Word: farce
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...bloody, four-decade-old civil war, but also be a precursor to freeing three Americans held by the guerrillas. The debacle has now left Chavez looking humiliated, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe looking churlish and the leftist rebels, the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces - known by their Spanish acronym, the FARC - looking more than ever like the deceitful thugs their critics insist they've become over the years...
There's enough blame to go around. In principle, the FARC agreed earlier this month to release former Colombian Congresswoman Consuelo Gonzalez and politician Clara Rojas, who were kidnapped six years ago. The third hostage was Rojas' 3-year-old son, Emmanuel, whose father is said to be one of the FARC captors. They were to be freed days before New Year's Eve. But when nothing happened last weekend, and when the FARC kept failing to provide Venezuelan officials with geographical coordinates for the release site, doubts began to rise...
...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 a year via ransom kidnapping and protecting the country's cocaine trade. The U.S. State Department has listed both the FARC and Colombia's right-wing paramilitary armies...
Standing up to the FARC has made the conservative Uribe a widely popular President, with both Colombians and the Bush Administration, which counts Uribe as its closest Latin American ally. But Uribe didn't exactly help matters late Monday when, as observers still held out hope that the FARC might come through, he seemed to break his own promise to stay clear of the process and arrived in Villavicencio with stunning news. 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...
...Spain publicly told him to "shut up." That rebuke was followed this month by another from Venezuelans, who in a constitutional referendum voted down his bid to deepen his "21st-century socialism" and eliminate presidential term limits. As a result, Chavez and his backers no doubt saw the FARC hostage release as a way to revitalize his hemispheric influence - leading him, perhaps, to a naïve trust in the FARC...