[Ezln-it] Fw: [narconews] Feder: U.S. Companies and Paramilitaries; Davies: New Strategy for Oaxaca

[nadiadarco]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: ddbriones 
To: narconews at yahoogroups.com 
Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2008 5:32 PM
Subject: [narconews] Feder: U.S. Companies and Paramilitaries; Davies: New Strategy for Oaxaca


January 22, 2007
Please Distribute Widely

Dear Colleague: 

The U.S. commercial media have been fixated on the telenovela of
hostage negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC), and the recent visit to Colombia of three U.S. congressmen has
been reported only in terms of how it relates to that issue.
Unreported in any U.S.-language media was the meeting between Rep.
Delahunt (Democrat of Massachusetts) and a number of jailed former
leaders of the recently-demobilized narco-paramilitary army, the
United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia. Bellow, we publish a
translation of the story from the January 16 edition of the Colombian
paper El Tiempo. 

Delahunt says he has received new information on the extent to which
U.S. corporations supported the AUC, which existed with relative
impunity throughout Colombia, inflicting a government-protected,
drug-funded reign of terror from roughly 1997 to 2004. (Whether that
period has truly ended if of course debatable). Last year, the coal
company Drummond was found not liable for the paramilitary murders of
three mine union officials after extraordinary maneuvers by the judge
and the Uribe administration to prevent key witnesses from testifying.
And while Chiquita Brands was fined a sum amounting to less than one
percent of its annual income for making payments to the AUC (the
company's leaders portraying themselves in the press as victims of
extortion), no one in the justice department or the press seemed
concerned that thousands of weapons for the AUC had entered Colombia
through Chiquita's private ports. 

Read this story, and the discussion it has already begun to generate
due to Delahunt's record as a staunch Plan Colombia supporter, in the
Narcosphere:

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2008/1/19/203538/370

And Nancy Davies comments on the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of
Oaxaca's first large, public action of 2008, calling it "the best
organized and most comprehensive march the APPO could have desired at
this time in its existence." The biggest issue that brought people out
on the streets was a hike in bus fares that put a huge burden on
Oaxaca's poorest residents. 

Davies writes:

"It was a day of 'something for everyone'; the marchers represented
the spectrum of civil society in Oaxaca. So did the solutions: demands
to withdraw government imposition of higher costs or fewer benefits,
and to maintain intact the historic city center. The range of protests
includes: removing price increases for basic foods such as tortillas,
and for gasoline; freeing political prisoners; returning the
disappeared alive; canceling changes to the national social security
institute (the ISSSTE); protecting streets in the center of the city;
rescinding the increase in bus fares; and handing the schools still
held by the breakaway teachers union Section 59 (promoted by governor
Ulises Ruiz, who the teachers and APPO tried to force out of office in
their 2006 uprising) back to Section 22.

...

"The bus fares, now 4.5 pesos each way, might not seem like much. But
they come just after a minimum wage increase of only two pesos, the
same as the difference for a round-trip the bus fare. Those two pesos
represent a 29 percent bus fare hike, but only a four percent rise in
wages. So, those who make the minimum of 50.96 pesos per day (about
$4.70 in US dollars) and have to pay nine pesos a day to travel feel
the pinch. The general cost of living has gone up in Oaxaca, which is
one of the poorest states and whose capital city stands among the most
expensive."

http://www.narconews.com

Also new in The Narco News Bulletin are several translations of our
Spanish-language reporting of the Zapatistas' new years and
anniversary events in Chiapas by Raúl Romero and Juan Trujillo, Brenda
Norrel's latest reports on indigenous and popular resistance to
repression on the U.S.-Mexico border, and more.

http://www.narconews.com

>From somewhere in a country called América,

Dan Feder
Editor-in-Chief
The Narco News Bulletin
www.narconews.com

Narco News is supported by:

The Fund for Authentic Journalism
P.O. Box 241
Natick, MA 01760
http://www.authenticjournalism.org

The Fund receives online donations at this web page:

http://www.authenticjournalism.org

Apply for your co-publisher's account, here:

http://www.narconews.com/copublisher/application.php

Subscribe for free alerts of new reports:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/narconews

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portugues brasileiro:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/narconewsbrasil



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