At The Daily Bell, Ron Holland describes Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe as a Latin “Ronald Reagan.”
Unlike knee-jerk leftists, I recognize that Reagan started out with some genuine free-market leanings. Contrary to the mythology, he was well-informed about economics. And he was a realist dove, not a neo-con hawk:
“As the liberal US writer Peter Beinart argues in his book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris: “On the ultimate test of hawkdom – the willingness to send US troops into harm’s way – Reagan was no bird of prey. He launched exactly one land war, against Grenada, whose army totalled 600 men. It lasted two days. And his only air war – the 1986 bombing of Libya – was even briefer.”
In contrast, consider the blood-spattered record of his successors. George Bush launched Gulf war I and sent troops into Panama and Somalia; Bill Clinton bombed Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia; George W Bush invaded Afghanistan and gave us Gulf war II and the war on terror. And the Nobel peace prize winner Obama had troops surging in Afghanistan, launched a war on Libya and sent drones into Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.
Lest we forget, after America’s first encounter with jihadist violence in 1983 – when 241 US military personnel were killed – Reagan, to use the disparaging lingo of the neocons, chose to “cut and run”. Every single soldier was pulled out of Lebanon within four months. “Perhaps we didn’t appreciate fully enough the depth of the hatred and the complexity of the problems that made the Middle East such a jungle,” Reagan later wrote in his memoir, adding: “The irrationality of Middle Eastern politics forced us to rethink our policy there … If that policy had changed towards more of a neutral position … those 241 marines would be alive today.”
These are the words not of a hawk but of a dove; of a leader who did not share the neocons’ blind faith in the use of military force to spread freedom.
The truth is that Reagan wasn’t a Reaganite; he ended the cold war through negotiation and with far fewer military interventions than his successors have managed so far in the war on terror. His actions, rather than his occasionally bombastic words, reveal a president more interested in jaw-jaw than war-war.”
But, by the second half of his presidency, the shadow state had taken over. Neocons had infiltrated the offices of the executive, were conducting espionage, pulling strings to overcome security blocks, and pushing agendas developed in their think-tanks.
Stephen Green at Counterpunch describes the decades-long take-over that started in the 1970s, accelerated in the second half of the Reagan administration, and came to full flower with Bush junior. The main figures are people like Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, Michael Ledeen, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, with supporters like Norman Podhoretz, Midge Dector, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick.
Ledeen especially was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra affair and with Colonel Oliver North, a key figure in the drug-arms-money-laundering that was the principal source of funding of the Shadow State.
This network has been called the Octopus by Danny Casolaro (who was murdered because of his investigations of it).
Other related or overlapping networks/operations include the Enterprise and Pegasus.
All of them are tied in different ways to prominent, seemingly disparate scandals of the period – Operation Red Rock in Vietnam, the CIA-related Australian Nugan-Hand bank, the CIA-related BCCI bank, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the deaths of drug barons like Pablo Escobar and political bosses like Manuel Noriega.
To sum that up as briefly as possible, the New World Order was put in place through covert operations by a secretive element in government that is now so extensive as to control the entire government. That shadow government relies on the drug/arms trade for its funding and espionage and blackmail for its enforcement.
Uribe is an integral part of that story.
Mr. Holland is maybe naive.
But the Bell?
From the Guardian, some information tying Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe to Pablo Escobar:
“My brother Jaime died in 2001, married to Astrid Velez, they had two children … Any other romantic relationship that my brother may have had was part of his personal life and is unknown to me,” Álvaro Uribe tweeted on Sunday. He denied Jaime was ever linked to the drug lord Pablo Escobar.
According to the Nuevo Arco Iris investigation, Jaime Uribe was arrested and interrogated by the army in 1986 after detectives discovered calls had been made from his carphone to Escobar, leader of the Medellín cartel.
Álvaro Uribe acknowledged that his brother had been arrested but said he had been released and charges were dropped, claiming Jaime was recovering from throat surgery in a local hospital at the time the calls were made. “His car phone was cloned by criminals,” Alvaro Uribe tweeted.
