Colombia’s presidential election could determine the fate of the historic peace deal ending their 53-year civil war. While most in the country want to honor the agreement, Colombia’s right wing has been a fervent opponent.

In Bogotá, Abby Martin interviews Congressman Edward Rodriguez, a leading member of the far-right Democratic Center Party founded by former President Uribe. She challenges him on his party’s ties to death squads, drug cartels and potential to reignite the war.

Martin also visits the government office dedicated to compensating the civilian victims and speaks with Director Ana Maria Almario about their monumental task.

Below is a summary of our work in 2017––we are looking forward to helping cut through the imperialist propaganda and featuring more untold histories and censored voices in the year to come. 

In a year when so much of the corporate media was hyper-focused on President Trump, Abby Martin and the Empire Files crew sought to cover underrepresented domestic and international issues that affects real people.

Inside the Empire, that meant the ongoing opioid epidemic in a discussion with leading attorney Mike Papantonio, examining why 91 Americans die each day due to opioids, and how Big Pharma’s desperate pursuit of profit is attempted murder upon all injured Americans.

It meant examining the new Administration’s assault on the freedom of assembly in the form of controversial J20 arrests, where more than 200 demonstrators faced decades in prison for conspiracy and other charges.

And it meant examining overarching issues in America, like racism, inequality, the dysfunction of capitalism and the US Empire’s need to prop up the system.

Always connecting struggles in here to the victims of US Empire, Empire Files revealed the censored history of how the US Empire destroyed and subjugated the Philippines, Colombia, Palestine, Venezuela and more.

While the mass media’s most-reported story in 2017 was fear-mongering and aggression towards Russia, Empire Files sought to explore what could happen if this trend continues how the US Empire looted Russia after it led the overthrow of the Soviet Union, and Russia’s own history of defeating the oligarchs a century ago.  

The Places

 In 2017, Abby Martin and the Empire Files crew traveled both domestically and abroad to cover the year’s most important stories: From Houston, Texas a month after Hurricane Harvey to cover the government’s inaction in communities that were affected the most, to Washington, D.C. to dive deep into the protests surrounding the inauguration of President Trump.

Alongside Trump’s major announcement to declare Jerusalem the official capital of Israel, Abby Martin’s interviews with Israelis in Jerusalem, who wished exile and worse upon Palestinians, gave an eye-opening counter-narrative to the corporate media’s depiction of the situation. Martin’s report was so controversial that she became the target of a smear campaign by Israeli organizations.

Amidst a relentless regime-change operation in Venezuela by the Pentagon and Venezuelan oligarchs, Empire Files went into the heat of the battle, producing the only widely-seen coverage countering US propaganda–everything from being tear gassed with opposition protesters, to using hidden cameras to investigate food shortages, to explaining the reality of the country’s economic crisis, to pro-government protests ignored by Western media. 

Most recently Empire Files travelled to Colombia, covering the historic peace deal that ended a 53-year civil war–and went deep into the jungles to investigate a breech of trust that left 8 farmers massacred by police. 

In each location, Abby Martin spoke with victims of violence and colonization funded and perpetrated by the US Empire – points of view never found in the mainstream.

The Voices

Those voices, those marginalized individuals deemed too inconvenient to the Empire’s agenda, were amplified through Empire Files in 2017.

Early in the year, Abby Martin spoke with Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa shortly before he left office after 10 years, as well as top officials in the Venezuelan government, and the rare voice of former Israeli infantryman Eran Efrati.

Profiling academics rarely seen on television, interviews with Dr. Gerald Horne, Rosa Clemente and Chris Hedges gave essential perspective on the resurgence of neo-Nazis and white supremacists under Trump. 

Brining grassroots voices to the forefront, Empire Files was especially honored to interview Filipina domestic workers fighting human trafficking, young radical organizers in the People’s Congress of Resistance, Sikh Americans responding to racism and Islamophobia, poor and working-class Venezuelans fighting US regime change, peasant farmers in Colombia in the wake of a state massacre, and unsung heroes who saved lives in the Hurricane Harvey. 

