Posted on 04/14/2003 7:52:48 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
LA GABARRA, Colombia -- Maria, a wizened 57-year-old farmer's wife, lives in a plank-board shack in Santa Isabel, a village on the River of Gold that serves as Colombia's muddy border with Venezuela.
Shortly after breakfast one day last month, she and several dozen families watched grimly as Colombia's long war arrived swiftly along Santa Isabel's single dirt street. Violence has washed over the village for years, but never in the way she witnessed that sweltering March 21.
Maria and a dozen frightened neighbors said hundreds of guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) attacked their town from Venezuela, crossing the river to engage an anti-guerrilla paramilitary force occupying several riverside villages. Within an hour, Maria saw Venezuelan military aircraft swoop over her village to bomb paramilitary positions inside Colombia supporting the rebel advance.
If corroborated by the Colombian government, the bombings would be Venezuela's first military foray into Colombia's civil war. Now Maria and hundreds of others from Santa Isabel and neighboring villages along the border have fled south to this town, terrified that what they saw could get them killed. Colombian officials said they are investigating their account.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Rescind 12333 and do him asap.
After Fidel, of course.
Trickle-down realpolitik.
I've read that but can't locate the link. Here's just a sample of what's happening.
Colombian rebels say they hold Americans*** BOGOTA - For the first time, Colombian guerrillas Saturday acknowledged seizing three U.S. government contractors after their plane went down in the southern mountains on Feb. 13. In response to the kidnapping, scores of U.S. troops have poured into the South American nation, bringing the number to record levels and drawing the United States further into Colombia's prolonged civil conflict.
In a communiqué, leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, said they could guarantee the safety of the three men only if the Colombian military stopped running patrols in a southern region considered rebel territory. Complying, however, would mean calling off the massive search for the men whose small Cessna plunged into a mountainous jungle nearly two weeks ago. President Alvaro Uribe rejected the deal Saturday, and the notion that the government would bow to rebel demands. ''Operations are managed by the [Colombian army] . . . not the FARC,'' Uribe said.
Some U.S. sources familiar with U.S. operations in Colombia privately expressed fears that the men might have been killed already by an elite rebel unit called the Teofilo Forero Brigade, which apparently seized the hostages. One defense industry source said the fears were based on communications overheard by U.S. intelligence indicating that the Forero unit had received permission to carry out ``executions.'' The information, however, could not be confirmed.
…………… Bob Barr, a four-term conservative congressman from Georgia who is now a lobbyist, visited Colombia last fall and issued a scathing report on operations under the $2 billion aid package known as Plan Colombia. The aid package provides money to fight Colombia's drug industry, which supplies 90 percent of the United States' cocaine. The FARC earns money off taxes from coca growers. In the past five years, 12 Americans -- including six government contractors -- have died in Colombia because of lax safety measures, Barr said in his report. A ''little shot of reality here: Today in Colombia, the FARC has a bounty on the heads of Americans working with the Colombian National Police and military,'' he said. `They are all targets.''***
Families fear search will endanger hostages - Asks U.S. to consider prisoner exchange***The rebels, for their part, stoked fears this week. In case of a rescue attempt by force, the kidnapped victims ''run the risk of dying as a consequence of a crossfire between members of our guerrilla organization and units of the state security forces,'' the rebels wrote. So instead, the Colombian family members plead for a deal, a humanitarian accord as they call it, so that their loved ones can be freed.
The longest time period of captivity has been six years. The most famous hostage among them is Ingrid Betancourt, a former presidential candidate, who was kidnapped Feb. 23, 2002.
Some of the kidnappings have been brazen. One former governor was seized while riding in a United Nations motorcade. Sen. Jorge Gechen, head of Colombian Senate's Peace Committee, was aboard a flight to Bogotá last year when four armed rebels forced the plane to land and shuffled him off. In the process, they blew up a bridge and killed a pregnant woman.
If anything positive comes from the Americans' kidnapping, relatives believe it could be that more pressure is put on the government and the rebels to make an exchange.
