With all eyes suddenly on Honduras over the expulsion of President Manuel Zelaya, few were paying attention when President Barack Obama quietly met with Colombian president and staunch U.S. ally Alvaro Uribe this week.
Uribe knows something about changing a constitution to stay in office. In 2004, his powerful supporters in the Colombian Congress passed legislation to amend the 1991 constitution in order to allow the popular president to seek a second four-year term. Though controversial, the new law was upheld by the country’s Supreme Court, and in 2006, Uribe won the presidential election in a landslide.
It’s an alarming prospect. Since Uribe’s first re-election, reports have surfaced that members of Congress were bribed by his administration to vote for his re-election bid. The accusations add to a mind-boggling litany of charges against Uribe, whose government has been linked to right-wing paramilitaries for years — and whose military continues to kill innocent civilians and then dress up their corpses as FARC guerillas.
Add to that a series of intelligence scandals — including a wiretapping probe targeting politicians and journalists — and one would think it might be time to distance the U.S. from the man George W. Bush liked to call “mi amigo.”
Yet Obama greeted Uribe warmly at the White House this week, praising him for his “diligence and courage” and speaking optimistically about the passage of a free trade agreement — a measure presidential-candidate Obama opposed on human rights grounds.
noting both the yin and yang of futurity, watching cover ups as they happen, fighting back, and wooking pa nub in all de wong places. that's what i do.
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