Reply #1: "Chavez said Uribe is serving his 'masters' in Washington."

[Peace Patriot]

That's likely the truth of the matter. Billions of U.S. tax dollars are at issue, for Uribe, in the phony, neverending "war on drugs" (war on the poor), and whose close ties to rightwing paramilitary death squads, including drugs and weapons traffickers, have been exposed by courageous prosecutors and judges in Colombia over the last year. In fact, I was quite surprised when Chavez was able to make any headway at all toward resolving the 30 year civil war in Colombia.

And it's interesting that Uribe didn't want Chavez to contact the Colombian military. Did he expect him to walk into that minefield without direct assurances from the Colombian military that they would not interfere and kill people who were negotiating? Not to mention his own safety. One of the recent disclosures in the Colombian scandals was a rightwing paramilitary plot to assassinate Chavez (and the Colombian military is closely tied to the paramilitaries). Chavez would need to contact the elements in the Colombian military leadership who could control the paramilitaries. Otherwise, this negotiation could very easily have been a trap--of one kind or another, including an ambush of Chavez himself.

It was a curious "condition" and appears to be just an excuse to stop the negotiation, get more billions from the Bushites (our tax dollars), and deny Chavez any credit as a diplomat. Fits with everything else Uribe and Bush have done. Serves the interests of Exxon-Mobile, Chevron-Texaco, Chiquita, Monsanto, the World Bank loan sharks and other global corporate predators.

Too bad for the hostages, whom Bush and Uribe never gave a fuck about anyway. Neither wants peace. War is too lucrative.