Chavez makes Colombia rebel call

Source: BBC News

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has called on the US and European governments to stop treating Colombian left-wing rebel groups as terrorists.

Mr Chavez said the Farc and ELN guerrilla movements were armies with a political project and should be recognised as such.

He was speaking a day after helping manage the Farc's release of two hostages held for more than five years.
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I ask you (Uribe) that we start recognising the Farc and the ELN as insurgent forces in Colombia and not terrorist groups, and I ask the same of the governments of this continent and the world," Mr Chavez said.

Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7184485.stm

I truly have no respect whatsoever for ANY of the parties involved in the Colombian conflict, including Uribe, the paramilitaries and the FARC.

FARC USED to have a political project, but in the last couple of decades the situation has deteriorated in a way that they only exist to justify their own existance. The Colombian civil war is a way of life (and way of profit) for MANY people involved, from drug lords, to politicians, to guerrilla and paramilitary chiefs, in all parts of the political spectrum (although it should probably be called greed spectrum, because they don't really care much about politics, just their own well being).

The Colombian people have suffered enough by the hands of ALL involved, and it is way past time that this conflict is over.


However, I do agree that a political and negotiated solution must be reached... it is pretty clear now that the fascistic-Uribe-Bush way of a strong hand against "terrorism" doesn't work in the long term and only causes temporarily "positive" illusions. And most of all, Chávez can really prove that if you sit down and negotiate you can accomplish great things. The liberation of Clara Rojas and Consuelo González yesterday is clear evidence that this is the way to go.


The armed conflict must STOP... by ALL of those involved!

And again, although I don't agree 100% with Chávez, he has my deep respect and admiration because of what he accomplished. They were only 2 hostages out of hundreds, but it is the most important hostage release in more than half a decade, and he, along with Senator Piedad Córdoba, was responsible for it.

and that is the importance of democracy. Sure, none of the parties in Columbia seem to have any interest in it, but when a truly democratic leader is able to come up with a solution for a problem, it is a victory for us all. I think the real problem, for many years, has been looking at Columbia as having a "real" government and FARC, where as, in reality, there have been two governments. Our country is largely responsible for this problem, and I really do hope that the next president we have, whoever it may be, is serious enough about democracy to stop backing the the right-wing Columbian government, and start working for a real solution.

If not more.

FARC actually control over 30% of the country, where there is no presence whatsoever of the supposedly "real" government.

A political deal must be found, and certainly Chávez is the most capable person to negotiate this type of deal in ages.

What we have done to Columbia in the name of law and democracy is a travesty. I really hope that we can see a resolution to this in our lifetimes (to me, that seems like a long time, but to many columbians, my 3 decades is old age).

So, sometimes I'd rather stay out of the decisions of your own government because it gets frustrating that although it affects everyone so much, I have no say whatsoever. I learned that during the 2004 election :)

But yes, I agree too... it is unconceivable to me that the largest foreign "aid" package in the world goes to Colombia to supposedly fight drug trafficking when the underlying problems are much worse. Especially because the paramilitaries also fund their war by drug trafficking while the US and the Colombian government simply decide to turn their eyes somewhere else. And the thing is, it doesn't just include Colombia... my own country has a treaty with the US that allows the US coast guard to "help" in "fighting" drug trafficking.

So, frequently, at least a couple of times a year but sometimes several times, our Congress has to approve that a few dozen US ships and aircraft use our resources and ports in special missions against drugs trafficking. At least our Constitution doesn't allow any foreign military using our air space or seas without authorization, but still, I'd rather don't have the US military near our coasts doing god-knows-what.

Yet, I'm still hopeful that although a Democratic administration probably will not change any of these (to be honest, Clinton was not that much better than Bush regarding Latin American foreign policy), at least the secretive practices and hidden wars will be more likely to come to the public light.

will be unable to resist poking their nose in. They will want the status quo to remain
for now until it suits them to do otherwise.

It's worth remembering that until 9/11 <your one not the major one in Chile '73> your government did nothing positive to stop financial support for the IRA from the USA. Thereafter they declared the IRA to be a terrorist organisation and blocked funds.

I notice his intentions of having other countries and the Colombian government to recognize that there is a political movement behind the guerrilla is may be to start a political dialog and move the FARC to disarm and integrate into democracy. Like the ELN did.

And of course the forces who want to stop Chavez and keep going the arm conflict will have a hard time fighting against peace.

