Word: chavez
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...reminders that principle is hardly a reliable currency in FARCland. The left-wing Chavez learned an important lesson about the 20,000-strong rebel army: it couldn't care less about its public relations image because it is powerful and rich enough not to have to care. Maybe it could have been counted on to keep its word a generation ago, when combating Colombia's epic social inequalities was still its primary objective. But today the FARC, which controls a mammoth swath of southern Colombia, is widely considered to be a ruthless mafia that earns as much as $1 billion...
...Colombian government intelligence, he said, suggests that 3-year-old Emmanuel was released two years ago to a foster family. Whether that's true or not, Uribe left the impression that he was passively-aggressively scuttling the release effort to avoid the embarrassment of having FARC hostages delivered to Chavez; last month Uribe all but cut off the Venezuelan leader from the government-rebel negotiations when a dispute erupted between the two Presidents and their notoriously oversize egos. Chavez wondered the same thing aloud to reporters. Uribe, whose government is embroiled in a scandal over alleged ties to the right...
...Chavez, however, may have set himself up for embarrassment. The New Year's debacle capped what has been a dismal few months for the radical, anti-U.S. leader, who controls the hemisphere's largest oil reserves. He started the year seemingly at the height of power, taking office after a landslide reelection and with crude prices breaking records by the day. But in November, during one of Chavez's rants at a summit in Chile, the King of Spain publicly told him to "shut up." That rebuke was followed this month by another from Venezuelans, who in a constitutional...
This week's setback could, by the same token, make Chavez a smarter and more effective mediator in the long run. Many still believe that his leftist bona fides make him the right man to persuade the guerrillas to release hostages and the government to free hundreds of jailed rebels. All that could in turn help end a war that has killed almost 40,000 people, displaced millions more and drawn the U.S., albeit indirectly, into the conflict with some $1 billion a year in anti-drug...
February, in fact, marks the fifth anniversary of the FARC's capture of three U.S. defense contractors - and the sixth for the rebels' best-known captive, liberal Colombian Senator and presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, whose dual Colombia-French citizenship has made her a cause celebre in Europe. Chavez said he still believes the FARC will release Gonzalez and Rojas, who was Betancourt's running mate. But if they don't, 2008 will begin as yet one more year of shame for Colombia...