The historical role of dictators and caudillos allied to the United States, in our continent and in the world, has been to serve as operators of its particular political strategic objectives, but it has also served for these self-same dictators and caudillos to find guaranteed impunity for the crimes against humanity, which they have perpetrated in their respective countries.
Together with the economist Felipe Tascón, in 2015, we wrote a book about Uribe’s relationship with the transnational extreme right. Our investigation demonstrated that he (Uribe) had efficiently fulfilled the role of placeholder for US politics in Latin America at the start of the XXI century.
The book analysed his close bonds with a sector of the Republican Party in the state of Florida; his efforts were to localise the worst policies of the White House with respect to human rights, such as “the war against terrorism” resulting in his “democratic security”, the “war against drug-trafficking” which was applied via Plan Colombia; the models which gave rise to “false positives’ (in effect: extrajudicial executions) which were exported to other Latin American countries; the illegal spying and the promotion of a civic-military model which resulted in fertile ground for the growth of paramilitarism and para-politics.
