#petro government

[reasonsforhope]

"After its first-ever left-wing presidential administration took charge of negotiating permanent peace with the socialist FARC rebels, Colombia’s forests are feeling the effects with a 26% reduction in deforestation in the conflict areas.

These dense, biodiverse rainforests that are a part of the Amazon in places, and independent of it in others, have been one of the many victims of the country’s civil war.

However, President Gustavo Petro is conducting peace negotiations that put the environment first with around 20 splinter factions of the FARC guerillas, who have responded positively.

De-facto leadership in the conflict areas in the forested state of Gauviare has instituted its own deforestation moratorium, and an estimated 50,000 hectares of rainforest have been saved as a result.

“This is really dramatic,” conservationist Rodrigo Botero told The Guardian. “It’s the highest reduction in deforestation and forest fires that there has been in two decades.”

The Guardian recently covered these peace negotiations alongside a delegation from Norway which included that country’s environment minister, Espen Barth Eide.

“What I’m hearing, seeing, and feeling in these meetings is that there is an enhanced understanding that you cannot build a new Colombia on the basis of the further deterioration of nature, so you have to find an economic, social, political, inclusive process that is more respectful towards nature than before,” Barth told the English paper.

Often flying under the radar when compared to its neighbor Brazil, Colombia is the second-most biodiverse country on Earth, and the most biodiverse in terms of bird life.

It’s the 25th-highest country in the world for Forest Integrity Index score (8.26) and boasts twice as many square miles of highly-intact forest than of poorly-intact forest, almost all of which resides in the conflicted states of Amazonia, Caquetá, and Putumayo.

If the Petro government can really put the brakes on the conversion of forests into pastureland for cattle, it would be helping to save one of the most valuable tropical forest ecosystems on Earth."

-via Good News Network, 7/14/23

[nando161mando]

"The bombs in Gaza are not fired by simple Israeli soldiers: it is big capital in the world, centralized, coordinated, influencing the governments... The Nazis are in power, they rise through financial capital, they manage to run the government of the USA."

During his acceptance speech of the Great Medal of the State of Palestine, Colombian President Gustavo Petro delivered a powerful speech, deconstructing the West's unlimited support for Israel.

[sayruq]

Colombia's president Gustavo Petro has signed an order suspending coal exports to Israel

“With Colombian coal they make bombs to kill the children of Palestine,” said Sunday Colombian president Gustavo Petro in his X account, echoing the decree published by the media. Thus, “exports to the State of Israel of thermal coal” are prohibited, according to the decree, which was signed by several ministers, including the chancellor, Luis Gilberto Murillo, on 14 August and will enter into force next week, despite the fact that the ban was already announced by Petro in June. Fuels and products of extractive industries, including coal, are the main export of Colombia, and between January and June they have cost the country 11,689 million dollars, with the United States being the main destination.

[komsomolka]

After refusing to engage with the Mexican government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador to discuss crimes committed during the Spanish conquest, the Spanish monarch was not extended an invitation to attend Claudia Sheinbaum’s inauguration. While President Pedro Sánchez was invited, he declined the invitation due to the exclusion of the king. [...]

In this regard, last Wednesday, September 25, López Obrador told the press “These differences with the government of Spain are not with the Spanish people. We are talking about differences with the Spanish monarchy, which was respectfully asked to apologize to the Indigenous peoples of Mexico for the atrocities committed during the European invasion of our country. And there was no response.”

In response to the conflict, several Spanish politicians from left and progressive parties expressed their disgust with the attitude of the Spanish monarchy and government. Analysts from across Latin America highlighted that when the Spanish King attended the swearing in of Colombian President Gustavo Petro in 2022, he refused to rise when the sword of Sim��n Bolívar, who led the struggle against Spanish colonialism, was brought out during the inauguration.

[secular-jew]

I sort of forgot about Colombia which is a beautiful country, sadly, corrupted by the drug cartels. But like all failed South American states, Colombia has fallen into disarray, so much so that many of its best people have left, and the remaining seem to have elected the worst possible type of Marxist leader, who was formerly a terrorist, as ex head of gorilla group, M-19. His campaign has allegedly been financed by the rich drug cartels.

