From: Colombian Labor Monitor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 16:12:03 -0500 (CDT)
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: CLM: Daily News 8 August 2001
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COLOMBIAN LABOR MONITOR
www.prairienet.org/clm
ASSOCIATED PRESS -- Wednesday, 8 August 2001
Rebels blame Colombia's president for breakdown in peace talks
By Jared Kotler
ASSOCIATED PRESS -- Wednesday, 8 August 2001
Colombian president suspends talks with nation's second-biggest
rebel group
By Susannah Nesmith
THE GUARDIAN [London] -- Wednesday, 8 August 2001
EDITORIAL
The ruins Tony Blair should visit;
Forget Cancun, Globalisation Has Destroyed The Real Latin America
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Wednesday, 8 August 2001
Rebels blame Colombia's president
for breakdown in peace talks
---------------------------------
By Jared Kotler
BOGOTA -- Colombia's second-largest guerrilla group blamed President
Andres Pastrana for a breakdown in peace contacts and vowed to fight on
while hoping for new talks under the next government.
''There has been a lack of will on the government's part to search for a
political solution to the conflict,'' Antonio Garcia, a member of the
five-man ruling council of the rebel National Liberation Army, or ELN,
told Colombia's Radionet radio on Wednesday.
''The expectations many Colombians had from this government have been
practically erased from the map,'' he added.
Garcia's comments followed Pastrana's announcement Tuesday that he was
suspending contacts with the 6,000-strong rebel group. The two sides have
met in Venezuela, Cuba and Switzerland over the past year in an effort to
get formal talks off the ground.
Pastrana, who began his final year in office Tuesday, said the guerrillas
had been ''obstinate'' in the discussions, which have centered on ELN
demands to be granted a safe haven in northern Colombia that would serve
as the venue for the talks.
Defending the president Wednesday, Defense Minister Gustavo Bell said
Pastrana had been ''magnanimous in peace'' and accused the ELN of reneging
on promises. Business and church leaders urged the two sides to leave
channels open for future talks.
The president created a similar sanctuary in southern Colombia three years
ago for a larger rebel faction, the 16,000-strong Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Talks there have yielded little of substance,
however, while prompting criticism of rebel abuses in the zone and fears
that the land-for-peace formula could lead to a physical breakup of the
South American country.
Pastrana had announced plans to create a similar zone for the ELN along
the country's main waterway in northern Bolivar state. But those plans
were scuttled amid security concerns and opposition from residents and
right-wing paramilitary militias.
That reversal, according to an 11-point communique read by Garcia on
Wednesday, was part of a pattern of ''stalling and noncompliance'' by the
president.
The group also alleged the government had carried out ''indiscriminate''
fumigation of peasant drug crops in Bolivar during an eradication
offensive being financed through a dlrs 1.3 billion U.S. aid program.
Guerrillas tax peasant growers to pay for the insurgency.
The rebel statement accused Pastrana of ''wasting'' his opportunity to
make peace, adding that the ELN hopes ''Colombia's next leader will rise
up to this historic moment.'' Presidential elections are scheduled for
May, 2002.
In announcing he was suspending talks, Pastrana said the rebels had
rejected alternative plans offered in informal conversations in Venezuela
in recent days including a reduction in the size of the proposed
demilitarized zone and holding peace talks outside of Colombia.
Some analysts said they now fear a terrorist backlash by the rebel group.
The ELN has been fighting since the 1960s, and says its seeks reforms to
fight poverty and corruption and reduce foreign ''exploitation'' of
Colombia's oil resources.
Copyright 2001 Associated Press
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ASSOCIATED PRESS
Wednesday, 8 August 2001
Colombian president suspends talks with
nation's second-biggest rebel group
---------------------------------------
By Susannah Nesmith
BOGOTA -- President Andres Pastrana suspended talks with Colombia's
second-largest rebel group, dimming hopes for an end to the country's
37-year civil war.
The announcement Tuesday came as representatives of the leftist rebel
National Liberation Army, or ELN, and the Colombian government were
meeting in neighboring Venezuela.
Pastrana said negotiators were on the verge of establishing ground rules
for formal peace talks when ELN officials made new demands and rejected a
series of new government proposals.
"Faced with the obstinate position of the National Liberation Army to keep
the process frozen, I've decided to suspend the talks," Pastrana said in a
nationally televised speech.
ELN officials could not immediately be reached for comment. ELN commander
Antonio Garcia claimed last week that Pastrana was using the talks to
further his political career.
The development dimmed hopes that Pastrana, who began the last year of his
four-year term Tuesday, can forge peace with Colombia's two main guerrilla
groups.
The front-runner to replace Pastrana in elections next May, Horacio Serpa,
launched his candidacy on Tuesday and expressed impatience with the
results of Pastrana's peace initiatives.
Talks with the larger Revolutionary Armed Forces, or FARC, were opened in
1998, but there has been no substantive progress. Pastrana ceded a
Switzerland-sized swath of land to the FARC and had planned to provide a
smaller area to the ELN, but the plan stalled amid opposition.
In his speech, Pastrana said the ELN had rejected government proposals for
a gradual implementation of the plan to create a demilitarized zone under
ELN control, a reduction in its proposed size and an alternative proposal
to begin formal peace talks outside Colombia.
The announcement was a blow to hopes that a peace accord could be reached
with the 5,000-strong ELN, which has suffered battlefield losses recently
against the army and right-wing paramilitaries.
"It's a shame, because of all the hopes that we as Colombians had for
rapidly establishing a negotiating agenda with the ELN," Sen. Carlos
Garcia, the president of Colombia's Senate, told The Associated Press.
