Correa warns Colombia; challenges Uribe to see who is lying.

[rabs]

Don't know if this has been posted. If not, Correa gave an interview to an Ecuadoran TV station yesterday (Sunday) in which he said that any further attack by Colombia would be met with a military response (as in war). He said he would not permit any incursion by the Colombian military into Ecuadoran territory.

"There is no other way out, given that the first time (Colombian attack of March 1, 2008) we took the diplomatic route before the Organization of American States; Colombia was totally condemned but it continues with the position of (former defense minister Jose Manuel) Santos, who had a doctrine of preventive war."

Correa said the election of Santos to the presidency would be "very dangerous," but that is a decision for the Colombian people.

Correa also challenged Uribe to submit to a lie-detector test "so we can see which of the two of us has ties to the FARC or with the narco-traffic." :rofl:

[Zorro]

1. Correa should admit FARC is a regional problem

and engage with Colombia to deal with it. Continuing this bluster just shows he's not serious about addressing the issue.

His sabre-rattling doesn't help promote peace in the region, and Ecuador's military would come out on the losing end if they chose to start a conflict against the best-trained and experienced military in South America.

[subsuelo]

2. Colombia is the regional problem

Anyone paying attention can see that

[Zorro]

5. Anyone paying attention

will know that FARC's number 2 has been captured on video admitting FARC contributed money to Correa's election campaign.

Could that be one reason Correa has not aggressively gone after FARC when they set up camp in Ecuador? Are you saying FARC is not a regional problem?

[subsuelo]

10. I'm no fan of the FARC

http://www.chomsky.info/books/roguestates08.htm">you should read this, as should anyone interested in Colombia and the region, generally (emphasis added by me)

In 1999, Colombia became the leading recipient of US military and police assistance, replacing Turkey (Israel and Egypt are in a separate category). Colombia receives more US military aid than the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean combined. The total for 1999 reached about $300 million, along with $60 million in arms sales, approximately a threefold increase from 1998. The figure is scheduled to increase still more sharply with the anticipated passage of some version of Clinton’s Colombia Plan, submitted to Congress in April 2000, which called for a $1.6 billion “emergency aid” package for two years. Through the 1990s, Colombia has been by far the leading recipient of US military aid in Latin America, and has also compiled by far the worst human rights record, in conformity with a well-established and long-standing correlation.

...

In Colombia, however, the military armed and trained by the United States has not crushed domestic resistance, though it continues to produce its regular annual toll of atrocities. Each year, some 300,000 new refugees are driven from their homes, with a death toll of about 3,000 and many horrible massacres. The great majority of atrocities are attributed to paramilitary forces. These are closely linked to the military, as documented in considerable and shocking detail once again in February 2000 by Human Rights Watch, and in April 2000 by a UN study which reported that the Colombian security forces that are to be greatly strengthened by the Colombia Plan maintain an intimate relationship with death squads, organize paramilitary forces, and either participate in their massacres directly or, by failing to take action, have “undoubtedly enabled the paramilitary groups to achieve their exterminating objectives.” In more muted terms, the State Department confirms the general picture in its annual human rights reports, again in the report covering 1999, which concludes that “security forces actively collaborated with members of paramilitary groups” while “government forces continued to commit numerous, serious abuses, including extrajudicial killings, at a level that was roughly similar to that of 1998,” when the report attributed about 80 percent of attributable atrocities to the military and paramilitaries. The picture is confirmed as well by the Colombian Office of UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson. Its director, a respected Swedish diplomat, assigns the responsibility for “the magnitude and complexity of the paramilitary phenomenon” to the Colombian government, hence indirectly to its US sponsor.

