Bush’s Colombian buddy Uribe threatens South American war

This video by Mark Fiore in the USA is called Colombia Clean.

By Bill Van Auken:

US-backed border massacre brings South America to brink of war

5 March 2008

The Colombian military’s massacre last Saturday of 17 members of the guerrilla movement FARC, including its second in command, on Ecuadoran soil has brought tensions in the region to an unprecedented level, raising the serious threat of armed conflict.

Both Ecuador and Venezuela have massed thousands of troops on their borders with Colombia, while breaking off diplomatic relations with the right-wing government of President Alvaro Uribe in Bogota and expelling its ambassadors and diplomatic personnel from Quito and Caracas.

Authorities in Bogota initially claimed that the killing of the FARC leader Raul Reyes and the other guerrillas was a matter of Colombian troops pursuing and killing them in battle. A forensic investigation by Ecuador, however, established that murdered FARC members were the victims of a bombardment launched while they were sleeping and that some of them were then finished off by Colombian ground forces, execution-style.

Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa denounced the attack as a gross violation of Ecuador’s sovereignty and warned that the actions of the Uribe government threatened to turn the region into “another Middle East.”

Indeed, the killing of Reyes, who served as the FARC’s main international representative, pursuing diplomatic contacts in Europe and Latin America, had all the earmarks of a “targeted assassination.”

Colombian police officials made no secret of the fact that the targeting was carried out by US security forces, which are extremely active in the south of the country near the Ecuadoran border. US intelligence resources were used to track Reyes’s satellite phone, according to the Colombian officials. The US has funneled some US$5 billion in military aid into Colombia under the aegis of “Plan Colombia,” an operation that was launched on the pretext of waging a “war on drugs,” but which has increasingly been focused on a counterinsurgency campaign against the FARC, a rural-based guerrilla movement that has been fighting government forces for 40 years and which has controlled up to 40 percent of Colombian territory.

Correa indicated in a televised address Monday that the attack was launched in the context of intense discussions involving the Ecuadoran government and Reyes over the release of nearly a dozen high-profile hostages held by the FARC, including the former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three captured US military contractors.

“I regret to inform you that the conversations were very advanced for the freeing in Ecuador of 12 hostages, among them Ingrid Betancourt,” said Correa. “It was all frustrated by the militarist and authoritarian hands. We cannot discount that this was one of the motives of the [Colombian] incursion.”

The French Foreign Ministry also revealed Tuesday that it had been in discussions with Reyes over the release of hostages—particularly Betancourt, who holds French citizenship—and that the Colombian government was informed of these contacts.

Betancourt’s ex-husband denounced the actions of the Uribe government as “abominable,” charging that it launched the attack to block any agreement on a hostage release.

The principal committee in support of Ingrid Betancourt’s release in France issued a statement declaring its “dismay” over the turn of events. “When the exit door was wide open, dark intentions have preferred to slam it violently shut,” it said.

See also here. And here.

Update 7 March 2008: here.

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