Well, no…actually, they’re more like pathetic, and have been ever since poor, mad old Uncle Miltie kicked the bucket (many years past his due date, if you ask me). So you’ll have to pardon me if I smile with a kind of pitying scorn at people who spew drivel like this:
Colombia’s diplomatic spat with Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela may help President Alvaro Uribe build support in the U.S. Congress for a free-trade accord, Citigroup Inc. economists said.
Colombia could help securing passage of the agreement by casting it as a way to limit Chavez’s regional influence, economists Franz Hamann and Luisa Charry wrote in an e-mailed report today.
“The sharper dividing line between the two countries can serve as a warning signal of the potential costs of not supporting economic freedom in the region,” Bogota-based Hamman and Charry said.
Actually, it could serve as a way of showing your Latin American neighbors how to cut off their noses to spite their faces. By voluntarily opening its own veins to international megacorps (primarily based in the US, but with bank accounts in the Caymans), Colombia is certainly sparing those gringos the trouble of having to wield the fleam and bloodstick themselves. (The salient lessons of Argentina and Chile will of course go straight down Ye Olde Memorye Hole.)
The question is, how many Colombians seriously want to go that route? Especially when you consider that it will do nothing for the vast majority of them anyway, and will in fact only plunge them even further into poverty and dependence on the cocaine trade than they already are? Who voluntarily puts themselves on the shit end of a stick unless they are already hopelessly abject, used to being the butt of every dirty joke? Is Colombia so far gone?
Gawd, I hope not. That would be just plain sad.
The other funny-pathetic thing about this is how the “economists” cited seem to think that Chavecito is some kind of toxic toad. That just touching him is a good way to end up hallucinating, if not dead. And that his alternative inter-American fair trade plan, the ALBA, is some cockeyed scheme that can’t possibly work (with the unwritten subtext that the best way to prove THAT is to keep as many countries from trying it as possible. And to minimize the successes of those countries that ARE in it, preferably by appealing to their oligarchs and fascist shit-disturbers to start riots on any pretext.)
Only when we get to the last paragraph, though, do we realize it IS a punchline, albeit a very clunky one:
“While the probability of the approval of the FTA is rather low, the recent political tensions between Colombia and Venezuela may improve it,” the economists wrote.
Ha ha. Free-traders funny after all. Rimshot!
So all this was to just prove Colombia’s free market Corporatocracy loyalty to the members of the U.S. Congress? I wonder how those freed hostages feel about that? Nice to know Uribe was willing to throw those hostages under the bus, and most of Colombia’s populace, for some quick corporate cash.
Then again, there is the CIA and DEA that continue to operate in Colombia funded with over $1,000,000,000 in a strictly anti-drug role, of course. Don’t want to get on the bad side of those agencies less you find yourself dead in a gutter. Maybe Uribe had no real choice. With that kind of foreign military force operating in Colombia, sovereignty is just an illusion.
Wait, it gets better. There is a reason Uribe threw them under the bus. It’s not just the corporate cash or the DEA money; he’s bona fide, drug-lord, death-squad scum himself. Read:
http://www.borev.net/2007/11/chavez_cant_do_anything_righto.html
Gee, what a co-inky-dink. Dubya’s pet preznit is a man right after his (and Negroponte’s!) own shrivelled black heart. Of course he’s gonna taunt the hostages with hope and then yank it away right before it materializes. He’d rather get patted on the head for staging a bloody final battle with the FARC than for doing something decent. That way, his own shady past will be magically expunged.
Wow! Colombia’s government is a real cesspool. No wonder the media left out all these details. With all the facts, any comparisons to Venezuela will only make Chavez look even better and Uribe look even worse.
As usual, Citigroup is only after Colombia’s natural resources, namely the labor of its people, probably in the form of more development loans with interest rates that will make them all but impossible to repay. Just another tale of economic hit men.
BTW, here are some specifics on what Chavecito plans to do if he doesn’t get that apology:
President Hugo Chavez threatened Friday to nationalize the Venezuelan subsidiaries of Spanish banks Banco Santander SA and Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA, if Spain’s king does not apologize for telling Chavez to “shut up.”
What are foreign banks doing there anyway? (Rhetorical question–WE KNOW.)
PS: Oops, this was meant for the post on Chavecito and the King’s humble pie. Teach me to not look closer at where I’m posting, LOL.