3-30-08, 1:24 pm

The March 1, 2008 death of Colombian FARC guerrilla leader and spokesperson Comandante Raul Reyes and twenty-five of his companions on Ecuadorian soil has American fingerprints all over it. This is the conclusion offered by Ecuadorian military sources and by left observers and commentators in Colombia and throughout Latin America.

The undisputed facts of the incident seem to be that on the night of March 1, Reyes, second in command of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejército del Pueblo (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia— People’s Army, or FARC-EP), was asleep at a clandestine FARC encampment in a remote jungle area called Angostura, 1800 meters from the Colombian border, well inside Ecuadorian territory. According to an Ecuadorian Air Force communiqué, shortly after midnight the camp was hit by ten American – made laser-guided GBU 12 Paveway II 500-pound bombs, leaving craters 2.4 meters in diameter and 1.8 meters deep. These bombs, which were extensively used by U.S. forces during the first Gulf War in 1991, have the capability of exploding within one meter of a predetermined target. The camp was also strafed with 50 caliber helicopter-mounted machine guns. Twenty-six people were killed, including Reyes, four visiting Mexican observers, and an unidentified victim believed to be an Ecuadorian citizen. One Mexican student survived the raid and is expected to recover from her wounds.

Initial reports that Julián Conrado, noted Colombian rebel folk musician and composer, was among the victims of the attack have since been proven false.

The hidden jungle camp was allegedly located by tracking signals from Reyes’ satellite phone, a technique pioneered a decade ago with deadly results against Chechen terrorist leader Dzhokhar Dudayev. Reyes was in Ecuador attempting to arrange a meeting with French peace commissioners in Panama to seek the release of French-Colombian citizen Ingrid Betancourt, a Colombian Green Party presidential candidate who was captured by FARC guerrillas in 2002 and held as an enemy combatant since then. Betancourt is reportedly suffering with hepatitis B, malaria and malnutrition, and at this writing the Colombian government is offering to exchange a number of FARC prisoners for her release

The extreme right-wing Colombian government has claimed full responsibility for the raid, but Ecuadorian government sources point out that all ten bombs landed within a fifty meter circle, a feat of technical precision in night bombing that is currently far beyond the capabilities of any South American air force. Nor do any Colombian Air Force planes (Brazilian Supertucanos and Israeli Kfirs) have the capacity to carry out such a raid with this tonnage of bombs. An Ecuadorian military officer who spoke on condition of anonymity assured reporters “off the record” that the raid was actually carried out by one or more American planes flying out of the U.S.-leased Manta Airbase in Ecuador, an installation that local progressives have denounced as “The United States’ largest land-bound aircraft carrier.” However, the helicopter gunships which strafed the encampment after the bombing carried Colombian markings.

The incident, which briefly caused a threat of war between Colombia and Ecuador and sparked a momentary border shutdown between Colombia and Venezuela, is still surrounded with unconfirmed claims and unanswered questions. The Colombian government has accused Ecuadorian officials, even up to the ministerial level, with collaborating with the FARC, offering as evidence photographs of Reyes with what was later proven to be a visiting Argentine pacifist. The Colombian military also claims it found Reyes’ personal laptop computer in what was left of the jungle camp, and retrieved files supposedly documenting both Ecuadorian and Venezuelan aid for the FARC. In response, the FARC has denied any foreign support, and points out that not even the most heavily armored military-grade laptop could have survived the type of air raid that razed the guerrilla encampment and killed Reyes.

The FARC, one of two Colombian leftist guerrilla armies, was founded in 1966 with the support of the Colombian Communist Party, but has long since gone its own way and is now widely seen, even on the Left, as a part of Colombia’s national crisis rather than its solution. The U.S. Government lists the group as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization.” Although the FARC has at times controlled as much as one third of the nation’s territory, its widespread use of kidnapping, recruitment of child fighters, alleged complicity with drug trafficking and reported conflicts with indigenous communities has largely alienated potential sympathizers at home and abroad.

