Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the [Iron] Curtain

Just as Concord Live’s last post on the FARC’s mounting defeats and the radical Latin American left’s material and political support for them was published, news broke of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s calls to the FARC to free their hostages and end their guerrilla strategy. Helen Murphy, writing for Bloomberg, has a summary of the situation as it stands:

The guerrillas, who hold as many as 750 hostages for ransom and political bargaining chips, are cornered in the country’s most remote regions with their ranks reduced to as few as 8,000 fighters from as many as 17,000 before President Alvaro Uribe took office in 2002. At that time, guerrilla attacks and bombings were common inside Bogota and other major cities.

International pressure on the FARC to free its hostages took an unexpected turn yesterday when Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez urged the rebels to give up their armed struggle and unilaterally release all their captives, some of whom have been held for more than 10 years.

“Guerrilla war has passed into history,” Chavez said in his regular Sunday television program, “Alo, Presidente.” “You in the FARC should know, you have become an excuse, an excuse for the empire to threaten all of us.”

Chavez, on Jan. 11, called the FARC, designated a terrorist group by the U.S., Canada and the European Union, a real army with legitimate political goals, worthy of the world’s respect. Colombia accuses the Venezuelan president of assisting the rebels with arms and as much as $300 million in financing.

The governments of Colombia and the United States welcomed his words, but his actions remain to be seen.

Shifting Tactics Continue to Foment Violence and Revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean

Given the following:

First, that Interpol certified the computer files and documents obtained on the Colombian Army’s raid resulting in the killing of Raul Reyes, and that this evidence showed Hugo Chavez a willing direct sponsor of FARC terrorism;

Second, that this year’s bid to gain the FARC legitimate belligerent status fell absolutely flat, resulting rather in today’s announced European Union-United States call for the release of all hostages held by armed groups in South America as well as freedom for all of Cuba’s over 300 political prisoners;

Third, that the strategy of creating radical regimes through the ballot box rather than through military-driven revolution (woe to ye who think that the ballot box embodies any kind of procedural democratic guarantee when dealing with determined people with Marxist ideology and aims) has worked well enough to bring Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, and Daniel Ortega to power in the Twenty-First Century Socialism coalition nurtured by totalitarian Cuba’s Fidel and Raul Castro, and to bring the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front (the political home of El Salvador’s vicious 1980s terrorist guerrillas) within striking distance of winning El Salvador’s next elections;

And fourth, that Chavez was offering $300 million to finance the FARC’s operations (land mines, child soldiers, and targeting of civilians included) even as he shuttled from Venezuela to Colombia on a purported mission of mercy to gain the release of hostages, which served as a pretext for his belligerent status drive;

it is reasonable to conclude that this public position taken by the Venezuelan dictator:

First, is a reaction to the political cost of the intelligence revelations from Raul Reyes’s files, chiefly in the form of the international pressure alluded to in the second point;

Next, that there is no reason why the FARC might decline to aim to continue destabilizing Colombia for another 50 years if its members ostensibly demilitarize and compete politically to achieve the same kind of bloody rule under which they have kept the Colombian interior for decades;

Next, that the Twenty-First Century Socialist coalition will continue cooperating to support radical leftist agendas whether under the guise of guerrilla forces, political parties, student and youth movements to the detriment of the people of Latin America who will continue to be denied freedom, peace, and the opportunity for prosperity;

And finally, that as long as Cuba remains under the rule of a regime that terrorizes its people and remains determined to export revolution, Latin America and the Caribbean will be especially prone to tyranny and material poverty.