Without these voices, these stories simply could not have been told.

You can view the full library of Empire Files episodes here, and be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook to see what we have coming in 2018!

The US began heavily pushing military intervention in Colombia under the Kennedy administration, whose National Security Doctrine aimed to wipe out all populist movements in Latin America through the backing of right wing death squads.

FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), the Marxist-Leninist rebel group, is branded a terrorist group by the US, yet is trying to initiate a peace process. The US prevents this from happening, and continues to use the rebel group as an excuse to increase its military involvement. The so-called Drug War is just another arm of the ongoing violence on the ground.

The role of the US military in Colombia is intense. According to the former US Ambassador to Colombia, the US has more involvement in Colombia than anywhere in the world, including Afghanistan. There is also widespread abuse on behalf of the US military throughout the community. Between 2003-2007, US soldiers and contractors sexually abused at least 54 children and could not be tried or extradited due to immunity clauses between the two countries.

All this aside, Colombia remains the invisible country in the invisible war, shunned by the world. Abby and Robbie Martin are joined by Dan Kovalik, human and labor rights lawyer, on Media Roots Radio to discuss Colombia’s current war and the far-reaching effects of US interventionism over the past half century. 

If you want to directly download the podcast, click the down arrow icon on the right of the soundcloud display.

This Media Roots podcast is the product of many long hours of hard work and love. If you want to encourage our voice, please consider supporting us as we continue to speak from outside party lines. Even the smallest donations help us with operating costs.

Listen to all previous episodes of Media Roots Radio here.

Follow @FluorescentGrey | @AbbyMartin | @DanielMKovalik

LUIS ROBAYO/AFP/Getty Images

Documentarian Kevin Booth is the director of several films that scrutinise America’s dubious relationship with drugs and suggest that illegal trafficking is embedded in the US economy.

As arrests are hastily made for the possession of marijuana – which is proven to have countless medical benefits, people are bombarded with advertisements for alcohol and cigarettes. Booth’s films bring attention to the profit holding priority over public health with big pharma and private prisons reaping substantial benefits to the detriment of patients whose lives could be vastly improved by medical marijuana.

American Drug War: The Last White Hope

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Booth has lost close friends and family members to legal drug addiction amongst whom include Bill Hicks, legendary comic whose outrage with the establishment’s hypocrisy on drugs paralleled Booth’s. Their shared worldview fueled them to create Sacred Cow Productions which has since produced a host of eye-opening documentaries including American Drug War 2: Cannabis Destiny and How Weed Won the West.

With Colorado recently legalising cannabis and Washington close to follow, it’s due time for the US to review its classification of marijuana. Filmmakers like Kevin Booth deserve worldwide recognition, and we were lucky to sit down with him for an interview with Media Roots.

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MR: I recently saw a video where you and Bill Hicks are on site covering the Waco massacre in 1993. Is that where your filmmaking career kicked off?

KB: That was in 92. I started shooting in 84. I sold cocaine in order to buy my first video camera all the way back in 1984. In Austin, Texas, they a public access channel which would allow first time filmmakers or people that made videos to able to put videos out that they made up on Austin access which was channel ten on the regular cable vision. If you had basic cable in Austin you would actually get Austin access channel ten. I became a producer for that and that was all the way back in the mid-eighties. Around the same time my band got a record contract with Chrysalis records was actually out of England, they did Jethro Tull who was one of the first bands out of Chrysalis records. I helped do a music video that was on MTV and that’s what really kind got me pushed through into this more seriously. Up until then I thought I was going to be a musician and I just did video as a hobby, and then once I did this help on the music video for MTV I got the bug. I started getting more interested in cameras than I was into guitars. Bill and I did a karate movie called, Ninja Bachelor Party – we started that all the way back in 85. I did a lot of videos before the Waco thing.

