One is that if your whole damn country hadn't been a failed state for 20 years or so, you might not have idiots from France like producer/co-writer Luc Besson and director Olivier Megaton -- yeah, that's a put-on last name -- using it as a cheap pretext for a trashy and ridiculous blend of "La Femme Nikita," "Scarface" and "Fast Five."Har!
Of course, it's precisely the complaint of the Colombians who are protesting this movie that Colombia is a not a failed state, that surely the whole damn country is not, and that Colombian demonstrates that even educated Americans like O'Hehir don't know any better. He appears to be proving that point. I'm not qualified to make the case for Colombia as an improving nation, but the case is out there for you to evaluate.
But set aside potential improvements in Colombia's condition. Maybe we should consider why the country has been in such dire straights for so long. Perhaps there's some giant rapacious superpower due north that has explicitly proclaimed its ownership of the hemisphere for centuries that has been causing a little chaos. We could talk specifically about Plan Colombia, which has included funding and arming right wing paramilitary organizations, funneling in money that corrupts police departments and empowers cartels, sending military ordnance into a country that doesn't need any more weapons, and spraying thousands of defenseless people with aerial fumigation of unknown medical consequences and sometimes devastating economic consequences. Or we could go beyond just Plan Colombia and look at our general, decades-long history of manipulation in Colombia and the region, undertaken in large part to secure valuable resources and perpetuate a useless and inhumane drug war. Or we could just talk about the fact that this country can't stop doing cocaine but refuses to decriminalize it, and what that means for Colombia.
You know. If you're into that sort of thing.
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