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Author Topic: Latin American Politics: Moralism  (Read 92552 times)

Cheesy Honkers

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Re: Latin American Politics: Fashes gona fash
« Reply #1005 on: February 06, 2020, 09:01:40 am »

I have family in Colombia, they are embracing themselves for a Venezuelan Refugee wave. Also Maduro is supporting terrorist attacks in the north in an attempt to try and force a military intervention from Colombia into Venezuela as a distraction from the economic collapse.
This is the only post I managed to dig up regarding Latin America by ChristianWeiseth. While it is comical, especially in hindsight, I do think that in general the dude is simply misinformed, potentially because of the bias he has towards Colombia, a country that certainly picked up a thing or two from fascists over the years. All in all, I'm willing to assume that he (or she) is simply in the dark about Latin America.
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Reelya

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Re: Latin American Politics: Fashes gona fash
« Reply #1006 on: February 16, 2020, 08:35:52 am »

Sounds just like an ill-informed patsy. The idea that Colombia is some victim and is besieged on all sides by other nations is paranoia they use to justify that absolutely insane level of military build-up in Colombia.

Click on the 25 year history here:
https://tradingeconomics.com/colombia/military-expenditure

Colombia has had a near continuous and never ending escalation of military spending for the last 25 years, with recessions only being temporary hiccups in the military build-up.

Also note that Venezuela has been slashing their own military spending.
https://tradingeconomics.com/venezuela/military-expenditure

After Colombia bombed sites in Ecuador in 2008, and then claimed Ecuador was in league with terrorists, Venezuela did direct more spending towards the military, but even then, they only went from spending 10% as much as Colombia to spending 20% as much as Colombia, and that only lasted a few years before they slashed spending again.

Even on a GDP-basis, Venezuela currently spends only 0.5% of GDP on the military, whereas Colombia spends 3% of GDP on the military:
https://tradingeconomics.com/venezuela/military-expenditure-percent-of-gdp-wb-data.html
https://tradingeconomics.com/colombia/military-expenditure-percent-of-gdp-wb-data.html

So, even given that Venezuela's GDP has fallen, they don't have a strong emphasis on maintaining military spending. It's not a main priority of their government, so this notion that Venezuela is some military threat to their neighbors is fanciful. As Venezuela's GDP has fallen, they've actually focused spending away from the military, not towards it. This is the opposite of what militarily aggressive regimes do when under pressure.

The idea that Colombia is beset on all sides by military threats is in fact internal fascist propaganda to justify their own totally out of control military build-up and threatening to attack their neighbors. This idea that Venezuela is backing terrorists in Colombia to try and goad Colombia to invade them as a "distraction" is in fact an attempt to justify Colombia stomping on their neighbors, as in the 2008 Ecuador bombing, as some sort of act of self-defense. If Venezuela was planning a war as a distraction they wouldn't be seriously slashing their own military spending at the same time. So the only logical conclusion is that the right-wing in Colombia wants the war but they want to justify it by blaming Venezuela for Colombia's own rebels.

Note, that the Venezuelans supported the FARC peace process, i.e. the ending of Colombia's civil war, while Uribe was dead opposed to the peace process. i.e. the political far-right in Colombia are pretty much the only people who wanted the civil war to keep on keeping on. It's because they've used the civil war to justify 25+ years of continuous military build up, and they use it as an excuse to threaten their neighboring nations as a "self defense" act. Saying Uribe was a fascist dictator isn't any stretch. His family had their own personal paramilitary death squads. His brother and cousin are in prison for that.

EDIT: as for paranoia, here's Uribe saying it was a British plot when his death-squad links were being uncovered:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/25/colombia-alvaro-uribe-mi6-death-squads-charges
So it's not just Venezuela, Ecuador. The British commies are coming for Colombia too.

Quote
Colombia’s powerful former president Álvaro Uribe has announced that he will resign from his senate seat in order to focus on battling a widening supreme court investigation.

(Link: Colombian army killed thousands more civilians than reported, study claims)

Uribe, a hardliner who led a brutal campaign against leftist rebels from 2002 to 2010, has long dodged accusations of involvement in paramilitary massacres that occurred during and before his tenure.

He could, however, come unstuck in the face of new charges of bribing and intimidating witnesses related to those death squad cases.

On Wednesday, Uribe accused the British intelligence agency MI6 of colluding with his former defence minister and eventual successor as president, Juan Manuel Santos, to supply recordings that implicate him in crimes.

“There are repeated allegations that the recordings were made by the British agency MI6, friends of Juan Manuel Santos,” he tweeted. “Foreign authorities in a ruse against me.”

Quote
“Foreign authorities in a ruse against me.”

