SOUTH AMERICAN WAR ¿Por qué no te callas?

Dear friend;

All Latin America was against Columbia military action in Ecuador; and Mr. Bush didn’t get it ??

Maybe, after all, you will understand the international hostility against Mr Bush.

Please, someone could tell Mr. Bush to be reasonable? Other nations will listen and follow

so, and never someone like Chavez would have a chance to speak up.


OR ask him, since is to help like this...

¿Por qué no te callas? Pourquoi tu ne te tais pas ?
Why don’t you shut up? Por que não te calas?


Friendly reminder:

Reagan's "Peace through Strength", long after"Eisenhower's doctrine" marked the end of cold war.

(Just to mention only Republicans), time has changed, sometimes a General is not mandatory...


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Hopefully, with this action the families of FARC hostages will not be penalized

Hostage Ingrid Betancourt’s husband stated yesterday: " Mr Uribe is inhumane

and just thinks about war"



SEE BELOW



Mar. 4 - President Bush backed Colombia in an escalating Andean crisis as Venezuela moved troops to its border.

The crisis erupted after Colombia bombed and sent troops inside Ecuador in a weekend raid that killed a Colombian rebel leader in his jungle camp. The death toll from that action continues to rise, with Ecuadorian authorities saying the Colombian attack on the FARC rebel camp has left 21 dead, but analysts say despite heightened tensions, they do not expect a war.

Deborah Lutterbeck reports.



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ONE DAY LATER ....



Latin America scrambles to defuse crisis in the Andes
Tue Mar 4, 2008 3:17am EST





By Saul Hudson

CARACAS, March 4 (Reuters) - Latin America scrambled to defuse a three-nation crisis that threatens the region's stability after Venezuela and Ecuador cut diplomatic ties with Colombia and ordered troops to their neighbor's border.

The Organization of the American States, the region's top diplomatic body, will hold a crisis session in Washington on Tuesday to press for a negotiated end to a dispute that erupted after a weekend Colombia raid to kill a rebel inside Ecuador.

Ecuador's President Rafael Correa will also start a five-nation tour of the region -- including to leftist ally Venezuela -- to lobby for support against what he calls a premeditated violation of sovereignty.

"This is not a bilateral problem, it's a regional problem," Correa told Mexican television. "Should this set a precedent, Latin America will become another Middle East."

Latin American governments generally lined up to condemn conservative Colombian President Alvaro Uribe for sending troops and warplanes over the border in an attack on a jungle camp that killed a senior FARC rebel.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, a former guerrilla and a close leftist ally of Venezuela and Ecuador and who has a territorial dispute with Colombia, accused Uribe of becoming a threat to Latin America.

The region's diplomatic heavyweight, Brazil, demanded Uribe apologize to Correa. It also worked on the crisis with Argentina, whose president will visit Venezuela on Wednesday.

"This conflict ... is beginning to destabilize regional relations," said Marco Aurelio Garcia, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's foreign policy adviser. "We are mobilizing all of Brazil's diplomatic resources and those of other South American capitals to find a lasting solution."

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the three countries to exercise restraint and address their concerns "in the spirit of dialogue and cooperation that has traditionally characterised their relations," his spokeswoman said in a statement issued in Geneva just before he left for New York.

Major powers such as France and the United States, as well as U.S. presidential candidates, also urged diplomacy to defuse the tensions.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has negotiated the release this year of rebel hostages, called the guerrilla leader's death a "cowardly assassination" by a U.S.-backed president who did not want more captives freed.

Chavez and Correa expelled Colombia's diplomats from their capitals on Monday.

Colombia also fueled the tensions by accusing Chavez of funding Latin America's oldest insurgency -- a charge denied by the anti-U.S. president's aides.

Despite the three leaders' brinkmanship and the risk of military missteps, political analysts said a conflict was unlikely on borders that stretch from parched desert through Andean mountains and jungles to the Pacific Ocean.

Chavez, the leader of a growing bloc of Latin American leftist presidents, may fire up his supporters by challenging Uribe but he can ill afford to lose food imports from Colombia as he combats shortages in his OPEC nation, analysts said.



