(PIG BUSH, DEMOLISH THE BORDER WALL) reads the message on the side of the big pink pig aloft during the Roger Waters concert in Mexico City on March 6, two days before his Bush visit warm-up performance in Bogota
Bush's imperial entourage dropped into Bogota yesterday, but the presidential visit to what the media describes as the administration's strongest South American ally was cut short because of security concerns. The President, who had traveled to and from a private stage set downtown in a 55-car motorcade which was preceded by an additional, 12-car phony/decoy motorcade, fled the country after staying little more than six hours. Oh, should I mention here that I've read that on this trip, and apparently on every trip, our president apparently has access to Marine One (perhaps shipped in the hold of a jumbo cargo jet)? Pretty soon we're talking real money.
The idea of the visit had been to give a morale boost to a government dogged by a scandal involving its association with drug traffickers and brutal right-wing paramilitary death squads . Bush's meeting with Alvaro Uribe Velez in the presidential palace on Sunday brought out some 2000 protesters (and 20,000 police and heavily armed troops). On Friday, in a concert in the same city (presumably, traveling sans motorcades) former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters introduced the subject of the huge amounts of U.S. money which maintains and corrupts the Columbian regime (Colombia receives more U.S. aid than any country outside the Middle East and Afghanistan). The band's legendary helium-filled pink pig hovered above the stage, this time bearing the legend:
EL PATRÓN BUSH VISITA EL RANCHO DE COLOMBIA
(PATRON BUSH VISITS HIS COLOMBIAN RANCH)
Sigh. Do we have any idea of what we look like?
Are the Americans who voted for this regime noticing that from the very beginning of his term in office Bush has been unable to appear or speak in public except before military or invited audiences, and that this is also true on the rare occasions he travels abroad, even when he is a guest of a government described as closely-allied to our government? What does this say about Bush, and what does this say about us?
Do those same Americans believe that all those "foreigners" hate us personally, and not just the selfish and exclusive policies of our government? If we continue to choose governments like this one I have no doubt that eventually, as very fortunate people who represent ourselves as part of a democratic system, we will come to be despised by the world as individuals, and very rightly so.
[image of Fernando Aceves and Marco Peláez from laJornada]