Posted on 02/24/2003 8:06:47 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
Colombian rebels declared Monday that three captured Americans were "prisoners of war" and will be freed only as part of a broad prisoner exchange with Colombian government.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, demanded a demilitarized zone from the Colombian government in order to exchange the three Americans and dozens of Colombian soldiers and police who are also held by the rebels for insurgents who are in Colombian prisons. The rebels posted their statement on their Internet site.
The three Americans were captured on Feb. 13 after their U.S. government plane went down in FARC territory. A fourth American and a Colombian were shot and killed near the scene of the crash. Colombian authorities announced Monday they had captured a suspect in the killings.
"The three gringo prisoners of war in the custody of our organization will be liberated along with other Colombian prisoners of war once an exchange materializes in an large demilitarized zone," the FARC said in its statement.
President Bush authorized the deployment of up to 150 more troops to Colombia to help in the search for the three Americans, U.S. Southern Command spokesman Art Merkel said Monday.
The FARC said in its statement that the decision to send more troops to Colombia, where more than 200 military personnel are already training Colombian forces, was "a bald-faced invasion by the United States of our country."
Members of the Senate's foreign relations committee may call a special session to debate the deployment, said Jimmy Chamorro, vice president of the committee. The Senate is currently in recess.
The constitution requires that the Senate authorize any U.S. deployment that involves offensive operations, Chamorro said.
U.S. officials said Monday the additional troops would not be allowed to take on combat roles.
The U.S. government has not announced what specific mission the Americans were on when their plane went down over southern Colombia's Caqueta state. Officials said they were contractors with the Miami-based Southern Command.
Colombian authorities announced Monday that they had charged Fidel Casallas Bastos with homicide, kidnapping, possessing landmines and rebellion in the kidnappings and shooting deaths.
Bastos was captured near where the plane went down on Feb. 14, officials said. Prosecutors did not say what evidence they had to implicate Bastos.
The United States has been helping Colombia fight production of cocaine and heroin in this South American country. The drug trade is controlled by the rebels and a rival right-wing paramilitary group. Washington recently expanded its assistance including the training of Colombian troops by U.S. special forces and millions of dollars worth of helicopters and other gear to counterinsurgency aid.
The mountains and jungles of Caqueta state are a prime cocaine-producing region and a rebel stronghold. During three years of failed peace talks, the rebels controlled a vast demilitarized zone that encompassed part of Caqueta and Meta states. The government ended the peace talks and sent troops back into the region a year ago, but rebels still control much of the area.
The Colombian government had ruled out a prisoner exchange with the rebels, but recently said such a deal might be possible. However, President Alvaro Uribe has said it would never give the rebels another safe haven.
The money transfers never were recorded by Venezuela's national banking superintendent, a Chavez appointee. U.S. diplomatic sources in Caracas confirm that official inquiries through Venezuela's banking authorities have failed to reveal evidence on terrorist money laundering. "We've only consulted officials of the government," admits a U.S. economic officer.
Intelligence sources familiar with the cover-up say Chavez is withholding information on the Arabs, some of whom were important financial contributors to his presidential campaign. The report, withheld from the United States, also mentions Nasser Mohammed al-Din, described as a powerful entrepreneur and a close personal friend of Chavez, at whose home in Margarita the Venezuelan president stays on his frequent visits to the resort island, which is a favored venue for his private meetings with Castro. According to presidential pilot Maj. Juan Diaz Castillo, Chavez and Castro get together two or three times a week.
Margarita Island appears to be the center of an extensive terrorist financial network stretching throughout the Caribbean to Panama and the Cayman Islands, where three Afghanis traveling on false Pakistani passports were caught entering from Cuba with $200,000 in cash in August 2001. According to British colonial authorities, efforts to launder the money through Cayman banks also involved a group of Arab businessmen.
Chavez's ties to international terrorism date back to the days of his bloody 1992 military rebellion against the government of Carlos Andres Perez in which nearly 100 people were killed. After being received with honors by Castro in Havana, Chavez proceeded to Tripoli and Baghdad. "He came back with a lot of money to form his Movimiento Revolucionario Venezolano [MRV] and run for president," says Col. Pedro Soto, a Chavez supporter at the time.
Chavez paid presidential state visits to Libya, Iraq and Iran in February 2001, signing cooperation agreements with Muammar Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein and Tehran's ruling mullahs. Castro visited Libya, Iran and Syria some months later. An MRV politician and close Chavez aide closely tied to the Circulos Bolivarianos, Freddy Bernal, was in Iraq last March. He got caught trying to move arms into Saudi Arabia by U.N. peacekeeping forces policing the border.
