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.
PHOTO: AFP
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.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees