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Las Americas, continued from page 19 Andres Uriel Gallego now serves as the Minister of Transportation. He’s a long-time friend of Uribe’s and held the post of Public Works Secretary in the state of Antioquia while Uribe was Governor there. Uriel Gallego is Uribe’s Mini-Me, frequently parroting the new President. Lately he’s been pushing the sale of tunnel and highway concessions under the Roads for Peace Program. In fact, politicians and Army men in Colombia describe almost everything as “For Peace.”There are Roads for Peace, Helicopters for Peace, Bazookas for Peace, Informers for Peace, Peace for Peace… With so much Peace stuff, it seems odd that the whole country’s at Classical Where Classical Music Goes to Party Join Golden Arm Trio’s Graham Reynolds and Brown Whornet’s Peter Stopschinksi, hosts of KMFA’s Classical Crossover, as they explore underground classical music, past and present, from Austin and around the country. war and has been for 50 years, but there you are.The explanation for this semantic twist is simple: If you say something’s for peace, you can get U.S. money for it, but if you say it’s for war, you can’t.Yet. Under the Bush administration this is about to change:The U.S. Congress is poised to bankroll its favorite Colombian gang with more taxpayer money, even as Uribe and his team set up compulsory informant networks, a tactic that turns civilians into military targets, and declare a state of siege that suspends most civil rights for at least 90 days due to the internal “commotion.” Between the narco-president and the death squad army, it’s pretty hard to make a compelling argument for getting more mixed up in this. But the new Minister of Defense, Marta Lucia Ramirez, is going to try. She’s in charge of begging the United States for more money in exchange for “professionalizing” the Armed Forces. Where have we heard this before? With Diem in Vietnam? With Duarte in El Salvador? Any place Henry Kissinger ever set foot and passed his expert assessments on to Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. Hey, maybe we could use a new era too, here in the U.S. The long-term strategy of financing and ‘training’ the same old kleptos, narcos, armies, and death squads who compulsively slice up peasants and stuff trade unionists down latrines is just not working. That doesn’t seem to matter to the people in charge, though. As soon as you see Henry Kissinger starting to visit the Sunday morning news shows, you know that any real change of era is not bloody likely. Gabriela Bocagrande is a Writer for Peace based in Washington, D. C. WRITE DIALOGUE The Texas Observer 307 W. 7th St. Austin, TX 78701 [email protected] Best of the Old & New! MI fhe lafesi in Organic & Nafural foods and Classical Crossover 11:05pm Thursdays and tam Saturdays. The Voice oLthe Arts for Central Texas. Old favorites, foo in a comfy-size Neighborhood Sfore! uuheatsv ille \\ food co-op 3101 Guadalupe 478-2667 9/13/02 THE TEXAS OBSERVER 29