France renews contact with FARC leaders

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Reuters

Friday June 20, 01:15 AM
France renews contact with FARC leaders

PARIS (Reuters) - France has renewed contact with the leaders of Colombian guerrillas holding Franco-Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt to try and secure her release after their main guerrilla contact was killed in March, presidency sources said on Thursday.

The left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has turned to kidnapping, extortion and the cocaine trade to finance operations against the military and outlawed paramilitary groups.

"We have managed to renew dialogue with certain members of the FARC secretariat. We are pursuing contacts but discreetly," said one senior source at the French presidency, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The FARC has recently suffered a series of losses among its senior members, including the guerrilla group's founder Manuel Marulanda and his deputy Raul Reyes, who was named by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner as France's main FARC contact.



Read more: http://nz.news.yahoo.com/080619/5/686b.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. France love terrorists! France loves terrorists! France loves terrorists!

If a rightwing French president can do it, without getting slandered as a terrorist-lover by Bushites and assorted Colombian, Miamian and Associated Pukes fascists, why can't the leftwing presidents of Venezuela and Ecuador do the same? They live there, on the borders of Colombia, with the 40+ year Colombian civil war and the related, murderous, corrupt, failed U.S. "war on drugs," spilling over their borders in fighting, death, drug trafficking, pesticide spraying, and tens of thousands of Colombian refugees into their countries. As Rafael Correa, President of Ecuador, says, "My country borders the FARC, not Colombia."

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The passive tense strikes again to exonerate Bushite/Colombian murder, and once again the culprit is Reuters. Note the passive tense (no actor committed the deed)

"...to try and secure her release after their main guerrilla contact was killed in March..." --Reuters

Guess who deliberately targeted and killed Raul Reyes, the chief FARC hostage negotiator with the presidents of France, Ecuador, Venezuela, Argentina and others? The Colombia military and Alvaro Uribe (Bush's pal, former Medellin Cartel go-to guy, recipient of $5.5 BILLION in military aid from the Bush Junta) using U.S. high tech surveillance, five to ten U.S. "smart bombs," and--very probably--U.S. (or Dyncorp?) aircraft and personnel.

Guess why they targeted Raul Reyes--and bombed him and 24 other people in their sleep, and then crossed the border to shoot any survivors in the back, as they ran around in their underwear and pajamas trying to escape death--on the eve of the release of Ingrid Betancourt to the president of Ecuador, in March?

Last year, Alvaro Uribe asked Hugo Chavez to negotiate with the FARC for the release of hostages. Days before Chavez's first successful negotiation was to bear fruit with the release of two hostages, Uribe--no doubt after a call from Washington DC (my guess, Donald Rumsfeld)--abruptly canceled the negotiation for no good reason. But the hostage release was already in progress. The two hostages being released later reported that they came under heavy Colombian military rocket fire as they were in route to their freedom, driving them back on a 20 hike into the jungle, and back into captivity for safety. In other words, Uribe lured Chavez in--with hopes for peace in Colombia's long civil war--then withdrew his permission at the last minute, and bombed the hostages, in order to hand Chavez a diplomatic disaster, with dead hostages. It appears now that that was the plan all along.

Only the quick-thinking of the FARC guerillas who were accompanying the hostages saved them from being killed. Chavez later got them out by another route--and got a total of six hostages released from Dec 07 through Feb 08, at which point Colombia/Bush Junta slaughtered the hostage negotiator in his sleep, just inside Ecuador's border (where Raul Reyes had made camp, obviously looking for safe harbor to release more hostages).

This Colombian/U.S. bombing/raid into Ecuador caused a major fracas in South America. Ecuador's Correa sent military reinforcements to his border with Colombia. So did Chavez in Venezuela. The threat of war hung over the region. The Rio Group (all Latin American crisis group--no U.S.) met and Uribe was roundly condemned for violating Ecuador's sovereignty. Uribe was compelled to apologize and promise never to do it again. Lula da Silva credited Chavez with defusing the potential war (called him "the great peacemaker").

Back up to the weekend of Dec 1, 2007--the weekend that the first two hostages were to be released, as the result of Chavez's efforts, and consider what Donald Rumsfeld says in the first paragraph of an op-ed he published in the Washington Post that same weekend: He says that Chavez's help with hostage negotiations was "not welcome in Colombia." But it had been welcome days before. That is why Chavez was doing it--at Uribe's request!

"The Smart Way to Beat Tyrants Like Chávez," by Donald Rumsfeld, 12/1/07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/30/AR2007113001800.html

Rumsfeld was in on this plan, it appears to me. And the plan backfired. They had not intended to hand Hugo Chavez a diplomatic triumph--just the opposite. It seems so obvious now. And so, having failed to hand Chavez a diplomatic disaster, and having destroyed the hostage negotiations by killing the hostage negotiator, and having failed to start a war, what is the next thing we hear from Uribe? That he has got hold of Raul Reyes' laptop (later laptopS)--seized after the 5 to 10 "smart bomb" slaughter of Reyes' camp--and its contents "prove" that Chavez, and also Rafael Correa, were...funding the FARC, taking campaign money from the FARC, helping FARC to obtain a dirty bomb, that Chavez was responsible for genocide, and on and on--wild, incoherent charges that Uribe ran over to the World Court to file (and got run right out).

Hard to know if every bit of this was orchestrated, or if Rumsfeld & co. were using backup plans, as things unfolded (Plan A-kill some hostages, blame Chavez; Plan B-oops, Chavez got six hostages released; quick, kill the hostage negotiator; Plan B-1, and start a war, to destabilize the region; Plan C-failing to start a war, concoct "evidence" that Chavez and Correa, lured into negotiations with the FARC, were "terrorist-lovers" because they were negotiating with the FARC.

I won't go into the whole story of the laptops. Just figure this: Rumsfeld, Iraq WMDs, Ahmed Chalabi, "Curveball," cherrypicked and manufactured "evidence," lies and disinformation. Cuz that's the deja vus all over again story.

Do you see any of this context in the Reuters 'news' story, above? They erase the actors from the sentence, and black-hole this information by using the passive tense. No one killed Raul Reyes. He merely "was killed"--by somebody or other.

That is devious, lying, disinformationist journalism.

I have interpreted and inferred this story, from the facts that I've been able to piece together. I think it's close to the truth. I wouldn't expect a corporate journalist to connect all the dots that I connect, or interpret things the way I do. But to entirely leave out the subject of the sentence, as to who killed Raul Reyes, and some of the circumstances of it, constitutes an egregious lie. Further, to fail to investigate this matter--for instance, to look into the Ecuadoran president's and military's statements about U.S. involvement (Colombia doesn't have the high tech capability to have located Reyes by his phone calls; and doesn't have the aircraft to carry "smart bombs," and doesn't have "smart bombs"; Reyes and others shot in the back; Correa in "advanced negotiations" for Betancourt's release), and to fail to put some of these pieces together, and then to promote Uribe's "terrorist" allegations, day after day, has become typical of the war profiteering corporate 'news' monopolies, and it is why we are suffering, and the Iraqi people are suffering, this goddamned disaster in Iraq, and all the other disasters of the Bush regime.