[News] Improbable Database Of A Farc Commander

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Improbable Database Of A Farc Commander

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/3624

July 7th 2008, by Maurice Lemoine - Le Monde Diplomatique

Media attention following Ingrid Betancourt's 
dramatic release from captivity should not 
obscure a surprising revelation: laptop computers 
implausibly retrieved from an obliterating air 
raid on a Farc base in Colombia are being used to 
sour the country's relations with Ecuador and 
smear the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, in 
western and Latin-American media.
The first of 10 smart bombs guided by GPS hit its 
target at 00.25 on 1 March 2008, less than two 
kilometres from the Ecuador-Colombia border, 
along the Putomayo river. Four Blackhawk OH-60 
helicopters appeared out of the darkness with 44 
special commandos from Colombia's rapid 
deployment force on board. But there was no 
fighting: the temporary camp of the Farc (the 
Marxist-inspired Revolutionary Armed Forces of 
Colombia) had been destroyed by the explosions 
and 23 people killed in their sleep (1). Among 
them was Raúl Reyes, the Farc's second-in-command 
and the group's "foreign minister". His remains 
were taken back to Colombia by ground troops as a trophy.



Early that morning the Colombian president Alvaro 
Uribe contacted his Ecuadorian counterpart, 
Rafael Correa, to brief him on the raid: the 
Colombian airborne unit had been attacked from 
within Ecuador and had pursued the rebels in 
legitimate self-defence. But, he assured Correa, 
their return of fire came from Colombian 
territory and didn't violate Ecuador's airspace. 
Colombia's defence minister, Juan Manuel Santos, 
gave the same assurance later.

Initially Correa took Uribe at his word. Until 
this incident they had been on good terms and 
spoke on the phone every day. Two weeks before, 
Correa had said in private to one of the close 
advisers of the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez: 
"Tell Chávez that I get on very well with Uribe 
and that if he wants I can help smooth things out 
between them." Correa felt betrayed, a feeling 
compounded when Ecuadorian military personnel 
arrived at the bombed camp: not only had the 
Colombians violated Ecuadorian territory, they 
had also, as Correa put it in a press conference 
on 2 March, conducted "a massacre".

Reyes' death sparked a crisis. Ecuador severed 
diplomatic relations with Colombia and deployed 
11,000 men along its border. Venezuela also sent 
10 battalions to its border. "We don't want war," 
Chávez warned, "but we won't allow the [North 
American] empire, nor its little dog [Colombia], 
to weaken us." Nor were they willing to allow it 
to act with impunity on its neighbours' territory.

Unanimously rejected

The word "condemnation" was avoided, but South 
American governments unanimously "rejected" 
Colombia's incursion. The United States supported 
Bogotá in the name of the "war on terror". Craig 
Kelly, principal deputy assistant secretary at 
the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, 
explained: "What we have said is firstly that a 
state must defend itself against the threat of 
terrorism and that when you talk about a border, 
you have to consider the general context, which 
[in this case] is a continual violation of the 
borders by the Farc." An interviewer asked: "Does 
that mean that, for example, if Mexico pursued 
drug traffickers _into the US, the US wouldn't 
have any objection to Mexican forces entering its 
territory?" Kelly replied: "I'm not going to get 
into a theoretical discussion" (2).

There has been speculation about the planes used 
on 1 March. Five Brazilian-made Supertucanos 
EMB314s and three US-manufactured A-37 attack 
aircraft have been mentioned, but the bombs 
couldn't have been released from either of those 
planes. One thing is certain: weapons of the same 
sophisticated kind did a lot of damage during the US invasion of Iraq.