Not surprisingly, the dark side of Marxism has partnered with Islamism, again. These authoritarian enterprises seem to make compatible bedfellows.

The government of Colombia has just announced it is breaking ties with Israel and is recalling their ambassador. Because diplomacy, Marxist style, means not engaging.

Columbia's first Marxist leftist president in the country's modern history, Gustavo Petro Urrego, was formerly the leader of the gorilla group M-19. He is currently under fire for taking illegal money from drug cartels, but has the audacity to accuse Israel of genocide.

We don't need you asshole leftist guerilla Marxists. Go away and stay away.

[probablyasocialecologist]

London did try to cobble together a three-part strategy for a sustainable, if vastly reduced, postwar empire: first, consolidate smaller colonies into cost-effective confederations; next, control their exports to capture hard-currency profits; and finally, cling to military bases critical for imperial defense. For instance, it merged nine sultanates and two crown colonies into the Federation of Malaya to control the US dollars earned from its rubber exports, which provided, by 1952, 35 percent of Britain’s net balance of payments with the dollar area. So critical was this cash flow that London dispatched 50,000 troops, who would fight for a decade to crush a communist revolt and keep Malaya in the British Commonwealth. Similarly, the Central African Federation combined three colonies to secure the dollars from Zambia’s copper exports while supporting a small number of white settlers in Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), who had been allocated 50 million acres of farmland, compared to only 29 million for Africans. In the Persian Gulf, British Petroleum explored for oil while British advisers led seven sheiks into a federation that later became the petro-rich United Arab Emirates. Over the longer term, the Federation of Malaya and the United Arab Emirates proved relatively stable independent states, while their Central African counterpart broke apart, after mass protests and inept colonial repression, into the nations of Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Alfred W. McCoy, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change

[mimosita]

Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, condemned Isr*el for the genocide they are committing and Isr*el government got angry and stopped "security exports to Colombia" (weapons and what not. mind that Isr*eli soldiers trained far-right paramilitaries here to commit massacres, etc).

I guess they thought they'll make him retract himself but he answered "If foreign relations with Isr*el have to be suspended, we suspend them. We do not support genocide."

[troythecatfish]

Colombia bans the export of coal to Israel

President Gustavo Petro signed a presidential decree prohibiting coal exports to Israel, aiming to pressure the Israeli government to halt its genocide on Gaza.

The decree, dated August 14, will take effect this week, as reported by Bloomberg.

The Colombian president took to X and stated, "Colombian coal is being used to make bombs that kill Palestinian children."

Source: Mintpress

[allthegeopolitics]

Deforestation in Colombia fell by 36 percent in 2023 compared to the previous year, the country’s environment ministry said, as President Gustavo Petro’s government works to halt record-breaking destruction in the Amazon. In a statement on Monday, the Environment Ministry said deforestation fell to just over 792 square kilometres (305 square miles) across Colombia last year, down from around 1,235sq km (477sq miles) in 2022. “It is very good news, but we definitely cannot say that the battle is won. We continue to confront illicit economies,” Environment Minister Susana Muhamad told reporters in the capital, Bogota.

Continue Reading.

[treethymes]

With the exceptions of North Korea and Cuba, the communist world has merged onto the capitalist highway in a couple different ways during the twenty-first century. As you’ve read, free-trade imperialism and its cheap agricultural imports pushed farmers into the cities and into factory work, lowering the global price of manufacturing labor and glutting the world market with stuff. Forward-thinking states such as China and Vietnam invested in high-value-added production capacity and managed labor organizing, luring links from the global electronics supply chain and jump-starting capital investment. Combined with capital’s hesitancy to invest in North Atlantic production facilities, as well as a disinclination toward state-led investment in the region, Asian top-down planning erased much of the West’s technological edge. If two workers can do a single job, and one worker costs less, both in wages and state support, why pick the expensive one? Foxconn’s 2017 plan to build a U.S. taxpayer–subsidized $10 billion flat-panel display factory in Wisconsin was trumpeted by the president, but it was a fiasco that produced zero screens. The future cost of labor looks to be capped somewhere below the wage levels many people have enjoyed, and not just in the West.

