A director of Colombian military intelligence and another officer implicated in a series of false attacks and a bombing that killed a civilian and injured 19 soldiers in Bogotá in 2006, attended the US Army School of the Americas, an examination of records shows. The Colombian Public Ministry is investigating Colonel Horacio Arbelaez, former director of the Army’s Joint Intelligence Center; Major Javier Efrén Hermida Benavides; and Captain Luis Eduardo Barrero for orchestrating placement of bombs in a Bogotá shopping mall and other sites in July 2006, on the eve of President Uribe's inauguration for his second term. At the time of the bombing and false attacks, they were attributed to guerrillas of the FARC. In most cases, the bombs were not detonated, but were denounced by the accused officers and deactivated to demonstrate the FARC threat and show military intelligence was doing its work. [Procuraduría General de la Nación, Oct. 12. 2006]

Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on a visit to Colombia Jan. 18 that the US is concerned about a Venezuelan military buildup, pointing to "what Mr. Chávez has done militarily in recent years and his acquisitions—both those he's made as well as those he states he's making for the future—high performance airplanes, modern submarines." President Hugo Chávez is negotiating with Russia to buy five diesel submarines that he says Venezuela needs to protect its extensive offshore oil drilling facilities. (AFP, Jan. 18) Days after Mullen's remarks, Miami's El Nuevo Herald cited anonymous Colombian intelligence officials as saying that the country's FARC and ELN guerillas are receiving ammunition manufactured in Venezuela. The officials said the 7.62mm AK-47 ammo recently captured from the FARC is produced by the state-owned Venezuelan Anonymous Military Industries Company (CAVIM). (Nuevo Herald, Bloomberg, Jan. 21)

Venezuela's Recognition of the Colombian Insurgency

by Paul Wolf

"Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." — I Samuel 15:3

In the wake of his successful negotiation of the release of two hostages held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has launched an initiative for the FARC and its junior counterpart, the National Liberation Army (ELN), to be recognized by the international community as legitimate "belligerents"—not terrorists. Chávez says the FARC is an "insurgent" force with legitimate political aims and that the terrorist label "has just one cause: pressure from the United States."

Two dozen heavily armed special police from the Venezuelan Interior Ministry searched the Hebraica community center in Caracas last month, ostensibly looking for weapons or evidence of "subversive activity." There were no arrests or seizure of property. The Venezuelan Jewish community's umbrella organization, the Confederation of Israelite Associations of Venezuela (CAIV), protested the raid as an "unjustifiable act" aimed at creating tensions between the community and the government of President Hugo Chávez. "It seems that the only interpretation is that this was an intimidation by the government," CAIV president Abraham Levy Benshimol told New York's Jewish weekly The Forward, noting that the raid came on the eve of the referndum on Chávez's proposed constitutional reform. "We're facing the first anti-Jewish government in our history," added Hebraica president Simon Sultan.

On Jan. 10 a group of about 20 rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) released two hostages in the southeastern department of Guaviare in an arrangement worked out with Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez Frias and Colombian ex-senator Piedad Cordoba. The hostages, Consuelo Gonzalez de Perdomo and Clara Rojas, were then taken to Santo Domingo, Venezuela, and later to a meeting with Chavez and Cordoba at the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas.

Chilean agronomy student Matias Catrileo Quezada, an indigenous Mapuche, was shot dead early on the morning of Jan. 3 at the Fundo Santa Margarita estate, in Vilcun in the southern region of Araucania, presumably by police agents. He and other Mapuche activists were setting fire to bales of hay; the estate, which the local Mapuche community claims as part of its traditional ancestral lands, has been attacked several times in recent years. Activists told Bio-Bio radio station Catrileo was shot in the back with a machine gun.

New Constitution Escalates Polarization

by Ben Dangl, Upside Down World

"Let's go unblock the road, compañeros!" a man in an old baseball cap yells as he joins a group of people hauling rocks and tires from a central intersection in Cochabamba. This group of students and union activists are mobilizing against a civic strike led by middle-class foot soldiers of the Bolivian right. These actions in the street are part of a political roller coaster which is dramatically changing Bolivia as it enters the new year.