As a Latin American, I loved the article. I think, ultimately, the problem is an ideological one, it is the strength of anti-communism in the US and in Western countries.

If indymedia has had ongoing reports on the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Middle East crisis and other places, why not have one of, at least, Colombia's Civil War? Surely, by now, they would have got the message on how important it is.

I do not think indymedia is completely independent, because I do not beleive Western countries have yet recovered from decades of anti-communist indoctrination and ideological attacks from political influences, including anarchist ones.

Furthermore, there is also a great deal of ignorance in Western countries of the Latin American left and its long history of fighting US imperialism. As anyone with good knowledge of it will know, Marxism in Simon Bolivar's America, and Latin American politics in general, is truly an autonomous phenomenon, and cannot, and does not, mirror the European experience.

I call upon everyone and anyone, who is true to the class struggle, to unite and fight, a disease in western society called anti-communism, whether one is sincerely conscious of it, or not, because; our class enemies surely are.

"All the world's peoples who

have fought for liberty have,

in the end, eliminated their

tyrants..."

Simon Bolivar

San Mateo, March 1814

I agree with your sentiment. I strongly encourage all those who are interested in Columbia to visit the Columbia IMC site at:

http://colombia.indymedia.org/

As I cruise around other IMC sites around the world I am pleased to see that many of them feature stories on the struggle in Columbia. I can only compare this to the lack of intelligent coverage in the mainstream US press, so yes, I am pleased of the coverage at the IMC sites. As more and more IMC sites become created it will be interesting to see how they might collectively increase our access to such stories.

where's the translation button.... for gringos like me who struggle outside of my limited English skills???

Yes we are all engaged in struggle even if we sometimes define it differently, eh? I have book marked:

http://babelfish.altavista.com/

for my translation needs. To be fair though there are a number of translation sites that pop up even with the most limited of search engines. Your personal choice of translation sites may vary.

My name is Jay and I help with a number of Indymedia projects. Yes, absolutely there should be as many reports on Indymedia sites as possible about the situation in Colombia. Michael points out that there is a Colombia IMC, which would seem to be the best place to post and find coverage. Actually, Indymedia works almost primarily according to the principle of "open publishing." Rather than an editorial board sitting around deciding what is important to cover, all articles that appear on the Indymedia newswires are unsolicited. People post what they find interesting. In other words, the statement "Indymedia should provide more coverage of such and such" turns around to be "people out there who post to Indymedia should provide more coverage of such and such." The exceptions are the few IMCs that have printed publications, the imc-print team's weekly PDF, and the center columns of many Indymedia sites that offer features. In those instances you're right, I think Indymedia should be as on the ball as possible about what's happening in Colombia. I can't speak for any other group than the www.indymedia.org features team, since I'm not involved with any of the other projects. We've had a lot of features on Latin America (currently there are front page features on Argentina and Ecuador). We haven't had a Zapatista feature for a long while, nor have we done one on Plan Colombia for a couple months. I would say both issues are long overdue to be revisited as features.