News
Doubt Cast on Colombia's Seizure
By Kelly Hearn
Washington Times
April 29, 2008
Sen. Jorge Enrique Gomez's appointment illustrates a political scandal that has snared 32 lawmakers in Colombia. Mr. Gomez replaced a jailed senator, who had replaced one who resigned under criminal investigation, who had replaced a jailed senator.
The government of Colombia, stung by scandal over government links to right-wing militias and an imperiled trade deal with Washington, faces charges from leading U.S.-based academics that it is distorting information purportedly seized from Marxist guerrillas during a cross-border raid.
In an open letter to the media, about two dozen specialists from U.S. research institutes and universities, including Harvard and New York University, have warned reporters to be cautious with accounts from Colombia's government that purport to link Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
On March 1, Colombian forces bombed a FARC rebel camp located inside Ecua-dorean jungle, about one mile from the Colombian border. Troops killed a FARC leader, Raul Reyes, as well as about 20 others, and reportedly seized three laptops and data drives belonging to Mr. Reyes.
Venezuela and Ecuador responded to the raid by deploying troops to their borders with Colombia. Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa severed diplomatic ties with Colombia, and he continues to trade barbs over the incident with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe in the press.
Colombia's top police chief, Gen. Oscar Naranjo, has gone public with computer documents that he says prove Mr. Chavez gave or planned to give FARC $300 million — a claim Mr. Chavez denies.
Any day now, the International Criminal Police Organization, better known as Interpol, is slated to wade into the multinational spat by ruling on the authenticity of the laptops.
The letter released Friday warned international media to treat the Interpol announcement carefully.
"In the first round of media coverage of the event, significant problems of inconsistency surfaced precisely as a result of the gap between Colombia's exaggerations and what the documents actually say," says the letter.
The signatories include Greg Grandin, a professor at New York University; Larry Birn of the Council of Hemispheric Affairs; Miguel Tinker Salas of Pomona College; and Mark Weisbrot of Washington's Center for Economic and Policy Research. The signatories are generally considered left-leaning in their analyses of events in Latin America.
The letter states that even if Interpol says that the laptops belonged to FARC, "there is no evidence that the publicly available documents support any of the extreme claims by the Colombian government that Venezuela and Ecuador had any sort of financial relationship with the rebels."
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