Colombia hostage families ask Chavez for more help

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Reuters

Colombia hostage families ask Chavez for more help
Wed Dec 5, 2007 3:01pm EST
By Hugh Bronstein

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Families of hostages held by Colombian rebels have asked Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to keep trying to broker a deal to free the kidnap victims despite being fired from that job by Colombia's leader two weeks ago.

A letter signed on Tuesday by 13 relatives of hostages including the mother of the French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, kidnapped in 2002, asks Chavez to keep negotiating with the Marxist guerrillas.

"You have all of our confidence and our mandate to continue meeting, talking and whatever else is needed to liberate our family members," the letter said.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe halted Chavez's role in the negotiations on November 21 after accusing him of breaking protocol by talking directly by telephone with a Colombian general and asking for information about the hostages.



Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSN0560677620071205

[gorbal]

1. I wonder if he still has the generals number

Is their any rule saying he can't call them again? I don't understand why Uribe values the lives of the kidnap victims so little.

[Peace Patriot]

2. And Donald Rumfeld is using this incident (no doubt engineered by him)--

of Uribe stopping the negotiation (what did they do, kneecap Uribe?)--to threaten U.S. military intervention in Venezuela, and an economic war. See Rumsfeld's op-ed in WaPo the day before the Venezuelan referendum (on constitutional amendments) last weekend.**

I've been thinking about this phone call to Colombia's military (Uribe's excuse to stop the negotiation) that they said Chavez made. (But the call was actually made by a Colombian senator who was working with Chavez.) If you were Chavez, would you walk into a hostage negotiation with armed rebel groups who are hated by Colombia's military and by its closely tied rightwing paramilitaries, without trying to make sure that it was not an ambush?

So I'm thinking Rumsfeld and cabal got Uribe to set up what WAS to be an ambush--possibly a plot to assassinate Chavez. And either Chavez got wind of it, and deliberately broke protocol (through the senator) to verify the rumors, or to put the negotiation on hold until he could GET assurances from the military, or he decided that he had to have such assurances, and took the risk of giving Uribe this excuse to end the negotiation. Maybe the Colombian general warned him. SOMETHING was up here, that we cannot quite see. This Rumsfeld op-ed, using this particular event against Chavez, is no accident, I think--and it probably got a lot of re-writes, up to the last minute before its publication (one day before the referendum).

I remember I was quite surprised when Uribe asked Chavez to negotiate for the hostages. It was just very out of character for Uribe, who is closely tied to the Bush Junta, and to horrendously violent rightwing paramilitaries. I had the hopeful thought that the Bolivarian Revolution (independence, sovereignty, for Latin American countries) was even getting to rightwing dinosaurs like Uribe. There were also reports that Uribe had balked at a prior rightwing Colombian paramilitary plan to assassinate Chavez. But I'm thinking now that Uribe is a rat bastard--or at least got used by the rat bastards in Washington DC, whose goals were, a) to literally ambush Chavez (get him killed in some confused crossfire situation--for which there may have been a rehearsal not too long ago, wherein some other FARC hostages were inexplicably targeted and killed by an unknown group of armed operatives--I'm thinking Blackwater), or b) barring that Rumsfeldian scenario, to embarrass and discredit Chavez in some way, for conducting an honorable negotiation (protecting FARC negotiators? refusing to cooperate in their apprehension? staging a false flag FARC attack somewhere, and blaming it on Chavez?).

But Chavez, with maybe a dose of pure luck (and friends in the Colombian military?), evaded these two fates, and is now credited by the hostage families for having obtained "proof of life," and is being asked, by them, to continue the negotiation.

And Rumsfeld comes out with this lying garbage about Chavez--saying he is "threatening his neighbors" and colluding with terrorists--but it is falling on deaf ears in the world community, and in South America. Donald Rumsfeld, indeed. He tries his best to twist the facts into Chavez being a "tyrant," and they just don't fit. Typical Rumsfeld. When the facts don't fit, hammer on them even harder. Grit you teeth, grunt, sweat, ram-ram-ram, to MAKE them fit. Hammer them into wood shavings, that you can pick up and re-shape into whatever lie you want to tell.

Think about this possibility--that Rumsfeld used Uribe to set up a FARC hostage negotiation as an ambush of Chavez--and now re-read Rumsfeld's tirade of this last weekend. He is purple with anger that it failed. And, whatever "comfort" the Bushite psychos can take from Chavez's hairbreadth loss on the referendum, they will not be satisfied, and will not rest in their efforts to return South America to fascist/corporate rule.

----------------------

**"The Smart Way to Beat Tyrants Like Chávez," By Donald Rumsfeld, Sunday, December 2, 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/30/AR2007113001800.html

Discussion at:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x323889