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US to keep FARC and ELN on terrorist list

Washington rejected Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's call that the international community stop branding Colombia's Marxist rebels terrorists, amid news of the leftists' apparent seizure of six more hostages on Monday.

"You'll excuse me if we don't take that advice," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

"Look, they earned their way onto the terrorism list," McCormack said, noting that FARC continues to hold many hostages, including three Americans, despite their release of two Colombian politicians last week.

"If there is any reason whatsoever to take a group off the terrorism list, then that's done," McCormack said. "But I'm not aware of any substantial change in a pattern of behavior by the FARC that would merit their being taken off the list."

Chavez last week described the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) as legitimate armies with political goals that must be respected and urged governments to remove the terror label.

McCormack said the US remains concerned about the three American hostages, contractors in anti-drug operations who were captured by FARC after their plane was shot down in 2003.

"They should be released, unconditionally, so that they can be reunited with their families," McCormack said. "There's no reason on Earth to hold those people."

The head of the US military, Admiral Michael Mullen, said Chavez's proposal would not help Latin America.

"I'm honestly not surprised by that support," Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters after a visit to the headquarters of the US Southern Command in Miami.

"I don't think it is helpful long-term for building the kind of stability that we need to see in this part of the world," Mullen said.

Chavez, who was an intermediary in the release of the two Colombian women last Thursday, said afterwards that the guerrilla groups had legitimate national programs.

They "are not any terrorist body, they are real armies that occupy territory in Colombia," Chavez said. "They must be recognized, they are insurgent forces that have a political project ... which here is respected."

But Colombian President Alvaro Uribe flatly rejected the call, which came amid news of six new kidnap victims in northwestern Colombia possibly by leftist FARC guerrillas.

Among the six taken were Onshuus Nino Alf, who holds both Colombian and Norwegian nationality, and his biologist wife Maria Serrano. Also seized were an engineering student, a teacher, a businessman and hotel owner.

Also on Monday, former Colombian hostage Consuelo Gonzalez returned to Bogota following her release last week by Marxist rebels who held her in the jungle for six years.

Gonzalez, 57, had been in Venezuela since Thursday when the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) handed her and Colombian politician Clara Rojas, 44, to the Venezuelan government and Red Cross.

"I am enormously moved about returning free to my homeland," she said in a brief news conference at the airport in Bogata.
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