Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

By

Colombia: Santos rides his Nobel Prize

He got what he was after, and now he’s free to ignore the will of the electorate:
Colombia’s President Hopes Nobel Prize Momentum Pushes Peace Deal to Finish Line

After four years of negotiations, Mr. Santos won congressional approval for the pact with the rebels last month, just weeks after voters narrowly rejected an earlier version in a plebiscite. But to fully implement a pact that gives the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, seats in congress in exchange for disarming requires constitutional reforms that must be debated and voted on by lawmakers.

That promises to take months amid stiff opposition from a former president turned senator, Álvaro Uribe, who argues that the government is selling out to a group many consider a terrorist organization.

“This is total impunity,” Mr. Uribe said in a speech Friday from Washington, where he was lobbying against the pact.

Mr. Santos said the award has given him momentum to end the Western Hemisphere’s last major conflict, an effort he called “a ray of hope” for other war-torn countries in the world.
. . .
The president could receive another boost on Monday if Colombia’s Constitutional Court gives his government “fast track” powers to quickly approve vital reforms that are in the pact. That would ease implementation of the peace deal, which calls for the FARC to convert to a political party and for the government to create a special tribunal to investigate war atrocities.

Santos gave an interview in Oslo, after which Uribe sent a press release,

Article at The Economist:

The president had promised time and again that Colombian voters would have the last say in any agreement with the FARC. But after his defeat at the polls in October, Mr Santos was forced to choose between unpalatable options. Putting the updated terms to a new referendum risked a devastating second rejection. Instead, he settled for legislative passage. That eliminated the risk of a return to war, but also meant the pact will lack the democratic reinforcement of a formal seal of approval from voters.

Santos lied.

UPDATE:
Peace Agreement? FARC Accused of Violating Ceasefire for Third Time

Share

By

Colombia: Santos intends to bypass people for “new, improved” FARC agreement UPDATED

Is Santos rushing this deal because Trump won? Read the UPDATE below.

After the people of Colombia rejected the so-called peace agreement with the largest narco-terrorist Marxist organization in the world, Juan Manuel Santos went back to negotiating and announced a new accord last Saturday,

The new accord with the FARC, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, would include much of what had been agreed upon in the earlier pact, which was to be a pillar of Mr. Santos’s administration. The government and rebel commanders did make changes to several points in the original agreement, from requiring the rebels to surrender money and holdings from their criminal activities to providing safeguards for private owners as part of a modernization of the countryside.

What else is in the “new and improved” deal? (emphasis added)

The new accord will be presented to Congress for a vote and then be implemented, a process that would lead to the disarmament of about 6,000 FARC fighters. The deal also calls for infrastructure development for the countryside, provides the FARC with up to 10 seats in Congress and calls upon the rebels to work with the state to fight drug trafficking.

So we’re expected to believe that the new unelected congressmen will be working to fight against their own organizations’s largest source of funds?

Under the new agreement, foreign judges were eliminated from participating in the new judicial system for those accused of war-related crimes and there is explicit language laying out how the FARC chieftains would be confined as punishment for crimes. On the political front, the rebels made concessions, including receiving less state money for the political party that the accord allows them to form.

Rebel chieftains responsible for atrocities, though, would still be able to run for office.

The FARC will still receive state taxpayers’ money while criminals are holding office, in addition to having 10 members holding ten unelected congressional seats. What could possibly go wrong?

Santos, who at the start of the negotiations in 2012 had sworn up, down and sideways that 50% of the electorate would have to approve the deal in a referendum, changed that number last year, to least 13% of the electorate in a plebiscite.

The deal was rejected last month, but Santos was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The “new and improved” agreement will not be subject to approval in a referendum. Santos will present it to Congress, bypassing voters altogether.

Why? (emphasis added)

What Mr. Santos has wanted to avoid is that the implementation of the deal run up against the political campaigning expected at the end of 2017, when candidates running for Congress and the presidency start looking for political banners, one of which could be an anti-FARC plank. The next presidential election is in 2018. Mr. Santos can’t run, but wants to ensure that a candidate supportive of the pact takes office, since implementation will run years.