It's going to be an all out battle on some level, getting the Uribe administration to give up the wildly over sized foreign aid package _Bush sends them, at the U.S. taxpayers' expense, almost all of which goes to military projects and maintenance.

Blair and others had the same hopes for the IRA. Well, the IRA made some concessions too. Today the IRA no longer exists and has been replaced by a political party.

--filed for political office, and were promptly assassinated.

Edit: Kill off all the political FARC people, and what is left is thugs. Works that way with bacteria too--saturate a petri dish with every known antibiotic and whatever is able to grow there is a real mofo.

Not surprising in any way, either, unfortunately. They are not diversity encouraging people, are they? How right-wing.

The only rebel-related politician I've heard about is Gustavo Petro, as in this report:

BOGOTA, Colombia - The political scandal that forced Colombia's foreign minister to quit and put other close allies of President Alvaro Uribe in jail is being driven in large part by a rebel-turned-senator who has defied death threats to become the opposition's most fearless provocateur.
Sen. Gustavo Petro has relentlessly accused the law-and-order president of letting a poisonous alliance prosper between the political class and illegal right-wing militias, which are responsible for brutal massacres and the theft of millions of acres from poor peasants.

Colombians who fear taking explosive information to police or prosecutors often turn to Petro instead, and the scrappy senator regularly goes public with their allegations, tempting fate in a country where political assassination has a long tradition.

A former leftist rebel, Petro has nine bodyguards, wears custom-tailored bulletproof sport jackets and has a crew of loyalists looking out for him. Twice, he has foiled paramilitary plots to kill him, and he has periodically fled into exile for safety. In an interview with The Associated Press, he casually mentioned that it would be nice to die of old age.

More:
http://www.newsty.com/world/id_77640/



Gustavo Petro

Chavez irks Colombia by defending rebels By CHRISTOPHER TOOTHAKER, Associated Press Writer
Fri Jan 11, 11:05 PM ET



CARACAS, Venezuela - President Hugo Chavez, emboldened by his success in a hostage release, took the side of leftist rebels in neighboring Colombia's decades-old civil conflict Friday, calling the guerrillas "true armies" who shouldn't be categorized as terrorists.

Colombia's U.S.-allied government, which has made eradicating the rebels a top priority, reacted with outrage. Interior Minister Carlos Holguin said Colombia "cannot accept a request of this sort."

Chavez's defense of the rebels thrust him deeper than ever into the thicket of Colombia's conflict. He said the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and the National Liberation Army "are not terrorists, they are true armies ... They must be recognized."

FARC is the hemisphere's biggest rebel force with 14,000 fighters, mostly peasants it says are fighting for a fairer distribution of wealth. It funds itself mainly by drug trafficking, and the government says it holds some 750 hostages, either for ransom or political leverage.

more:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080112/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/venezuela_colombia_hostages;_ylt=Ah_BTlVBPK0a8lg5igJiXA9vaA8F

And all the others, of course.

the danger is very real that it will escalate into Oil War II, and that American young people will be drafted into this second corporate resource war, and be fighting in the Andes mountains and the jungles of the Amazon, serving the interests of Occidental Petroleum and Exxon-Mobile, within the decade.

Read Donald Rumsfeld's op-ed of 12/1/07 in WaPo, in which he virtually declares war on Venezuela, and lays out plans for both economic warfare and U.S. military intervention in support of fascist coups in the region. It is chilling. You wonder what Rumsfeld has been up to in his "retirement"? Now you know...

"The Smart Way to Beat Tyrants Like Chávez," by Donald Rumsfeld, 12/1/07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/30/AR2007113001800.html

Our part in Rumsfeld's "PNAC-II: South America" will be to sit quietly as all remaining "checks and balances" in our own government (such as they are) (i.e., that fusty old Congress) are removed/disempowered, so the U.S. can "act swiftly" in support of Rumsfeld's "friends and allies" in South America (fascist thugs planning violent overthrows of democratic countries that have lots of oil).

And, of course, we get to fund it. And we are already funding it--to the tune of billions of dollars in military aid to the worst government in South America--Colombia--a government that has tolerated, and colluded with, rightwing paramilitaries who chainsaw union leaders and throw their body parts into mass graves, and have tortured and killed thousands of innocents in the name of fighting "terrorism" or "the drug war," while they are the worst terrorists in the region, and they are also into guns/weapons trafficking.