The Uribe family has long faced accusations of ties to drug trafficking. A US intelligence report from 1991, declassified in 2004, identified Álvaro Uribe as a “close friend” of Escobar, who was “dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín cartel”. It also says Uribe’s father was murdered “for his connection with the narcotic (sic) traffickers”. Officially Uribe’s father died while trying to resist being kidnapped by leftist guerrillas in 1983.
The US state department disavowed the intelligence report when it was published, during Uribe’s second year in office, saying it had “no credible information” to substantiate the information.
Another Uribe brother, Santiago, isbeing investigated over the alleged founding and leadership of a rightwing paramilitary group, while Uribe’s cousin Mario lost his seat in the senate and was jailed for seven and a half years over ties to paramilitaries, main players in Colombia’s drug trade.“
Colombia Reports has more on Uribe’s ties to narco-trafficking:
“Uribe’s early political career has been the subject of much speculation, rumors and accusations over his alleged links to Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel. He began his political career in the late 70s, holding the posts of Chief of Assets for the Public Enterprises of Medellin (EPM) in 1976 and serving as Secretary General of the Ministry of Labor from 1977 to 1978. However it was after he was appointed as Director of Civil Aviation in 1980 that the rumors began.
Uribe’s appointment coincided with the rise of Escobar as an international trafficker and Uribe has had to answer allegations that the unusually high number of pilot’s licenses and airstrip construction permits issued on his watch were a major contributing factor to Escobar’s success. According to Escobar’s former lover Virginia Vallejo, the drug lord held Uribe in high regard for establishing the infrastructure to transport cocaine to the U.S.
Accusations that Uribe was an ally of Escobar were to follow him into his first major political role. In 1982, Uribe became mayor of Medellin, a post he was to hold for less than half a year. His reasons for leaving remain unclear but several journalists and writers have alleged his mafia ties became an embarrassment to more senior political figures. In his short term, Uribe publicly supported two public works projects financed by Escobar; construction of new housing for the poor and a city-wide tree planting scheme. Further controversy followed after the death of his father when it was reported that Uribe flew to his father’s ranch in a helicopter belonging to Pablo Escobar.
In 2004, during Uribe’s presidential term, the U.S. National Security Archive (NSA) published a declassified 1991 intelligence report from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) that listed Uribe on a list of prominent Colombians involved in the drug trade. The report described Uribe as a “close personal friend of Pablo Escobar” and “dedicated to collaboration with the Medellin cartel at high government levels.”
From Counterpunch, analysis of Uribe’s US-backed policy of fomenting divisions in Latin American solidarity (written in 2010, when Uribe was stepping down):
“A U.S.-Colombian offensive against Venezuela at the moment of political transition presents a huge threat to regional stability. Uribe has consistently relied on the visceral response of the international right, forces within the U.S. government and nationalist anti-Venezuela sentiment in Colombia to build a fear of Chavez that is based more on created perception than on cool-headed analysis. Obviously, the vast majority of FARC, ELN and rightwing paramilitary forces declared “terrorist”, operate within Colombia.”
Stephen Lendman cites the valiant James Petras on Uribe’s narco-state:
“Thanks to Plan Colombia and other support, the state is heavily militarized, more than ever now serving as Washington’s land-based aircraft carrier against regional targets, including neighboring Venezuela.
The Pentagon got expanded access, former President Alvaro Uribe agreeing to US forces on seven more military bases (three airfields, two naval installations, and two army facilities), as well as unrestricted use of the entire country as-needed for internal and external belligerency, including out-of-control violence and human rights abuses, the region’s most extreme to keep two-thirds of Colombians impoverished, millions displaced, corruption endemic, wealth concentration growing, and corporate predators freed to exploit and plunder.
Also to facilitate record amounts of Colombian cocaine from government-controlled areas reaching US and world markets, new President Juan Manuel Santos embracing the “Uribe Doctrine,” now his. It’s extremist, hard right, corrupt, brutal, corporate-friendly, and militarized in lockstep with Washington.
As Uribe’s Defense Minister, James Petras explained that Santos was an assassin, deploying military forces and paramilitary death squads “to kill and terrorize entire population centers, (murdering) over 20,000 people….falsely labeled ‘guerrillas.’