Home | Friday 9th July 2010 | Issue 730
BESETTING A PRESIDENT
The new president-elect of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, was met by a Downing Street picket as he arrived for a chinwag with chinless wonder David Cameron on Monday (5th).
Activists from the Colombia Solidarity campaign and the Colombian leftist opposition – the Polo Democratico – were joined by Chileans, the Movement of Ecuadorians in the UK, and the Latin American Workers Association in demanding an end to aid for the chronic human rights abusers in power in Colombia.
Santos recently defeated Green party candidate Antanus Mockus – a political outsider who surged through the polls on an anti-corruption manifesto. Before running for president, Santos had been the Defence Minister of current hard right president Alvaro Uribe. In his time working for Uribe, Santos found himself up to his neck in scandal. He was in charge of the army throughout the ‘false positive’ affair, where Colombian soldiers were found to have murdered civilians and dressed them up as guerillas to claim kill bonuses.
He was also allegedly the architect of the air strike on Ecuadorian territory that killed one of the leaders of leftist guerilla group the FARC, igniting a diplomatic crisis in the process. As a result he currently can’t set foot in Ecuador because of an outstanding arrest warrant for his part in the raid. Uribe and Santos’ political supporters have also been ravaged by the ‘para-politcial’ scandal which exposed collusion between politicians from their party and paramilitary groups – groups who have admitted securing votes through violence and coercion.
Santos has pledged to continue both the military and economic policies of Uribe – a combination of militarism and neo-liberalism that has led to widespread human rights abuses and economic misery for the estimated 64% of Colombians living below the poverty line.
* Colombia Solidarity are also keeping up the pressure on BP over their abusive treatment of Colombian oil workers (see SchNEWS 724) with a picket outside BP HQ yesterday (8th).
