Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Colombia: Odebrecht and elections

Luke Taylor reports on how The Odebrecht Corruption Scandal Is Already Shaking Up Colombia’s Presidential Vote

In August, Colombia’s Supreme Court called on President Juan Manuel Santos and several former ministers to testify about Odebrecht bribes to the Colombian government that the attorney general’s office says exceed $27 million. Investigations have already revealed that both of Santos’ election campaigns, in 2010 and 2014, received money from Odebrecht.

In December, the Democratic Center party led by Santos’ predecessor and key opposition figure, Alvaro Uribe, was also implicated when a former vice minister of transportation, Gabriel Garcia Morales, was sentenced to prison for taking $6.5 million in bribes in exchange for awarding Odebrecht a road construction contract in 2010 worth more than $1 billion. Morales has promised to testify against other Colombian officials, according to the attorney general’s office.

These scandals have discredited some of Colombia’s biggest political figures, including both the Santos and Uribe administrations, and could have significant effects on the upcoming presidential election, which will take place in two rounds in March and May.

As a result,

The fallout from Odebrecht has created the space for an unlikely leftist coalition. The image of many mainstream politicians has reached an all-time low, and polls show that corruption is currently the single biggest political issue for Colombian voters.

Taylor examines the coalition in the article.

How the elections turn out remains to be seen, but without a doubt, Odebrecht’s bribery machinery, a.k.a. the smoothly-run Division of Structured Operations, with its own hierarchy, its own accountants, and its own off-the-books communications system, called Drousys, kept a finger on the pulse of Latin American corruption.

In other election news,
FARC’s Political Party to Deploy Network of Militias throughout Colombia.

Timochenko said that the guidelines for FARC policies will be made through the creation of Tactical Units of the People throughout the country that will be responsible for spreading their propaganda in which he will collect men and women from amongst the common people.

What could possibly go wrong?

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Venezuela: Topic of discussion at the Palace

Pres. Trump talked about Venezuela during a dinner he hosted last night at the Palace Hotel,
Trump calls for democracy to be restored in Venezuela ‘very, very soon’ but avoids talk of a ‘military option’

– President Donald Trump met with a group of Latin American leaders Monday
– He said the Venezuelan government was ‘collapsing’ and the people were ‘starving’
– He said the U.S. was prepared to take ‘further action’ if the Maduro administration persisted in imposing ‘authoritarian rule’
– He called the situation ‘completely unacceptable’
– Trump said in August there was a ‘possible military option’ for Venezuela

Brazil’s President Michel Temer was among the guests, along with the presidents of Colombia (Juan Manuel Santos), Panama (Juan Carlos Varela) and Peru (Pedro Kuczynski), and Argentina’s vice president Michetti.

In case you wonder, the Palace Hotel is owned by the Sultan of Brunei.

Cross-posted at WoW! Magazine.

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Colombia: FARC’s listed assets fall short

The declared inventory included broomsticks, orange squeezers, mugs, talcum powder, dentistry equipment and industrial tools, but The FARC’s Riches: List of Assets Fails to Reveal Guerrillas’ Total Wealth.

InSight Crime reports, that, for instance,

Much of the real estate listed by the FARC, which amounts to around half of all its assets, lacks any official registration, “which frankly makes it useless and inadmissible” to the inventory, Martínez wrote. As the ownership of these properties cannot be legally identified, the Attorney General’s Office has stated that “for now, none of the FARC’s real estate is immune to being seized” by authorities.

In the inventory, the FARC also “accepted as [their] own” any assets that state prosecutors may have uncovered in their investigations into the rebel group, without actually identifying these themselves. Authorities have already started seizing FARC assets worth nearly $580 million dollars, according to Martínez’s letter.

The term smoke screen comes to mind.

Looks like the Colombian authorities could use several independent forensic accountants: Estimates published by The Economist in 2016 suggested that the FARC’s total assets could surpass $11 billion, but the list only declared some $332 million (Datawrapper version of the summarized inventory here).

If you go by the inventory, the FARC has a measly US$450,000 cash on hand.

Walter White would put them to shame.

The FARC will be laughing all the way to the bank while the Colombian government spends $39+ billion pesos (US$13+ million) to finance the FARC’s political party.

But don’t worry; Santos gets to keep his Nobel Prize.

Cross-posted at WoW! Magazine.

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Colombia: FARC still not disarming

Colombia’s FARC Says More Time Needed to Hand over Weapons

The FARC guerrillas won’t meet a May 29 deadline to hand over their weapons under the terms of last year’s peace accord with the Colombian government, a rebel negotiator said on Friday.

Completing the disarmament process will require at least two additional months, Jesus Santrich told a press conference in Bogota.

As. the old joke goes, “the check is in the mail, I love you, and . . .”

But I digress.

The Marxist guerrilla will have an additional 20 days to hand over its weapons and an additional two months to reintegrate into society amid delays and foot-dragging:

Among the key problems is that shipping containers, where the weapons were to be stored, haven’t been installed at some of the camps. The government also said that hundreds of weapons caches identified by the guerrillas were in areas too remote to be reached by the deadline.

Santos downplayed the delays Monday, saying they were “nothing, if it means ending 53 years of conflict, violence and fratricide.”

