Latin American crisis triggered by an assassination “Made
in the USA”

By Bill Van Auken

7 March 2008

Nearly a week after Colombia’s cross-border raid against
an encampment of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia)
guerrilla movement in neighboring Ecuador, Latin America continues
to confront its worst regional diplomatic and military crisis
in decades. The US government and mass media have weighed in with
unsolicited judgments and advice, attributing the tense standoff
between Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela to the threat of terrorism
to Colombia, the complicity in terrorism on the part of Venezuela
and overheated animosities between the respective heads of state
of these three countries.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey declared that “it’s
important to recognize that the events that took place were, in
fact, a response to the presence of terrorists.” Similarly,
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino affirmed that Colombia “was
defending itself against terrorism.”

This official reaction extends to Colombia—Washington’s
principal client state in South America and the recipient of some
$600 million annually in American military aid—the mantle
of the Bush Doctrine, which holds that in the “global war
on terrorism” such niceties as respect for sovereign borders
and international law no longer apply.

The Washington Post went a step further, calling the
March 1 raid a “remarkable success” and accusing Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez and Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa of
“backing an armed movement with an established record of
terrorism.” It compared the strike on the FARC camp to US
air strikes against Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

And the New York Times, the voice of America’s
erstwhile liberal establishment, found it “hard to believe
that in the 21st century the democratically elected governments
of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela would be talking about war.”
While acknowledging that Colombia’s raid constituted “an
infringement of Ecuador’s territory—a sensitive issue
anywhere,” it urged the presumably hot-headed Latin leaders
of Ecuador and Colombia to “cool their rhetoric and begin
a serious discussion of how they can jointly secure their borders
against the FARC.”

One would never guess that Washington had any role in the bloody
events on the Colombian-Ecuadoran border. The Bush administration
portrays itself—and is largely portrayed by a compliant media—as
a selfless champion of democratic values and faithful ally of
the people’s of the southern hemisphere.

The facts, however, tell another, far uglier story. The three
Andean nations have been brought to the brink of war by a brutal
and cold-blooded political assassination carried out to further
the interests of US imperialism at the expense of the Colombian
people and the population of the entire region.

The March 1 raid was carried out not to defend Colombia from
terrorism, but to murder one man, Raul Reyes, considered the second-in-command
of the FARC and the guerrilla movement’s principal international
spokesman and diplomatic representative. He was well known in
both Latin America and Europe, having served as the principal
FARC negotiator in the abortive attempt under the government of
President Andres Pastrana (1998-2002) to broker a peaceful settlement
of the civil conflict that has wracked Colombia for more than
four decades. During that same period, he met with officials of
the Clinton State Department.

To carry out this political murder, air strikes were called
in against the camp inside Ecuador as Reyes and some 20 of his
comrades slept. Commandos were then sent into the camp to finish
off most of the survivors and haul Reyes’s bloody corpse
back to Colombia as a political trophy for the right-wing US-backed
government of President Alvaro Uribe.

This ruthless attack was staged not to ward off some pending
terrorist attack. On the contrary, it was designed as a “preemptive
strike” against a negotiated release of hostages held by
the FARC, among them a former presidential candidate, Ingrid Betancourt,
who holds joint Colombian-French citizenship and has been held
prisoner by the FARC for six years.

Just two days before the border massacre, French President
Nicolas Sarkozy publicly called for the release of the ailing
Betancourt and announced that he was prepared to fly to the Colombian
border to personally receiver her.

The FARC itself issued a statement that Reyes had been working
through Venezuelan President Chavez to concretize plans for a
meeting with Sarkozy to arrange for the hand-over of Betancourt.

The French government has not denied this account. Indeed,
on Monday, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told the media,
“It’s bad news that the man we were talking to, with
whom we had contacts has been killed. Do you see how ugly the
world is?”