My background was first in music then in comedy and then going into documentaries wasn’t until after Bill died. Alex Jones as a conspiracy guy was just getting started up at the Austin access channel up at the time and like you said I did that video with Bill up at Waco. Alex was just this young guy starting off and he was doing some stuff with Waco, in fact he was trying to raise money to help the Branch Davidians rebuild the church and so I started to travel to Waco with him and started filming him up at Waco. That kind of led me into working on my first real documentary with working together with Alex Jones. I worked on several documentaries with Alex for a while until we kind of had a clash of personalities. I wanted to kind of be able to do my own which what led me to do American Drug War besides other personal reasons.

MR: Talk about your reasons for setting out to make films.

KB: At the time I had lost Bill to legal drugs. There’s no proof but Bill was such a heavy, horrible smoker and abused his body horribly with alcohol and cigarettes then my brother died in 97 from having a seizure from pharmaceutical drugs. He was a schizophrenic and was actually court ordered to take anti schizophrenic medication which gave him a seizure. My mom and dad were both alcoholics, my dad he died of throat cancer from cigarettes that he had smoked when he was way younger and my mom died of liver complications so I kind of looked at it like I had lost all my friends and family to legal drugs of alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceutical. A close friend of mine by the name of Mambo Johnny he went to a prison camp for two years for just growing marijuana and then when he got out of this prison camp he died from complications or some disease he got while he was in this prison. Around the same time George Bush was on TV saying, ‘If you buy drugs then you support terrorism.’  All that together made me think decide to put everything I have together to make a documentary about the drug war.

MR: How has the reaction been to your work?

KB: It’s been really great. When the first one came out on Showtime in 2008 I got probably one hundred emails a week from people sharing their stories of drug addiction or their stories of being arrested and how much they appreciate me shedding light on the topic – pretty much all positive reactions. The very few people that have anything negative to say to me will usually just do it on comments, they don’t ever do it face to face. They’ll hide behind their computer if they have anything mean to say to me.

MR: There’s psychoactive properties of some drugs that would make them dangerous, if not life threatening for some people. Personally, I can understand why drugs like LSD are illegal.

KB: Yeah, Bill had a joke about that, how Art Linklater’s daughter took acid and jumped off a building. His joke was would be like, ‘Well, you don’t see ducks lined up to take elevators. If you thought you could fly take off from the ground first! Don’t blame acid on this fucking dumb ass!’  If you take drugs and run into a wall…No, I get it.

Some people watch these films and they don’t really totally get it. Their knee jerk reaction is to think that I’m just out there promoting drug use and it couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m actually kind of conservative!  When I go to some of these pro-legalisation rallies and I have to interact with a lot of these people, I run into a lot of them that say everything should be legal – crystal meth, PCP should be legal ,legal, legal..I have to be honest and say I have a hard time with that. There really does need to be a line.

The problem always comes in to what should be against the law and I think it should be your actions need to be against the law, not ingesting a chemical. If you’re selling drugs to children then that should be against the law. I wish there was a way for people who wanted to do cocaine responsibly in their home to be able to get legally controlled substances.  It’s like when you hear the thing about Phillip Seymour Hoffman dying, right? Most likely what killed him was that he probably got hold of something that was a lot stronger than what he was used to. I think that most of the deaths that are related to illegal drugs have to do with a lack of control. There are more deaths in this country right now from Tylenol than there are from heroin and meth and all these other illegal drugs combined. Of course there’s no deaths from marijuana but when you look at the deaths that happen from illegal drugs it does have to do with the lack of control.

I don’t believe that everybody should be able get everything but I think that if you’re a responsible adult and you want to work through certain channels say you want to be able to take a hit of ecstasy with your wife in the privacy of your own home, have a shared experience maybe you could go to a certain doctor or psychiatrist. They found that it’s really good as a marriage counseling drug. We worked with these people that were doing ecstasy when someone was going to die, like a wife was about to lose a partner they would take ecstasy together and have these amazing experiences before they die. There’s a lot of therapeutic benefits to it all but if someone wants to do it they have to go get it from some scummy person off the streets and that’s what really screws it up. I wish that I could try cocoa leaves for example. I think it would be amazing if I could try chewing on some cocoa leaves like god intended, I mean wouldn’t that be awesome? I’ll never get to do that, all I get to do is do this thing called cocaine that is a powerful chemical derivative that’s very dangerous because you have no idea what people are mixing it with in the jungle to get it across the border. It’s a very cloudy issue.

