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Three Colombian rebels killed in border incident
by Eric Jackson

What actually happened may never come out in the press. Panama's police are keeping reporters out of the area, and if they let them in to report on the story, it will be carefully chosen ones with police minders.

The generally reported outlines --- from Martinelli administration sources --- are that on January 27, a small group of armed members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a leftist rebel group that is on the run lately but has been fighting under its present name since 1964, were detected by Panamanian border police in Panama, on the bank of the Tuira River not far from Boca de Cupe. They were ordered to stop, they didn't, and Panamanian forces "repelled the aggression," killing three FARC guerrillas and taking two prisoners.

It is at least the third "shootout" between Panamanian forces and FARC in the last year. It bore a curious hallmark of such incidents: although FARC is a seasoned fighting force, there weren't any Panamanian casualties.

Meanwhile from the other side of the border, Colombian President Álvaro Uribe congratulated the Panamanian government, and according to the Colombian daily El Espectador, it was a matter of Panamanian forces bombarding a FARC camp on the Panama-Colombia border.

Other signs of the Martinelli administration's position in the Colombian internal conflict are less ambiguous: the Panamanian police wanted posters for FARC leaders posted around Darien communities near the border. Although Colombia's right-wing paramilitaries have attacked Panama and burned villages, assassinated public officials and kidnapped and murdered fleeing Colombians in the course of these attacks, there are no similar posters for the perpetrators of these acts.

FARC has for decades come into Panama to buy groceries or flee pursuit by Colombian government forces or their allied paramilitary forces. FARC attacks on Panama are rare, as in the 1993 kidnapping and subsequent murder of three American missionaries, and as in the "purchase" of people abducted in Panama by ordinary criminals in order to extort ransoms from their families.

In what is claimed to be a FARC communique published in the Colombian press and sent to the Panamanian government, the leftist guerrilla group purported to reiterate its policy not to attack the forces of neighboring countries, complain that Panamanian police were conducting joint patrols on both sides of the border with Colombian forces, and urge Panama to suspend its attacks on FARC. Vice President and Foreign Minister Juan Carlos Varela responded that "We will defend our border with Colombia up to the very last meter of Panama."

There are US mercenaries active in Darien to support Panamanian and Colombian forces, The Panama News has separately learned, but we have no information of any role they might have played in this latest incident. Because it's a matter of private corporations being hired by the US government, on the American side a veil of secrecy has been imposed, which would not be the case if regular US military forces were deployed.

The Martinelli administration has come under criticism from various points along the political spectrum for its policy along the border. Former legislator Haydee Milanés de Lay, who is of Mireya Moscoso's faction of the government coalition, complained on the Telemetro TV network that the real problem in the border area is not guerrillas but ordinary criminals and that measures taken against FARC like restricting shipments of food to the area harm the local residents. From the PRD as well as from some Panameñistas there were published warnings that it's not a wise policy to get involved in Colombia's conflicts. From the left, where there is a certain amount of sympathy for FARC, FRENADESO let loose with bitter denunciations of the Martinelli administration's policy.

The president's new guards

If Panama is going to go to war with FARC to the extent that FARC responds in kind, even if they are depleted by defeats in their war with government forces in Colombia, the guerrillas probably outmatch any fighting force of Panama's. They probably also have the funds to bribe key Panamanian security forces.

So is it a surprise that President Martinelli is now guarded by Israeli agents, variously reported to be of the Mossad, or formerly of the Mossad? The government says that the Israelis, who now surround the president on his public appearances, are mere "advisors" who are training the Institutional Protective Service (SPI) presidential guards.

The last Panamanian leader to bring in the Mossad was one General Manuel Antonio Noriega, who put Israeli agent Mike Harari in charge of a bloody purge of suspected disloyal elements of the Panama Defense Forces in the months before the 1989 US invasion. The latest import of Israeli agents comes in the wake of a bizarre alleged plot to kidnap the president and hold him for ransom, and as Panama moves all but explicitly into the Colombian civil conflict on the government and paramilitary side.