Saturday, December 22, 2001
Call them rebels, terrorists or guerrillas, but the most accurate name for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia cannot be printed in a family newspaper. In denying a cancer-stricken child the opportunity before he died of seeing his kidnapped father, FARC has demonstrated its unspeakable cruelty.
As 12-year-old Andr & eacute;s Felipe Perez, lay dying of cancer, hoping to spend his last days with his father -- a policeman kidnapped by FARC -- the guerrilla leaders tried to deal Norberto Perez for one of their own members jailed in Colombia.
But like other nations that have learned not to deal with terrorists, Colombia refused, asking instead that Perez be released as a humanitarian gesture.
When an organization thrives on bombings, murder, kidnapping, extortion, hijacking as well as guerrilla and conventional military action, humanitarian is not part of the revolutionary lexicon.
Andres died last Tuesday. His father remains in captivity.
FARC rationalizes its continuing violence on the perceived injustices of the past. Within its Marxist ideology, there can be no room for evolution of thought, for re-evaluation of tactics or for understanding that Colombia, the United States and the world have changed in the nearly 40 years of the insurgency.
Targets: The United States and its citizens have long been FARC targets. Despite the guerrillas avowed commitment to the rights of Colombia's "peasants" -- mostly indigenous peoples -- two years ago, FARC executed three U.S. Indian rights activists in Venezuela after kidnapping them in Colombia.
FARC also regards the international war on narcotics to be against its interests, calling instead for the legalization of drugs as a way of increasing the incomes of peasant farmers..
According to the self-styled secretariat of the general staff of the FARC-People's Army, "The narcotics traffic is a phenomenon of globalized capitalism and the yankees above all. ... Since the U.S. government uses the narcotics traffic's existence as as the pretext for its criminal action against the Colombian people, we call upon it to legalize its consumption."
As Americans have learned to their dismay and surprise, most recently about Osama bun Laden's group Al-Qaida, terrorist organizations aren't small bands of unsophisticated mercenaries who just get lucky when they perpetrate their atrocities.
FARC, too, is no rag-tag troop of revolutionaries. Instead, it maintains a technologically advanced website to promulgate its propaganda and hatred for the United States.
But clearly, it's not only the United States that FARC hates. It also hates 12-year-old boys and the millions of people ravaged by the Colombian narcotics trade.