MR: Has your view on drugs changed since putting out the first film?

KB: My reaction from putting out these movies and the reaction I got is that I’ve probably actually gotten a little conservative with what I think is reasonable. Now that marijuana is legal in Colorado, case in point, I’ve been going to Denver since Colorado has been legalised and I have to be honest it’s a little over board. It’s fun, don’t get me wrong. It’s probably how Chicago was when prohibition ended and people were dancing and drinking in the streets. Now everybody’s ‘Dabbing’ – I don’t know if you know what dabbing is?  Everybody’s smoking these big pipes using blow torches and smoking this really powerful form of marijuana extract. Everywhere you go everybody’s is smoking this and when I see that in Denver I go, ‘Oh my god, when the rest of the country sees this it’s really going to hurt the legalisation!’

People always have to take things too far, you know what I mean? It’s kind of human nature, it’s the blow back from all the years of it being illegal too that people are always going to take things to the far extremes. I’m all for responsible use, I’m all for people being sober when they drive. Then again I believe that alcohol probably is one of the most horrific drugs out there when it comes to making people act like idiots and do really stupid things, acting violent, driving bad, doing dumb things. I think that alcohol is at the very top of the list as one of the most dangerous drugs out there. It’s just amazing to me that I can go to the grocery store and there are bottles of Jack Daniels and tequila right there! If I drunk that I would lose my mind! There’s just so much hypocrisy.

MR: What do you think would be the immediate effects of nationwide cannabis legalisation?

KB: You can look at what’s going on in Colorado right now. Colorado is having a real boom. I’m getting ready to go to a conference of billionaire investors who are all flocking around Colorado to see how they can get involved in the emerging legal cannabis business. Looking at what’s going on in Colorado around the cannabis industry right now is a little indicator of what could happen across the rest of the country. Now of course I’m not talking about legalising cocaine or any of those things, though wouldn’t it be cool if you could grow poppy plants in your back garden? Of course I’m not advocating that you have some big lab or something like that. Anytime you’ve got people mixing dangerous chemicals, that should be illegal. It should probably be illegal to set up a laboratory of flammable explosive things, you know? I don’t think it should be illegal to grow and consume anything. I guess where I draw the line is at nature.  If it grows out of the ground then you should be able to plant it and consume it. If it takes chemistry to do it then yeah, maybe the law should step in.

MR: One fascinating aspect of your films is how deeply embedded the drug market is in American economics, for example the CIA drug running.

KB: You can look at what’s going on right now. We could flash to Afghanistan and the reason why the military is still there. A lot of people believe we are still there basically protecting the opium and the heroin. Right now there’s huge resurgence. There’s stories on the news that are like, ‘Wow, heroin is really having a big resurgence in America!’ and they never connect the dots like, ‘Oh, yeah! That Afghanistan thing!’ They never connect those dots! Another fascinating thing that no one ever talks about is the banks and the money laundering taking place. Anyone can see for themselves if they go to Google maps – go to the Texas border and type in ‘banks’ and zoom in and look at the Mexican border – it’s fascinating to see all the banks. There are so many banks along the border in these border towns. Not only that, there are so many of these weird foreign banks with these names that you’ve never heard of and it’s all just money laundering. Then again other big mainstream banks get caught doing it being knowingly involved in money laundering for cartels and, you know, no one ever goes to jail. Nothing ever happens to the big guys it’s just all the little people that get sent to jail.

MR: What’s next for you?

KB: After doing Cancer in Kids I need to take a break from the seriousness. I’m moving off and getting back into my comedy roots a little bit. One of the documentary projects I’m working on is kind of showing some of the corruption in the marijuana industry – some of the more high end corruption. There are a lot of big companies that are now coming out of the industry and I don’t know if you realise this but a lot of them are actually being publicly traded. Although a lot of them are really great, some of them in my opinion are fraudulent. People when they think about marijuana they think of hippies, peace and love but some of the people in the marijuana industry are some of the most cutthroat people I’ve ever been around. It’s a whole another level. We’re not talking about just drug dealers any more, we’re talking about an industry that is not quite regulated by the government yet but it has been legitimised by the fact that they’ve legalised it in two states!