''If there were reasons before, now there are more,'' said Yolanda Pulecio, mother of Betancourt, the one-time presidential candidate.
But for now, the positions are hardened. Since peace talks broke down last year, the Colombian government and the FARC have argued over conditions for a prisoner exchange. Among the sticking points: who exactly will be released, who should moderate the discussion and whether the exchange should take place in a demilitarized zone.***
U.S. offering reward for FARC hostages - Americans held
FARC - Secret Service tracks mystery of fake fortune - Printed on Iraqi bank notes*** The money reached Orlando about 2:30 a.m. Jan. 26. Held in a black duffel bag, the $952,900 weighed just less than 21 pounds. Armed agents watched as the fortune changed hands outside a 7-Eleven on South Orange Blossom Trail. Screams of "Policia! Policia! Manos arriba! Ponte en el piso!" ended the transaction. A startled Colombian national and an accomplice followed the orders in Spanish, raising their hands, then dropping to the ground.
The bogus $100 bills equaled 10 percent of all the counterfeit currency seized last year in the United States. What's more, many were printed on Iraqi bank notes. Since that night, nearly $20 million of the same counterfeit bills have been seized in Colombia. And the U.S. Secret Service and other intelligence agencies are questioning why a counterfeiting ring protected by Marxist guerrillas had access to bank notes from Iraq……………………… The probe is so secret that the Secret Service routinely declines comment. The agency went as far as persuading the federal Government Accounting Office to delete portions of a 1996 report on counterfeiting that mentioned rumors of a Middle East country printing U.S. dollars to finance terrorism. Unlike the superdollar case, agents know where the Orlando bills were printed. On Feb. 11, Colombian police raided the printing plant on a farm near Cali. The $20 million worth of counterfeit bills was the largest seizure in the country's history, according to the Secret Service. Colombia is the world's largest producer of counterfeit U.S. currency, followed by Bulgaria.
The ringleader, Hector Tabarez, told Colombian police that he had regularly paid the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Latin America's oldest revolutionary group known by its Spanish acronym as FARC, to protect the printing presses, agents said. The use of Iraqi bank notes didn't make sense to investigators. "It seems like an odd place to get their paper when they've got Venezuela right across the border," said Agent Kevin Billings, one of the Orlando supervisors. Counterfeiters typically use an inexpensive currency and bleach off the old ink before printing the fakes.
Venezuela's currency, the bolivar, is the usual choice of Colombian counterfeiters. It's almost as inexpensive as the Iraqi note -- worth less than a penny each -- and is printed on paper from the same company in Massachusetts that supplies the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Billings said. Currency-grade paper is essential to pass the touch test. Agents say cheap paper makes counterfeit bills feel slick while real ones are rough and durable. The printing plant in Colombia was discovered as the result of a tip to the U.S. Customs Service that about $1 million was about to be smuggled into Florida. The tip was passed to the Secret Service office in Bogota, from whichAgent Rafael Barros followed the ring's courier on a Jan. 25 flight to Miami.***
Colombian ex-rebel says he saw Irish trio setting off explosives***BOGOTA - In dramatic testimony, a former Colombian guerrilla, Edwin Giovanni Rodríguez, testified Friday in a packed courtroom that he witnessed three suspected members of the Irish Republican Army testing weapons in Colombia's former demilitarized zone.
James Monaghan, Niall Connolly and Martin McCauley were arrested in August 2001 at Bogotá's El Dorado airport on charges of using false passports. The three men were later found to have IRA links and are on trial for allegedly helping train the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the country's largest insurgent group.***
They are now officially with terrorists and against US. How stupid are these guys?
I suppose the strategy is to get us involved in lots of different places and then coordinate some kind of attack, but that's not what's going to happen IMO. Maybe something specific, limited to the biggest perps and Bolivarianos "leaders", something covert coordinated with the local good guy generals. We'd need to rearm the police and the loyal military, supply a little intel and get out of the way.
If a legitimate government requested our help for clean up of the "foreigners"... Of course, cutting off the funding for these foreigners would be a good non-military start.
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