Prospects for peace negotiations with Latin America’s last major rebel army have all but disappeared after Colombia tricked the guerrillas into handing over their most prized captives without firing a shot.
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe promised after the triumphant recovery of 15 hostages including kidnapped presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three US citizens that he seeks “a path to peace, total peace.”
On Monday, Uribe said that “at whatever moment FARC [the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia] rebels want dialogue, we’re disposed.”
But that doesn’t mean Uribe is ready to swap rebel prisoners for the 29 remaining high-value hostages, or make any other concessions to end a conflict that has claimed well over 100,000 lives over the last 44 years. His actions — and the pronouncements of his top aides — suggest he seeks nothing short of complete surrender.
“If they want peace, [they should] demobilize and disarm,” Uribe’s closest advisor, Jose Obdulio Gaviria, said in an interview.
Uribe’s domestic approval rating is above 80 percent and, thanks in large measure to billions of dollars in US military cooperation, the leftist FARC have never been weaker.
In part because the rebels no longer hold Betancourt — a cause celebre in Europe — or any other foreigners, Uribe apparently no longer feels the political pressure to keep Europe involved in trying to end Colombia’s class-based conflict. So he has frozen international mediation efforts, accusing the Swiss and French envoys at its forefront of overstepping their mandate in dealing with the FARC.
Since the July 2 raid, Uribe’s conservative government has leaked rebel-penned documents supporting its claim that the envoys — Swiss emissary Jean-Pierre Gontard in particular — were sympathetic to the rebels.
“Generally speaking, they had always been a nuisance,” Gaviria said.
Such language indicates government officials “aren’t interested in establishing serious contact” with the rebels, independent political analyst Leon Valencia said.
“Without mediation and without an international presence, there is no possibility of arriving at any accords,’’ he said.
Colombia’s chief prosecutor Mario Iguaran said on Tuesday that he would likely open a preliminary criminal probe into Gontard’s activities based on the documents, which are among thousands the government says it found in a laptop belonging to FARC foreign minister Raul Reyes after killing him in a March 1 raid on his jungle camp in Ecuador.
One 2004 message from Reyes quotes Gontard as calling Uribe “a fascist cowboy” and stressing that Switzerland had no intention of joining the US and EU in branding the FARC a terrorist organization.
The Swiss envoy also personally carried US$2,000 in June last year from Reyes to the FARC’s representative in Switzerland, two documents show.
Still other laptop documents detail French efforts to buy Betancourt’s freedom by offering asylum to the family of Reyes’ daughter and the rebels’ entire seven-man leadership, the Colombian TV network RCN reported on Tuesday.
Gontard, a 67-year-old university professor, did not respond to telephone and email requests for comment. But his government stood firmly by him, saying it had instructed its ambassador to “stop the attacks on the Swiss mediator,” who it said had pursued “only humanitarian aims” under “sometimes life-threatening conditions.”
Thomas Greminger, the senior Swiss Foreign Ministry official to whom Gontard reports, said that Gontard had been under contract for eight years — earning at least 100,000 Swiss francs (US$98,500) a year — with “a clear mandate” but some room for maneuvering.
Uribe’s preference for military options had frustrated recent efforts by the French and Swiss emissaries — as well as Colombia’s leftist neighbors — to make any headway with the rebels.
Also See: Latin America’s anti-Chavez axis
BLOODSHED: North Koreans take extreme measures to avoid being taken prisoner and sometimes execute their own forces, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Saturday said that Russian and North Korean forces sustained heavy losses in fighting in Russia’s southern Kursk region. Ukrainian and Western assessments say that about 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy swathes of territory after staging a mass cross-border incursion in August last year. In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy quoted a report from Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi as saying that the battles had taken place near the village of Makhnovka, not far from the Ukrainian border. “In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka,
US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen on Monday met virtually with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (何立峰) and raised concerns about “malicious cyber activity” carried out by Chinese state-sponsored actors, the US Department of the Treasury said in a statement. The department last month reported that an unspecified number of its computers had been compromised by Chinese hackers in what it called a “major incident” following a breach at contractor BeyondTrust, which provides cybersecurity services. US Congressional aides said no date had been set yet for a requested briefing on the breach, the latest in a serious of cyberattacks
In the East Room of the White House on a particularly frigid Saturday afternoon, US President Joe Biden bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 19 of the most famous names in politics, sports, entertainment, civil rights, LGBTQ+ advocacy and science. Former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton aroused a standing ovation from the crowd as she received her medal. Clinton was accompanied to the event by her husband, former US president Bill Clinton, daughter, Chelsea Clinton, and grandchildren. Democratic philanthropist George Soros and actor-director Denzel Washington were also awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor in a White House
Venezuelan opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia was expected to meet Argentine President Javier Milei yesterday on a regional tour to drum up support ahead of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s swearing-in for a third term. Venezuelan authorities have offered a reward of US$100,000 for information leading to the capture of Gonzalez Urrutia, who insists he beat Maduro at the polls in July last year and is recognized by the US as Venezuela’s “president-elect.” The 75-year-old fled to Spain in September after being threatened with arrest by Maduro’s government, but has pledged to return to his country to be sworn in as
RSS