Don't feed Colombia's violence

Dangerous games

There was a press conference in Bogota the other day, with lots of prior leaks to build it up. Computers recovered from a FARC guerrilla camp just over the border in Ecuador, it was said, would be certified as not having been manipulated and as proving that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was giving money and weapons to the Colombian rebels.

INTERPOL did certify that the computer files were genuine and had not been tampered with. The international law enforcement agency, however, said that it could not and would not comment on the Colombian government's interpretation of those contents. Many of the international media, citing documents that they said they had been shown by officials of Colombia's Uribe administration but neither quoting nor publishing said documents, reported the Bogota government's allegations as if they were undisputed truth. Some of the more responsible mainstream media used the word "allegedly" or similar modifiers to characterize the official version of what was in those computers. The New York Times reported, as to the claim that Chávez was supplying FARC, that "Proof of any such arms deals has not emerged."

That, however, did not stop certain reactionaries here from alleging or suggesting that the editor of The Panama News is a FARC supporter because he doesn't take Álvaro Uribe's word at face value.

It has always been the position of The Panama News and its editor that FARC is a bunch of thugs, and that the paramilitary forces arrayed against FARC are another bunch of thugs, as are many of Colombia's politicians and much of Colombia's armed forces.

The civil war in Colombia pits the president, who rose to political prominence on his daddy's drug fortune and is allied with drug-funding paramilitaries, against drug-funded guerrillas. The brutality on both sides is beyond atrocious and a constant reminder to Panamanians about why we don't want to be Colombians. There are no "good guys" to support in the Colombian conflict.

As part of the buildup to his press conference with INTERPOL, two days earlier President Uribe extradited 14 leaders of the United Colombian Self-Defense (AUC) paramilitary to the United States. There they will face drug charges. There, so long as George W. Bush is president, they will also be out of the reach of Colombian prosecutors.

That latter point is most important for Álvaro Uribe. You see, he's under criminal investigation himself. His cousin, who used to lead the ruling alliance's faction in the Colombian Senate, is behind bars. So are nearly two dozen other legislators of the Uribe faction. Nearly 50 other Colombian legislators are under investigation. Their alleged crimes? They were part of the AUC's bloody crime wave, which not only involved massive drug running as the US authorities allege, but also took the lives of thousands of Colombians, most of them non-combatant civilians. And who just got extradited out of Colombian justice's reach? Why, some of the key people who could finger President Uribe.

Why are they investigating Uribe? It could well be a broad pattern of conduct demonstrable by massive circumstantial evidence, which shows that the AUC paramilitary was an extra-legal arm of the Colombian Army, whose commander-in-chief Uribe is. It could be, but it isn't. He's being investigated in connection with something that happened when he was governor of the department of Antioquia, in 1997, the El Aro Massacre.

The record, as established in Colombian courts, shows that the government of Antioquia provided helicopters to transport members of the AUC to the village of El Aro. That record also shows that the Colombian Army sealed off the town to keep people from getting out or going in while the attack was ongoing. In that attack 15 people were murdered, about 30 more disappeared, 43 houses were burned down, a number of women were raped, about 900 people were forced to abandon their homes and more than 1,000 head of cattle and other property was stolen. A number of those who were killed were horribly tortured first. Prosecutors have obtained a paramilitary telephone message congratulating the governor for the grisly crime. A witness, formerly of the AUC, claims that Uribe, AUC leader Salvatore Mancuso and two Colombian Army officers met to plan the El Aro Massacre. Mancuso and other potential witnesses were among those sent away in the mass extradition.

Leave it to a leading Democrat in the US Congress to say something stupid about the whole affair. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer praised Uribe for the extradition and said that it should help the cause of a US - Colombian free trade agreement. But leave it to most Democrats, both in Congress and among the American people, to wisely reject such ideas.

However, just because the Colombian government is toxic and its word --- especially so long as it is headed by Uribe --- should never be taken at face value, does not mean that relations between Venezuela and FARC are no concern. If there are suggestions that FARC is getting weapons through Venezuela with the active participation or passive toleration of President Chávez, those are suggestions that the Venezuelan government is doing something that's both foolish and obnoxious, as well as illegal under international law.

(The same applies, by the way, to Panamanian authorities looking the other way at gun running through this country to Colombia's combatant factions. This is neither a theoretical nor a rhetorical consideration here.)

All governments, groups and individuals should stop feeding Colombia's violence. The United States should end Plan Colombia. The countries surrounding Colombia should crack down on all material assistance to the guerrillas as well as all such support to the paramilitaries.

Foreigners won't be able to end Colombia's nightmare, but we can and should make it more difficult for those who want to make it continue.

It's in the best interests of Venezuela and of Hugo Chávez himself to join in an international boycott of Colombia's violence, and limit their activities to those of promoting peace talks and the humanitarian release of hostages and prisoners.

It's in the best interest of the United States to join in an international boycott of Colombia's violence, and withdraw the troops, mercenaries and military aid that it has sent to support Álvaro Uribe's death squad regime.

It's in the best interest of Panama to join in an international boycott of Colombia's violence, by denying the use of our territory for Plan Colombia support activities, by arresting and interning for the conflict's duration those members of the guerrilla and paramilitary apparatuses found here, and by seizing all FARC or AUC funds or other property in this country.

Torrijos and climate change

At the European - Latin American and Caribbean Summit in Lima, the subject of which was global warming, President Torrijos proposed to turn global warming into "an opportunity to build a really innovative sustainable development model." Using all sorts of catch phrases like "measurable goals" and "the greatest challenge of our generation," Martín advocated --- what?

Nothing in particular.

Of course, humanity has lasted this long --- including through some serious climate changes --- due to our adaptability. We will have to be creative and adaptive to meet this challenge, and we'll need a sense of justice, a lot of empathy and a cooperative attitude to keep the coming changes from sparking wars and riots over things like water, land, food and migration.

So will Torrijos get an international reputation as some sort of visionary? Perhaps.

However, he has a record on climate change here, and it shows very little evidence that he's a man who thinks ahead.

Panama City's storm drains overflow whenever we have a heavy rain at high tide, and parts of the city flood. So is there any evidence that either the national or the municipal government have been planning for the inevitable effects of a rising sea level, and the extra added problems this will create for the capital? Not that's visible to the naked eye. Their planning, such as it is, concentrates almost entirely on financial benefits for a carefully selected few.

The Panama Canal will face stiff competition with the opening of navigable Arctic Ocean passages. The Northwest Passage that goes past Alaska, Canada and Greenland melted to the point of full navigability last year, and the Northeast Passage across Russia and Norway is also melting to the point where it will also soon have a shipping season. But Torrijos used public funds to deny this possibility and its importance, and to vilify people who raised the issue during the Panama Canal expansion referendum campaign.

The world's fisheries have largely collapsed, and the changes that global warming will cause in the oceans will make the task of rebuilding those fisheries all the more complicated. But the Torrijos administration hasn't paid much attention to Panama's declining fisheries as it is, let alone develop a strategy for dealing with changed oceanic conditions.

To what extent is global warning driven by human activity? It's a legitimate scientific question, but that there are human effects on climate is hard to reasonably deny anymore. That doesn't stop the Torrijos government from copying one of the very worst public policy mistakes that the United States made over many decades, designing the nation's physical infrastructures around the assumption that people should drive cars to where they work, shop, study and entertain themselves.

Let's hope that the next president travels less and reads more, and builds his or her reputation for dealing with climate change on substantive things done here rather than empty rhetoric abroad.

Bear in mind...

The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.

Maureen Dowd

When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will finally know peace.

Jimi Hendrix

Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.

Octavio Paz

editorial