Disgraceful.

Cross-posted at WoW! Magazine.

UPDATE
Mary O’Grady posits that Santos is rushing his “new improved” accord because of Trump’s win:
Santos Panics With the Election of Trump. The Colombian president’s deal with FARC terrorists, six years in the making, is ‘fixed’ in six weeks.

He needs backing from someone. On Wednesday the former head of criminal investigations in Colombia gave credible testimony to the Supreme Court that he was part of a 2014 Santos re-election campaign effort to smear opposition candidate Óscar Iván Zuluaga with allegations of illegal wiretapping, in a tight race that Mr. Zuluaga lost. The investigator’s claim rocked the nation and it casts doubt on the legitimacy of Mr. Santos’s second term.

Mr. Santos has relied heavily on Mr. Obama to advance his “peace” agenda. That support has not been limited to the U.S. president’s decision to send an envoy to sit at the negotiating table in Havana. In the U.S. extradition case of former Colombian Agriculture Minister Andrés Felipe Arias, who will have a hearing in the Southern District of Florida federal court on Thursday, the Obama Justice Department is invoking a treaty that does not exist—in an attempt to help Mr. Santos put a political enemy behind bars. It’s hard to imagine a Trump government doing the same sort of favor for Mr. Santos.

Related: The Clinton Foundation’s toxic legacy in Colombia.

Share

By

Colombia: How did Santos earn a Peace Prize?

Who stands to gain from the “peace” agreement?

Michael Fumento asks, A Peace Prize for Aiding and Abetting a Drug Cartel?

Santos made a cushy treaty with what’s been rightly called the world’s most powerful narco-terrorist group.

Fumento explains (emphasis added),

At one time the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) was indeed ideological and sought to violently overthrow the government. Today its ideology is plata (money), and it’s sworn off the traditional money-raiser of kidnappings. Which leaves drugs. And although the FARC controls only a small percentage of Colombian territory, curiously that area accounts for about 70 percent of the nation’s coca cultivation.

Colombia as a whole produces about half of the world’s cocaine supply, includingover 90 percent of that used in North America. Far from any success in reducing this, the latest Colombia Coca Survey, jointly produced by UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the Colombian government itself, shows an almost incredible doubling in the coca crop area in just the last two years.

Much of this increase is directly attributable to Santos ending aerial spraying last year, which as can be imagined is vastly more effective than sending troops into areas guarded by narcotrafficantes and their horrible land mines. I saw a lot of missing male legs in Colombia. “Las minas de las FARC?” I would ask. “Si, señor.” But Santos insists aerial spraying will not resume, despite the country’s chief prosecutor having recently called for it.

And then there are the heroin exports. Heroin, you ask?

A 2015 report from the UNODC shows opium-poppy cultivation in Colombia rose by almost 30 percent between 2013 and 2014, to the highest level observed since 2008. “Colombian organizations appear to have shifted their focus from low-level distribution to large-scale production,” notes the Insight Crime Foundation. “While acknowledging the growing importance of Mexico as a supply country for heroin reaching its market,” according to a 2013 UNODC report, “the United States continues to consider Colombia the primary source of heroin in the country,”although Mexico may be moving ahead. The FARC is believed to control a major portion of opiate production.

Read the full article.

Of course Colombians want peace. What they don’t want is the FARC in charge of the whole country.

Too bad the Nobel Committee doesn’t understand that.

Share

By

Colombia: Santos awarded Nobel Peace Prize

20131011153017nobel_prizeFrom the press release:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2016 to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos for his resolute efforts to bring the country’s more than 50-year-long civil war to an end, a war that has cost the lives of at least 220 000 Colombians and displaced close to six million people. The award should also be seen as a tribute to the Colombian people who, despite great hardships and abuses, have not given up hope of a just peace, and to all the parties who have contributed to the peace process. This tribute is paid, not least, to the representatives of the countless victims of the civil war.