Amnesty International, in a thorough report on the violence in Colombia, attributes 92% of the violence to the government security forces and associated paramilitaries, and only 2% to FARC. (The rest is crime-motivated--not politically motivated.) They also say that those 2% of FARC incidents are probably the murder of people colluding with the rightwing death squads. This is not to excuse such frontier justice, but it is very important to know peoples' motives. Which brings me to Chavez and his assertion that FARC is a political organization with an army, and should be recognized as such (and not regarded as "terrorists"). This is what brought Vietnam to my mind.

The similarity to Vietnam is in our government's attitude toward the Vietcong. The Vietcong were, first of all, VIETNAMESE. It was THEIR country. Secondly, they were a fighting force in South Vietnam, connected to what was arguably the only legitimate government of Vietnam, North Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh was a war hero, who, like Simon Bolivar in South America, freed Vietnam from colonial rule, after WW II. If UN elections had been held in Vietnam in 1954, when they were supposed to, Ho Chi Minh would have won, and the whole of Vietnam would have been governed by an ELECTED communist government, which--amazingly--wanted to be allies with the U.S. The U.S. nixed the elections, and sent the CIA into Vietnam to create a puppet state in the south--a government that was illegitimate and very corrupt, and upon which the U.S. began to lavish millions of dollars in military and other aid. And we know the rest of this tragic story. WE created a civil war in Vietnam, where there would have been only a short-lived conflict between the legitimate, elected government, and a small rightwing minority whom most of the people opposed, if we had not intervened.

The members of FARC are COLOMBIANS. They BELONG THERE. We do not. We have NO BUSINESS arming one side in this civil war. We should withdraw immediately--all funds, all arms. If Colombia's rightwing government cannot maintain its legitimacy and authority on its own, without billions and billions of U.S. military dollars, and U.S. "war on drugs" advisers, and Blackwater, and God knows what else, then it should fall, and let the Colombians and their democratic neighbors work things out. There are plenty of good governments bordering or near Colombia who very much want peace in Colombia and will broker a peace--if the U.S. would butt out. But of course the Bushites have never butted out of a situation that they could make worse. (And bear in mind that it was the Democrats--LBJ--who escalated the war in Vietnam. Democrats are by no means innocent of U.S. imperialism and warmongering.)

The U.S. really only has two allies left on the whole continent--its puppet Colombia, and Peru (corrupt "free trade" country). The others want the U.S. out, or, at the least, are very cold and wary toward U.S. plans. Ecuador intends to throw the U.S. military base out this year. And the Bolivarians are sick unto death of the corrupt, failed U.S. 'war on drugs" and want that gone, too. (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and probably Argentina.) Whatever the good intentions of the "war on drugs" may have been (and I'm not convinced it was ever well-intentioned), you can imagine what it has become under Bushites. It is a tool for oppressing and murdering poor peasant farmers and political leftists and human rights workers. The purpose of poisoning rural lands with pesticides is not to stop drug traffic, but to drive small peasant farmers off their land, so that Chiquita, Monsanto et al, can take over the region for environmentally unsound biofuel production using slave labor. It also allows the big drug lords freer reign. And the peasants end up displaced or driven into urban shantytowns, by the millions.

Last year, the Bush Junta CHANGED the justification for these billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to Colombia from the "war on drugs" to the "war on drugs" and "terrorism." That is another reason why descriptions of FARC are important. Are they "terrorists," or are they people who live there who have a legitimate grievance with the existing government? No question that they live there. And you only have to read the AI report to know that there are very legitimate grievances with the brutal and oppressive Colombian government.

Rumsfeld's op-ed puts all this into perspective--the Bush Junta's last seven years of policy in South America, which has been aimed at demonizing democratic and very representative governments--like those in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador--and participating sneakily in coup attempts and other destabilization plots--and lauding, and lavishly funding, rightwing/fascist government which bends to Bushite goals, and which fails to represent Colombia's poor.

The Bolivarians believe that profit from local resources such as Venezuela's and Ecuador's rich oil deposits, and Bolivia's gas deposits, should be use to uplift the vast poor majority which has been so devastated by "free trade" and "war on drugs" policy. The Bushites of course want all the profits for themselves and their buds. And the Bushites are LOSING this battle. Thus, Rumsfeld's plan to spend more billions (of our non-existent tax dollars--and, no doubt, billions he has looted from us in Iraq and stashed in various places), to pressure these countries economically (to punish them for rejecting U.S.-dominated "free trade"), and to use "unitary executive" power to directly intervene, to destroy their democracies and restore Corporate Rule.

