s strategy of “gaining recognition through town-hall meetings” has made kind of impossible to know the identity of every person he met during his campaign. But Álvaro Uribe is an old politician and a very notorious leader supported by many assistants and advisors. He started his political career at late seventies and has exerted positions as major, congressman, civil aeronautics officer and governor. He does know how do national and local formal and informal power work. He knows many details about the Colombian conflict and its military development. He has repeatedly claimed this knowledge and has even remarked his participation in the commission that Andrés Pastrana’s government sent to dialogue with demonstrators that blocked the Vía Panamericana, the main highway in south western Colombia, in November of 1999. He has stated suspiciously he was dealing with a social movement manipulated by Marxist guerrillas, as a proof that he is an indulgent contradictor and not the hard right wing politician his enemies have described.
The middle Magdalena valley is a very well known scenario of Colombian violence. In a television show, at late 1989, right wing journalist Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, invited Uribe, a petroleum labor union leader and a landowner’s organization leader to talk about left and right political ideas and violence. The three showed a defined attitude about that region, formerly dominated by left-wing social movements and Marxist guerrillas, and gradually invaded by paramilitaries since earl eighties. Barrancabermeja, the city where the denounced meeting happened, is a reputed social movement’s stronghold and underwent a crude confrontation, because the offensive of paramilitaries to expel guerrillas from suburbs in late nineties. Massacres, blasts, displacement, refugees, political control by arms and corruption, domination of illegal business, etc. Most of these facts were widely denounced and divulged by commercial and alternative press. Paramilitaries renamed a city park with the name of his historical leader, de drug trafficker and mass murderer Fidel Castaño. Demonstrations manipulated by this mafia were done several times supporting its interests. And then, in 2001, this candidate went to this city and met this anonymous communitarian leader who says him: “I am the responsible for citizen security in my neighborhood” and answered asking: “Do you collaborate with police and army?” and got quiet when the guy answered “yes”. It is not a decent explanation to say: Whoopsy! Oh, sorry, it’s my very first time!
The second point, the Ochoa’s accusation is something about what I don’t have any information but it is obvious that the accusation and the statement of the asking for an investigation are not a myth-fact valid couple.
The conclusion, below the title “the truth”, blames a “larger campaign” for these incidents and remarks the myth of government’s popularity avoiding the critical points of the debate.The divulged part of videos can be seen at Equinoxio.

2 comentarios:

Anónimo dijo...

comienzas mal el post: no es "chancellorship" es "foreign ministry"... solo en america latina se usa canciller en el sentido de ministro de relaciones exteriores

vulturno dijo...

Muchas gracias, se ha corregido.