In Colombia, Left and moderate reaction to Reyes’ death has generally been one of dismay. Repudiating the killing of Reyes, Colombian Liberal Party Senator Piedad Córdoba recently told the Colombian Communist Party’s newspaper, Voz, that there is an ever increasing demand by Colombians for a negotiated solution to the conflict in their country. However, “the greatest obstacle is that the Government wants neither a humanitarian accord nor a negotiated, political solution to the internal conflict. Past agreements have never been carried out. I think that the Government has opted for a policy of ‘democratic security’ that is tied closely to that of ‘preemptive war,’ as we have just seen [with the assassination of Reyes]. They are convinced that first they must bring the guerrillas to their knees in defeat, and then impose whatever sort of peace process they want.”

However, she points out, even with U.S. and Israeli aid the Colombian government has shown itself clearly unable to defeat the guerrillas militarily, and if it could, the causes of the nation’s internal conflict would still remain unsolved. . .

Noting that Reyes was in Ecuador to arrange a humanitarian prisoner exchange, Cordoba declared that “the stomach-turning and shadowy facts” surrounding Reyes’ death and that of Comandante Ivan Rios, another FARC leader recently killed under questionable circumstances, reflect “the prostration and degradation of the Colombian conflict,” and make it clear that the current Colombian government is a “Mafioso state.” “The most important thing,” she told Voz reporter Alvaro Angarita, is to “put an end to extrajudicial executions, put an end to arbitrary detentions, and to get the guerrillas to agree nationwide to eliminate kidnapping from the internal conflict,” which, she notes, has now ground on for sixty years without resolution or visible benefit for either side.

In an editorial published March 19th, Colombian Communist Party writer AlvaroVásquez described the killing of Reyes as state-supported terrorism, “which has been practiced for decades against popular leaders in an effort to disable the struggle and the organization of dissident sectors.” “The persistence of guerrillas in our country,” writes Vásquez, “is explained because they were not born of a conspiracy of tiny groups, but rather from the needs of the organized masses, above all in the rural areas. Thus the accusation of terrorism that [Colombian president] Uribe makes against the insurgent groups and extends against anyone opposed to his militarist power, is nothing more than a vulgar repetition of the Bush doctrine, which makes “the terrorist threat” into justification for his ‘preemptive war.’”

In its official statement responding to Reyes’ killing, the Colombian Communist Party accused the U.S. government of responsibility for the bombing and for the Colombian military incursion into Ecuador, and linked the assassination of Reyes to the pending Free Trade Agreement between the United States and Colombia, as well as Bush administration hostility to Hugo Chavez and his Bolivarian Revolution in neighboring Venezuela. “Bush is playing the war card, and thus extending the Colombian tragedy,” declares the Party. “The terrorist in this instance is found in the White House, the enemy of the people and of peace. Basically, what he is trying to do is to pile up excuses for a direct aggression against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.”

Denunciations of the attack on Ecuadorian soil have been numerous and vocal throughout Latin America. Particularly impacted was Mexico, which lost four of its citizens in the incident. Journalist Carlos Fazio, in a fulminating editorial in the Mexico City daily La Jornada, denounced American reports about the incident as “seeking to demonize the adversary [Reyes], stripping him of every shred of humanity and turning him into a thing, so that eliminating him is somehow not the same as committing murder.”

Lucía Andrea Morett Alvarez, a Mexican university student who survived the attack and as of this writing is recuperating in Quito, Ecuador, wrote from her hospital bed, “I am sure that very soon my comrades will have a worthy gravestone, that their death will not be in vain, and that their seed has fallen on fertile ground, where beside them will spring beautiful flowers and fruits. Their voice, a voice that they so viciously tried to silence, will multiply into the shouts of many millions all around the world. … I remain confident that this America, this great homeland that Bolivar and Martí dreamed of, will soon come to be. Our nations, after a long eclipse, shall flourish. No empire lasts forever.”