[News] Colombia Kills Four Mexican Students in Ecuador Bombing

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/ross04052008.html

Apri1 5 / 6, 2008


Colombia Kills Four Mexican Students in Ecuador Bombing


La Cumbia de la Doctrina Bush

By JOHN ROSS

Mexico City.

The parents of the murdered students pushed their 
way through the crowded aisles of Benito Juarez 
International Airport each clutching urns that 
contained the ashes of their dead children, 
slaughtered while they slept March 1 in an 
Ecuadoran guerrilla jungle camp of the long-lived 
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) by 
the Colombian air force along with 18 fighters 
and an Ecuadoran citizen. The 23 dead were the 
first known victims in Latin America of the Bush 
doctrine of preventative war against suspected terrorists.

On hand to receive the grieving parents of 
Fernando Franco, Juan Gonzalez del Castillo, and 
Veronica Velazquez with flowers and paper doves 
of peace were dozens of their fellow students in 
the Philosophy & Letters Faculty of the National 
Autonomous University (UNAM) led by the director 
of that school. A fourth student killed in the 
bombing, Soren Ulises Aviles attended the 
National Polytechnic Institute (IPN.) Lucia 
Morett, also a UNAM student, survived the attack 
along with two Colombian women but was gravely 
wounded by shrapnel and remains in a Quito hospital.

Later, their UNAM classmates carried the ashes of 
the martyred students from faculty to faculty on 
the huge campus in the south of the city, 
saluting them with the traditional cry of 
"Presente!" with which the Latin American left 
honors its fallen. The Philosophy & Letters 
faculty is the most left-leaning of all the UNAM 
schools, boasting such graduates as Subcomandante Marcos.

Lucia, Juan, Veronica, and Fernando were 
post-graduate candidates in Latin American 
Studies at Philosophy & Letters and formed the 
Simon Bolivar Cathedra, a leftish movie club. 
They flew to Quito in mid-February, according to 
the faculty director Ambrosio Velazquez, to do 
field research in the contemporary Latin American 
social dynamic, meeting with leaders of Ecuador's 
very active 
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indigenous movement, political analysts, and 
environmentalists. From February 25 through the 
27th, the students, along with Soren Aviles, 
participated in a Bolivarian conference convened 
at Quito University and the Ecuadoran capital's House of Culture.

The next day, the five flew into the Amazon to 
Lago Agrio ("Bitter Lake") to survey the havoc 
wrought by Big Oil during decades of careless 
drilling in the jungle. In truth, Ecuador had 
been bombed by U.S. proxies before the March 1 
attack - Texaco so destroyed Secumbios canton 
that abandoned villages sometimes blow sky high 
when a farmer's machete strikes a spark and whole 
Indian tribes have simply vanished from the face of the earth.

But the students had another item on their agenda 
- a trip to the FARC camp at Angostura, two 
kilometers inside Ecuador in Secumbios to 
interview the guerrilla's second-in-command Raul 
Reyes about the prospects for peace in the 
40-year war between the FARC and the Colombian 
oligarchy. Reyes was the key rebel negotiator in 
the recent release of seven of the 50 hostages 
that the guerrilla continues to hold. The 
humanitarian gesture was stage-managed by 
Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and was an acute 
embarrassment to both the White House and its 
Colombian surrogate Alvaro Uribe.

According to Lucia's parents, the five students 
had arrived in the camp only four hours before 
the attack. They were sleeping when Colombian 
planes - possibly Israeli-built Kfirs - dropped 
ten 500-pound Paveway bombs on the hideout. The 
Paveway bombs were identical to those deployed by 
the U.S. during Operation Desert Storm, according 
to Ecuadoran Air Force experts who retrieved bomb 
parts from the scene of the massacre.

To compound this egregious violation of Ecuador's 
sovereignty, Colombian troops then crossed the 
border to snatch the body of Raul Reyes (not his 
real name) and his supposed second, the 
troubadour-guerrillero "Julian Conrado." The U.S. 
Drug Enforcement Administration has reportedly 
offered a $7 million USD reward for the capture 
of "Reyes" and "Conrado" dead or alive.

The Mexican students were collateral damage in a 
targeted assassination of the sort so popular 
with the Israeli Defense Force. The Colombian 
military has a lengthy history of consorting with 
the IDF and indeed, according to the Mexican 
daily La Jornada, a retired Israeli Air Force 
general, Israel Ziv, was visiting Bogotá at the time of the attack.