Back in the days when he was a frustrated coup leader, Chavez also received help from Colombian narcoguerrilla organizations. He now is repaying them by closing Venezuelan airspace to U.S. antidrug flights. A military-intelligence report shown to Insight by the former commander of the 2nd army theater of operations on the Colombian border, Gen. Nestor Gonzales, shows that the Colombian drug forces are being protected by Chavez in camps inside Venezuelan territory. The sick leader of Colombia's National Liberation Army (ELN), Comandante Pablo, rests under DISIP protection at a villa in the upmarket Caracas neighborhood of El Marques.***
In a statement harshly critical of the U.S. role in Colombia, the rebels said the Americans -- plus dozens of kidnapped lawmakers and police officers -- would be swapped for all imprisoned members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the FARC. The exchange would have to take place in a demilitarized safe haven, the rebels said.
Hostages now for 12 days, the Americans -- Department of Defense contractors on an apparent intelligence mission -- were seized after their plane went down in jungle about 200 miles southwest of Bogotá. U.S. officials say engine trouble caused the crash.
Two others in the plane were shot to death near the crash site. On Monday, the government charged one captured rebel in the deaths of crew members Thomas John Janis, an American, and Colombian intelligence sergeant Luis Alcides Cruz -- both of whom were shot at close range. According to a visiting U.S. Congressional delegation, Janis is a former member of the U.S. military.
Hundreds of Colombian soldiers, with the aid of the United States, have scoured the southern mountain jungle in Caquetá province to no avail.
NO TALKS
A U.S. State Department official appeared to rule out negotiations with the rebels.
'The FARC is responsible for the American crew members' safety, health and well-being. We have not authorized or requested any group to negotiate. We demand that the FARC immediately release the U.S. crew members,'' said spokeswoman Jo-Anne Prokopowicz.
The FARC has been pressuring the Colombian government for a prisoner exchange, and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who originally said no such deal was possible, has appointed a commission to explore the possibility.
On Saturday, the first time the FARC acknowledged that it was holding the Americans, the Marxist-led group said it could guarantee the men's safety only if the Colombian army stopped patrolling an area near the crash site. Uribe refused.
On Monday, the FARC said its tough stance was justified by the direct involvement of the United States in the nearly four-decade conflict. The hostages, the rebels have claimed, were CIA agents gathering information to target them.
As a measure of American hostility, the FARC singled out Plan Colombia, the $2 billion aid plan from Washington that provides funds not only to impede the cocaine trade but to train Colombian soldiers to fight the guerrillas.
''The aforementioned proves irrefutably the direct participation of high-ranking gringo officers in overt and covert military operations . . . which de facto makes them -- once captured . . . prisoners of war,'' the FARC declared in a written statement.
The rebels, who make money off the drug trade, were further angered by reports that said the United States had dispatched another 150 soldiers to find the missing Americans. But Col. David McWilliams, spokesman for the Miami-based Southern Command, said only some 40 U.S. soldiers had been sent to Colombia to help in the rescue.
Regardless, the FARC saw more troops as a further sign of the ``barefaced invasion of our country by the United States, which violates once more our sovereignty with the complicity of the toadying government of [President] Uribe Velez.''
CANDIDATE
A proposed prisoner exchange could also include the release of Eugenio Vargas Perdomo, known as ''Carlos Bolas,'' a member of the FARC extradited from Suriname to the United States last year. Vargas is accused of being an arms and drug broker for the rebel group. Vargas is the only known FARC member in U.S. custody.
The newest FARC member to be charged in a crime, though, is Fidel Casallas Bastos Dias, accused of killing two aboard the crashed plane. [End]
Herald staff writers Andres Oppenheimer and Renato Perez contributed to this report.
IN 6 weeks time, FARC might want to prepare them selves for a little Saddamizing........
I only hope that what gives, is the American lefts desperate love for PsuedoSocialist thugs.
The vast majority of the paramilitary forces are no more right wing than the Nazis were...it is a fiction created by the popular misconception of right and left and the desire of intellectuals to create a moral equivalency between leftists and any respectable political faction.
The problem with the paramilitaries is that the majority of them are just as prone to profitting off of the drug trade, using kidnapping to raise funds, and indiscriminate killing as the FARC (although obviously on a smaller scale due to their smaller numbers). Helping the enemies of our enemies without consideration of what it was we were siding with has been disastrous in the past, and would be so in this case as well, IMHO.
Come on -- ya think playing a teutonic cyborg in real life AND in every movie is easy??...
And one more compelling question: If Aah-nold can defeat Martian dictators, Columbian Rebels, and invincible Predator Aliens, why hasn't Rumsfeld called him yet?
And Col. has a constitutional problem with not being allowed to arm militias, (which led to the defeat of the S.L. in Peru.) With no ability to arm themselves, and the Army often afraid to enter, villages have no where else to turn for a self defense force than illegal "paramilitaries." It's a complex situation.
I think I can definitely agree with that.
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