The long arm of Washington was also discernible 
when Correa made other discoveries, notably that 
his military command had lied to him. Tension 
peaked when General Jorge Gabela, the Ecuadorian 
air force commander, revealed that the radar 
nearest to Santa Rosa, the zone where the Farc 
camp was located, had been down for maintenance 
for several days. Correa sacked the head of the 
army's intelligence services, Colonel Mario 
Pazmiño, and announced in a broadcast to the 
nation that "the CIA has totally infiltrated some 
of Ecuador's military intelligence bodies". He 
also replaced defence minister Wellington 
Sandoval with loyalist Javier Ponce. Correa's 
reassertion of his authority also led to the 
resignations of the joint chief of staff and the 
heads of the army, navy and air force.

Correa soon began to see the consequences of his 
actions. He had announced in his election 
campaign that he would close the US base at 
Manta. The lease on this "foreign operating 
location" granted to the US in 1999 expires in 
2009. On 28 February the assembly set up to 
"refound the country" adopted an article which 
asserts that "Ecuador is a land of peace; foreign 
military bases or foreign installations with 
military purpose will not be allowed." With its 
state-of-the-art technology, Manta plays a key 
role in US military support for Colombia. During 
the operation on 1 March it would have controlled 
the air space the mystery planes overflew.

Opening salvo

The Colombian government announced that during 
the raid its army had seized a laptop (later 
increased to three laptops) belonging to Reyes, 
which revealed that both Chávez and Correa have close links to the Farc.

In the absence of hard evidence, questions arise. 
Reyes' main camp is known to be in Colombia near 
the border. In that region the Farc have many 
hiding places, secret shelters and secondary 
camps. Yet the guerrilla leader had apparently 
gone to Ecuador with three laptops, two hard 
drives and three USB drives - everything but the 
kitchen sink. According to the Ecuadorian army, 
the 10 missiles made craters 2.4m wide and 1.8m 
deep and destroyed the vegetation all around, yet 
the computers emerged without a scratch.

What a tale those laptops told. The Spanish daily 
El País, which is the spearhead of a campaign 
against the progressive governments of Latin 
America, didn't stop to question the authenticity 
of the revelations. On 12 March its readers 
learned in an article, "Farc finds refuge in 
Ecuador", that "guerrillas drive around the north 
of Ecuador in vans, as a member of the OEA 
(Organisation of American States) attested. He 
privately expressed astonishment at encountering 
fully equipped guerrillas in restaurants in border country."

What readers didn't see was a letter sent to the 
editor of El País on 15 March by the OEA's 
secretary general, José Miguel Insulza, in which 
he expressed his "astonishment and indignation": 
"I can assure you that this claim is absolutely 
false. The OEA does not have special missions, 
nor does it have representatives at any level 
deployed on Ecuador's northern border, therefore 
it is impossible that any member of the 
organisation could have made such a statement" (3).

Reyes and his guerrillas were in Ecuador. Reyes 
had for months been the key contact for the 
representatives from France, Spain, Venezuela and 
Ecuador negotiating hostage releases, including 
that of the French-Colombian Ingrid Betancourt. 
The Farc have long been intransigent over their 
demand for direct dialogue with the Colombian 
government. They insisted on "humanitarian 
exchange" - hostages for guerrillas - or nothing. 
Their aim is political: to achieve the status of 
legitimate combatants by gaining recognition from 
the Colombian government. The Farc have been on 
the list of terrorist organisations since 2002 
but have never accepted that they are terrorists. 
Uribe wanted to avoid giving them recognition at all costs.

Chávez mediates

The mediation which Chávez set in motion on 31 
August 2007 broke a stalemate that had lasted 
since 2002. The guerrillas freed seven hostages 
unconditionally, leading Caracas to say: "The 
Farc are using a more political logic, which is a 
positive sign for how things could develop." But 
hostages warmly thanking members of the 
Venezuelan government dressed in red must have 
been a great source of irritation to the Colombian president.

