…at least when it comes to Ingrid Betancourt, now a captive of the FARC for going on six year.
Via the BBC Chávez stated at a press conference in which he asked the FARC to rlease Betancourt:
“It doesn’t make sense to keep her in the jungles of Colombia.”
Indeed, I have never understood, even from the point of view of the FARC’s alleged goals, why they took Betancourt in the first place, let alone held her as long as they have.
As I wrote a little over a week ago:
I have never understood the FARC’s kidnapping of Betancourt, nor do I understand why they would have “vented their anger on her.” While it is true that she was once a member of the then-ruling Liberal Party, the fact of the matter is she had formed her own party by 1998, having broken with the Liberals and was part of the center-left in Colombia that represented a potential new path for Colombia politics. It is true that her parents were both active in Colombian politics, but it is unclear to me that they did anything that the FARC would find especially pernicious.
The short of it is that on the face of it, Betancourt is the kind of politician that had a higher probability of being sympathetic to negotiations with the FARC, yet they kidnapped her and abused her. Not only is the entire situation clearly inhumane, but the political calculations behind it simply don’t add up. Indeed, this type of behavior makes it very difficult for the FARC to make cogent arguments about being a legitimate belligerent at war with the Colombia state and bolsters the government’s argument (along with the US and the EU) that they are properly described as terrorists.
Of course, in typical Chávez fashion, and even after the “gift from God” in Santo Domingo, he used the situation to tweak Uribe and to try to create ex post justification for Venezuelan and Ecuadoran contact with the FARC:
Venezuela and Ecuador, he said, had been seeking her release through Ecuadorean territory.
But that attempt had been disrupted by the Colombian operation to kill senior Farc commander Raul Reyes in a raid inside Ecuador, Mr Chavez said.
Funny how this is the first time we’ve heard that one.
March 10th, 2026 at 9:23 pm
[...] really, the slimy relationship between Latin America’s ‘new left’ and some really dreadful drug-running terrorists, is now public enemy number one for Congressional Democrats (see below). [...]