Hablando del rescate de Ingrid Betancourt, Atilio Boron menciona
la cooperación de Estados Unidos, negada oficialmente pero admitida por todos en Colombia,
En el sitio web de la Casa Blanca la portavoz de Bush dice
We were aware of the operation in its planning stages. We provided some specific support, which I’m not allowed to go into the details on
It’s to be hoped that Uribe doesn’t let this brilliant success go to his head. And I am sure we won’t have long to wait before some lickspittle here in Argentina claims that Cristina deserves some sort of credit for this.
Even before the news that Tirofijo is toast was confirmed Richard Gott had his eulogy for the old bastard online at CiF. No surprise there and not worth refuting.
When he comes to describing how the FARC makes money and came to be still in business long after other Latin American guerrilla armies had been left behind by history though, it’s hard not to admire the exquisite choice of words,
Land devoted to growing cannabis, coca and poppies has grown five-fold since the 1960s, and the Farc found new support by offering its protection to rural workers on these plantations.
In this story in today’s La Nación President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is reported as having said the following during her visit to Paris:
We ask the government of Colombia, all the institutions, and the FARC to free Ingrid [Betancourt].
As far as I know Ingrid Betancourt has been a captive of the FARC these last six years and not the Colombian government. Asking the Colombian government to free her would be like asking Tirofijo to release FARC prisoners in Colombian government jails; it’s something beyond his power to do.
So why say this? Well, if your closest international ally and lender of last resort is Hugo Chávez, that might be a reason. The Venezuelan leader is very keen on the FARC and when the Colombian government recently infringed Ecuadorian sovereignty to kill one of their senior leaders he couldn’t have got more agitated had it been Venezuelan national territory that had been intruded upon. Calling on the FARC alone to release the unfortunate Franco-Colombian hostage might not, therefore, have been to Chávez’s liking and it might have lessened the possibility of him shelling out for Argentine bonds the next time the government wants to raise money.
President Fernández de Kirchner didn’t stop there. She went to say that,
…it is necessary to emphasise that the greatest force for the freeing up of these obstacles [to the freeing of Betancourt] must be made precisely by those who have the responsibility of leading democratic institutions.
So it’s not even a case of moral equivalence, it’s the democratically elected government of a friendly state that has a greater responsibility to ensure the safe release of the hostage than the illegal armed group with pretensions to belligerent status that is actually holding her.
If a democratically elected Argentine president has ever made more morally squalid public remarks then I’d sure like to know what they were.
And one more thing, supposing that Betancourt gets released, will there still be marches in Paris, Buenos Aires or anywhere else calling for the release of the dozens (hundreds?) more ordinary Colombians being held captive by the FARC?
According to this story in El País, Iván Ríos, the second member of the Secretariat of the FARC to be killed in eight days, did not die in combat but was in fact murdered by his subordinates who handed over
his right hand, his passport and his computer
to the Colombian Army as proof that they had killed him. Apparently his men decided to do it because they found themselves surrounded by government forces and decided that the only way out was to murder their chief. The supposed five million dollar reward for his head must have had something to do with it too.
Now assuming the Colombian Defence Ministry hasn’t invented all this, it’s really bad news for the FARC. If the personal escort of one of their top dogs can’t be trusted not to kill him then they have very serious morale and leadership problems and the pressure being exerted by the government is beginning to tell in a big way. The surviving members of the Secretariat have a lot to think about.
And considering that the row over the attack on the FARC camp in Ecuador has been settled with little more than a slap on the wrist for him , Álvaro Uribe has had an excellent couple of weeks.