The left-wing economist Joan Robinson used to tell a joke about poverty and investment, something to the effect of: The only thing worse than being exploited by capitalists is not being exploited by capitalists. It’s a cruel truism about the unipolar world, but shouldn’t second place count for something? When the Soviet project came to an end, in the early 1990s, the country had completed world history’s biggest, fastest modernization project, and that didn’t just disappear. Recall that Cisco was hyped to announce its buyout of the Evil Empire’s supercomputer team. Why wasn’t capitalist Russia able to, well, capitalize? You’re already familiar with one of the reasons: The United States absorbed a lot of human capital originally financed by the Soviet people. American immigration policy was based on draining technical talent in particular from the Second World. Sergey Brin is the best-known person in the Moscow-to-Palo-Alto pipeline, but he’s not the only one.

Look at the economic composition of China and Russia in the wake of Soviet dissolution: Both were headed toward capitalist social relations, but they took two different routes. The Russian transition happened rapidly. The state sold off public assets right away, and the natural monopolies such as telecommunications and energy were divided among a small number of skilled and connected businessmen, a category of guys lacking in a country that frowned on such characters but that grew in Gorbachev’s liberalizing perestroika era. Within five years, the country sold off an incredible 35 percent of its national wealth. Russia’s richest ended the century with a full counterrevolutionary reversal of their fortunes, propelling their income share above what it was before the Bolsheviks took over. To accomplish this, the country’s new capitalists fleeced the most vulnerable half of their society. “Over the 1989–2016 period, the top 1 percent captured more than two-thirds of the total growth in Russia,” found an international group of scholars, “while the bottom 50 percent actually saw a decline in its income.” Increases in energy prices encouraged the growth of an extractionist petro-centered economy. Blood-covered, teary, and writhing, infant Russian capital crowded into the gas and oil sectors. The small circle of oligarchs privatized unemployed KGB-trained killers to run “security,” and gangsters dominated politics at the local and national levels. They installed a not particularly well-known functionary—a former head of the new intelligence service FSB who also worked on the privatization of government assets—as president in a surprise move on the first day of the year 2000. He became the gangster in chief.

Vladimir Putin’s first term coincided with the energy boom, and billionaires gobbled up a ludicrous share of growth. If any individual oligarch got too big for his britches, Putin was not beyond imposing serious consequences. He reinserted the state into the natural monopolies, this time in collaboration with loyal capitalists, and his stranglehold on power remains tight for now, despite the outstandingly uneven distribution of growth. Between 1980 and 2015, the Russian top 1 percent grew its income an impressive 6.2 percent per year, but the top .001 percent has maintained a growth rate of 17 percent over the same period. To invest these profits, the Russian billionaires parked their money in real estate, bidding up housing prices, and stashed a large amount of their wealth offshore. Reinvestment in Russian production was not a priority—why go through the hassle when there were easier ways to keep getting richer?

While Russia grew billionaires instead of output, China saw a path to have both. As in the case of Terry Gou, the Chinese Communist Party tempered its transition by incorporating steadily increasing amounts of foreign direct investment through Hong Kong and Taiwan, picking partners and expanding outward from the special economic zones. State support for education and infrastructure combined with low wages to make the mainland too attractive to resist. (Russia’s population is stagnant, while China’s has grown quickly.) China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, in 2001, gave investors more confidence. Meanwhile, strong capital controls kept the country out of the offshore trap, and state development priorities took precedence over extraction and get-rich-quick schemes. Chinese private wealth was rechanneled into domestic financial assets—equity and bonds or other loan instruments—at a much higher rate than it was in Russia. The result has been a sustained high level of annual output growth compared to the rest of the world, the type that involves putting up an iPhone City in a matter of months. As it has everywhere else, that growth has been skewed: only an average of 4.5 percent for the bottom half of earners in the 1978–2015 period compared to more than 10 percent for the top .001 percent. But this ratio of just over 2–1 is incomparable to Russia’s 17–.5 ration during the same period.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, certain trends have been more or less unavoidable. The rich have gotten richer relative to the poor and working class—in Russia, in China, in the United States, and pretty much anywhere else you want to look. Capital has piled into property markets, driving up the cost of housing everywhere people want to live, especially in higher-wage cities and especially in the world��s financial centers. Capitalist and communist countries alike have disgorged public assets into private pockets. But by maintaining a level of control over the process and slowing its tendencies, the People’s Republic of China has built a massive and expanding postindustrial manufacturing base.

