Chavez announced that some negotiators for the Colombian guerrilla group FARC are in Venezuela.
Chavez announced that some negotiators for the Colombian guerrilla group FARC are in Venezuela.
The idea isn’t to negotiate a peace agreement, and the basics are not in place for that. The government is still headed by an Uribe/Bush/paramilitary regime and no guerrilla group can expect any meaningful moves from such a regime. The FARC seem to have been militarily unaffected by all of Uribe’s offensives over the past 5 years. A different view of politics on the part of FARC and a less bloody regime in power are a couple of prerequisites for a negotiated peace, and these aren’t in place.
Still, a humanitarian accord, if it could be negotiated, would be a good thing. For the FARC to return some of its kidnapped prisoners in exchange for some humanitarian moves by the government would be positive for the Colombian people and could soften views towards them, views that are not at an all-time high. FARC has done numerous unilateral returns of prisoners in the past. They are a long way from unilaterally stopping kidnapping civilians altogether, it seems, though I suspect that doing so would be a huge political gain for them.
It’s a courageous thing for Chavez to get involved in, since it is unlikely to work and he is likely to get blamed or smeared. On the other hand, given that the base from which US destablization efforts against Venezuela have come has been Colombia, it isn’t as if Chavez can afford to ignore the country and helping peace negotiations is a very intelligent way to get involved – much more intelligent than the kinds of covert operations the US would be doing, or that Israel does to its neighbours.
