Diego Montoya, who was arrested in La Paila, Valle del Cauca, on September 10, ranked second on the FBIs 10 most-wanted fugitives list. He will shortly be extradited to the US to stand trial for cocaine-related racketeering offences. Predictably, the US State Department and much of the corporate media have hailed his arrest as a victory in the so-called war on drugs. Yet, despite this official posturing, it is undeniable that Montoya, like many other significant figures associated with Colombias multibillion-dollar cocaine industry, was a product of US Colombia policy.
David T. Rowlands
Three-metre high security fences, heart-stopping tasers, a bone-smashing water cannon, mobile prison buses and — perhaps most disturbing of all — the threat of automatic incarceration for randomly abducted protesters? Welcome to the growing international phenomenon of “population control”. The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum is in Sydney, and NSW security chiefs are telling you to follow orders, shut up and stay away. Prison cells are ready and waiting if you fail to heed the warning.
Popular resistance to neoliberal “reform” was the underlying cause of Peru’s July general strike. On July 5, public schoolteachers walked off the job over government plans to privatise education. Within days, discontented workers from other industries joined the embattled teachers. Before long, schools, mines, factories and construction sites were shut down as tens of thousands of striking protesters took to the streets of every major city demanding higher pay, improved conditions and revisions to the US-Peru free-trade agreement. Peasant farmers joined the mass mobilisation, closing roads and paralysing transport networks.
The corporate media has heaped praise on Al Gore following the international rock gig Live Earth. But to ask the Uwa people, from the tropical cloud forests of north-eastern Colombia, what they thought about Gore and Occidental Petroleum (Oxy), the oil company from which his personal fortune is derived, would be to receive a very different opinion.
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