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
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS