VEN/COL Improve Relations at OAS Summit

[magbana]

Venezuela and Colombia Improve Relations at OAS Summit
June 3rd 2008, by James Suggett - Venezuelanalysis.com

Colombian Chancellor Fernándo Araújo and Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro met privately Monday and agreed to keep lines of communication open, despite political differences. (ABN)

Mérida, June 3, 2008 (venezuelanalysis.com)-- The Venezuelan Foreign Relations Minister, Nicolás Maduro, and the Colombian Chancellor, Fernándo Araújo, agreed to improve their communication despite political differences and discussed bilateral relations in a private meeting Monday during the 38th summit of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Medellín, Colombia.

“With Colombia we have discussed diverse themes in a very frank manner... We have distinct visions of some processes that are underway on the continent, distinct visions of some elements of bilateral policies, but we have ratified the necessity of maintaining a permanent communication about different topics and conversing very frankly,”
Maduro told the press after meeting with Araújo.

Maduro expressed that there are “elites,” including the owners of major newspapers such as El Tiempo in Colombia, El País in Spain, and the Miami Herald who wish to provoke “armed conflict, that there be violence between our countries and our people.” The minister insisted that Colombia and Venezuela must not allow “the media and people interested in damaging our relations impose an agenda on our countries, our governments, our peoples.”

He continued, “very frankly we have said to that we hope every type of public campaign be stopped in relation to the themes that the Colombian and Venezuelan public opinion already know well, and that levels of respect and communication are re-established.”

Following the meeting, Araújo reported, “We reviewed how several themes that are of interest to both countries that have frozen up a little and the importance of re-engaging them.” Topics of discussion included “commerce, the theme of border security, and the systems of border integration,” he said.

Araújo added that in disputes over territorial sovereignty, “it is very important that we maintain communication and that when an incident exists … we remain in communication and always solve the problem by way of diplomatic channels.”

The Colombian minister referred to Venezuela’s accusation two weeks ago that Colombian troops had crossed the border into the Venezuelan state of Apure without permission. Colombia denied this, saying a river in the area would have made it “practically impossible” for Colombian troops to cross.

Last Saturday, President Hugo Chávez announced that Venezuelan troops had killed a Colombian “subversive,” in an armed confrontation at an unspecified location along the border. “They fired at each other and one of the subversive group died,” the president told a gathering of members of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

Chávez said it was unclear whether the person who died was a paramilitary or a guerrilla, but that the incident shows how Venezuela “is profoundly affected by the internal conflicts that Colombia has,” which cause “subversion, delinquency, drug trafficking, contraband” in the border region.

Diplomatic tensions between Venezuela and Colombia increased when Colombian armed forces bombarded an encampment of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) inside Ecuadorian territory last March.

Since then, Colombia has claimed that computer files seized during the raid reveal that Venezuela financed and Ecuador provided refuge for the FARC. Venezuela and Ecuador have assured that their only relations with the FARC, which Colombia and its ally the United States consider a terrorist organization, have been for the negotiation of hostage releases.

A recent investigation by the International Police organization INTERPOL found “no evidence” of tampering with the computers during the month they were in U.S. and Colombian custody. INTERPOL did not evaluate whether the files substantiate Colombia`s accusations against Venezuela and Ecuador.

Maduro met Sunday with the Ecuadorian Foreign Relations Minister, María Isabel Salvador, regarding the accusations. According to Salvador, the two agreed that “obviously those documents do not have any validity” because the evidence was not properly handled and was seized during an illegal raid. This point had been previously asserted by the Venezuelan Supreme Tribunal of Justice.

OAS to Examine FARC Connection to Ecuador

Sunday, Ecuador made a formal request that the OAS carry out an independent investigation of the INTERPOL report.

“Ecuador has asked the OAS to investigate all the information found in those computers,” Salvador declared. She added that the OAS should “determine everything that must be determined.”

According to Salvador, Ecuador has a “clean conscience” because, like Venezuela, its only relations with the FARC were for the liberation of hostages, and the country “will continue doing it in any process that brings the unconditional liberation of hostages retained by the FARC.”

Similarly, Maduro declared that Venezuela is “always willing to help peace in Colombia,” and recounted how the Venezuelan government has been repeatedly invited by France and by the family of the FARC’s highest profile hostage, Ingrid Betancourt, to negotiate hostage releases.

The president of the Colombian Supreme Court, Javier Ricaurte, said he had solicited the computer files from the Colombian Attorney General, Mario Iguarán, more than a month ago but had not yet received them. So far, Ricuarte has only received copies of files related to investigations of members of Colombia`s opposition.

OAS General Secretary José Miguel Insulza said Friday that the three-day OAS Summit, which began Sunday, would be “the continuation” of diplomatic meetings to resolve the regional crisis sparked by Colombia’s attacks in March, but the OAS will not pressure either Venezuela or Colombia to renew diplomatic relations.

“We are not going to pressure. We are facilitators,” Insulza said. “No one is going to ask them to be friends again but we hope that in some moment they shake hands and leave the conflicts behind.”

Addressing the general OAS assembly Tuesday, Maduro said the solution to the conflict in Colombia should come from within Colombia, with cooperation from the rest of Latin America. He encouraged Latin American countries not to fall for “the intrigues that the empire is trying to plant in our countries, with only one objective: to look for a grand conflict among brotherly peoples such as those of Venezuela and Colombia.”