;)

EDIT2: Actually didn't know this:

Quote
A separate scandal led to the abolition of the country’s domestic intelligence agency in 2011 after it was revealed that Uribe had used it to spy on opposition members and journalists. Several witnesses in other cases have turned up dead.
The department of security in Colombia had some very prominent scandals relating to murdering journalists / doing death threats against other journalists. Turns out they didn't survive the scandals. This is equivalent to something happening like the FBI having to be abolished because it was being used as the armed wing of the Trump Organization to discredit or assassinate opponents.
« Last Edit: February 16, 2020, 09:09:49 am by Reelya »
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Dostoevsky

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Re: Latin American Politics: Fashes gona fash
« Reply #1007 on: March 07, 2020, 12:13:07 pm »

The Washington Post has an interesting article up (well, a second article that references a first one that's also interesting) regarding the situation in Bolivia:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/as-the-us-backed-government-in-bolivia-unleashes-what-many-see-as-political-persecutions-the-trump-administration-remains-silent/2020/03/06/542b828c-5751-11ea-8efd-0f904bdd8057_story.html

Perhaps the most surprising part is that the Post seems to be changing its tack regarding Morales's ouster, likely due to the behavior of the new government. The interesting part is that MIT (the university) did some statistical analysis of the election results and argues that there isn't significant evidence of the 'election irregularities' that OAS raised concerns about. I.e. the concerns that led to the ouster in the first place.

Based on what I've learned elsewhere I'd personally be a bit surprised that there weren't any irregularities under Morales... but on the other hand, given the history of OAS, the current U.S. Administration, and everything that's happened since, this really does seem more and more like an old-fashioned "U.S. installs a terrible right-wing regime" sort of thing.
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Reelya

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Re: Latin American Politics: Fashes gona fash
« Reply #1008 on: March 07, 2020, 06:02:54 pm »

WaPo and NYT are both paywalled these days, putting an excerpt of the key bits is helpful, especially since each of us maybe gets 1 free article a month on each of those, so if we all look at that, we've all used our quota on that one article.

Maybe you can link some of the anti-Morales stuff.

One perspective is that if the opposition were such hardline fascists to start with, people in Evo's political camp probably knew all about it. They'd know what those other leaders say locally and in the media. So Evo & Co pulled out all the stops to prevent full-on Nazis from taking power, then that context gets omitted and it gets presented as being "anti-democratic" by the Latin American right-wing media, which is often very comparable to Fox News, but then gets sanitized because it gets picked up by mainstream media in the USA including New York Times, so people in the USA don't actually realize the source newspapers / TV stations down south are way further right than Fox News.
« Last Edit: March 07, 2020, 06:14:56 pm by Reelya »
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ChairmanPoo

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Re: Latin American Politics: Fashes gona fash
« Reply #1009 on: March 07, 2020, 07:20:41 pm »

Tangentially related: I do not know what I watched that caused this, but for some reason the youtube algorythm has been suggesting a lot of pro-Bolsonaro fascist propaganda as of late.
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Re: Latin American Politics: Fashes gona fash
« Reply #1010 on: March 07, 2020, 10:03:35 pm »

WaPo and NYT are both paywalled these days, putting an excerpt of the key bits is helpful, especially since each of us maybe gets 1 free article a month on each of those, so if we all look at that, we've all used our quota on that one article.

Maybe you can link some of the anti-Morales stuff.

Ah, sorry. A few excerpts (which is hopefully not a verboten practice...)

Spoiler: article bits (click to show/hide)

The person who I've mentioned a few times here says that the "savages" reference is pretty well-worn code phrasing for the country, so not subtle at all.

The article also opens with police going to a person running a left-wing publication, saying they'd like to talk to him about a 'cybercrime'. They take him to the station, then inform him that he is the cybercrimer and slap him into house arrest. Fun times.
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Reelya

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Re: Latin American Politics: Fashes gona fash
« Reply #1011 on: March 07, 2020, 10:37:02 pm »

A note that OAS is often cited as being politically biased. The OAS was set up by the Americans during the cold war as an anti-communist front group, and is headquartered in Washington DC. In the inagural meeting, the members states took an anti-communist pledge, so OAS has been fully involved in suppressing dissidents and isolating left-wing regimes since the start.