Interesting wording: “and to all the parties who have contributed to the peace process.” Makes you wonder if Castro and Timochenko would have been awarded along with Santos, had the “yes” vote won the Sunday referendum,

Asked why the committee had not extended the award to other parties to the negotiation, notably the FARC commander in chief, Timoleón Jiménez, Ms. Kullmann Five said the committee never commented on those who did not receive the award.

But she said that there “are strong reasons to put a light on the president himself,” and that “his role as president” and “the keeper of the process” had been instrumental is securing a deal.

Santos convinced the Norwegians. He just didn’t convince his own people.

Why is that?

In brief, Santos did not keep his promises.

As you may recall, Santos started the negotiations secretly in Cuba, and the agreement he and Timochenko signed essentially gave the FARC everything the FARC wanted, as Plinio Apuleyo pointed out:

[Amnesty] regardless of the atrocities they carried out for over 50 years; they’ll effectively be awarded 26 seats in Congress, 31 radio stations, a TV channel, a bountiful budget to propagate their ideology and will occupy vast regions of the country absent of Public [law enforcement] Forces, areas which effectively will become small independent states where they can spread their socialist project.

This would have turned the Marxist narco-terrorist FARC- whose crimes include the recruitment of thousands of child soldiers, kidnappings, mass rapes, forced abortions, massacres of villages, political executions, and bombings – into a political power.

Additionally, under the agreement Colombia would have to finance and host an extra-national tribunal not subject to Colombia’s Constitution, and whose decisions would be exempt from appeals, while Santos has continued to expand his power through decrees.

Make no mistake, the Nobel is indeed a boost to Santos

“There is a real danger that the peace process will come to a halt and that civil war will flare up again. This makes it even more important that the parties … continue to respect the ceasefire,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said.

The Nobel Committee ignore the fact that the FARC would not have agreed to talks had they been winning.

But then, the Peace Prize was awarded to Yasser Arafat, too.

Cross-posted at WoW! Magazine.

UPDATE
Austin Bay:

Pompous Norwegians have bestowed the Nobel Peace Prize on Juan Manuel Santos, a failed Colombian president who negotiated a flawed peace deal Colombia’s citizens rejected. Let’s agree that Colombia’s dirty war stained everyone. Former President Alvaro Uribe is a stained man, but Uribe is the leader who defeated the Communist rebels. He and the Colombian military created the military and political conditions that brought the rebels to the table. Santos didn’t. Why didn’t the Nobel committee give the prize to both Santos and Uribe? Oh, right. Santos is a socialist. Uribe is a conservative. Giving the award to Santos shows the peace prize is a joke.

I wouldn’t call Santos a Socialist, but he definitely was willing to have dictator Raúl Castro host the negotiations.



Share

By

Liu Xiabo awarded Nobel Prize in absentia

At Peace Prize Ceremony, Winner’s Chair Stays Empty (emphasis added)

OSLO — Imprisoned in China and with close family members forbidden to leave the country, the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, an empty chair representing his absence at the prize ceremony here.

For the first time in 75 years, no representative of the winner was allowed to make the trip to receive the peace medal, a diploma and the $1.5 million check that comes with it.

You would think the prior Nobel Peace Prize winner would make a moral statement by attending the ceremony in person in a show of solidarity.

You would be wrong.

24223
Share

By

VIDEO Liu Xiaobo – A story of hope and struggle

By NMA.TV,

Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. But instead of traveling to Oslo to receive the award Liu will spend the day in jail, where he is serving eleven years on charges of “inciting subversion of state power” for his part in the writing of Charter ’08, a document that called for greater freedom of expression, human rights and free elections in China.

Animated video,

Here are the countries that are siding with China on the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony for Liu Xiaobo:
Russia
Ukraine
Kazakhstan
Cuba
Venezuela
Morocco
Egypt
Tunisia
Sudan
Iraq
Afghanistan
Pakistan
Colombia
Vietnam
Iran
Saudi Arabia
Philippines
Serbia

. Beijing boasted Tuesday that most countries would stay away from attending the ceremony. In fact, only the 65 countries with embassies in Norway were invited, and 44 of those had accepted, according to the Nobel Prize Committee.