Open dialogue had been ongoing in Caracas through 
the intermediary of Farc leaders Iván Marquez and 
Rodrigo Granda, and sometimes even with Reyes at 
the camp in Ecuador. The French and Ecuador 
governments knew this. A troubling detail is that 
a week before the 1 March raid, French 
representatives met Colombia's High Commissioner 
for Peace, Luis Carlos Restrepo, in Panama. 
Restrepo told them they should stay in contact 
with Reyes. "He's the one who can help you. He's 
your man. He can help you get Ingrid freed." This 
explains Correa's fury: "Look how low Alvaro 
Uribe has sunk! He knew that in March 12 hostages 
were going to be freed, including Ingrid 
Betancourt. He knew that, and still he used his 
contacts to spring this trap." Kill the 
negotiator and you kill the negotiation.

But the hostage aspect of this crisis took second 
place to the revelations at a news conference on 
3 March by the director general of the Colombian 
police, General Oscar Naranjo. He revealed that, 
based on computer equipment found near Reyes' 
body, there was an "armed alliance" between the 
Farc and the Venezuelan government, as well as 
political and economic links between Correa and 
the guerrillas from the time of his election campaign.

Media revelation

The media went to town with these "explosive 
documents" from the seized computers, which the 
Colombian intelligence services had helpfully 
filtered. Prominent were the Spanish El País (4) 
and the Colombian daily El Tiempo, which is owned 
by the Santos family, to which both the 
vice-president and the defence minister belong. 
On 4 March El País ran with "Bogotá unmasks the 
Farc's support". On 10 May, in the first of a 
series of articles by Maite Rico, "The Farc 
papers point the finger at Chávez", readers 
learnt that "without raising an eyebrow Chávez 
approved a request for $300m" from the 
guerrillas. On 12 May the article condemned by 
the secretary general of OEA appeared. The day 
before Rico had written of "groups linked to 
Chávism which regularly train in Farc camps in 
Venezuela". There were even claims of waiting 
lists to take part in their courses.

When The Economist wrote about Chávez's 
generosity in providing $300m to the Farc on 24 
May, it mentioned as its source a message from 
Raúl Reyes reproduced in El País and the 
Colombian weekly Semana. It also quoted from a 
document obtained by the Wall Street Journal: 
"The Venezuelan interior minister, Ramón 
Rodríguez Chacín, asked the Farc to train 
Venezuelan soldiers in guerrilla tactics." It's 
unclear whether the Wall Street Journal copied 
the Miami Herald, which printed the same claim.

The improbable was followed by the bizarre: 
between 2000 and 2002, the Farc and ETA allegedly 
planned an attack in Madrid on prominent 
Colombian figures - the current vice-president 
Francisco Santos Calderón, the former head of 
state, Andrés Pastrana, and the former ambassador 
in Spain Noemi Sanín (El Tiempo, 2 June). BBC 
Mundo reported on 5 March that the Farc had tried 
to get hold of uranium to make a dirty bomb.

According to the Reyes documents, Chávez's 
friendship with the Colombian rebels dated back 
at least as far as 1992. When he was imprisoned 
for a failed coup attempt in February that year, 
he received $150,000 from the Farc (Le Figaro, 5 
March and Wall Street Journal, 11 March). He must 
have spent it all in the prison canteen, because 
when he was released in 1994, he had no money and 
had to stay in a small apartment in central 
Caracas belonging to his future minister of the 
interior, Luis Miquilena, who also lent him a car.

Though it was more cautious, Le Monde ran a piece 
on 12 March about a Farc deserter: "According to 
the deserter, the Farc leader Iván Marquez and 
its commander-in-chief Manuel Marulanda are 
staying in Venezuela". That will stick in the 
reader's mind, as will the Figaro heading 
"Dangerous liaisons between the Farc and Chávez" (15 May).

In Venezuela, the dailies El Nacional and El 
Universal, along with the private channels Radio 
Caracas Télévisión (RCTV) and Globovisión, are 
having a field day. They are only too happy to 
broadcast the views of the governor of Zulia 
state or the former presidential candidate Manuel 
Rosales, accusing president Chávez of betraying the country.

