Least we forget: The FARC is a criminal organization

Tonight coming back from work I could finally get the news about the release of Clara Rojas and Consuelo Gonzalez. We can take a few minutes to celebrate this happy news, that these two women, held for no just cause for years in the Colombian jungles can finally live free again, with one of them even getting back the son she might have thought she would never see again. A son that required DNA technology to be identified, just after learning about the child abuse he had been subjected from the mere fact of being born to a FARC hostage.

If some media are willing to call this a Chavez triumph, following the steps of sick fucks like Oliver Stone, most keep a cool head, a healthy wait and see attitude, even as they are willing to give some credit to Chavez. This one has played too much with the feelings of the people, has made too much of a media show of his crazy love for notoriety that serious folks are weary.

Thus a short list of reminders of the truth about the Colombian hostage situation least some might start seeing the FARC as good revolutionaries, flower-child left overs, "excellent guerillas".

There are still more than 700 hostage being kept in some quarters of the Colombian jungle by the FARC and ELN.

No matter how hard pro FARC folks like Piedad Cordoba try to convince us, the hostages are kidnapped victims, "secuestrados", and not just temporarily held folks, "retenidos".

Neither are these hostages "prisoner of war". If indeed there are some army and cops in their lot, most of them were innocent civilians going on their own business and taken away from their loved owes, their friends, their associates. And they were taken away for financial reasons, for extortion, not to score political points.

And if it is possible that Chavez has humanitarian intentions, it is even more true that he is managing this whole show, at Venezuelan tax payer expenses, for his own glory. Today, among the crowd that flew to Colombia, even Piedad Cordoba was dressed in bright red clothes ALL THROUGH THE DAY, from the Colombian lift off point to her impromptu press conference on the Melia Hotel side walk.

Let's not forget that Clara Rojas love child out of a possible Stockholm syndrome situation was taken away from her and put into hiding in an orphanage. The FARC had the cruelty to prefer to place the sick and abused kid in an orphanage rather than sending it directly to Clara Rojas relatives. Or even to the father relatives as surely he must have had some left somewhere.

Let's not forget that the arrogance of Chavez forced a second DNA evaluation in Spain, which confirmed that Emmanuel did indeed exist and had been placed for a couple of years in an orphanage.

Let us not forget that in Venezuela there are officially nearly 100 hostages, possibly much more than that as relatives rarely call for the inefficient a corrupt security system and prefer to deal on their own with the captors. Let's not forget that the Chavez administration is infinitely more interested in the FARC hostages than the ones he has at home and for which he could do a lot if he really wanted to.

So, let's be happy tonight that at least two hostages have escaped the hell of the FARC camps, but let's not forget that the FARC is a mob organization, a mafia style drug cartel, a cruel and inhumane system who should have its butts on the benches of The Hague international court and whose best hope to avoid such fate is to negotiate fast the release of the other hostages.

Let's also hope that the Copenhagen syndrome does not extend more than what it already has (yes, I got the right capital, read the Moises Naim article).

And let's hope that the sympathies of the Venezuelan current power holders for the FARC fade some as they realize that the FARC lied to them, were not in control of the situation and messed the scheduled previous release because at the last minute they failed to recover Emmanuel. Then again, the egotistic and narcissistic Chavez does deserve the selfish FARC...

-The end-