24169
Share

By

Are the Nobels becoming relevant?

In the natural sciences, the Nobel Prize committees have been awarded to people who have done meaningful work that changed the study of science; however, in literature and the “peace” categories, they have shown themselves totally irrelevant.

This year marks a change:
First, with the Nobel in Literature,
Vargas Llosa and the Value of Literature
His work is a rebuttal to those who believe that fiction exists on the periphery of history and politics.

As Mr. Vargas Llosa wrote in his 2001 essay about literature, “Nothing better protects a human being against the stupidity of prejudice, racism, religious or political sectarianism, and exclusivist nationalism than this truth that invariably appears in great literature: that men and women of all nations and places are essentially equal.”

Vikram Seth:

This year’s citation for Vargas Llosa says that he got the prize for “his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” This points to a focus on individual rights which is central both to simple humanitarianism and also — though European Leftists would disagree — market-led neoliberalism.

In making this choice, for this reason, the Academy seems to have done just what is expected of it, which is not to go by rumours and prejudices, but to look at the work itself. And as an example of why Vargas Llosa is fascinating, there is not just all his considerable body of work over the years, but also his most recent book, published this year, which has not been translated from Spanish, but whose subject matter signals its exceptional interest.

The selection of Liu Xiabo for Peace Prize is even more striking:
China is furious, making this onerous statement,

In recent years, relations between China and Norway have maintained favorable development, which is in the basic interests of the two countries and their people. The Nobel committee’s award to Liu Xiaobo is completely contrary to the objective of the Nobel Peace Prize, and will bring harm to the China-Norway relationship.

The Chinese government has also forced Liu Xiabo’s wife out of her home in Beijing, and blanked Nobel Prize searches:

Text-messaging on mobile phones is not immune from censors, either. A Shanghai-based netizen, @littley, tweeted his unfortunate experience: “My SIM card just got de-activated, turning my iPhone to an iPod touch after I texted my dad about Liu Xiaobo winning the Nobel Peace Prize.”

23484
Share

By

Alvaro Vargas Llosa speaks about Mario’s Nobel Prize, and VIDEO

From an email by the Independent Institute, where Alvaro Vargas Llosa is senior fellow,

Alvaro Vargas Llosa, Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Prosperity, who has authored such notable works as Liberty for Latin America, which obtained the Sir Anthony Fisher International Memorial Award for its contribution to the cause of freedom in 2006, expressed the following sentiments:

The Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to my father, Mario Vargas LLosa, is great news for those of us who value freedom. His work explores the oppressive structures of power and the plight of the individual who rebels against them, [and} their impact has given some comfort, for decades, to those who struggle against authoritarian regimes. Among the moving messages he and the family have received since the announcement are hundreds of letters of hope from Cubans and Venezuelans who see in him a symbol of what they stand for. The cause of liberty in the Western Hemisphere has good reason to rejoice.

The Independent Institute and its staff would like to join Alvaro in his praise, and extend their sincere appreciation to Mario for his tremendous contributions to the advancement of freedom in Latin America and across the world.

In other Nobel Prize news, the Peace Prize committee finally gets it right:
Nobel Peace Prize Given to Jailed Chinese Dissident (emphasis added)

Liu Xiaobo, an impassioned literary critic, political essayist and democracy advocate repeatedly jailed by the Chinese government for his activism, has won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of “his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.”

Mr. Liu, 54, perhaps China’s best known dissident, is serving an 11-year term on subversion charges, in a cell 300 miles from Beijing.

He is one of three people to have received the prize while incarcerated by their own governments, after the Burmese opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, in 1991, and the German pacifist, Carl von Ossietzky, in 1935.

By awarding the prize to Mr. Liu, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has provided an unmistakable rebuke to Beijing’s authoritarian leaders at a time of growing intolerance for domestic dissent and a spreading unease internationally over the muscular diplomacy that has accompanied China’s economic rise.

I applaud the Peace Committee’s decision; let’s hope they continue on this track.

UPDATED with video,

A Pen Against Dictatorship
Vargos Llosa wins the literature Nobel.

23459
Share