FRFI 202 April / May 2008
On 1 March two members of the FARC-EP Central High Command, Raul Reyes and Julian Conrado, and twenty three other members of the 48th Front were butchered inside Ecuador. At least five smart bombs exploded within a 50-metre radius during a night attack, an impossible achievement for the Colombian Air Force. Two days before the attack, US Admiral Joseph Nimmich met with Colombian military leaders in Bogota with the stated purpose of ‘sharing vital information in the fight against terrorism.’ US intelligence located the base after Reyes used his satellite phone to arrange the goodwill release of four prisoners – ex-members of the Colombian Congress – to Venezuelan officials two days earlier. Chavez described Colombia as the ‘Israel of Latin America’.
Last November Uribe shamelessly bombed the location of a meeting between Reyes and Senator Piedad Cordoba, a Colombian Congress representative, just after it had ended. Despite this, Reyes, the lead contact in negotiations for the exchange of prisoners of war, subsequently released two prisoners: Clara Rojas – ex-vice presidential candidate – and Consuelo Gonzalez – ex-Congress member – to Red Cross and Venezuelan government delegates, inside Colombia on 10 January. To exhibit goodwill, Chavez had also released Colombian paramilitaries arrested in 2004 as they prepared terrorist actions in Venezuela.
All Venezuela and FARC’s sincere attempts to restart negotiations to end the civil war in Colombia have been cynically abused by Uribe’s gangster government. Colombian Police General Oscar Naranjo – who previously resigned as anti-drug chief when his brother was arrested for trafficking in Germany – claimed they had captured Reyes’s laptop with ‘proof’ of both Ecuador and Venezuela’s financial and other dealings with FARC. (Greg Palast exposes these claims at http://www.gregpalast .com/300-million-from-chavez-to-farc-a-fake/#more-1). Both countries have ridiculed the charges, including the idiotic charge that FARC seeks nuclear weapons which followed the sudden ‘discovery’ of 66lbs of natural uranium by the roadside south of Bogota. As Ecuador’s President Correa said, ‘It is difficult to speak with someone who constantly lies and when he is exposed, invents a new infamy.’ Uribe then called for President Chavez to be taken to the International Criminal Court for Crimes against Humanity and Genocide. This was outrageous hypocrisy: in 2002, Uribe set a seven year waiting period for the investigation of crimes committed by pro-state paramilitaries in Colombia to give them time to escape.
Venezuela and Ecuador reacted immediately to the incursion into Ecuador’s territory, sending troops to their Colombian borders, whilst Chavez warned that any further incursion would be a cause for war. The majority of other Latin American States also condemned the attack. The Rio Group of 20 states debated the matter at a previously-scheduled meeting in the Dominican Republic on 7 March and rejected the Colombian attack. Uribe told a meeting of his party leaders that he would do the same again and that the Rio Group declaration ‘was nothing more than a pantomime.’
The same day, Colombian Defence Minister Santos announced that a third FARC Comandante, Ivan Rios, had been assassinated on 4 March by a man called Rojas, an alleged FARC traitor. But an anonymous official had previously reported Comandante Rios’s death as the result of an assault carried out by an elite wing of the Colombian army. It is apparent that Uribe’s clique is lying wholesale in order to conceal US military management and to try to demoralise FARC.
A week later, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Chile and Brazil to get support for Washington’s position on Colombia’s attack. In Brazil she proposed the ‘flexibilization of borders’, to allow the Colombian military to combat groups like the FARC outside its territory. President Lula flatly rejected this. On 18 March, the foreign ministers of the Organisation of American States (OAS) approved a resolution ratifying the declaration of the Rio Group considering the incursion a ‘clear violation’ of articles 19 and 21 of the OAS Charter. State officials from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Peru condemned the assault. US representative Negroponte said the US ‘supported’ the resolution in order to ‘build trust between Colombia and Ecuador’ yet argued that Colombia’s military incursion was ‘legitimate defence.’ In the meantime, following Uribe’s claims about supposed Venezuelan links with FARC, the Bush administration launched a preliminary legal inquiry that could put Venezuela on the US list of nations that support terrorism
If this pretext for sanctions and embargoes against the Bolivarian republic succeeds, it will severely limit the ability of US firms to do business with Caracas while making it nearly impossible for Venezuela to export oil to the United States or import vital spare parts. This would force an acceleration of the Bolivarian revolution and expose the growing conflicts within the US economy.
FARC’s aims
FARC wants to re-establish a military free zone to re-open discussions on a peaceful solution to the Colombian civil war. Uribe wants only the strengthening of the state and the destruction of his opponents. Yet he cannot destroy FARC or the other democrats opposing his government. Indeed opposition is growing. Once back in Bogota Consuelo Gonzalez said she would devote all her efforts to facilitate the exchange of a further 45 prisoners held by FARC for 500 guerrillas held in Colombian prisons, a process in which she said President Chavez has a vital role to play. She and the families of prisoners held by FARC refused to join the state and business sponsored anti-FARC marches on 4 February. On 6 February a large demonstration against state and paramilitary violence was held in the capital.
Uribe is now faced with even more pressure from prisoners’ families to enter wider formal discussions. Killing the key FARC contact was his answer, but the majority of Colombians see this as a blow to hopes for peace. Chavez has called for an internationally-mediated solution to the conflict with the recognition, as a first step, of FARC and Colombia’s second largest guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), as belligerent forces. FARC and the ELN were listed as ‘terrorist’ by the USA only after 9/11, after 40 years of civil war. As Chavez said… ‘if it is necessary to have a terrorist list, then that list should be headed by the US government because of its illegal invasion and massacre of innocent civilians in Iraq.’ Uribe is caught: he cannot defeat FARC and the democratic forces against him, but neither can he make concessions to them since it would expose the brutality of the Colombian ruling class.
Alvaro Michaels