2 days later...



OAS approves resolution on Colombian action in Ecuador - Summary
Posted : Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:51:05 GMT
Author : DPA


Washington/Quito - The Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS) on Wednesday approved a resolution stating Colombia violated Ecuador's sovereignty with a cross-border raid to kill a leftist rebel over the weekend. The move sought to defuse the tension that had been mounting among Andean nations, after Ecuador and Venezuela broke diplomatic relations with Colombia and sent extra troops to their borders with that country to protest the action. Venezuela also closed its border to trade.

The resolution did not include a condemnation of the Colombian military operation Saturday on Ecuadorian soil, but did feature an explicit acknowledgement that Colombia violated Ecuadorian territory.

The raid on Saturday - reportedly triggered after a phone call from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to the rebel leader was tracked to the area - claimed the lives of Raul Reyes, second-in-command of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and some 20 other rebels.

The OAS resolution also establishes the creation of a commission headed by OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza to look into the incident, although it leaves open whether it is to be an "investigative" commission, as Ecuador wanted, or a "fact-finding" commission according to Colombia's wishes.

The text calls for a meeting of OAS foreign ministers on March 17 in Washington.

Late Tuesday, a 10-hour emergency OAS meeting in Washington was suspended without an agreement. Conflicting parties continued to exchange accusations, as Ecuador and Venezuela further increased the troop strength along their borders with Colombia.

According to a report by Colombian radio station RCN, a military source who asked not to be named said a call on February 27 from Chavez to Reyes on a satellite phone allowed Colombian intelligence to track down the rebel leader.

The left-wing populist Chavez had been active in seeking the release of more than 40 hostages held by FARC, including former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt - held for over six years and who has become the group's most high-profile hostage.

Recently Chavez had unsuccessfully called on the international community to grant political status to FARC and remove the group from terrorist lists.

Chavez reportedly talked to Reyes about the release that day of four hostages held by the rebels for at least five years.

"It is a bit ironic that it was a call from President Chavez that allowed us to kill Reyes," the military source was quoted as saying.

The same source said FARC's top leader, Manuel Marulanda Velez, is in Venezuelan territory, close to the Colombian border.

"(Intelligence services) have established that he is ill and has taken refuge in a Venezuelan estate, across the border with the (Colombian) province of Norte de Santander," the source told the radio station.

On Tuesday, conservative Colombian President Alvaro Uribe said he was taking Chavez before the International Criminal Court for "sponsoring and financing" terrorists. However, the Colombian opposition and even the president's foreign policy advisers said such a move would be ill-advised.

In Brazil, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa on Wednesday called Uribe a "psychopath," a day after describing him as the head of a "rogue government."

At the OAS meeting on Tuesday, Colombia had accused Ecuador and Venezuela of supporting "FARC terrorists" and stressed its right to self-defence. The representatives of Ecuador, Venezuela and other Latin American countries like Nicaragua, Bolivia and Argentina had demanded a condemnation of the "violation of the sovereignty" of Ecuador.

Colombia had strong backing from the United States. US President George W Bush Tuesday expressed his country's support for Uribe and praised his efforts against terrorism, stressing that Colombia could count on the assistance of the United States against Venezuela's "provocative" manoeuvres.

The Colombian Air Force used cluster bombs to attack the Colombian rebel camp on Ecuadorian soil Saturday. Following the bombing, Colombian ground troops entered Ecuador to recover Reyes' body and the rebels' computers, among other things.

FARC, founded in 1964, is the oldest and largest rebel group in Colombia, with some 10,000 fighters, and it has been fighting the Colombian state for over 40 years.

Ecuadorian Defence Minister Wellington Sandoval said Wednesday that the two alleged female rebels (one Mexican citizen and two Colombians) who were injured in Saturday's attack will be tried by Ecuadorian courts.

Sandoval visited the three women at a Quito hospital, where they were recovering from bullet wounds after being rescued by Ecuadorian forces from the site of the attack. The minister said later that there are precedents of Colombian rebels tried in Ecuador for breaking local laws by carrying weapons illegally.