Submitted by WW4 Report on Wed, 11/19/2008 - 04:08.
On Nov. 12 Cuba released La Paz en Colombia (Peace in Colombia), a
265-page book by former president Fidel Castro giving new information
about the Cuban government's relations with Colombia's leftist
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In the book, which Castro
says took 400 hours of work, the former president repeats criticisms he
made last July of the FARC's treatment of prisoners of war and "the
capture and holding of civilians not involved in the war." In the book
he also notes that holding "prisoners and hostages deprived the
combatants of the ability to maneuver."
Castro says he tried to convince former FARC leader Manuel Marulanda
Vélez, who died in March of this year, that he could make a peace
agreement with then-president Andres Pastrana during negotiations in
1999, but that Marulanda didn't negotiate seriously because he thought
the US was planning an intervention that would lead to a prolonged war
and possibly a "continental struggle." The Cubans told him that "the
international situation was entirely different from the way he saw it."
Castro says he admired Marulanda's "revolutionary firmness" but felt
that armed struggle was no longer viable, noting that Cuba aided the
rebels in Nicaragua in the 1970s and in El Salvador in the 1980s. Castro
mocks the US insistence that the rebels are terrorists; in 1999, Castro
says, a US representative met with the FARC's chief negotiator, the late
Raúl Reyes, in Costa Rica to discuss cooperation on an anti-narcotics
program. (Granma, Cuba, Nov. 15; La Jornada, Nov. 13, 14, 15)
From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Nov. 16
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