So you’ve got two out of fifty states that have legalised it, so in a way the government has said, ‘Okay, yeah so it’s illegal’, although people are being arrested in these forty eight states. Meanwhile you have not only the good people like rich investors from all over the world. Tokyo, Germany, Switzerland rushing to Colorado to figure out how they can invest in this thing to get in on it early, you also have a lot of scummy, fly by night, get-rich-quick schemer type people. They call it ‘the green rush’ and in my opinion it really is like a modern day gold rush, because so many people have this idea of easy money and dollar signs in their eyes. I’m working on a documentary that’s going to look at that and a lot of its humorous so it’s going to be more of a comical documentary, because in my mind, once you enter into the world of trying to get rich overnight then it’s all fair. I can’t feel sorry for you if get screwed when you’re trying to get rich overnight. It kind of all becomes comedy to me at a certain point with people scamming each other. I’m also working on a scripted show that’s going to based on the same thing. None of them are drop dead serious. It’s more in the vein of comedy.

Written and transcribed by Aaron Williams, photo by Kayvee Inc.

MEDIA ROOTS – You often hear the term Gulag and think of a secret prison in a third world dictatorship, where its purpose is to break you down, humiliate and torture you.  This style of imprisonment has been frequently used by members of the US military in Afghanistan, Gitmo and Iraq. 

Torture and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ fall outside of the realm of the Geneva Conventions since those imprisoned are deemed ‘enemy combatants’ instead of prisoners of war.  Labeling such prisoners as ‘enemy combatants’ is nothing more than a flimsy legal loop hole that gives the military carte blanch to treat them however they would like, without due process.  It’s hard to believe that someone would experience a similar fate on American soil.

Recently, in San Diego, California, a UCSD student named Daniel Chong was arrested during a 4/20 marijuana drug raid and left in a holding cell without charges for over five days.  He was without food, water, toilet, or human contact of any kind.  Chong eventually resorted to drinking his own urine and eating a bag of white powder he discovered in the cell, which turned out to be meth amphetamine–only exacerbating his psychotic state.  He described attempting to commit suicide with broken glass from his glasses and said that the he literally lost his mind and didn’t think he would survive. 

The DEA and San Diego police claim that this is a unique incident that rarely ever happens.  They chalk it all up to a “mistake,” stating that someone simply “forgot to go check on him.”  Whether or not the person [or people] accountable for driving Chong insane and leaving him to potentially meet his demise for the crime of smoking marijuana is yet to be seen.

Robbie Martin for Media Roots

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HIGHLANDER NEWS – For nearly five days, Chong sat alone in a room with no food, no water and no toilet. Chong told CBS News that he kicked the door many times and screamed for help, but his cries were ignored. “I just couldn’t believe that this was legal,” Chong told the AP. “I’m thinking ‘no way.’”

He drank his urine three times due to dehydration and unknowingly consumed methamphetamine after finding the drugs in the cell; the DEA has yet to explain why the methamphetamine was found in the holding cell.

“The DEA’s protocol was so sloppy that somebody who was a previous prisoner secreted a small amount of meth in a plastic bag inside a blanket,” stated Chong’s attorney, Gene Iredale, in an article by the LA Times. It is unclear whether the hallucinations that Chong experienced were caused by the drugs or other severe ailments such as starvation.

Chong told the New York Times that on the fourth day, the lights shut off in his holding cell. Chong, contemplating suicide, chewed into his glasses and attempted to carve the words “Sorry mom” into his arm using a glass shard. “I pretty much lost my mind,” he told the Associated Press.

Agents found Chong on the afternoon of April 25, covered in his own feces but still conscious. “He is glad to be alive,” Iredale said of Chong. “He wants to make sure that what happened to him doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

Continue Reading UCSD student left in DEA cell for 5 days sues for 20 million.

Photo by Robbie Martin