And we have only to look at Iraq, to know that, while this sounds nuts on paper, it is a real threat, so long as Bushites or collusive Democrats are in charge of our government.

But I do think that Rumsfeld feels some urgency to get this war in motion while Bush is still in office, because the political atmosphere in South America has been moving so strongly against him, and it is not certain what a Democrat--even the kind of Democrat that Dieobld voting machines would (s)elect--would actually do, in support of oil corp and other theft in that region. The whole world knows, for instance, that Hugo Chavez is a good president, and a believer in democracy. He is not "dictator," as the Bushites and their lapdog corporate press have alleged. And it will be only a matter of time before that knowledge leaks out more widely in the U.S. The token real Democrats that Diebold has permitted to sit in Congress have already shown themselves feisty on the issue of labor and human rights in Colombia. They are blockading a "free trade" deal with Colombia. They may lose their "elected" status because of it, but it seems to be one of the few issues that motivates these Democrats to fight hard for justice and the right policy. What will a Democrat in the White House do in that case--even a corporate Democrat?

It's touch and go, in my opinion. We could be in a war in South American very soon. The Bushites would lose, but they can cause tremendous grief and suffering in the course of losing. They have been frustrated (I think by international pressure--China, Russia and others), as to invading Iran. How are they going to grab more resources and enrich their puppetmasters? They may be selective and just topple, say, the Bolivian government of indigenous president Evo Morales. They are pouring a lot of resources into destabilization there. And they may leave the next U.S. government in a foothold situation, a la Vietnam, and really stir things up, including preventing a peace settlement in Colombia, so that the next president has only bad choices (or seems to have). They wanted to do this in Iran. They have done it in Iraq. This is their M.O.

The masters they serve are, a) war profiteers, b) oil corps, and c) other global corporate predators (such as the World Bank/IMF and manufacturers seeking cheap labor). The war profiteers benefit from conflict, no matter who wins. The oil corps don't care about local chaos, so long as they have sufficient soldiers and thugs to guard their pipelines, wells and ports, and can make us pay for it. The others need some minimal order for looting--such as they created in Argentina, with greedy, "bend over" leaders, while they looted Argentina blind and crashed its economy. But I think the latter group--manufacturers, ag corps, global "free" predators--have got the short end of the stick in Iraq, and may be seeing the need for a new Clinton regime to create better opportunities for their piratical plans. This is why I think Hillary is the 'made' candidate. Bushism's benefits have gone mostly to a narrow group--war profiteers, oil corps--and the very activities that have benefited these narrow interests have alienated a lot of other markets. The U.S. is hated throughout South America for the Iraq War, among other things.

In any case, Hugo Chavez is making a very specific, legal point here, in how he defines FARC--as to international law and various justifications for outside, particularly U.S., intervention. What business has the U.S. fighting FARC? What business has the U.S. in Colombia at all? The Reaganites "justified" the slaughter of TWO HUNDRED THOUSANDS Mayan Indians in Guatemala with the word "terrorist" (or its equivalent in those days--"communist"), although those villagers were no more "terrorists" than you and I are. They were just very, very poor, and sought some minimal representation of their interests in government. The Bushites, of course, use "terrorist" to describe anyone who opposes them in whatever way. Max Cleland was a "terrorist" (lover of Osama bin Laden) because he was winning a race for Senate in Georgia, and was a paraplegic Vietnam vet against the Iraq War--a clear threat to Bushitism. We're all "terrorists"--that's why they spy on us all--seeking out the political opposition. And they have used "terrorist" particularly loosely in Iraq to justify widespread terrorism against the local people, both non-combatants and local patriots who oppose occupation.

They wanted FARC to be specifically tagged with "terrorist" to continue justifying infusions of billions of dollars into Colombia to fight an oil war with Venezuela and others. (Read Rumsfeld's op-ed.) Chavez is saying, "Nope, these are locals, in a local struggle, that needs diplomacy and a ceasefire, not more bloodshed." And, looking at the AI report, Chavez seems right. FARC 2% of the violence; the government and paramilitaries 92%. (Note: They are talking mostly about violence against union leaders.) In fact, it would seem that the government and paramilitaries are the real terrorists of the region.