Maria Emma Mejia, a former foreign minister and a peace mediator, called
Pastrana's announcement "unfortunate."
"I thought it was still possible to find a way out and not close the
process definitively," she said.
The FARC and the ELN complain that Pastrana's government has done little
to reign in the paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, which
Colombian and international monitors accuse of committing most of
Colombia's human rights violations.
But both rebel groups have attacked civilian populations and carried out
kidnappings for ransoms. Both the FARC and the paramilitaries earn huge
profits in protection payments from cocaine and heroin producers. The ELN
has not been linked to such activity.
Serpa, a former interior minister, announced he would lead a peace march
next month to the border of the zone Pastrana ceded to the FARC.
Speaking to a group of about 10,000 supporters, he said the march would
express "a resounding 'no' to the war which kills and destroys."
Serpa launched his election campaign 75 miles northeast of Bogota in
Puente de Boyaca, the site of a key 1819 battle during Colombia's war of
independence from Spain.
Also running are former Foreign Minister Noemi Sanin, who has also called
for more results from the peace process, and Alvaro Uribe, who has said he
would strengthen Colombia's U.S-backed military and demand that guerrillas
agree to a cease-fire before he would talk peace.
Pastrana cannot run for re-election because Colombian law limits
presidents to a single four-year term.
Copyright 2001 Associated Press
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THE GUARDIAN [London]
Wednesday, 8 August 2001
*************
* EDITORIAL *
*************
The ruins Tony Blair should visit
Forget Cancun, Globalisation Has
Destroyed The Real Latin America
---------------------------------
Tony Blair is unlikely to be troubled on the beaches of Cancun in Mexico -
where he is taking a much needed holiday - by any challenge to the vision
of global prosperity that he promoted in his brief tour of Latin America.
Cancun is an affluent resort, much favoured for Latin American summits and
well endowed with that combination of natural beauty and comfortable
surroundings that our leaders favour when they gather to order our lives.
But perhaps the prime minister might notice that the benefits of the
economic liberalisation that most countries in Latin America have pursued
over the past 15 years are less evident to those around him than he might
hope. In fact, as a senior UN development programme official put it two
years ago: For the millions of poor, the slum dwellers, globalisation now
has the face of cruelty, of unemployment and marginalisation. . ." The
distribution of wealth and income in the region is the most unequal in the
world and the rise in daily criminal violence . . . continuing
drug-related problems, as well as the incidence of official corruption
(are), in part, a manifestation of the unequal pattern of development."
It is not a great moment for advocates of globalisation in Latin America.
Argentina, for instance, was until lately a country cited as a fine
example: it had a president who, despite his Peronist label, had
implemented the policies of the free market, pegged the local currency to
the dollar, controlled inflation and carried out wholesale privatisation.
Argentina appeared to blossom and bankers and financiers sang the praises
of Carlos Menem from New York to Zurich. Now, though, ex-president Menem
faces criminal charges, Argentina's external debt has reached a staggering
pounds 90bn, unemployment stands at 18% and the country is bankrupt.
In Brazil, things are only slightly better. There, too, the president is a
liberaliser, but after a promising start, the economy has been plagued by
recurring crises. Two years ago, with inflation running at nearly 20% and
a general collapse in middle-class incomes, more than 100,000 people
marched in Brasilia to demand the resignation of the president and an end
to IMF reforms.
Then there is Peru - another case of a promising start gone wrong. Alberto
Fujimori's regime ended last year in chaos, but he also was once the
darling of international finance - a man who appeared to have tamed
inflation and was liberalising the economy. Today he is hiding out in
Japan, a country of which he recently admitted to being a citizen. (If he
had owned up 10 years ago, of course, he would have been disqualified the
presidency of Peru.) His government collapsed in a corruption scandal of
breathtaking proportions and he is reduced to posting messages on his
website, singing his own praises.
Colombia also has a president who is keen on liberalisation - but his main
preoccupation is the fact that his country has become, with Plan Colombia,
the latest arena for the theatre of American military illusions.
Plan Colombia has notched up the achievement of uniting most Colombians
against the environmental disaster of enforced aerial spraying of toxic
chemicals and further victories are in the pipeline - a growth of
paramilitary human rights abuses, escalation of military activity and the
likely export of Colombia's problems to her neighbours are all on the
cards.
But there is one major Latin American country that is bucking the trend of
liberalisation: in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, the still popular president of
the country that boasts one of the largest oil reserves in the western
hemisphere, offers an interesting exception to the general rule.
In most of Latin America it is the poor and the newly impoverished middle
classes - the teachers and health workers who no longer have jobs, the
pensioners who no longer have pensions - who articulate the opposition to
economic liberalism. They have the bad grace to point out that, so far at
least, it has brought dramatic increases in inequalities in the
distribution of incomes and assets.
In Venezuela, though, it is the president who says so. Chavez is an
old-fashioned nationalist caudillo who prefers the company of Fidel Castro
to that of George Bush or Tony Blair. Chavez seems determined to introduce
to Venezuela some Cuban-style social control though, so far, this does not
seem to have dented his domestic ratings. He's a wild card who might not
matter but for those oil reserves.
In the 50s and 60s, behaviour such as Chavez's would certainly have
invited destabilisation and a military coup to save his electorate from
the communist menace. The menace is not what it was, so I trust that the
rumours circulating in Washington about US encouragement for a coup
against Chavez are ill founded. Otherwise, it might seem as though
democracy is to be encouraged only in countries that elect leaders who are
willing to make the world safe for globalisation - and that can't possibly
be what Mr Blair and his new friend President Bush believe, can it?
Copyright 2001 Guardian Newspapers Limited
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