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Colombian president tells Mexican TV he has no regrets about Ecuador raid

Marcelo Franco, father of Fernando Franco, one of four Mexican university students killed during a Colombian raid in Ecuador, protests outside the site of the World Economic Forum on Latin America in Cancun, Mexico, on Wednesday. His banner reads: “Uribe, murderer, bastard.” PHOTO: AP

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe said he doesn’t regret ordering a cross-border raid on a rebel camp in Ecuador, despite the deaths of four Mexican students there.

Uribe told Mexico’s Televisa network on Wednesday that the students were seen in a video with the guerrillas, which he said indicated that they were in league with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

“They were not doing humanitarian work. They were not hostages,” he said. “So why were they there?”

“They were there as accomplices ... They were there as agents of terrorism,” he said.

Later on Wednesday, Mexican President Felipe Calderon asked Uribe not to jump to conclusions as to why the students were at the FARC’s camp until a thorough investigation had been conducted.

“I think it is prudent not to qualify or prejudge these youths’ activities,” Calderon said.

“Everyone has their own hypothesis but the pain of their relatives deserves the benefit of the doubt until an investigation is carried out,” he said.

The National Autonomous University of Mexico — where three of the dead and the survivor studied — said in a statement that Uribe’s comments were “baseless, imprudent and irresponsible.”

The other student who was killed attended Mexico’s Politecnico Nacional university.

Uribe’s comments thrust him headlong into a debate in Mexico about whether the students should have been at the guerrilla camp.

Many Mexican news commentators have said the students were supporters of the rebels. But the students’ families have denied they were involved with the FARC, saying they traveled to Ecuador for a leftist political conference before visiting the rebel camp for academic purposes.

The raid caused a crisis in relations between Colombia and Ecuador that has not yet healed. Ecuador cut off diplomatic ties following the attack.

Uribe on Wednesday reiterated his position that the attack was justified.

“I don’t regret it. In no way could I regret” carrying out the raid, Uribe said at the World Economic Forum on Latin America in Cancun, Mexico.

“It would have been ideal not to have had to bomb a [foreign] territory,” he said.
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