It’s important to understand both of these patterns as part of the same global system rather than as two opposed regimes. One might imagine, based on what I’ve written so far, that the Chinese model is useful, albeit perhaps threatening, in the long term for American tech companies while the Russian model is irrelevant. Some commentators have phrased this as the dilemma of middle-wage countries on the global market: Wages in China are going to be higher than wages in Russia because wages in Russia used to be higher than wages in China. But Russia’s counterrevolutionary hyper-bifurcation has been useful for Silicon Valley as well; they are two sides of the same coin. Think about it this way: If you’re a Russian billionaire in the first decades of the twenty-first century looking to invest a bunch of money you pulled out of the ground, where’s the best place you could put it? The answer is Palo Alto.

Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto

[vague-humanoid]

US Deploys Troops to Give Israel’s Genocide a Boost

On The Freedom Side LIVE, Thursday, 10/17  at 3pm ET/12pm PT, Eugene and Rania are joined by special guests:

Mike Prysner - War veteran, Host of Eyes Left Podcast and producer for The Empire Files joins the show to give insight into the Pentagon’s plans to deploy a THAAD advanced anti-missile defense system to Israel along with 100 US soldiers to operate it – the first time the US has deployed boots on the ground since the start of the Gaza genocide. Prysner will discuss how the move signifies preparations for US involvement in a wider regional war.

Zoe Alexandra - Journalist and Editor of Peoples Dispatch joins the show to discuss the latest attempts by the Colombian right-wing to overthrow Gustavo Petro’s democratically-elected government through an unconstitutional investigation into his 2022 campaign finances. Several world leaders have called this a lawfare coup. Zoe will discuss the mass mobilizations taking place to defend Colombia’s democratic process.

Giorgio Cafiero - CEO of Gulf State Analytics, a Washington, DC-based geopolitical risk consultancy, joins the show to discuss how the reactionary Gulf States are responding to Israel’s dangerous escalations to provoke a full-scale regional war in the Middle East.

Lawrence Grandpre - The Director of Research at Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle will discuss Kamala Harris’s recently unveiled ‘opportunity agenda for Black men.’ Grandpre explains why the superficial attempts from the Harris-Walz campaign to win the Black vote – while doing nothing to address Kamala’s abysmal track record incarcerating Black people – will only fall short.

Junaid S. Ahmad – Professor of Law, Religion, and Global Politics and Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization in Islamabad, Pakistan joins the show to discuss the mass protests that swept Pakistan following Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Ahmad explains how the resistance in the Middle East has helped to revitalize the mass action against Pakistan’s US-backed military regime.

#breakthroughnews

[loving-n0t-heyting]

Anarchists have a natural affinity for frictionless, stateless Bitcoin, and Ukraine in turn has a long and storied history of embracing anarchy. "It's about not believing in the state," says Oleksii Mushak, a young member of Parliament in President Petro Poroshenko's ruling party. Mushak and I are enjoying a meal at Coin – "Like money," the hostess replies when I ask about the name – an upmarket restaurant in a high-rise business center on the outskirts of Kyiv. He says pushing back against government oppressors "is what Ukrainians have been doing for the last 1,000 years."

In the early days of the revolution, Mushak made his living mostly by operating a crypto-mining operation in Kyiv and fundraising for the Maidan movement, which relied in part on digital coins to buy food, armor, and protection against Yanukovych's special forces. He was elected to the first post-Maidan parliament in 2014 and became the nation's first MP to declare crypto assets.

