[Marxism] Chávez's Promised Hostage Release Fizzles, His Second Major Setback in Weeks

[Walter Lippmann]

(As this makes obvious, the New York Times is hoping that a foundation is
being laid to promote another recall or other effort to get rid of Chavez
with the talk here about "misplaced priorities" in Venezuela. Anyone who 
has seen the movie SECUESTRO EXPRESS, an exceptionally violent and brutal 
feature film describing the process of so-called "express kidnappings"
which takes place in Venezuela, and in other countries in Latin America,
gets a sense of the kind of criminal underworld which Chavez has to deal
with in his home country. This is in addition to the political opposition.

(Not a word here about the immediate willingness of members of the child's
family to immediately provide DNA samples to confirm or refute the claim
by Uribe that the child has been in foster care for two years. A report in
today's Washington Post by Juan Forero strikes a much more cautious note
about the child, the DNA issue, and the attitude of Venezuela, too. NOTE:
not a word here about Chavez's amnesty for the 2002 coup-plotters who are
still in Venezuela if they have either turned themselves in or else been
tried and convicted for their role in the April 2002 anti-Chavez coup.
This story seems all but buried from the media which are always ready to
blast Chavez for more or less anything he has, or hasn't, in fact done.)

Washington Post/Juan Forero's more cautious report:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/message/77594 
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
Chávez’s Promised Hostage Release Fizzles, His Second Major Setback in Weeks

By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
Published: January 2, 2008

RIO de JANEIRO — Last week, Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, seemed on
the verge of one of his biggest triumphs to date. Now, amid renewed acrimony
with the Colombian leader, Álvaro Uribe, he is staring at his second major
political defeat in just over a month.

Using his credibility as a former rebel leader, Mr. Chávez orchestrated a
plan to release three hostages being held for years in the jungle by a
Colombian guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, 
known as the FARC.

Bristling with confidence, he assembled his allies in Latin America,
including the former Argentine president, Néstor Kirchner, to witness a
breakthrough in the decades-old conflict between the Colombian government
and the FARC. The movie director Oliver Stone was part of a multinational
group of observers that included diplomats from seven countries, including
France and Switzerland.

Then on Monday, Mr. Chávez’s showman moment seemed to turn from
history-making success into his latest failure.

For reasons that remain unclear, the FARC refused for four days to give the
exact location of the hostages to Venezuelan helicopter pilots. Mr. Chávez
read a letter from the rebel group late Monday that said the promised
security conditions had not been met.

“This is an important defeat for Hugo Chávez’s regional agenda to promote
his Bolivarian revolution and utilize his contacts with armed groups to win
political influence,” said Román Ortiz, the director of security and
post-conflict for the Ideas for Peace Foundation, a Bogotá research
institute focused on Colombia’s armed conflict.

A successful mission would have been likely to have embarrassed Mr. Uribe, 
a conservative who has made little progress in negotiating the release of
any of the several hundred hostages held in jungle camps, some for nearly a
decade. Mr. Uribe has been skeptical of Mr. Chávez’s attempts to spread his
Socialist ideology across the continent.

At the same time, the operation would have helped Mr. Chávez bounce back
from a narrow defeat in a referendum early last month on a proposal that
would have tightened his grip on power. For several days, at least, Mr.
Chávez and Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, also
managed to divert attention from the brewing scandal involving a suitcase
filled with $800,000 in cash believed to be a secret Venezuelan donation to
her campaign.

Mrs. Kirchner dispatched her husband to Colombia, and several other
countries joined in a scramble to claim credit for helping to break 
the impasse in the only armed conflict in the Western hemisphere.

But the FARC, which appeared to want to help Mr. Chávez while showing up 
Mr. Uribe, did not cooperate.

“Clearly, Chávez did provide the best chance for making some progress, but
it wasn’t enough,” said Michael Shifter, a vice president at the
Inter-American Dialogue, a policy group in Washington. “In the end, the
distrust that the FARC felt for the Colombian government trumped any good
feelings they felt for Chávez.”

Mr. Uribe accused the FARC of lying about its reasons for scuttling the
promised transfers, even suggesting that the rebels did not have one of the
three hostages, a 3-year-old boy named Emmanuel who was born in captivity to
a rebel soldier and Clara Rojas, another of the hostages. Ms. Rojas and
Consuelo González were to have been delivered with the boy to the
Venezuelans.

Hopes ran high that the transfer of the three hostages would lead to 
wider prisoner exchanges for more of the 700 hostages reportedly still 
in guerrilla hands. They are believed to include a former Colombian
presidential candidate, Ingrid Betancourt, a dual French-Colombian 
citizen kidnapped in 2002.

France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has been lobbying for Ms. Betancourt’s
release since videos and photos were seized late last month that apparently
showed her alive. The materials also appeared to show that three American
contractors, Thomas Howes, Marc Gonsalves and Keith Stansell, who were
captured in 2003 when their plane went down in the Colombian jungle, were
alive as well.

Now the failed mission has exposed Mr. Chávez to criticism of misplaced
priorities. As he worked to mediate the release of hostages in Colombia, in
Venezuela kidnappings are spiraling. Some estimates show that Venezuela has
more abductions per capita than Colombia now, but the Venezuelan government
has done little to tackle the problem.

The breakdown in the deal with the FARC led to a new round of harsh
accusations between Mr. Chávez and Mr. Uribe. Mr. Chávez said he had 
“plenty of reasons to doubt Uribe’s team and their analysis and hypotheses.”

He accused Mr. Uribe of trying to “dynamite” the operation, a claim
Mr. Uribe denied.

Jenny Carolina González contributed reporting from Bogotá.



THE NEW YORK TIMES
Charges Fly Over Failure to Release 3 in Colombia

By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
Published: January 1, 2008

RIO de JANEIRO — A Venezuelan-led mission to release three hostages held by
a Colombian rebel group seemed to be breaking down late Monday, with the
Colombian government and the rebels accusing each other of sabotaging the
operation.

President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who has been negotiating the hostages’
freedom, read a statement from the rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, in which the guerrillas accused the
government of President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia of not meeting the security
conditions agreed upon to free the hostages.

Mr. Chávez, who had gathered an international cast of diplomats and even the
film director Oliver Stone to observe the operation, said Mr. Uribe had
sabotaged his rescue plan. On Monday, diplomats from seven countries who had
come for the transfer were starting to leave the staging area, including
Néstor Kirchner, Argentina’s former president, and the French ambassador to
Venezuela, said Luis Alvis, the Venezuelan ambassador to Colombia.

“Uribe went to dynamite the third phase of this operation,” Mr. Chávez said,
referring to Mr. Uribe’s arrival on Monday at the staging area for the
transfer. He vowed that “the operation will continue,” adding that efforts
to secure the hostages’ freedom were “ongoing.”

Mr. Uribe, meanwhile, went on Colombian state television to offer a
hypothesis for the rebels’ failure to provide, as anticipated, the exact
location of the hostages, who could be anywhere in the jungle wilderness
that the rebel group controls, an area the size of France.

The Colombian president suggested that the rebels had lied about having one
of the three hostages, a boy named Emmanuel who was born in captivity to a
guerrilla fighter and thought to be 3 or 4 years old. Mr. Uribe said the
child might in fact be in the hands of social service workers in Bogotá,
Colombia’s capital.

Jenny Carolina González contributed reporting from Bogotá.






















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