One of the many editorials in the Washington Post 
about Venezuela sums up this media firestorm: "If 
managed correctly, the laptop scandal will surely 
deepen the domestic political hole into which the 
would-be `Bolivarian' revolutionary is sinking."

Verified by Interpol

Throughout, Bogotá and the media have relied on a 
seemingly unimpeachable line of defence: the 
validity of seized documents has been verified by 
Interpol. And yet, closer examination yields interesting results.

General Naranjo requested Interpol's independent 
opinion of the eight key "exhibits" (the computer 
equipment) on 4 March. Interpol's report was 
presented in Bogotá on 15 May by its secretary 
general, the American Ronald Noble. He paid 
extensive tribute at his press conference to 
General Naranjo, who was seated beside him, and 
to the Department of State Security (DAS), the 
political police (5). Naranjo, the former head of 
the Colombian anti-drug police, had to stand down 
after his brother, Juan David, was arrested in 
Germany in March 2007 for drug trafficking. He 
was implicated by the Venezuelan interior 
minister for his links with the "narco" Wilmer 
Varela (assassinated on 29 February). As for the 
DAS, its former director, Jorge Noguera, was 
arrested on 22 February 2007 for allowing paramilitaries to use its resources.

According to Noble's report (6) and statements, 
Interpol's role was limited to "(a) determining 
the actual data contained in the eight seized 
Farc computer exhibits, (b) verifying whether the 
user files had been modified in any way on or 
after 1 March 2008, and (c) determining whether 
Colombian law enforcement authorities had handled 
and examined the eight seized Farc computer 
exhibits in conformity with internationally 
recognised principles for handling electronic 
evidence by law enforcement." But "the remit of 
the IRT and Interpol's subsequent assistance to 
Colombia's investigation did not include the 
analysis of the content of documents, folders or 
other material on the eight seized Farc computer 
exhibits. The accuracy and source of the user 
files contained in the eight seized Farc computer 
exhibits are and always have been outside the 
scope of Interpol's computer forensic examination."

Interpol's team of experts, who came from 
Singapore and Australia and didn't speak Spanish, 
didn't examine the contents of the files. Perhaps 
this is understandable: in the 609.6 gigabytes in 
the eight "exhibits" there were 37,873 text 
documents, 452 spreadsheets, 210,888 images, 
22,481 web pages, 7,989 email addresses (no 
reference to emails, though they were widely 
quoted in the media), and 983 encrypted files. 
"In non-technical terms, such a volume of data 
would correspond to 39.5 million full pages in 
Microsoft Word format and . . . would take more 
than a thousand years to go through it all at a 
rate of a hundred pages per day."

That's a lot of data for one man to produce. 
Especially Raúl Reyes, constantly on the move in 
the jungle, living the dangerous life of a 
guerrilla. But it wasn't too much data for the 
Colombian government, which within a few hours 
had begun releasing a continuous stream of 
revelations from the files. Nor was it too much 
for journalists who wove the documents 
(authenticated by Interpol) into their own stories.

A troubling lack of rigour

The Interpol report shows a troubling lack of 
rigour. It says Reyes and Guillermo Enrique 
Torres, alias Julián Conrado, a Farc commander, 
were killed in the operation (page 10). But 
Bogotá, which had announced the death of Conrado 
on _1 March, had to retract that after a DNA 
examination of the only body (apart from Reyes) 
brought back by their forces. Similarly, the 
statement "Farc has been designated a terrorist 
organisation by Colombia, other governments and 
Interpol" (page 10) requires qualification. The 
designation has only been adopted by the US, 
Colombia, Peru, the EU, and Israel (31 countries 
in all), or 17% of the 186 countries that are Interpol members.

More significantly, the statement: "the eight 
seized Farc computer exhibits belonged to Raúl 
Reyes" or: "the eight seized Farc computer 
exhibits" (both page 10) should more properly 
have been: "the eight exhibits given to Interpol 
by the Colombian authorities". Interpol has 
accepted the Colombian version of events, though 
there was no witness present to verify that the 
equipment was actually found near the body of the 
Farc leader. This provoked Correa to say on 13 
May when he visited Paris: "Who can show that the 
computers were indeed found in the Farc camp?"

