Silvester's explanation is especially instructive when it leaves analysis and opinion and takes recourse in lies.  After spending several paragraphs documenting (accurately, I believe) violence from the guerillas, Silvester writes:

However, the paramilitary is absolutely no different even if is politically opposed. They are equally violent, equally destructive, have carried out atrocities of equal magnitude and are equally bad for Colombia.

No.  I have never been to Colombia, so feel hesitant to engage in this discussion, but I have no trouble calling equating the guerillas with the paramilitaries a lie.

The AUC and other paramilitaries are responsible for at least 70 percent of civilian deaths, and then the national army they co-ordinate with it is responsible for more.  The combined guerilla groups have carried out less than 20 percent of the atrocities, not equal violence and destruction.

The Council on Foreign Relations (supported by the $200 million Markle Foundation) puts the generally accepted figures for civilian murders at 75 percent committed by the AUC and 15 percent by the FARC and ELN combined.

The BBC reported in 2003: "the paramilitaries have made the massacre and assassination of suspected guerrilla sympathisers the cornerstone of their war against the rebels and last year were responsible for some 70% of registered human rights violations."

I've seen remarkably consistent figures – 70 percent or more of murders and massacres committed by paramilitaries – from a wide range of sources, including the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CDPH) in Colombia and even the U.S. State Department.

I'm pounding on this point because it goes to the heart of the whole mediated mess that Laura cuts through with sharp sarcasm– as I wrote after her first editorial column, if only satire could take down empire by itself, Uribe and Bush would be gone from power.  Silvester argues that Colombians do not believe what the media says, yet he clearly believes some media misrepresentations and bases his arguments on them.  (Note also that del Castillo is not writing a news article but an editorial– that she packs more news into one than in your average daily newspaper is not her fault.)

The other belief Silvester passes off as fact is that the guerillas are funded by drug trafficking and the paramilitaries aren't.  Sean Donahue wrote here on January 2: "The FARC plays a marginal role in 'taxing' coca cultivation and cocaine production in the zones under their control and trafficking in coca paste while the AUC is heavilly involved at all levels in the production and export of cocaine."

It's not that the government funds the paramilitaries, it's that it lets them operate at will – in both drug trafficking and killing – in exchange for the violent support of the continued power of a wealthy minority.

And whatever Silvester wants to say about the rebels, they are still engaged in a battle of public opinion.  The paramilitaries pay far better than the guerillas; ideology is as important as drug tarriffs to the continuing existence of these rebel armies.  I would be predisposed to believe a well-argued case that the left's (continuing) decision to meet state violence with (some) unjustifiable violence of it's own has put the social movements in Colombia behind their counterparts in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Brazil– that is, I want to read strategies for making things better as much as Paul Silvester does.

Which brings us to the lack of alternatives to Uribe in Colombia.  The charge that Narco News focuses on the negative is ludicrous; there is actually more of a tendency to be overhopeful on the ascendency of yet another president supported by the social movements (Gutierrez in Ecuador, Lula in Brazil, even Mesa in Bolivia) as these folks then go on to betray their supporters to a greater or lesser extent.  The political situation in Colombia is bad; Laura can't write about what doesn't exist.  She does in fact mention that the most viable alternative candidate in 2006, Carlos Gaviria Díaz, has launched his pre-canidacy.  I hope she'll write about him in a later column.  But detailing the dangers of and corrupt grab for a second Uribe term with style and fact are also extremely important.

Media silence about what everybody knows (the war on Iraq is about oil, politics is corrupt, the rich get richer) kills us.  Changing Constitutions for the immediate benefit of the person in power is very rare in functioning democracies, including the United States, except when constitutions are first written.  (As noted, the Constitutional Court could still block Uribe.)  Handing out ambassadorships and other positions in exchange for votes is bad for any country and is typical only of the more corrupt phases of U.S. history.  These shenanigans alone are worth a column, Laura del Castillo Matamoros also brought in Uribe's other crimes against democracy and his people.  But this wasn't enough for Silvester.  He wanted solutions.