Here’s Santos televised speech (in Spanish),

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Colombia: Santos to visit Trump this week

Mary O’Grady writes on A Colombian Shakedown in Washington.President Santos is a better friend to Cuba and Venezuela than to the U.S

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos goes to Washington this week to seek Donald Trump’s blessing for his amnesty deal with the narco-terrorist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. He also wants the $450 million that Barack Obama set aside for Colombia in this year’s U.S. budget. Back home Mr. Santos gets few blessings—a poll published May 8 by the market research firm Yanhaas found he has 19% approval. Mr. Trump might like to consider why that is.

On almost all counts Colombia is worse off than when Mr. Santos took the helm in 2010. Important economic reforms have languished, but last year the government sharply hiked taxes. The economy grew a scant 2% in 2016.

Mr. Santos has presided over a corruption boom.
. . .
Mr. Santos may feel smug when he arrives in Washington. He went around the Colombian Constitution to make his FARC deal law. Then he enshrined it above the constitution, even though the public rejected it in a national plebiscite. He also got his country’s Congress, which he controls, to give him rule-by-decree powers during its implementation.

Colombia is now a place where the president’s political enemies, or their relatives, often wind up in jail. Former President Álvaro Uribe’s brother Santiago has been behind bars since early 2016, though he has never been convicted of any crime.

Read the whole thing.

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Colombia: Santos snookered by the FARC, again

The FARC is not disarming, thereby violating the peace agreement, while Santos tweets that the new U.S. budget includes $450 million to support his FARC deal, writes Mary O’Grady.

First, Santos’s tweet,

“Bi-partisan accolade from the U.S.: Congress approved $450 million for Colombia Peace, 74 million more than in 2017”

Mary O’Grady writes about Colombia’s Perilous Deal With the FARC. The group promised to disarm, but it keeps getting caught with hidden weapons.

The latest proof that Mr. Santos was snookered by FARC is the discovery last week of another cache of FARC arms that were supposed to be handed in. Hidden weapons are like cockroaches. If you discover one, you can be sure there are many others unseen.

On Wednesday the Colombian army found 16 FARC rifles and 39 grenades near the border of the departments of Meta and Guaviare. The army said that the weapons had been used for extortion and to attack government teams eradicating coca. Last month another find in the same area included one M16, six magazines and 1,300 rounds of ammunition.

On April 20 the minister of defense announced the discovery of a FARC weapons cache in Putumayo. It included 54 rifles, six machine guns, three grenade launchers, 100 kilos of explosives, 200 land mines and 3,600 detonators. Two weeks earlier, the minister said, authorities had found 600 mortar grenades in Tumaco, in the department of Nariño.

As if to show who’s in charge, FARC leader Iván Márquez took toTwitter to characterize the discovery of the FARC weapons in Putumayo as an “assault,” complaining that it violated the agreement.

The child soldiers are not being returned, kidnappings continue (including a United Nations worker last week), and FARC are still active in the state of Amazonas.

Yesterday O’Grady tweeted Pedro Corzo’s op-ed in El Nuevo Herald,

Corzo asserts that Colombia is on the path to Chavismo,

El presidente Juan Manuel Santos ha sido un catalizador a favor del surgimiento y fortalecimiento de personas y fuerzas políticas contrarias a la democracia, como son los casos de las FARC y ELN, dos facciones que no han renegado de sus convicciones marxistas, ideología que sustenta gobiernos contrarios a los derechos ciudadanos.

Las características de los acuerdos de paz con las FARC y las conversaciones con el ELN propician el fortalecimiento de factores opuestos a la democracia.

[my translation] President Juan Manuel Santos has been a catalyst favoring the emergence and strengthening of people and forces adverse to democracy, as is the case with the FARC and the ELN, two factions that have not renounced their Marxist beliefs, an ideology supported by governments that oppose citizen rights.

The characteristics of the accord with the FARC and the talks with the ELN favor the strengthening of factions opposed to democracy.

Santos is leading his country towards disaster.

UPDATE
Colombian Guerrillas FARC and ELN Meet in Cuba to Discuss Peace Deals with Santos

Colombia’s ELN rebels ‘kidnap eight’

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Colombia: Trump meets with Uribe and Pastrana

Former Colombian presidents Álvaro Uribe and Andrés Pastrana met with Pres. Trump at Mar-a-Lago last weekend, in a meeting probably arranged by Marco Rubio:

In a tweet following the meeting, Pastrana thanked Trump for the “cordial and very frank conversation” about problems in Colombia and the region.

Uribe was unavailable for an interview, but his former vice president, Francisco Santos, said it was important that the Trump administration and U.S. Congress hear a more complete picture of the reality in Colombia. He described the meeting as short, but with a clear message. The former presidents raised concerns about the situation in Venezuela and Colombia, including damage they say the peace process has caused.

“We’re very worried,” said Francisco Santos, who is the Bogotá chair of Uribe’s Democratic Center political party and the current president’s cousin. “You have a perfect storm, and the government says everything is going fine and we’re living in peace. And that’s not true.”

The Mar-a-Lago meeting coincided with a letter Uribe wrote to the Trump administration and Congress, which he published on Twitter, warning that President Santos’ efforts to complete a peace deal with the rebels could lead to Colombia becoming an authoritarian state similar to Venezuela.

Here’s Uribe’s letter,

Related:
Prior posts on the FARC and the peace agreement.

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