Matt Yglesias

20 Responses to “Colombia Day”

1. Petey Says:
   October 20th, 2008 at 10:10 am

   “Hendrick Hertzberg takes a look at John McCain’s somewhat curious obsession with Colombia, and his extensive ties to Colombia-related business interests.”

   What’s the problem? Obama actually attended Columbia as an undergrad, and no one complains about that.

2. El Cid Says:
   October 20th, 2008 at 10:13 am

   Not directly related, but interesting: the FARC guerrillas release a video of the Colombian undercover rescue of hostages disguised as a Red Cross prisoner exchange. It is believed that the military attack on the FARC camp comes very shortly after the exchange seen on the video.

3. Petey Says:
   October 20th, 2008 at 10:14 am

   Bummer. Hertzberg’s first paragraph steals my joke.

   Someone ought to write an expose about Hendrik’s rampant plagiarism.

4. duBois Says:
   October 20th, 2008 at 10:52 am

   So, basically, Hertzberg points out that Republicans (via Karl Rove) love to accuse Democrats of doing what their Republican accusers are doing.

5. Outsider Says:
   October 20th, 2008 at 11:49 am

   What Hertzberg did not mention, but seemed like a curious coincidence at the time, was that McCain rushed down to Colombia in the middle of the campaign just in time to be there for the “daring rescue” of Ingrid Betancourt. He got to be loosely associated with the whole thing. Was he tipped that he should go down there?

6. kth Says:
   October 20th, 2008 at 11:55 am

   Hertzberg:
   

   But John McCain is an honorable man. Therefore, it is inconceivable that any of these “associations,” to use one of his favorite words, had anything to do with the Republican nominee’s extraordinary solicitude for the Colombia trade pact, let alone the way he rolled his eyes when Obama spoke of the murder of Colombian labor leaders.

   There’s a simpler explanation for McCain’s eyeroll: among the Beltway gatekeepers of acceptable opinion, to hold our client states to human rights standards is radical and dangerous. And no publication blacklisted Democrats more diligently for the human rights heresy than the New Republic of the 1980s, edited for part of that time by none other than Hendrik Hertzberg.

   Obama has a way of phrasing notions, that have already been declared verboten by the arbiters, such that they seem perfectly reasonable. McCain must have thought some kind of buzzer was supposed to go off whenever the sorry human rights record of one of our trade partners is mentioned, and when the buzzer didn’t sound, it was all he could do to keep from blowing his stack.

7. Rich Says:
   October 20th, 2008 at 12:49 pm

   Colombia is collateral damage, but not in the way progressive and drug-legalization activists think it is. Colombia under Uribe has done what progressives, at least of the not-for-the-guerrillas variety, asked of it: paramilitarism has been dismantled and its leaders have been killed, imprisoned, or extradited to the US; killings of union and leftist activists have declined by 90% even as unionism and leftist politics are at an all-time high (well, more the latter than the former, since Colombia’s experiencing the same secondary-to-tertiary sector transition that has reduced unionism in the developed world, including the US); indigenous people and Afro-Colombians have unprecedented legal protections, as does the environment (quaintly identified with those groups, at least by progressives); and the political class has been held to account for past connivance with paramilitarism. But all of that counts for nothing, because Uribe is a reactionary who supported Bush’s war in Iraq. So a trade treaty that is unobjectionable for Peru is anathematized for Colombia, for spurious reasons that only make sense in the Colombia of 2002, not the Colombia of 2008.

   McCain is, of course, corrupt through and through, and his reasons for supporting the trade treaty with Colombia are as dirty as they can possibly be. But the case against the treaty has been self-interested in a different way: it’s low-hanging fruit for US progressives eager to score a victory of whatever sort, even if they have to make stuff up. Personally I’m indifferent to the fate of the trade treaty, since it wouldn’t actually do anything significant in either direction; Colombia is what it is, in terms of what it’s reasonably going to produce and consume, and its economy won’t change with this treaty–neither, of course, will ours. But it’s been just about the most non-reality-based debate, at least in the US, that I have ever seen.

8. Aatos Says:
   October 20th, 2008 at 2:05 pm

   So when McCain said maybe Obama would understand Columbia better if he visited there, he really meant Obama might understand Columbia better if his campaign staff were festooned with lobbyists for Columbian business interests.

   Wow, I never saw that one coming.

9. Hector Says:
   October 20th, 2008 at 4:33 pm

   Rich,

   Don’t forget to mention, of course, that Colombia invaded neutral Ecuador earlier this year, causing the death of Ecuadorian citizens.

10. Rich Says:
    October 20th, 2008 at 6:16 pm

    Hector: You’re boring me. Why don’t you do us all a favor and publish a list of everyone who died in the Colombian attack? You know, name, nationality, employment. That would be most excellent reading.

11. Hector Says:
    October 20th, 2008 at 8:47 pm

    Rich,

    Why the f— should I? I’m not defending any party in the Colombian debacle- not FARC, not Uribe, and not the paramilitaries. You’re the one who was making an affirmative defence of Uribe. I was simply pointing out that Uribe was no angel, which is a fact.

12. Coffee Bean Says:
    October 21st, 2008 at 12:51 pm

    Ecuador was NOT neutral. Correa’s government has been permitting FARC leaders to camp in its territory for years already. You know how many Ecuadorian citizens died in that attack? Only one, and he was a member of that guerrilla.

    Uribe is no angel, Correa is no angel, Chavez well, haha…enough said.

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