Silvester's own plan for Colombia's economy is attracting tourists and foreign corporations (and, I assume, the dollars and Euros they would bring).  This is, of course, what the richest people everywhere want every country to be competing with each other on: who can lay flatter while international corporations decide who to walk on and who to rape.

With the international economy so horribly unequal, there can be all the companies in the world operating in Colombia and they will pay extremely low wages for unrewarding work under terrible conditions– unless people can organize to fight for their survival and improvement in their lives.

And this is where Silvester's suggested revolution by evolution in Uribe's Colombia falls apart.

The Campaign to Stop Killer Coke (begun because of Coke's Colombian bottlers' complicity in the murder of union workers by paramilitaries) reported the following threat:

On 17 November 2004 at about midday, paramilitaries delivered the following message to the headquarters of the regional CUT in Bucaramanga, Santander:

"This threat is directed towards those trade unionists who oppose the governor, the mayor and those private companies who are supporting the policies of the government of Dr Alvaro Uribe Velez. We inform you that we have made a military judgment to force you from the areas under our influence, or to kill you. We will show no mercy to those trade unionists who have initiated legal proceedings against government of private company officials. For this reason we have declared the following as military objectives:

David Florez
Martha Diaz
Teresa Baez
Efraín Guerrero
Carlos Castro
Javier Jiménez
Rafael Ovalle

Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), Santander."

The above names are all members of the CUT, and Efrain Guerrero is a Coca-Cola worker and leader of SINALTRAINAL in Bucaramanga. On 20 April of this year [2004], paramilitaries entered his house in the early morning and killed 3 members of his family; Gabriel, Fanny and Robinson Remolina.

Is Uribe going to dismantle the paramilitaries that have served him so well, or even allow their skill in murder to atrophy?  It's a nice hope, but that is the conjecture, not the conclusion that paramilitary violence will continue against the social movements under Uribe or anyone like him.

The Uribe regime has broadcast its intentions, but the balance Silvester craves and the rest of the media provides – as in equating the guerillas with the paramilitaries, so very nice and neat a balance – apparently makes these threats easy to miss for the lucky middle and upper classes (or those of us outside of Colombia altogether).  In his article, The Criminalization of Social Movements in the Andes, Tigran Feiler wrote:

In Colombia, where over 90 percent of the world’s assassinations of trade union members take place; the persecution of the social movements was given a new ideological framework in 2003.  According to a report published by the organizations in the Colombian Platform for Human Rights, Democracy and Development in September 2003 the human rights situation in Colombia worsened after Alvaro Uribe Vélez became president in 2002.  Uribe Vélez responded in an infamous speech on September 8, 2003 where he called human rights groups “spokesmen of terrorism” and ‘human rights traffickers’. A couple of days later Uribe Vélez specifically pointed out the respected Colombian Lawyers Collective José Alvear Restrepo as “mouthpieces of terrorism.”

The assumption of a fair election under these circumstances would be laughable if not for the tragic consequences.  The poor majority in Colombia can be effectively silenced in the media and electorally.  (It's similar in the United States: when computers reached 50% of the population, this was everybody as far as the establishment media was concerned.)  In Colombia's case, the majority may even become the minority, in effective power and even in their own mind.  The army and paramilitary groups are also there to make sure people do not try to express their power in any more direct, nonviolent way.

Paul and his friends, not among the poorest, see the positives from the Uribe administration, such as more affordable education (if you have some money, that is), and say things have gotten better.  This is a case of not being able to see the fascism for the treats.

Paul wants policy solutions.  I'd say Colombia needs to stop selling it's natural resources as fast as it can.  It needs to unite it's medium-sized population and economy with the surging power of India, Brazil, and Venezuela in confronting the economic powers to reform the international ecotomic powers in the interests of the majority.  It needs to allow it's people to build their lives and networks in freedom and safety.

And a first step in any of that is exposing Uribe for the what he is, a corrupt politician and ally of the most violent elements in Colombia and completely loyal to the interests of the elite in Colombia and the elite in the United States, not the interests of his country or it's people.  And that, if I can recall all the way back to Laura's article, is what she did.