Here is a tremendous media criticism article posted on Upside Down World, about a Wall Street Journal's columnist and her dangerous op-ed about the Colombian Peace Community in San Jose de Apartado. Please read, and yes, get angry!
MAMA
**************************************************************
Written by Belén Fernández
Tuesday, 29 December 2009
In her latest pro bono public relations initiative on behalf of right-wing Latin American regimes, The Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady interviews a former commander of the 5th Front of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)—Daniel Sierra Martínez, alias “Samir”— who deserted the organization in 2008 and is now serving as a primary accomplice in Colombian government efforts to prove campesinos are terrorists. In her Dec. 13 article entitled “The FARC and the ‘Peace Community’,” O’Grady announces that “[l]ast week Colombian authorities agreed to let [Samir] sit down with me and talk about his rebel experience,” an arrangement which presumably did not require much twisting of authorities’ arms.
The peace community in question is that of San José de Apartadó, which was founded in 1997 in the northwestern Colombian department of Antioquia near the Panamanian border and is a network of geographically-proximate villages and outposts that have renounced cooperation with the military, paramilitaries, and guerrillas alike. The unilateral rejection of armed conflict had not prevented the community from suffering 184 assassinations—out of a population of approximately 1500—as of its 12th anniversary this year, however, as nonviolent philosophies do not appear to be compatible with efforts to clear territory of inhabitants in order to exploit coal mines and other local resources.
For the full article, go to Upside Down World.
No comments:
Post a Comment