Actualidad Colombiana IN ENGLISH

Bulletin No. 393 Index

September 29 – October 13, 2004
Year XXV

Social Movements
The Unity of the Indigenous People

Opinion
Interweavings of the War

Economics
Taxation Reform 2004

Politics
EMCALI in Sight

Full Bulletin in Spanish (.html) and in English (.doc).

The Unity of the Indigenous People

"The critical situation in which the oppressed live must be a foundational problem related to the NEOLIBERAL strategy and to GLOBALIZATION, and for that reason any action that we do now will be part of a medium- and long-term fight.... This country is ours and it is time to reclaim it!!!"

ARTICLE FOR ILA
KRISÁLIDA

Summoned by these words, more than 60,000 men and women, indigenous, farmers, the homeless and others, mobilized between September 12 and 18 to reject the policies of the present government of Alvaro Uribe Vélez. In solidarity, they renounced: the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), the continuous human rights violations, the arbitrary constitutional reforms and the repressive "policy of democratic security".

Interweavings of the War

ALEJANDRO ÂNGULO
DIRECTOR GENERAL OF CINEP

Of the 1,098 municipalities in Colombia, 382 of them, more than a third, have been under the military-political and social control of the paramilitaries. However, these are only the official numbers authorized for publication. The paramilitary policy is a subject much more ample and interwoven with all the devices of the Colombian State. The actual numbers are not known. Nor is the corruption that all this entails.

Taxation Reform 2004

JAIRO BAUTISTA
PUBLIC ACCOUNTANT, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
ASSESSOR OF THE CONGRESS OF THE REPUBLIC

The candidate Uribe, upon presenting his first tax reform, promised that new taxes would not be necessary to maintain the level of state spending. He has failed, again, to fulfill this promise. Nevertheless, this time a project of bigger ambition has appeared, directed mainly at increasing the collections of IVA.

The structural reform vow will be for later, because right now the plan is to get more money so that again the candidate Uribe, hoping to get approved a law allowing for the immediate re-election of the president, has a substantial check with which to finance his untiring campaign in all the points of the country. The budget approved for next year is a sample of this, and the resources for this "mega-campaign" will come from the pockets of the poorest.

EMCALI in Sight

Behind "Operation Dragon" are privatization policies

ASSOCIATION FOR INVESTIGATION AND SOCIAL ACTION
NOMADESC

These days, the high spheres of the Colombian government have had to be responsible for the existence of a parallel network of intelligence to which members, both active and retired, belong to the National Army, who with the support of the Executive and private companies designed a meticulous plan of pursuit against opposition political leaders, defenders of human rights and, particularly, against the workers of EMCALI E.I.C.E. E.S.P., the second most important provider of public services in the country.