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FARC guerrillas `not terrorists' Chavez says

Colombian former hostage Clara Rojas, right, waves next to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at the presidential palace in Caracas on Thursday just a few hours after she was released by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). PHOTO: AFP

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez urged European and Latin American governments on Friday to stop branding Colombian Marxists guerrillas as terrorists, a day after welcoming two hostages released by the rebels.

"I am asking the governments [across Latin America] to take the FARC [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia] and ELN [National Liberation Army] off their lists of global terrorist groups," Chavez told the National Assembly, saying he asked European nations to do the same.

"Because those lists exist for one reason alone -- US pressure," Chavez said in his address reviewing last year.

The leftist Colombian rebel groups "are not any terrorist body, they are real armies that occupy territory in Colombia; they must be recognized, they are insurgent forces that have a political project, a Bolivarian project, which here is respected," Chavez said.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe was quick to respond, ruling out any change in the FARC's or ELN's status.

"For no reason at all will [Colombia] accept removing the terrorist label from these groups and replace it with `belligerent status,'" Uribe said in a statement read out by his spokesman, Cesar Mauricio Velasquez.

Instead, Uribe added, Colombia will continue considering the ELN and FARC, as well as all right-wing paramilitary groups, terrorist organizations, since "they are attacking a respectable democracy and because of their methods of extermination."

The FARC, Latin America's oldest and biggest guerrilla group, has been fighting to bring down the Colombian government since the 1960s.

The pro-Cuban ELN has had the same aim since the late 1980s, while right-wing paramilitary groups began operating in Colombia the 1980s to counter the influence of leftist insurgents.

"The government, with its armed forces and Constitution, will continue fighting until it defeats these terrorist groups who have received very generous peace offers," Uribe said in his statement.

Chavez, an elected leftist former paratrooper, says he is inspired by independence hero Simon Bolivar, whose name he also invokes to describe what he calls Venezuela's socialist "Bolivarian" revolution.

On Thursday two women released by the FARC were greeted in Caracas with kisses and tears after years of captivity in the jungle. Chavez helped mediate to secure their release.

The US deems Colombia's rebel forces terrorist groups. Uribe's government is Washington's closest ally in the Americas.

Uribe made a clear distinction between insurgent and terrorist groups.

South America, his statement said, "has seen violent groups fighting dictatorships that were branded insurgents. In Colombia, violent groups are attacking democracy, therefore the label they deserve is of `terrorists.'"

"The label is also deserved," he said, "because they finance themselves through a business lethal to humanity: drug trafficking."

Uribe stressed that despite the release on Thursday of hostages Clara Rojas and Consuelo Gonzalez, FARC was still holding some 750 innocent people hostage.
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