Some Facts About the “Scholarly Alvaro Uribe”
Sometimes a line or a phrase, or maybe a description of somebody stops you in your tracks. In “An Irishman’s Diary” (Irish Times 26/10/10) John Kavanagh decribes a holiday in Colombia. The article reads like a tourist guide extolling the wonders of the country. Fair enough, from what I hear read and have seen on television it seems to be a very beautiful country. What stopped me was the description of the previous president as “the scholarly Alvaro Uribe”. The article then goes on to mention that he was educated at Harvard and Oxford. Then the writer goes on to laud the successes of Uribe in dealing with the FARC guerillas. For me, the phrase that takes the biscuit is “Despite his successes, many Colombians criticised his links to the controversial right wing paramilitaries and his military reliance on the United States.”
Let’s examine some of the “scholars” successes, since he was elected in 2002 :
(1) During his term of office his army and their allied death squads were responsible for 14,000 extra-judicial killings.
(2) Colombia has the highest number of forcibly dissappeared people in the world, with 50,000 missing. His presidency contributed in no small way to these figures.
(3) Colombia is second only to Sudan in the number of people displaced from their homes. At the end of 2009, according to the International Internal Displacement Centre there were up to 4.9 million IDP’s in Colombia.
(4) During his term the “false positive” scandal was uncovered. This was a scheme where his army lured away street children and homeless people with promises of work and money, killed them, dressed them in FARC uniforms and claimed them as paramilitaries killed in combat. The soldiers and officers then received a bonus for every “kill”.
(5) In 2004 a 13 year old, previously classified US military document listed Uribe as number 82 in a list of 104 of Colombia’s most important narcoterrorists. The report also noted that Uribe had worked for the Medellín Cartel and was a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar Gaviría.
(6) Plan Colombia – since 1999 around $7bn of US taxpayers’ money has been invested in military hardware and anti-drug operations in Colombia. Under Uribe the controversial aerial spraying of the coca crop increased. Colombian farmers have complained about the huge damage to other crops by these herbicides and the possibility of the residual damage to the water table. The adverse health effects are also an issue. The glyphosate spray which is supplied by the Monsanto Company has caused lesions and other ill effects, particularly to children. This is reminiscent of Monsanto’s Agent Orange activities in Vietnam.
(7) US bases – Uribe tried to force his plan to open seven of Colombia’s military bases to US military personnel, through his country’s congress. This despite the opposition of nearly all the other Latin American countries. Happily, the new president Santos has decided not to present the plan to the Colombian Congress.
These are a few of the many successes of Uribe. Aren’t the Colombians lucky that he was so well educated?
What we have been seeing over the last few years from the Irish Times and much of the Western media is an attempt to present Colombia as a normal functioning democracy despite the fact that members of the opposition, community leaders and trade union activists are routinely disappeared, tortured and murdered. I suggest that Mr. Kavanagh comes along to meet some of the Colombians that the Latin American Solidarity Centre periodically has as speakers and listens to their horrific stories. These people are the bravest of the brave and their visits expose them to great personal danger but they are willing, indeed insist on coming here to provide another side of the story. They deserve better than this kind of offering from the Irish Times.
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