In a press bulletin issued March 14, the FARC 
pointed a finger at the U.S. South Command 
(SOUTHCOM) operating out of Quarry Heights Panama 
as having organized thed assassinations. 
According to published reports, Reyes was 
pinpointed by U.S. satellite interception of a 
phone conversation between the guerrilla leader 
and Venezuelan president Chavez. The logistics of 
the raid appear to have been coordinated by U.S. 
military personnel at the Manta Ecuador drug war 
base that President Rafael Correa has pledged to 
shut down when the Yanquis' lease runs out in 2009.

Since the U.S. declared its war on terror, the 
Bushites have insisted that there are no borders 
in their global crusade. Recent U.S. targeted 
assassinations in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, 
sometimes using unmanned drones, have written the 
Bush doctrine in blood. The New York Times (March 
9) noted the "remarkable similarity" between the 
U.S. killing of a top al-Qaeda operator in 
Pakistan and the massacre in Ecuador.

The bombing of the Angostura camp fits into the 
strategic framework of Plan Colombia, the $6 
billion anti-narco, anti-FARC boondoggle 
perpetuated since 1999 by the Clinton and Bush 
administrations. Now Washington is cloning the 
franchise with Plan Mexico AKA the Merida 
Initiative, a $1.4 billion buck investment in 
repressive Mexican security forces, soon to kick in.

Unlike Correa or Chavez and Nicaragua's Daniel 
Ortega who broke diplomatic relations with 
Colombia for a day, Mexico's dubiously elected 
president Felipe Calderon, an Uribe-Bush ally, is 
silent about the attack that resulted in the 
death of four of his young citizens and the 
maiming of another. Indeed, the Mexican federal 
prosecutor's office has sought to interview the 
hospitalized Morett to determine whether her 
group of revolutionary tourists had received arms 
and explosives training during their four houses with the guerrilla.

The Calderon administration's spin on Colombia's 
bombing of Ecuador was encapsulated in the 
initial Foreign Relations Secretariat's press 
bulletin following the identification of the 
Mexican victims: "(the Mexican government) is 
preoccupied by the involvement of Mexican citizens with terrorists."

The FARC has long been listed on the White House 
terrorist roster although Venezuela's Chavez 
prefers to deal with them as belligerents in a civil war.

The Bush terror war attack appears to have 
cancelled further hostage releases and prisoner 
exchanges with the Uribe government, which holds 
hundreds of FARC militants, and may have doomed 
once-upon-a-time presidential candidate Isabel 
Betancourt, a French citizen, who is said to be seriously ill with hepatitis.

The Colombian incursion blew up big in Venezuela 
where Comandante Chavez saw Uribe's unilateral 
aggression as an "act of war", broke off 
diplomatic relations, sealed the border with 
Colombia, and sent ten tank brigades to enforce 
the closure. The border was reopened ten days 
later and a peace concert headlined by the 
Colombian pop idol Juanes drew tens of thousands 
to the Simon Bolivar International Bridge in Cucuta.

As the crisis boiled over, the Group of Rio, an 
all-Latin American aggregation that excludes the 
U.S., met in Santo Domingo March 7. During an 
acrimonious interchange between presidents, Uribe 
sought to justify the raid as an act of 
self-defense against terrorists and drug gangs 
after Correa accused Colombia of criminal 
aggression. An uneasy deal was finally brokered 
by Brazilian foreign minister Celso Amorim who 
convinced the battling presidents that the summit 
presented a rare opportunity for Latin America to 
settle its own affairs without Washington's 
intervention. Although Chavez, Uribe, and Correa 
exchanged tepid handshakes, the matter was by no 
means settled when they left Santo Domingo.

The U.S. got its chance to intervene ten days 
later at an emergency session of the Organization 
of American States in Washington. The OAS is 
popularly known as the "Ministry of Colonies" throughout Latin America.

The OAS was installed by the United States in 
1948 as a bulwark against Communism. Its founding 
meeting took place in Bogotá, Colombia during 
widespread rioting following the assassination of 
the leftist Jorge Eliezar Gaitan, a conflagration 
that sparked a half century of "La Violencia" 
between conservatives and liberals of which the FARC is a lineal descendent.

The U.S. argued the appropriateness of the Bush 
Doctrine at the March 17 conclave. Washington's 
position was defended by John Negroponte, Bush's 
former intelligence czar and now number two at 
the State Department who has a dark history in 
Latin America. Negroponte, known as the 
"Pro-Consul" for his funding of the Contras 
during the counter-insurgency in Nicaragua, 
sought to persuade the Latinos that Colombia had 
a right to self defense (a la Israel) and that 
the March 1 bombing had been a perfectly legal 
preventative strike against a "criminal drug gang 
and terrorists." But outside of Salvador's stooge 
president Tony Saca, no one seemed to buy Tio 
Sam's line. Mexican foreign secretary Patricia 
Espinosa remained studiously close-mouthed during the debate.

