Colombia: Pillage, Promise and Peace http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/08/07/colombia-pillage-promise-and-peace/

Colombia stands at the crossroads: it can follow in the footsteps of its predecessor, narco-President Alvaro Uribe and remain a military dependency, a lone outpost of the US Empire in South America. Colombia can remain at the margin of the most dynamic world markets and at war with its people or via a new socio-political leadership it can effect a profound reorientation of policy and consummate a transition toward greater integration with the dynamic markets of the world.

Colombia has all the objective ingredients (material and human resources) to be part of the dynamic new order. But first and foremost it must shed its role as the militarized vassal of the United States and an object of exploitation by a rentier oligarchy. Colombia must cease backing US coups (Honduras, Venezuela) and threatening its neighbors (Ecuador).State and para-state violence, however, is not random; over 4 million Colombian farmers, peasants and rural intermediaries have been forcibly dispossessed and their lands seized by big landowners, narco-traffickers, generals and businesspeople allied with the government.

In other words State terror and mass dispossession is a peculiarly Colombian method of “capital accumulation”. State violence is the method to secure the means of production to increase agro-exports at the expense of family farmers. In Colombia, state and para-state extermination replaces the market and “contractual relations” in effecting economic transactions. The unequal relations between a militarist state and popular civil society movements has been the principal impediment to a transition from an oligarchical political regime to a pluralistic representative democratic electoral system.