So it's a tool of the US administration, and strongly aligned with the south American right wing and not really a neutral representative body that developed organically to represent all the nations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_of_American_States
Here's a note, that right before they inaugurated the thing in May 1948 in Bogota, Colombia, the Liberal Party candidate for president of Colombia was assassinated, leading to a period of intense  government repression known as "La Violenca", to the point that in the 1950 election there were literally zero Liberal Party candidates for president or the congress. I don't think the OAS had a single word to say about that. Murdering all the opposition leaders? Purely internal matter, nothing to see here.
« Last Edit: March 07, 2020, 10:48:12 pm by Reelya »
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scriver

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Re: Latin American Politics: Fashes gona fash
« Reply #1012 on: August 05, 2020, 04:15:51 pm »

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LordBaal

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Re: Latin American Politics: Fashes gona fash
« Reply #1013 on: August 05, 2020, 04:34:50 pm »

I've read he will be home detained because the pandemic and all that. It's interesting see how this will resolve.
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Reelya

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Re: Latin American Politics: Fashes gona fash
« Reply #1014 on: August 05, 2020, 04:37:38 pm »

Colombia's Supreme Court has detained Uribe

It's a bit of a shocker

I've posted stuff before in her about what a bad lot Uribe and his family appear to be, but I'm still surprised that the arm of the law can touch him. There's actually a documentary about his ties to the Medelin cartel. His start was when a guy in charge of aviation licensing got assassinated by the cartel, then Uribe took over that post. Didn't get assassinated, which means he played along with the game.

googled up an article at random
https://colombiareports.com/how-colombias-former-president-helped-kick-start-the-medellin-cartel/

This is the point where you'd normally quote some smoking guns from the article, but it's smoke and (actual) guns all the way down, plus you could probably come up with 50 other articles explaining different aspects of the whole story that this article missed.

Note that of the current case:

Quote
The trial was hampered by the assassination of a witness, attempts to spy on the magistrate investigating Uribe and attempts by prominent allies to pressure the court into giving the far-right politician a pass.

I mean, if you put all the stories together there are about 40 years of people just turning up dead if they get in the way of Uribe or his associates.

His political opponent was captured by FARC in 2002 when he ran for president. A few years later she was released and Uribe claimed credit, but video leaked of a peaceful handover rather than the daring commando raid Uribe's people had claimed. At which point they changed the story to the fact that they had infiltrators in FARC who could give the order to release her, thus it was still their victory. Well, how long were the infiltrators in there? More than a few years? FARC doesn't just give people the right to issue commands overnight. And if they can give the order to release a captive, were they also in a position to order the capture of a captive? So I'm pretty sure he actually used bribed FARC officers to take his opponent out of the 2002 election. He was a self-confessed FARC puppet master a few years later after all.
« Last Edit: August 05, 2020, 05:05:03 pm by Reelya »
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MetalSlimeHunt

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Re: Latin American Politics: Fashes gona fash
« Reply #1015 on: October 19, 2020, 03:48:00 am »

VIVA BOLIVIA, VIVA LA MAS

CIA? DEFUNDED

CHRISTOFASH? APOSTATIZED

ELON MUSK? $TSLA TO ZERO

COUP SUPPORTERS? BTFO



Ahem. I am somewhat pleased at the news in Bolivia today.
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voliol

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Re: Latin American Politics: Fashes gona fash
« Reply #1016 on: October 19, 2020, 04:37:08 am »

That is terrific news.

The tribunal waiting to release the results seems awfully fishy though, and the military demonstration to "keep peace" doesn't make it any better; who are the troublemakers Áñez is threatening if not the people who will protest against obviously fabricated results. At the same time, she congratulated Arce, which is strange. Is it all to keep up the appearances of her fraud "democracy"? I would not bet against it.

MetalSlimeHunt

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Re: Latin American Politics: Fashes gona fash
« Reply #1017 on: October 19, 2020, 04:42:49 am »

It could all go wrong for sure, but conceding the election and saying it was fair isn't exactly a normal thing to do if you want to steal the election.

MAS' popularity has proven to be an effective shield against the fash, now just as it did during the coup - kind of hard to piss off that many people at once and get away with it.
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voliol

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Re: Latin American Politics: Fashes gona fash
« Reply #1018 on: October 19, 2020, 05:13:02 am »

Yeah, they obviously fudged up, even Camacho winning at this point would look outright silly, which would make CIA backing harder to come by. I just don't like negative surprises, I suppose.

Dostoevsky

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Re: Latin American Politics: Fashes gona fash
« Reply #1019 on: October 19, 2020, 10:51:20 am »

It could all go wrong for sure, but conceding the election and saying it was fair isn't exactly a normal thing to do if you want to steal the election.

The statement is from the 'interim' president and not one of the candidates, though (since she dropped out after seeing her polling numbers). Means that she can act the graceful loser while letting the opposition candidate still try to start something. There's still enough anti-indigenous racism mixed up with the anti-socialists for things to get ugly, unfortunately. Hopefully I'm just worrying too much.
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