Colombian voters reject U.S. war

---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 18:43:09 -0000
From: "portsidemod" <portsidemod@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Colombia Voters Reject U.S. War -- Ruling Parties Lose the Senate
and the House

March 11, 2002 (Narco News '02)

Colombia Voters Reject U.S. War -- Ruling Parties Lose
the Senate and the House

By Al Giordano, Publisher

The Narco News Bulletin http://www.narconews.com

When Colombian voters went to the polls yesterday to
elect a new Congress, they massively rejected the
candidates of the traditional ruling two-party system
of the Conservative and Liberal parties.

The results also strongly suggested a rejection of the
U.S.-imposed strategy of "frontal war" upon the
Colombian rebels.

This is a story, so far, untold by the U.S. press.

President Andrés Pastrana -- the U.S. government's
delivery man for the $2 billion dollar military
intervention known as "Plan Colombia" -- saw his
Conservative party shrink to just 21 members of the 175
member House of Representatives, and to just 13 seats
in the 100 member Senate.

The Liberal Party -- the other side of the oligarchy's
political coin -- lost it's near-majority in the Senate
(losing 19 of its seats, thus cutting its bloc from 48
to 29 senators) -- and suffered a loss of 31 seats in
the House -- from 84 members previously to just 53 in
the new Congress.

Smaller independent parties gained, collectively, an
absolute majority in both Houses: 101 of the 175 seats
in the House of Representatives, and 58 of 100 seats in
the Senate.

With the exception of the European press agency EFE,
the coverage by the U.S. and Colombian press has been
dreadful. Nobody seems to want to report a story that,
at its heart, reveals big trouble for Plan Colombia.

Associated Press "reporter" Jared Kotler -- taken to
task last week by Narco News for his false and invented
report of the assassination of Senator Martha Daniels
-- seemed to have written his story before election day
and filed it last night. "Colombians ignored threats of
rebel violence" to go to the polls, was Kotler's lead.
He failed to note the 62 percent abstention rate in
yesterday's election. AP's Kotler described voters as
"fed up with the FARC," and even repeated is boldfaced
lie of last week referring to "a Senator slain last
week by suspected FARC rebels." (Not even Colombia's
notoriously anti-rebel press, nor Colombian
prosecutors, have repeated this fiction -- denied by
the FARC rebels, who do take credit for their bellicose
actions -- since the nation's top prosecutor revealed
last week that the investigation could be leading
toward "common criminals" and not a political act.)

But Kotler continues taking dictation from the U.S.
Embassy's propaganda machine instead of doing his job.
For any authentic journalist would have noted the big
news of yesterday's vote: the largest vote-getters in
the country were two former members of the M-19 armed
guerrilla movement, both of whom favor a negotiated
peace settlement over the Washington orchestrated
bloodbath backed by Pastrana.

Heading the votation in the Senate was former guerrilla
Antonio Navarro. In the lower House, his colleague and
ally of two decades, Gustavo Petro, won the day. Both
are leaders of the independent political movement
called Vía Alterna, or Alternate Path.

"A new hypothesis about the electoral success of Vía
Alterna," reported the online daily El Espectador this
morning in a reference to Navarro and Petro's ticket-
topping triumph, "is the rejection, by a large part of
the population, of the idea of a 'frontal war' against
subversion which the electorate identifies with the
political figure of (presidential candidate) Alvaro
Uribe."

The chief of Pastrana's Conservative Party, Carlos
Holguín, resigned last night in disgrace after his
party's drubbing at the polls.

The only foreign news agency to report the results
accurately was the Spain- based news agency EFE, which
led its story with these words: "Colombia's two
traditional political parties, the Liberals and the
ruling Conservatives, both lost seats" in the Senate
and the House.

Colombia's new Congress will take office on July 20th.

Yesterday's elections in Latin America's oldest
democracy were a defeat for Plan Colombia and the
oligarchy's two-party system.

Again, we ask: Where Is The Press?



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