US-backed border massacre brings South America to brink of war

[Joanne98]

The Colombian military’s massacre last Saturday of 17 members of the guerrilla movement FARC, including its second in command, on Ecuadoran soil has brought tensions in the region to an unprecedented level, raising the serious threat of armed conflict.

Both Ecuador and Venezuela have massed thousands of troops on their borders with Colombia, while breaking off diplomatic relations with the right-wing government of President Alvaro Uribe in Bogota and expelling its ambassadors and diplomatic personnel from Quito and Caracas.

Authorities in Bogota initially claimed that the killing of the FARC leader Raul Reyes and the other guerrillas was a matter of Colombian troops pursuing and killing them in battle. A forensic investigation by Ecuador, however, established that murdered FARC members were the victims of a bombardment launched while they were sleeping and that some of them were then finished off by Colombian ground forces, execution-style.

Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa denounced the attack as a gross violation of Ecuador’s sovereignty and warned that the actions of the Uribe government threatened to turn the region into “another Middle East.”

Indeed, the killing of Reyes, who served as the FARC’s main international representative, pursuing diplomatic contacts in Europe and Latin America, had all the earmarks of a “targeted assassination.”

Colombian police officials made no secret of the fact that the targeting was carried out by US security forces, which are extremely active in the south of the country near the Ecuadoran border. US intelligence resources were used to track Reyes’s satellite phone, according to the Colombian officials. The US has funneled some US$5 billion in military aid into Colombia under the aegis of “Plan Colombia,” an operation that was launched on the pretext of waging a “war on drugs,” but which has increasingly been focused on a counterinsurgency campaign against the FARC, a rural-based guerrilla movement that has been fighting government forces for 40 years and which has controlled up to 40 percent of Colombian territory.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/mar2008/sout-m05.shtml

[mike_c]

1. K&R-- everyone need to know about Plan Colombia and the evil...

...being perpetrated in our names.

[MaryCeleste]

2. Massacre? That language alone makes the rest of the article hard to take seriously

[lostnotforgotten]

3. I Guess You Never Heard Of The Allende Coup?

Time you catch up on your history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d'%C3%A9tat

[MaryCeleste]

4. Indeed I have, but its not applicable to what I was saying.

My point was that when an article starts out with that kind of nonsense, anything else that it might say is going to be taken with a grain of salt.

Most reporting on this, including statements from national leaders seem to say:
- A FARC camp located in Ecuador was attacked by Colombia
- FARC soldiers died in the ground attack, including a high ranking leader
- It was not a hot pursuit situation.
Sorry, but I don't get massacre out of that