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In the previous year, a plot to assassinate Chavez was hatched in the Colombian military and was exposed. Uribe and Chavez held a four hour meeting in which Uribe apologized to Chavez. Since an apology is two words and takes two seconds ("I'm sorry."), what else happened, in the remaining 3+ hours? My guess: That is where the treacherous Uribe hatched the next plot against Chavez, by asking him to negotiate with the FARC guerillas for hostage releases. That request was then announced publicly.
Chavez took it seriously. He began negotiating with the FARC for hostage releases. And he was on the point of success--with the first of what would be a total of 8 hostages to be released--on route to their freedom, when Uribe suddenly announced that he was rescinding his request of Chavez. This was two days before the release of the first two. That same weekend (12/1/07), Donald Rumsfeld published an op-end in the Washington Post, stating, in the first paragraph, that Chavez's help with the hostages "is not welcome in Colombia." The Colombian military then sent rocket fire at the locations of the first two hostages, who were on their way through the jungle. They were forced back on a 20-mile hike to a safe location. Numerous world leaders, including French President Sarkozy, human rights groups and the hostages' families begged Chavez to continue, which he did until he got a total of 8 out. Then he had to stop because it was becoming too dangerous for the hostages.
Chavez's hostage release work concluded just prior to the time that Uribe was calling Chavez "Hitler" to U.S. congressmen and talking about invading Venezuela--the date of these cables (1/28/08). I figure Uribe's (Rumsfeld's?) nasty little plot to hand Chavez a diplomatic disaster, with dead hostages, got foiled and that is why he was so angry.
And here's what happened just afterward--a month later (3/1/08):
Chavez and many other leaders had hopes of getting a peace negotiation going, to settle Colombia's 70 YEAR civil war. Argentina's newly elected president Crisinta Fernandez pledged her support of the hostage release efforts in her inaugural address. Many efforts were going forward, centered on FARC commander Raul Reyes, who was the FARC's chief hostage and peace negotiator. Reyes moved his hostage release camp to a location just inside Ecuador's border. He was about to release high profile hostage Ingrid Betancourt (a French-Colombian citizen). Her family had been notified. French, Swiss and Spanish envoys were in Ecuador, headed to Reyes' camp to receive her. They were warned off--told that "everyone in that camp were going to be killed." That night, the U.S./Colombia dropped 500 lb U.S. "smart bombs" on Reyes' camp, and raided over the border to shoot any survivors in the back, slaughtering a total of 25 sleeping people. This horrendous act nearly started a war between the U.S./Colombia and Ecuador/Venezuela.
But that's not the end of it. Soon Uribe was claiming to have seized Reyes' laptop computer from the bombed out camp and started making wild charges against Chavez--that he was a "terrorist lover," that he was giving the FARC money, that he was helping the FARC get a "dirty bomb," etc. etc. He said he had FARC emails to prove all this. This "evidence" was eventually completely debunked (even by Interpol, whose head tried so hard to help Uribe). It was crap. There weren't even any emails in the laptop (just alleged FARC documents). And the Colombian military had the laptop for three days and so compromised its provenance that it could not be used in a court of law.
From this perspective--the "miracle laptop" conclusion--looking back over the previous months, we can see the outlines of a likely made-in-Washington strategy to use Chavez's and others' desire for peace to expand Colombia's long civil war into Venezuela and Ecuador. Venezuela has the biggest oil reserves on earth (twice Saudi Arabia's, according to the USGS). Ecuador also has lots of oil and is also a member of OPEC. The U.S. wanted to destabilize these countries, get rid of their leftist governments and gain control of the oil (and particularly of the oil profits, for Exxon Mobil and Chevron). And, at the least, they wanted to stop all talk of peace in Colombia's civil war--it is a U.S. war profiteer gravy train--and damage Chavez and Correa as much as possible with dirty tricks and slander.
One other thing should be mentioned: Nearly half a million Colombians--mostly poor peasants--have fled over the borders into Venezuela and Ecuador, in flight from the Colombian military and its and Uribe's paramilitary death squads, and from the dreadful U.S. "war on drugs" (spraying of toxic pesticides on small farmers', their children, their animals, their food crops). A total of FIVE MILLION peasant farmers have been displaced in Colombia, by state terror--THE worst human displacement crisis on earth. The refugees who have crossed the borders are a significant burden on Venezuela's and Ecuador's governments (for one thing, because they are humanitarians and believe in helping the poor), and this vast migration also creates unstable borders. It is in the immediate interest of decent governments, like Venezuela's and Ecuador's, to see an end both to Colombia's civil war and to the U.S. "war on drugs" which the Bush Junta folded together into ONE WAR--the "war on terror"--a completely inappropriate and dreadfully bad policy, that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocents and the poverty of millions, and has been used by Colombia's fascist rulers as an excuse to slaughter trade unionists, human rights workers, teachers, community activists, journalists, political opponents, peasant farmers and others, and to spy on everybody (judges, prosecutors, opposition politicians and all of the above). Uribe has a string of bodies behind him all the way to Antioquia, where he was governor, in his early career. Some seventy of his closest political cohorts, including family members, are under investigation or in jail, for bribery, spying, ties to death squads, ties to drug trafficking and other crimes.
This is the context for Uribe--who oversaw one of the bloodiest, most criminal regimes ever to be propped up by the U.S. ($7 BILLION in military aid)--comparing Chavez to Hitler, and wanting to make war on Venezuela. Venezuela didn't destabilize its borders. Colombia did! The FARC is an armed leftist guerrilla army made in Colombia. They are not Venezuelans. They are Colombians. If they and a quarter of a million Colombian peasant farmers have spilled over the border, fleeing Colombia's police state forces, who's fault is that? Chavez wouldn't join Uribe in his war. Thank God! --or many more innocent people would be dead. He risked a lot for peace, and got nothing but the most twisted treachery imaginable for his efforts--the willingness of the fascists in Colombia and in Washington to kill hostages as a political ploy.
The Obama administration is now coddling Uribe, protecting him from prosecution in Colombia and giving him a platform. He gets to continue telling lies like this, and saber-rattling and stirring up trouble from the safety of CIA "made man" status, probably because of what he knows about Bush Junta crimes in Colombia--while Chavez gets constantly beaten up and lied about in our corpo-fascist press and by the U.S. State Department, no doubt following scripts written in Langley.
And Uribe is no doubt meeting with those same congresscreeps, that he blathered to about "Hitler," back in 2008, salivating over the newly Diebolded Puke U.S. Congress and itching to get back in power and be the U.S. point man for the next oil war. He's in Washington with an academic sinecure at Georgetown, and in Boston at Harvard, no doubt teaching our young people that, when it comes to crimes of the rich and the powerful, "we need to look forward not backward." He just asked Hillary Clinton to give him "sovereign immunity" from prosecution--and from even having to give a deposition--in a case filed here on behalf of rightwing death squad victims in Colombia! And he'll probably get it. They've already gotten all the witnesses against him out of Colombia, and out of the reach of Colombian prosecutors, with various midnight extraditions and asylums. "Sovereign immunity." What next?
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