Chavez keeps up campaign to get rebels off terrorist list
BOGOTA, COLOMBIA — It might sound like mere semantics. But when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez proposed this month that Colombia's largest rebel group be recognized as "belligerents," not terrorists, the reverberations reached to Washington and Europe, and relations between the two Latin American nations plunged to what one observer called perhaps the lowest point in their history.
Chavez has appealed to European and South American nations to strike the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and a smaller rebel group known by its Spanish initials, ELN, from their lists of terrorist groups.
The rebels should be viewed as "belligerents," Chavez said, a change that could open the way for diplomatic recognition of the groups -- at least by Venezuela. The FARC, he said, is an "insurgent" force with legitimate political aims.
The terrorist appellation "has just one cause: pressure from the United States," said Chavez, a fierce opponent of President Bush and his policies.
Most European, Central and South American countries gave Chavez the cold shoulder. But the Venezuelan National Assembly on Thursday, in a near unanimous vote, approved a resolution to grant the FARC belligerent status.
The bill's sponsor, deputy Saul Ortega, told reporters in the capital, Caracas, that the resolution has no legal effect, neither granting the FARC diplomatic status nor safe passage in Venezuela. It was merely a show of support for Chavez, he said.
But the Colombian government bitterly protested what it viewed as interference in its affairs. Colombian officials worry that Venezuela might take the further step of recognizing the rebels as a "state in formation," a status that France and Mexico granted the Sandinista rebels during the Nicaraguan civil war in the late 1970s.
Such a move would mean "giving the FARC diplomatic immunity, asylum rights, Venezuelan passports, and freedom from extradition," said former Colombian Defense Minister Rafael Pardo, now a consultant based in Bogota, the capital. "They would be giving the FARC a legitimacy, and that's very grave."
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe arranged an emergency trip to several European capitals this week to make the case to leaders that the FARC is a terrorist organization.
The difference in terminology is important. In the United States, groups on the State Department's roll of "foreign terrorist organizations" are pariahs, and individuals who have dealings with them are committing crimes.
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