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/3518

[Judi Lynn]

1. This is very telling. You have to wonder why it hasn't been yammered about in our own media!

From the posted article:

The president of the Colombian Supreme Court, Javier Ricaurte, said he had solicited the computer files from the Colombian Attorney General, Mario Iguarán, more than a month ago but had not yet received them. So far, Ricuarte has only received copies of files related to investigations of members of Colombia`s opposition.

Uh, HUH! What a surprise, right?

As Correa said to Uribe, "My hands are clean. I've got no blood on them," as he stared pointedly in the meeting at Uribe, the creepy little slime.

Glad Maduro mentioned "El Tiempo." It was only a couple of weeks ago I learned that the Colombian Vice President, Francisco Santos's family runs the paper. Here's the Wikipedia. (It should reflect that both Santos' serve currently in Uribe's administration. The article seems to slide past that fact.)

El Tiempo (Colombia)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Owner CEET-Planeta
Publisher CEET
Editor Guillermo Santos
Founded 1911
Headquarters Bogotá, Colombia

Website: eltiempo.com
El Tiempo (English: The Time) is the highest circulation daily newspaper in Colombia and a non-tabloid daily with national distribution. As of 2004, it had an average weekday circulation of 314,000, rising to 453,000 for the Sunday edition.<1>

The newspaper was founded in 1911 by Alfonso Villegas Restrepo. In 1913 it was purchased by his brother-in-law, Eduardo Santos Montejo. El Tiempo's main shareholders were members of the Santos family, as part of the media conglomerate Casa Editorial El Tiempo. In 2007, the Spanish Grupo Planeta obtained majority ownership of the daily.

El Tiempo has enjoyed monopoly status in Colombian media as the only daily that circulates nationally, as most smaller dailies have limited distribution outside their own regions. El Espectador, El Tiempo's longtime rival, was reduced to a weekly publication following an internal financial crisis in 2001, but returned to the daily format on 11 May 2008.

Several members of the Santos family who were also El Tiempo shareholders have participated in Colombian politics, including Eduardo Santos Montejo, who was President of Colombia from 1938 to 1942. Also, most recently, Vicepresident Francisco Santos Calderón and Defence Minister Juan Manuel Santos have served during President Álvaro Uribe's administration.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Tiempo



Francisco Santos is the one pouting on the left
next to President Álvaro Uribe, center, and his
cousin, Defense Secretary, Juan Manuel Santos.

The Santos family is mentioned with honors in recollections of deathsquad druglord, Salvatore Mancuso:

According to Colombia’s largest newspaper, El Tiempo (which is majority owned by the Santos family), Mancuso testified that in 1996 or 1997 Francisco Santos, then an El Tiempo journalist, talked with him in what Mancuso suggested was a non-journalistic way about organizing some kind of vigilante group in Bogota. Mancuso also testified that in the 1990s Defense Minister Santos, then a private citizen, had meetings with paramilitary leaders to propose a ceasefire between paramilitaries and their guerrilla archenemies and apparently to seek an exit of then-President Ernesto Samper, who was beleaguered by a drug-money scandal at the time. Mancuso mentioned meetings he supposedly had with Mario Uribe, allegedly resulting in paramilitary support for his senate candidacy.

http://www.fpri.org/enotes/200705.salisbury.columbiacongress.html

Their bonds go back a long time, as it seems.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Speaking of Colombia's BIG newspaper, El Tiempo, here's a feature they ran

which is startling, all things considered. Politically, this was a very strange act for them! It WAS an act of humane citizenship, however, no matter what their motivation was.

Colombia: Paramilitary Scandal, Crimes, and Media ‘Coincidences'
Saturday, April 28th, 2007 @ 04:13 UTC
by Carlos Raúl van der Weyden Velásquez

El Tiempo recently devoted its crime and law section to a shocking special on paramilitary crimes , titled Colombia looks for 10,000 people, which includes some grisly pictures. In one of the articles, Francisco Villalba, a.k.a. Cristian Barreto, who participated in the Ituango massacre in 1997, has confessed to making use of the Justice and Peace law, some of the atrocities that happened on his “training” three years before:

Villalba assures that for the cutting up learning they used peasants who brought up together during the occupations of neighboring towns. “They were older people taken on trucks, alive, tied”, he described. The victims arrived to the estate on topped trucks. They were taken down with their hands tied and moved to a room, where they remained locked for several days, waiting for the training to start.

Then the “bravery instruction” came up: people were separated in four or five groups “and there they were cut into pieces”, Villalba told during the deposition. “The instructor told me: ‘You stand up here and secures the one who cuts'. Every time a town was occupied and someone is going to be cut, the ones doing that job must be provided with security”.

Men and women were taken out the rooms on their underwear. Still with their hands tied, they were taken to the place where the instructor awaited to start the first recommendations: “The instructions were to take off their arms, their head, to cut them alive. They came out crying and asked us not to hurt them, they had a family”.

Villalba describes the process: “The people were opened from the chest to the belly to take out the guts, the innards. Their legs, their arms, their heads were ripped off, with a machete or a knife. The rest, their remains, by hand. We, who were on instruction, took out the intestines”.

The training was compulsory, according to him, to “test courage and learn how to disappear people”. During the month and a half Francisco Villalba says he was in the course, he saw cutting instructions three times. “They chose the students to participate. Once, one of them refused to do it. ‘Doble cero' stood up and told him: ‘Come here, I can do it'. Then he ordered to cut him up. They made me to cut one girl's arm. She was already taken her head and one leg out. She asked them not to do it, because she had two children”.

The bodies were taken to common graves at the same place, La 35, where it is estimated 400 people were buried.

http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/2007/04/28/colombia-paramilitary-scandal-crimes-and-media-coincidences/