Meanwhile, a French deputy foreign minister confirmed the role
played by Chavez in mediating the Sarkozy-FARC hostage negotiations.
“President Chavez has taken the initiative, he had taken
the initiative earlier on that had allowed for the release of
several hostages even though the situation had been blocked for
some time, so we are aware of his involvement and the important
role he has played,” the minister, Rama Yade, told a news
conference in Geneva.

After the news of Reyes’s assassination, the French foreign
ministry issued a pointed statement to the effect that the Colombian
government was well informed that France was conducting negotiations
with him.

This statement was fleshed out this week by the Argentine press.
Citing sources in the Argentine foreign ministry, it reported
that Sarkozy had sent a delegation of three personal envoys to
Colombia and that they were in the border region to meet with
Reyes.

“On Saturday [the day of the cross-border raid], the three
negotiators were 200 kilometers from the attack zone and were
headed for a meeting with Reyes when they received a call,”
the daily Pagina 12 reported. It was Luis Carlos Restrepo,
head of the Colombian government’s Peace Commission, who
warned them not to go to the meeting place.

Colombian officials have openly acknowledged the role of US
intelligence agencies in instigating and coordinating the March
1 targeted assassination. General Oscar Naranjo, commander of
the national police told reporters it was no secret that the Colombian
military-police apparatus maintained “a very strong alliance
with federal agencies of the US.”

The Colombian radio network, Radio Cadena Nacional (RCN), reported
Wednesday that Reyes’s location was pinpointed by US intelligence
as a result of monitoring a satellite phone call between the FARC
leader and Venezuelan President Chavez. The February 27 call—three
days before the raid—came after the FARC released to Venezuelan
authorities four former Colombian legislators—Gloria Polanco,
Luis Eladio Perez, Orlando Beltran and Jorge Eduardo Gechem—who
had been held hostage for nearly seven years.

“Chavez was thrilled by the release of the hostages, and
called Reyes to tell him that everything went well,” RCN
reported. Presumably, the CIA or other US intelligence agencies
were also tapping phone calls between Reyes and French officials
over the proposed release of Betancourt.

Another Colombian station, Noticias Uno, cited intelligence
sources as saying that they had received photographs from “foreign
spy planes” pinpointing the location of Reyes’s camp
in Ecuador.

The Colombian police commander insisted that, while relying
on US intelligence, the March 1 attack was an “autonomous
operation.”

This claim is improbable to say the least. US military “trainers”
are attached to the elite counterinsurgency units that would have
been employed in the ground attack that finished off the survivors
of the aerial bombardment.

As for the air raid itself, Ecuador’s Defense Minister
Wellington Sandoval reported the attack included the use of five
“smart bombs” of the type utilized by the US military.
“It is a bomb that hits within a meter of where it is programmed,
from high velocity airplanes,” he said. He added that to
target Reyes with such weapons, “they needed equipment that
Latin American armed forces do not have.”

Both Washington and the right-wing regime in Colombia were
determined to stop any further hostage releases in order to further
efforts to politically isolate the Chavez regime and to enforce
the Bush administration’s proscription against negotiations
with “terrorists.”

At the same time, the bombs dropped on the FARC encampment
were undoubtedly also meant as a message to Sarkozy not to meddle
in Yankee imperialism’s “backyard.” It should be
recalled that the French president, shortly after his election,
sent his then-wife to Libya to consummate the release of six medical
workers who had been held for eight years on false charges. This
political coup managed to bypass the European Union, which had
been negotiating the release, and paved the way for lucrative
Libyan contracts for French corporations. Washington had no intention
of seeing Paris pursue a similar path in relation to Venezuela,
which constitutes the fourth largest source of US oil imports.

In the final analysis, this episode in the “global war
on terrorism,” which has brought three South American nations
to the brink of armed conflict, is the product of a filthy political
murder carried out to defend the strategic and profit interests
of US capitalism.

It is a reminder that “Murder, Inc.”—as the
CIA became known during the 1960s and 1970s, when it organized
numerous assassinations and assassination attempts, along with
right-wing coups and dirty wars—is still very much in business
in Latin America.