A government in trouble? Yeah, right....

In the British newspaper, The Guardian, there is a news about the links with our Colombian president's cousin and the paramilitaries. They recognise however the lack of evidence that involves the president with the same groups. I wonder why in 2008, we keep trying to deceive ourselves (specially media) and not forcing the president to explain the recent ties between most of his party members in the Congress under investigation and his own cousin. It is really unlikely that he ignored all these irregularities. I remember how things were completely different some years ago with Samper as president of Colombia. Even though he was eventually forgiven for the investigation of his campaign that received money from the drug groups, the journalists and people in general incited him to resign. He didn't, but people was offended and put a lot of pression on him.

Now, when in my opinion, the situation is morally more embarrasing. We are not talking about financing a campaign with drugs money, we are talking about paramilitaries threatening people to vote for their candidates and even killing their oponents in the political run. The media seems to keep the "stable" but unacceptable situation, instead of pressing the president to resign or at least to call for a cleaning of the congress. Of course he is not going to accept to do the cleaning because his party is the congress dominant party, the one with 33 members under investigation.

The guardian today explains how it is not well seen in the international arena but in Colombia the government of Uribe is accepted broadly in part, in my opinion, due to the manipulation of the media that does not pay enough attention to covering this investigations.

An expert called Shifter, interviewed by the guardian says that"domestically President Uribe enjoys an 84% approval rating. Most Colombians support him for bringing the country from the brink of becoming a failed state and though the parapolitics scandal is important, "the sense of regaining control trumps everything," said Shifter.

Internationally, though, the idea that the president's cousin could have close ties with drug trafficking paramilitary death squads "doesn't smell good," he said. Read whole article here

Domestically the corpses of the victims of paramilitaries that are being exhumed must not smell good either, using Shifter's words. In fact, Uribe's government smells to death, injustice and abuse of power, arms and force to get political results. It does not only smell bad, it is terribly unaceptable, sad, unfair and embarrasing.