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Thursday, March 10, 2005

“Dubya” Bush violates international law in Colombia

The George “Dubya” Bush administration is now getting the US directly involved the war in Colombia. Today’s Wichita Eagle reported that Sonia (Omaira Rojas) was extradited to the U.S. for charges of “drug trafficking and supporting illegal activities.”
The FARC has never directly sold drugs. It has represented the coca growers union and it has charged traffickers taxes, but the FARC has never been directly involved in dealing cocaine. That charge is 100% bogus. What is alarming is that we are now taking prisoners from someone else’s civil war. The FARC has not had anything to do with us nor have they made any threats against the U.S.
Another guerrilla leader, Ricardo Palmera, was extradited to the US, from Ecuador, last year. This is a serious breach of international law and proof that president Dubya is out of control.
For more information than that tinny blip in the Eagle, go to:
BBC News “Colombia hands FARC leader to US” 31 December, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4138753.stm
“Rebel Leader ordered extradited to US,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 27, 2005
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0502270539feb27,1,3166361.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

For a reaction from the FARC:
THE GUILTY
As in any Hollywood movie, the reality the U.S. presents about Plan Colombia's implementation is simplistic.
Good, respectable citizens are victims of the evil drug traffickers who corrupt the very foundation of the land of the free with their loads of cocaine, and they must be eliminated by force, with weapons that would make even Rambo green with envy. Yet the scene is not the U.S. streets, but rather the thick, green jungles of the Amazon in the south of Colombia. This is where Rambo-esque heroes descend. Only they can handle this problem and save humanity from such evil.
In this version of the "eternal conquerors" establishing a difference among those who produce the coca leaf, those who process it, and those who traffic it, matters little. There is no clarification whatsoever about the guerrilla, its true target. Environmental damage is not even discussed. All information about the paramilitaries, the Armed Forces' extension of the dirty war in keeping with U.S. strategic plans, is omitted. Those displaced by the application of these plans do not exist. The "heroes" are already promising that it will be a clean, fast, and successful operation.
Just as the Nixon administration did, the Clinton administration is betting on a solution to drug trafficking by targeting the supply. There is no better evidence of this than the words of his first anti-drug czar, Lee Brown: "It is easier to go to the hive than to catch the bees as they fly over the U.S." Easier, and less traumatic for a society used to solving its problems by force, outside U.S. borders.
http://farc-ep.ch/pagina_ingles/

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