Colombia: Raid in Ecuador was justified

[maddezmom]

Source: AP

BOGOTA, Colombia - Colombia's president says he repeatedly asked Ecuador to deal with Colombian rebels operating from its territory before he ordered the cross-border raid that has set off an international crisis.

~snip~

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's defense of his actions came during a three-hour session with news media representatives Wednesday night but his office did not authorize release of his comments until Thursday.

The conservative leader expressed frustration at what he called inaction by Ecuador's leftist government over Colombian guerrilla camps in its territory.

The conservative leader expressed frustration at what he called inaction by Ecuador's leftist government over Colombian guerrilla camps in its territory.

"What does one do when bandits are shooting from the other side and the government doesn't do anything?" Uribe asked. "It's my job to defend 43 million Colombians."



Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080306/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/colombia_venezuela

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Rice to visit Brazil and Chile next week
Thu Mar 6, 2008 5:00pm ESTPost Your Comments | All Comments Email | Print | Share| Reprints | Single Page| Recommend (0) <-> Text WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will visit Brazil and Chile next week, an aide said on Thursday, making a trip that could be overshadowed by a dispute over Colombia's bombing of rebels on Ecuadorean soil.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey said Rice's March 13-15 journey would include two stops in Brazil -- the capital, Brasilia, and the city of Salvador, the former slave port that is now capital of the Brazilian state of Bahia.

She will also visit the Chilean capital, Santiago.

Casey said Rice would focus on regional and bilateral issues, including biofuels cooperation with Brazil and trade with Chile. He said he did not expect the Ecuador-Colombia dispute to dominate the trip, which was previously scheduled.


more:http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN0623535720080306

Refereeing the Colombia Standoff

The escalating crisis between Colombia and its neighbors is more than just a case of Andean road rage. It exposes volatile political fault lines not seen in the Americas in a generation. On one side stand President Bush and regional allies led by conservative Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, whose army is accused of invading Ecuador last weekend to kill a Marxist guerrilla boss. Against them stand Venezuela's left-wing President Hugo Chavez, whom Uribe accuses of sponsoring those rebels, and friends such as Ecuador's President Rafael Correa.

But not everyone in the region has chosen a side: Caught in the middle are the likes of Brazil's center-left President Lula da Silva, trying in vain to bridge the chasm. Right now, that appears to be an intractable diplomatic challenge — not the sort of mess you'd ever expect to be solved by the Organization of American States, long derided as one of the hemisphere's more hopelessly ineffectual institutions.

But the OAS, a sort of hemispheric United Nations, may yet surprise the doubters. On Wednesday, after four days of bellicose rhetoric from all sides and the massing of Venezuelan troops and tanks on the Colombian border, the Washington, D.C.-based body — which has, since its founding in 1948, too often been hamstrung by a domineering U.S. and Latin America's non-interventionist dogma — issued a resolution that appears to have cooled torrid temperatures in South America a few degrees. The document includes no outright condemnation of Colombia, as Correa and Chavez had demanded, but it calls Colombia's cross-border incursion a violation of international law and calls for an OAS investigative team, as requested by Correa, to visit the site of the raid — moves Uribe and the U.S. had resisted. As a result, says Peter Hakim, president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue, the OAS has struck "a reasonably acceptable middle ground" that could mark a first step toward ending the emergency

more:http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1720012,00.html

[Selatius]

1. A cross-border invasion was a cure that was worse than the sickness.

Even if it's true that Ecuador's gov't didn't act when Colombia asked, it certainly didn't warrant an invasion.

[bemildred]

2. Damn:

"In spite of everything, and no matter what happens, we will continue struggling ... for the liberation of all the hostages in the hands of the FARC, for the liberation of our much-loved Ingrid Betancourt," Chavez said, referring to the French-Colombian politician held for six years.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France appealed for her release in an interview on Colombian television, calling Betancourt's freedom "a personal commitment" for him and "a national cause" for France.

Meanwhile, some 40,000 people took part in a Bogota march for victims of Colombia's long-running conflict that had a decidedly anti-Uribe flavor. Many criticized the president's no-holds-barred military campaign and the right-wing paramilitary groups formed to counter the guerrillas.

"Uribe is the one who has always wanted war — and the United States, too," said one marcher, Jorge Sanchez, 53.

[maddezmom]

3. and condi is on her way to the region

I had forgotten about it, just added the link. If I was Chile or Brazil I think I'd ask her to stay home. :(

[bemildred]

4. Bwaaahaaahaa. That ought to just complete the picture. nt

[Judi Lynn]

5. Here's something on that march from another source:

RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Displaced Pay Homage to Victims of Paramilitaries
By Helda Martínez

FLANDES, Colombia, Mar 5 (IPS) - "It was an homage to the indigenous people, Afro-Colombians, peasant farmers and everyone else who has been killed in this absurd war," indigenous activist Manuel Bautista told IPS at the start of a three-day march that will end in the Colombian capital Thursday.

Bautista and others affected by Colombia’s civil war threw thousands of flowers into the Magdalena river, which crosses the country from south to north, on Tuesday in a "national homage to the victims of paramilitarism, parapolitics and crimes of the state."

The flowers of all colours were cast into the river by around 700 indigenous and black people displaced by the war who came from the western provinces of Chocó and Cauca to join others from the central provinces of Tolima, Huila and Cundinamarca in the march.

The ceremony took place on a bridge joining Flandes, a fishing village in Tolima, with Girardot, a town in Cundinamarca, in west-central Colombia.

According to a local non-governmental organisation, Justice and Peace, "nearly four million people in Colombia have been displaced and have been stripped of their land, and at least 15,000 people have been forcibly disappeared, with their bodies buried in 3,000 secret common graves or thrown into rivers."

More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41468

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All things considered, it will be a miracle if we hear another word on this!

[LynnTheDem]

6. No, actually, it wasn't. It was, however, illegal.

But then laws nowadays are just "quaint".