by David Usborne World News
Hugo Chávez
The armed revolutionary has no place in modern Latin America, the Venezuelan President has declared. Catching his critics off guard, Hugo Chavez called on the Marxist rebel army in neighbouring Colombia to lay down its arms and release its hostages, declaring that guerrilla armies are now “out of place”.
Adopting the mantle of international statesman, the Venezuelan President appeared to be stepping forward finally to turn a page of history for a continent that for decades has been blighted by eruptions of insurgent violence, not just in Colombia but also Nicaragua and El Salvador. As most of those conflicts have come to an end, Colombia has been alone in failing to end its own internal strife.
“At this moment in Latin America, an armed guerrilla movement is out of place,” Chavez said. “The guerrilla war is history,” he asserted in his weekly television address, prompting expressions of both surprise and welcome among government leaders in Colombia. They have recently accused Venezuela of running a clandestine campaign of support for the Marxist rebels.
Chavez is no stranger to the revolutionary mantle. In 1992 his Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement – inspired by the 19th century independence guerrilla Simon Bolivar – made a doomed attempt to overthrow the government. Even now, having made the transition from rebel to politician, Chavez is still the staunchest of supporters of the world’s most famous revolutionary, Fidel Castro. Whether his latest comments represent a profound change of heart or not, they may help open a path to long-term peace in Colombia after 40 years of bloodshed.
It is a time of deepening difficulties for Farc, the Spanish acronym for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which recently confirmed that its founder and top commander, Manuel Marulanda, also known as “Sureshot”, had died of a heart attack at a jungle base in March. It has lost several other members of its top leadership in recent months.
“I think the time has come for the Farc to free everyone they have in the mountains. It would be a great, humanitarian gesture in exchange for nothing. That is what I propose to the new [Farc] leader.”
Parapolitical reform dies in Colombia
On 10 June the reform aimed at purging congress of politicians and parties with links to paramilitaries collapsed. Until recently congress considered the reform as the only opportunity to restore its credibility in the wake of the parapolitical scandal. However, the legislature’s commitment to the reform has since waned considerably, largely because President Alvaro Uribe turned against the bill. It is likely that Uribe’s change of heart is linked to his increasingly obvious ambitions to run for a third term.