In the first fax Naranjo sent on 4 March to 
request Interpol help, he mentioned "three 
computers and three USB devices" (Appendix 2 of 
the report). In his reply of 5 March, Noble 
agrees on behalf of his organisation to examine 
"three computers and three USB keys" (Appendix 
3). But on 6 March, in a letter to Interpol from 
the director of DAS, Maria del Pilar Hurtado, the 
equipment has become "three laptop computers, the 
three USB keys and [for the first time] two 
hard-disc drives" (Appendix 4). Where did these 
hard drives come from? Had no one noticed them before?

The overall conclusion of the report is that "no 
data were created, added, modified or deleted on 
any of the these exhibits between 3 March 2008 at 
11.45 am [the date and time when they were 
entrusted to the computer forensic specialists of 
the Colombian Judicial Police] and 10 March 2008 
when the exhibits were handed over to Interpol's 
experts to make their image discs" (page 29). It 
also states that "access to the data . . . 
[during the same period] conformed to 
internationally recognised principles for 
handling electronic evidence by law enforcement" (page 28).

But what happened between 1 March and 3 March? An 
officer of Colombia's anti-terrorist unit 
"directly accessed the eight seized Farc computer 
exhibits under exigent and time-sensitive 
circumstances" (page 30) and they were all 
connected to a computer "without prior imaging of 
their contents and without the use of 
write-blocking hardware" (page 31). As a result 
of this, during those three days, "access to data 
. . . did not conform to internationally 
recognised principles for handling electronic 
evidence by law enforcement" (page 8). This is 
not insignificant, as Interpol discovered that a 
total of 48,055 files "had either been created, 
accessed, modified or deleted as a result of the 
direct access to the eight seized exhibits by 
Colombian authorities between the time of their 
seizure on 1 March 2008 and 3 March 2008 at 11.45am" (page 33).

No court of law anywhere could rely on the 
results of such a report to pass judgment on 
anyone. But that doesn't stop the rumours or the 
headlines. The rumour mills are now turning in 
Ecuador and Venezuela. Even if today the 
conditions are not yet right for Venezuela to be 
classed as a terrorist or rogue state, this 
campaign is creating the right conditions in 
public opinion. According to Maximilien Arvelaiz, 
an adviser to President Chávez: "George Bush 
wants to leave behind a time bomb so that, 
whatever the outcome of the election in November, 
it will be very difficult to soften US policy on Venezuela."

But an unforeseen turn of events can never be 
ruled out -- as has been shown by the 
spectacular, surprise release by Colombian troops 
of the French-Colombian politician Ingrid 
Betancourt and 14 other hostages, held for years 
by Farc guerrillas in jungle captivity.
________________________________________________________

(1) Among the dead were an Ecuadorian, four 
Mexican students and a Colombian soldier killed, 
not in combat, as Bogotá claimed when it accorded 
him a state funeral, but by a falling tree.

(2) BBC Mundo, London, 7 March 2008.

(3) 
<https://mail.zmag.org/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.vtv.gob.ve/detalle.php?s=2%26>www.vtv.gob.ve/detalle.php?s=2&... 


(4) The centre-left El País belongs to the 
multinational Prisa group, which controls more 
than 1,000 radio stations in Spain, the US, 
Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia, Argentina 
and Chile with a total audience of 30 million listeners.

(5) 
<https://mail.zmag.org/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.interpol.int/Public/ICPO/speech>www.interpol.int/Public/ICPO/speech... 


(6) The full public report in English can be 
downloaded here: 
<https://mail.zmag.org/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.interpol.int/public/ICPO/PressR>www.interpol.int/public/ICPO/PressR... 


Translated by George Miller




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