Venezuela Chavez calls for Colombia FARC ceasefire

Source: Reuters


Wed Apr 15, 2009 1:42am GMT Print | Single Page<-> Text <+>



CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez said Colombia's FARC rebels should lay down weapons for four months to help start peace talks, toughening his stance towards the Marxist group Washington says his government backs.

Chavez made his comments a few days before the Summit of the Americas, a meeting of regional leaders in which Chavez and U.S. President Barack Obama will both participate.

Chavez was speaking in support of a proposal by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who last week called on the rebels to cease hostilities as a sign they are interested in talks.

"The president said if there is a peace proposal the government is ready, that they should stop their activities for four months," Chavez said during a press conference with Uribe in Caracas.

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Read more: http://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFTRE53E0C720090415

:popcorn:

Waiting for the Chavez haters to show up and start a flame war.

Chavez has changed his tune. Chavez should have been saying this from day one instead of supporting the FARC.

You got to wonder what info Colombia has on Chavez from those laptops. Now he wants to be Uribe's best buddy.

to negotiate hostage releases with the FARC guerrillas, the Colombia military directed rocket fire at the location of the first hostages to be released to Chavez, while they were on route to their freedom, driving them back on a 20 mile hike into the jungle. Days before this first hostage release, simultaneous with a Donald Rumsfeld op-ed in the Washington Post, entitled "The Smart Way to Defeat Tyrants Like Chavez,"* Uribe suddenly, for no good reason, rescinded his request to Chavez to negotiate hostage releases. When the President of France, hostages' families and others begged Chavez to persist in the effort, and he succeeded in getting a total of 6 hostages released, the U.S./Colombia then (03/08) bombed a temporary FARC hostage release camp just inside Ecuador's territory, and raided over the border, killing the FARC's chief hostage negotiator, Raul Reyes, and 24 other people, in their sleep. According to all reports, the FARC had been about to release high profile hostage Ingrid Betancourt to French, Swiss and Spanish envoys who were in Ecuador for that purpose. This U.S./Colombia action nearly caused a war between Colombia and Ecuador/Venezuela.

Clearly, the Bushwhacks did not want peace in Colombia--and, indeed, it may well have been part of a Rumsfeld oil war plan for South America, to lure Chavez into negotiations with the FARC, then charge him with collusion with "terrorists." (Uribe did, then, make such charges, based on the "miracle laptop" purportedly seized from the bombed out FARC camp.)

Peace in Colombia and the end of Colombia's 40+ year civil war is in everyone's interest but the war profiteers. This long war is constantly spilling over into Venezuela and Ecuador, including tens of thousands of Colombian refugees, mostly fleeing the Colombian military and its death squads, whom Venezuela and Ecuador then must care for. The civil war is one of the two excuses that the Bushwhacks used for pouring $6 BILLION from U.S. taxpayers into the Colombian military, with no abatement in the cocaine trade, and thousands of murdered union leaders, small peasant farmers, human rights workers, journalists and other innocent people as the result.

So it will be interesting to see what will be driving U.S. policy in Colombia and South America, now that the Bushwhacks are mostly gone. (Some of them still linger in the State Dept., in U.S. embassies and in the CIA, DEA, USAID and other agencies.) It appears that a peace plan is afoot. The Bushwhacks did everything they could to prevent peace. The South American leadership--with leftist presidents all over the continent (Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and up into Central America--Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala)--has stood firm for peace, and against U.S./Bushwhack war plans and coup plots. Will the U.S. finally opt for peace, democracy, good government and social justice--after a century of bloody interference, including the last eight years, and as recently as this last September (U.S./Bushwhack-sponsored white separatist civil war in Bolivia)? It will be wonderful if it is true.

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*("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
Among other things, Rumsfeld urges "swift action" by the U.S. in support of "friends and allies" in South America, and likely meant "friends and allies" within Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, planning secessionist civil war, to create fascist mini-states in control of the oil.)