Smth i took away from that excellent excellent vincent bevins book was the extreme amenability of anarchist organising and messaging to co-opting by radical market liberals, especially in periods of crisis and volatility. He focuses on the "free brazil movt" that piggybacked on the hype around the free fare movt to help mobilise a libertarian political upsurge in the country, but the above is also a helpful illustration

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Proposals from Brazil and Colombia for new elections or a coalition in Venezuela rejected

The political crisis in Venezuela has been intensifying since the country’s presidential elections on July 28 when the National Electoral Council (CNE) proclaimed Nicolás Maduro the winner. Almost three weeks later, Chavismo has still failed to provide evidence to back the claim.

The opposition, which has made public more than 80% of the voting records in its possession, has slammed the result, calling it electoral fraud. Meanwhile, the international community has been more focused on pointing out the lack of transparency than on insisting on who has won.

Close to home, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico are seeking a negotiated solution, promoted by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Columbia’s Gustavo Petro, involving either new elections or a transitional coalition government which might lead to free elections with guarantees. The proposals, which Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador has not fully embraced, have been dismissed by both Maduro’s government and the country’s opposition.

Lula and Petro’s proposals come after nearly 20 days of insisting on the publication of the results by the CNE. Now the presidents of Venezuela’s two neighbors are seeking to pile pressure on Maduro, whose electoral triumph they have personally questioned. The Brazilian president said in an interview on August 15: “If [Maduro] has any common sense, he could put it to the people, perhaps calling new elections with a non-partisan electoral committee. Maduro knows he owes the world an explanation.”

Continue reading.

[partisan-by-default]

Syrian President Bashar Assad reviews the presidential guard during the welcoming ceremony in Athens, Dec. 15, 2003. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris, File)

But when faced with protests against his rule that erupted in March 2011, Assad turned to the brutal tactics of his father in an attempt to crush dissent. As the uprising hemorrhaged into an outright civil war, he unleashed his military to blast opposition-held cities, with support from allies Iran and Russia.

International rights groups and prosecutors alleged widespread use of torture and extrajudicial killings in Syria’s government-run detention centers. The war has killed nearly half a million people and displaced half of the country’s prewar population of 23 million.

The conflict appeared to be frozen in recent years, with Assad’s government regaining control of most of Syria’s territory while the northwest remained under the control of opposition groups and the northeast under Kurdish control.

Although Damascus remained under crippling Western sanctions, neighboring countries had begun to resign themselves to Assad’s continued hold on power. The Arab League reinstated Syria’s membership last year, and Saudi Arabia in May announced the appointment of its first ambassador since severing ties with Damascus 12 years ago.

However, the geopolitical tide turned quickly when opposition groups in northwest Syria in late November launched a surprise offensive. Government forces quickly collapsed while Assad’s allies, preoccupied by other conflicts — Russia’s war in Ukraine and the yearlong wars between Israel and the Iran-backed militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas — appeared reluctant to forcefully intervene.

[mariacallous]

Like many of his fellow Latin American leaders, Uruguay’s new president-elect is left-wing. But Yamandu Orsi, who narrowly won a runoff election on Sunday, stands out in at least one way: He has never attacked Israel.

Gustavo Petro in Colombia, Gabriel Boric in Chile, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil are all vehement critics of Israel; some have broken diplomatic ties with Israel over its war in Gaza. Jose “Pepe” Mujica, Uruguay’s former president and Orsi’s mentor, is also a harsh Israel critic.

Orsi, by contrast, expressed admiration for Israel’s multicultural society after visiting last year and reiterated those sentiments this month, shortly before the election, even suggesting that he could self-identify as a Zionist. He says he supports Israel’s right to exist while also backing calls for a Palestinian state.

“On the boulevard you see people of both faiths,” Orsi told an interviewer from the Jewish community in September 2023 in Tel Aviv. “That is what surprises me the most, honestly. There is a part of the reality here that is more about coexistence than the other. So it is possible.”

Orsi was on a trip organized by the Central Israelite Committee of Uruguay and the Latin American Jewish Congress, traveling with officials from those Jewish groups on an itinerary focused on science and innovation. Orsi, then mayor of Uruguay’s Canalones region, also visited major tourist attractions including Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial.