...
Daniel Bland, a human rights researcher who worked in Colombia through most of the 1990s, concludes that in the past three years alone, “more than a million people have been forced from their homes in the countryside, and between 5,000 and 7,000 unarmed peasants have been slaughtered by right-wing paramilitaries.” Of nine people he interviewed for a documentary on human rights in 1997—professors, journalists, priests, human rights workers—“three have since been murdered by paramilitary gunmen; four have fled with their families after receiving death threats.” UNICEF and the Colombian Human Rights Information Bureau CODRES estimate that in June-August 1999 alone, 200,000 more people were driven from their homes.

[Judi Lynn]

11. Great article. Well worth the time spent reading it. The facts are indisputable. n/t

[Peace Patriot]

12. "more than a million people forced from their homes"--and guess where they've gone?

They've immigrated into Ecuador and Venezuela, mostly to escape the Colombian military and its death squads, and U.S. "war on drugs" toxic pesticide spraying of small farms, causing the destruction of food crops and the deaths of animals and damage to human DNA including that of children. Ecuador and Venezuela have ended up with a huge refugee problem--a million people to feed, house and provide medical care and schools for--on top of constant US/Colombian military harassment of their borders. Presidents Chavez and Correa, as well as the presidents of France, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and other countries, and emissaries from France, Spain and Switzerland, were trying to initiate a peace settlement between the FARC and the Colombian government, starting with the release of FARC hostages, including Ingrid Bettancourt in early 2008. Uribe actually asked Chavez to negotiate with the FARC (late 2007), until Rumsfeld yanked his chain and he rescinded the request, just as Chavez was beginning to succeed. The Colombian military directed rocket fire at the location of the first two hostages that Chavez got released, as they were in route to their freedom, sending them back into the jungle on a 20-mile hike. Chavez--with Sarkovy, the hostages' families and others begging him to continue (despite Uribe's and Santos' treachery)--eventually got six hostages released but finally gave up, because Colombia was actively trying to sabotage hostage releases and any peace talk. The hostage release scene then shifted to Colombia's border with Ecuador, where, in March 2008--according to the French, Spanish and Swiss envoys, Bettancourt's husband and others--the FARC was about to release Bettancourt in Ecuador, when the U.S./Colombia dropped ten 500 lb. US "smart bombs" on the temporary FARC hostage release camp just inside Ecuador's border, and raided over the border, slaughtering 25 people in their sleep--including the FARC chief hostage (and peace) negotiator, Raul Reyes.

Colombia doesn't want peace. The FARC guerrillas are their meal ticket--so far to $6 BILLION in US taxpayer military aid, and other US taxpayer-funded pots of gold. The Colombian civil war has been going on for more than 40 years. Rafael Correa didn't start it--he wasn't even born when this civil war started--and he has absolutely nothing to do with it, except that it is his biggest headache as president of Ecuador, and his biggest worry as to the Bushwhacks' next oil war--Oil War II-South America. Ecuador is a member of OPEC and has one of the largest oil reserves in this hemisphere, in its northern province adjacent to Colombia. Venezuela's oil is in its northern provinces, also adjacent to Colombia and to the Caribbean. And in both cases--Ecuador's northern oil region and Venezuela's--rightwing politicians there openly talk of secession from the national governments.

On 12/1/07--in the midst of Chavez's hostage negotiations with the FARC at Uribe's behest--Donald Rumsfeld published an op-ed in the Washington Post, in which--among other things--he urges "swift action" by the U.S. in support of "friends and allies" in South America. Whatever did he mean--except these coup-plotting fascists in Venezuela's and Ecuador's oil provinces, and any other coup-plotting fascists who are "friends and allies" of the Bushwhacks, such as those in Honduras? (--which doesn't have oil but does have strategic location, as well as a history of being used as a "lily pad" country for U.S. aggression in Latin America).

This is the war plan. And presidents like Correa in Ecuador and Chavez in Venezuela are well aware of it. Colombian does not want peace. They have proven this time and again. They want to exterminate the left throughout Latin America, as they have exterminated thousands of labor union leaders, community leaders, political leftists, human rights workers and peasant farmers and ordinary people in Colombia, some after gruesome torture, many thrown into mass graves.