In the end, the argument before the OAS was 
reduced to whether the organization should 
"condemn" or "reject" the Colombian bombing of 
Ecuador. The rejectionists won out. Despite the 
toning down of the final document, the fact that 
Washington did not get its way with its "Ministry 
of Colonies" was hailed as a victory in Latin America.

But the conflict was not dead yet and blew up all 
over again with the revelation that an Ecuadoran 
citizen had been killed in the cross-border 
invasion. "It is unacceptable that an Ecuadoran 
citizen can be killed by foreign soldiers on 
Ecuadoran soil," an enraged Correa told the 
press. The fact that the Colombian government 
covered up the death of Franklin Aizcalla, a 
Quito mechanic whom Uribe's police described as 
the lover of the guerrillera "Esperanza", rubbed 
salt into the wound. In an apparent scam to reap 
the DEA reward, Aizcalla's body had been spirited 
out of Ecuador by Colombian troops and passed off 
as that of "Julian Conrado", the Vallenato 
virtuoso and guerrillero who performed for former 
president Andres Pastrana during the 1999 peace talks in Caguan.

The "Conrado" deception was not the only dirty 
trick that Uribe played on Correa. In classic CIA 
m.o., a fuzzy photograph was planted on the front 
page of El Tiempo, Colombia's top daily, 
purportedly depicting a meeting between "Raul 
Reyes" and "Gustavo Larrea", Ecuador's Security 
minister - "Larrea" as it turned out was really 
Patricio Etchegaray, secretary of the Argentinean 
Communist Party who had interviewed the FARC Comandante some months earlier.

The photograph was allegedly lifted from Reyes' 
laptop, which had magically survived a bombing 
attack that shattered and pulverized human 
beings. El Tiempo is owned and operated by the 
Santos family, three members of which hold high 
level posts in Uribe's government. Juan Manuel 
Santos is the nation's defense chief.

Other information supposedly located on the 
magical hard drive was said to implicate Chavez 
in financing the FARC to the tune of $300 million 
USD and U.S. experts were soon in Bogotá 
reviewing the "evidence" in anticipation of 
listing Chavez as a sponsor of terrorism - Bush 
has pushed to add Venezuela to his new shopworn 
Axis of Evil (Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria.)

The lame duck U.S. president is banking on the 
Colombian crisis to force congressional 
approbation of a bi-lateral free trade pact with 
Bogotá but the Democrats are reluctant to vote up 
the project in an electoral year.

Here in Mexico, despite a moment of silence to 
honor the dead students during a meeting of tens 
of thousands in the Zocalo plaza March 25 and 
similar minutes of silence in both houses of the 
Congress, Calderon's own silence remains 
deafening. Colombian police efforts to extradite 
Morret from Ecuador for questioning are stymied 
by the hostilities between Correa and Uribe. But 
should Morret return to Mexico, she runs the risk 
of being shipped to Colombia by her own 
government and Lucia's parents indicate she will 
apply for political asylum in Ecuador.

Colombia has refused to pay compensation to the 
families of the dead and wounded students 
insisting the bombing was "a legitimate action." 
The parents, for their part, insist they are not 
interested in compensation and only want the 
Calderon government to condemn the illegal attack.

The killing of the students has unleashed a 
savage media campaign against the UNAM, which 
right-wingers have always blasted as "a cradle 
for radicals." The putsch has been fueled by 
former leftist Jorge Castaneda's allegations that 
a FARC sleeper cell led by a Cuban-born engineer, 
Dagoberto Diaz, operates out of the university.

The FARC in fact had offices in Mexico City for 
years before former president Vicente Fox, in one 
of his first diplomatic blunders, shut it down in 
2000 - Castaneda was then his foreign minister. 
The clampdown was lamented by Pastrana who 
approved of the office as a point of contact 
between the Colombian government and the 
guerrilla. FARC-bashing is a popular pastime for 
Mexico's yellow press. Rumors buzzed back in 2001 
that the Colombian rebels were out to snatch 
Rudolph Giuliani when he came to Mexico City on a crime-busting swindle.

But UNAM rector Jose Narro and Philosophy & 
Letters director Velazquez see an ulterior motive 
in the media barrage against the UNAM - the 
privatization of public education, a pet project for Mexico's rightists.

Defending the UNAM, the oldest and largest in 
Latin America, at a meeting of the University 
Council this past Friday (March 28), Narro 
lamented "that we have to open this session with 
a moment of silence to honor the memory of our 
dead students. We will never accept the lies and 
infamies of those who would do harm to our 
university. The UNAM is a diverse and public 
university and it will remain that way so long as I am the rector."

John Ross is in Mexico City. He can be reached at 
<mailto:johnross at igc.org>johnross at igc.org




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