“I am a history teacher and I have taught classes on the Second World War and the impact of the Holocaust,” Orsi said in a second interview upon his return. “The guide showed us and gave us details of aspects that I frankly did not know and that, naturally, shocked me.”

Orsi faced criticism from pro-Palestinian leftists within his coalition, the Broad Front, for visiting Israel in a trip that came just weeks before Hamas attacked on Oct. 7, 2023, launching the ongoing war in Gaza. He also drew some criticism from pro-Israel Uruguayans for a tweet he posted while there that highlighted the income gaps between Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza.

“My strategy is dialogue. I can understand that they want to impose vetoes or … a kind of ideological purity of my actions,” Orsi told the interviewer about the left-wing critics. “Clearly, it is not my path. Dialogue and peace, peace and dialogue — I will not give up on that, nor on the freedom to express one’s opinion.”

Orsi’s campaign focused on the environment and the economy, and Israel was not a prominent part of the election discourse. But he discussed Israel at length just before the runoff election on air with a prominent Uruguayan radio personality.

The interviewer, Orlando Petinatti, is Jewish and pro-Israel; his show, “Bad Thoughts,” has aired since 1991 and is the most popular Uruguayan radio program. Orsi signaled that he agreed with Petinatti’s assertion that there is “no apartheid” in Israel, recalling how he watched Arab players on the Israeli team that Uruguay defeated in a game during his trip.

Orsi also said he would call himself a Zionist if the definition is as Petinatti articulated it: “in favor of the Jewish people having a state in the land of Israel.” Orsi added that that would need to come along with provisions granting equal rights to religious minorities.

“I like Zionism ,and also like the Palestinian cause to have a state,” he said. “Having said that, I’m in favor of Israel’s right to exist but I’m not always agreeing with the actions of the Israeli government.”

Uruguay is home to about 15,000 Jews, according to the Latin American Jewish Congress, out of a total population of 3.4 million. (While most live in the capital of Montevideo, there is also a burgeoning Jewish community in the coastal city of Punta del Este.) It was the first South American country to officially recognize the state of Israel and was home to the first Israeli embassy in Latin America, established in 1948, the year of Israel’s founding.

Orsi’s term begins in March and lasts five years. He replaces a center-right politician who represented the only break in the Broad Front’s leadership dating back to 2005.

Uruguay is considered Latin America’s most stable democracy; voting is mandatory and 90% of eligible voters cast ballots in each round of this year’s election. Its neighbor to the west, Argentina, is the largest country in the region with a right-wing president; Javier Milei is vociferously pro-Israel and is reshaping his country’s foreign policy after a period of left-wing leadership, with the goal of bringing Argentina closer to the United States and Israel.

Paraguay, to Argentina’s north, also has a right-wing and pro-Israel president. Santiago Pena, elected last year, is in the process of moving his country’s embassy back to Jerusalem after his predecessor, a liberal, moved it to Tel Aviv, prompting a diplomatic crisis. Pena plans to visit Israel next week to rededicate the Jerusalem embassy.

[enriquemzn262]

Major long shot, but have you heard anything about a Party of the U congresswoman named Milene Jarava Diaz or a Democratic Center senator named Paola Andrea Holguin Moreno? Both recently joined the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, and I felt that was a big deal since it's the main inter-legislative pressure group in support of Taiwain and previously its only presence in Latin America was in the Bolivian opposition(who have no power because Bolivia is not a democracy) and Paraguay(which is already one of the last remaining states to recognize Taiwan).

Honestly man? After the current scandal in which our president Gustavo Petro was found to be cheating on his wife with a transgender woman in Panama, which apparently its a psyops to distract from the fact that his government is effectively collapsing the country through corruption and sheer negligence, I can no longer give a shit about the political scene in Colombia, other than who will be the next presidential candidates two years from now.

Because currently our main hope of getting out of this quagmire is a new government, and I honestly don’t see the Army taking action before the elections, which is for the best.