Someone upthread said that Correa should be "statesmanlike" and cooperate with these utter fuckwads. He and other leaders tried that during the 2007-2008 period, and have gotten nothing but lies, insults, threats, border incursions and a big buildup of US military forces in Colombia for their trouble. Ecuador is an oil target. So is Venezuela. That is plain to see. The war propaganda buildup is already evident, and is approaching the level of "WMDs in Iraq." Correa has no choice--it is his responsibility as president of Ecuador--and Chavez also has no choice--but to prepare military defenses for US-instigated hostility with Colombia as the proxy and Honduras as one of the "lily pads." Neither the civil war with the FARC nor this planned oil war is their doing. They want peace. They are both strong social justice leaders. They are pouring resources--including oil profits--into bootstrapping the poor and creating a potential powerhouse trade block with other Latin American countries (--the South American "common market"--UNASUR--formalized last summer). They don't want to have to shift their resources to defense. But Colombia and the US are giving them no choice. The Bushwhacks want their oil. The Democrats here won't stop them. The destabilization of Honduras and the rightwing military coup--in a country that the US controls with funding--the Bushwhack reconstitution of the US 4th Fleet in the Carribbean last summer, and the five US military bases in Colombia are clear signals of war.

It was Brazil who proposed a "common defense" in the context of UNASUR. Brazil's president, Lula da Silva, stated the the US 4th Fleet poses a threat to Brazil's oil. (Everybody knows that it is a threat to Venezuela.) This could be a hemisphere-wide oil war.

[Judi Lynn]

13. You're so right, now more than ever: Colombia can't possibly allow war to end now!

Too much depends upon it in their own government, AND the U.S. is using it as the excuse to have 5 bases from which it can move against the rest of the Americas.

We'll be seeing more false positives, and more bogus stories about leftist leaders of Latin American countries being a threat to Colombia.

[Downwinder]

3. Lets see how they stack up against the taliban.

[Bacchus39]

6. Rafe and Hugo don't want a strong Colombia to compete and dominate

econimically and militarily do they? better to keep Colombia as a "problem".

well, its pretty much gone according to the script so far. Colombia sides with the US no matter who the US administration is and antagonistic countries who we were supposed to kiss and make up with remain antogonistic.

I am not for US military bases in Colombia, and I don't think that is the case, but its Colombia who remains aligned with the US. Colombia is taking its chances with the US rather than Chavez. smart move. I think the Obama administration gets it now. Its going to be hard for the Obama administration to beat up on Colombia when they let you use their bases, send troops to Afganistan, and its shown how other governments "in the region" are trying to undermine them.

[Downwinder]

9. Sycophant. n/t

[Downwinder]

14. You do what your banker tells you.

[Peace Patriot]

4. THAT I would love to see--Uribe's lie detector test results!

And those of his buds Donald Rumsfeld (and "little Donald Rumsfeld"--Defense Minister Santos), Dick Cheney, Junior and, oh, say, John Negroponte, Otto Reich, Tom Shannon, John McCain, the executives of Dyncorp, Chiquita, Occidental Petroleum, and a few others.

On the other hand, who needs lie detector tests to know that these are fucking fascists, mass murderers, and war profiteers and thieves on a scale without precedent?

I think that is President Correa's point. I admire his courage in making it. He is the one with a bull's eye target on his back.

[Zorro]

7. Correa has the opportunity to show real statesmanship and leadership

by acknowledging FARC is a regional problem and engaging with Colombia to deal with the issue.

However, he seems to prefer acting petulantly, which I think is intended to divert attention away from the charges that FARC contributed to his election campaign.

[magbana]

8. Thanks for sharing this story, rabs. Better to mess with Colombia BEFORE the . . .

five bases are fully stocked with arms and teeming with US "personnel." I really like it when a US-educated economist kicks a drug kingpin's ass. Chavez, Correa, Morales,Lugo,Zelaya, etc., all know that if they don't stop this US virus now, it only gets worse.