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March 30, 2008
Files Released by Colombia Point to Venezuelan Bid to Arm Rebels
By SIMON ROMERO
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Files provided by Colombian officials from computers
they say were captured in a cross-border raid in Ecuador this month
appear to tie Venezuela’s government to efforts to secure arms for
Colombia’s largest insurgency.
Officials taking part in Colombia’s investigation of the computers
provided The New York Times with copies of more than 20 files, some of
which also showed contributions from the rebels to the 2006 campaign of
Ecuador’s leftist president, Rafael Correa.
If verified, the files would offer rare insight into the cloak-and-
dagger nature of Latin America’s longest-running guerrilla conflict,
including what appeared to be the killing of a Colombian government spy
with microchips implanted in her body, a crime apparently carried out by
the rebels in their jungle redoubt.
The files would also potentially link the governments of Venezuela and
Ecuador to the leftist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC, which the United States says is a terrorist group and
has fought to overthrow Colombia’s government for four decades.
Though it was impossible to authenticate the files independently, the
Colombian officials said their government had invited Interpol to verify
the files. The officials did not want to be identified while any
Interpol inquiry was under way.
Both the United States and Colombia, Wa****ngton’s staunchest ally in the
region, have a strong interest in undercutting President Hugo Chávez of
Venezuela, who has sought to counter United States influence by forming
his own leftist bloc in the region. But the Colombian officials who
provided the computer files adamantly vouched for them.
The files contained touches that suggested authenticity: they were
filled with revolutionary jargon, passages in numerical code, missives
about American policy in Latin America and even brief personal
reflections like one by a senior rebel commander on the joy of becoming
a grandfather.
Other senior Colombian officials said the files made public so far only
scratched the surface of the captured archives, risking new friction
with Venezuela and Ecuador, both of whom have dismissed the files as
fakes.
Vice President Francisco Santos said Colombia’s stability was at risk if
explicit sup****t from its neighbors for the FARC, the country’s largest
armed insurgency, was proved true. “The idea that using weapons to
topple a democratic government has not been censured,” Mr. Santos said
in an interview, “is not only stupid — it is frankly frightening.”
Colombia’s relations with its two Andean neighbors veered suddenly
toward armed conflict after Colombian forces raided a FARC camp inside
Ecuador on March 1, killing 26 people, including a top FARC commander,
and capturing the computers, according to the Colombians.
Though tensions ebbed after a summit meeting of Latin American nations
in the Dominican Republic this month, the matter of the computer files
has threatened to reignite the diplomatic crisis caused by the raid.
Shortly after the crisis erupted, Colombian officials began releasing a
small ****tion of the computer files, some of which they said showed
efforts by Mr. Chavez’s government to provide financial sup****t for the
FARC.
Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos said in an interview that officials
had obtained more than 16,000 files from three computers belonging to
Luis Édgar Devia Silva, a commander known by his nom de guerre, Raúl
Reyes, who was killed in the raid. Two other hard drives were also
captured, he said.
“Everything has been accessed and everything is being validated by
Interpol,” Mr. Santos said, adding that he expected the work on the
validation to be completed by the end of April. “It is a great deal of
information that is extremely valuable and im****tant.”
Mr. Santos, who said the computers survived the raid because they were
in metal casing, strongly defended Colombia’s military foray into
Ecuador, which drew condemnation in other parts of Latin America as a
violation of Ecuador’s sovereignty.
“Personally I do not regret a thing, absolutely nothing, but I am a
minister of a government that has agreed this type of action would not
be repeated,” he said. “Of course, this depends on our neighbors
collaborating on the fight against terrorism.”
For his part, Mr. Chávez, in a meeting with foreign journalists last
week in Caracas, lashed out at Colombia’s government and mocked the
files.
“The main weapon they have now is the computer, the supposed computer of
Raúl Reyes,” Mr. Chávez said. “This computer is like à la carte service,
giving you whatever you want. You want steak? Or fried fish? How would
you like it prepared? You’ll get it however the empire decides.”
The correspondence also pointed to warm relations between Venezuela’s
government and the FARC.
One letter, dated Jan. 25, 2007, by Iván Márquez, a member of the FARC’s
seven-member secretariat, discussed a meeting with a Venezuelan official
called Carvajal. “Carvajal,” Mr. Márquez wrote, “left with the pledge of
bringing an arms dealer from Panama.”
Officials here said they believed that the official in question was Gen.
Hugo Carvajal, the director of military intelligence in Venezuela, a
confidant of Mr. Chávez and perhaps Venezuela’s most powerful
intelligence official.
In other correspondence from September 2004 after the killing by the
FARC of six Venezuelan soldiers and one Venezuelan engineer on
Venezuelan soil that month, General Carvajal’s longstanding ties to the
guerrillas also come into focus. In those letters, the guerrillas
describe talks with General Carvajal, Mr. Chávez’s emissary to deal with
the issue.
“Today I met with General Hugo Carvajal,” a FARC commander wrote in on
letter dated Sept. 23, 2004. “He said he guarded the secret hope that
what happened in Apure,” the rebel wrote in reference to the Venezuelan
border state where the killings took place, “was the work of a force
different from our own.”
Officials in General Carvajal’s office at the General Directorate of
Military Intelligence in Caracas did not respond to requests for comment
on the letters. Mr. Chávez responded to a re****t earlier this year in
Colombia claiming that General Carvajal provided logistical assistance
to the FARC by calling it an “attack on the revolution” he has led in
Venezuela.
Another file recovered from Mr. Devia’s computers, dated a week earlier
on Jan. 18, 2007, described efforts by the FARC’s secretariat to secure
Mr. Chávez’s assistance for buying arms and obtaining a $250 million
loan, “to be paid when we take power.”
The FARC, a Marxist-inspired insurgency that has persisted for four
decades, finances itself largely through cocaine trafficking and
kidnappings for ransom. But other files from the computers suggested
that Colombia’s counterinsurgency effort, financed in large part by $600
million a year in aid from Wa****ngton, was making those activities less
lucrative for the FARC, forcing it to consider options like selling
Venezuelan gasoline at a profit in Colombia.
The release of the files comes at a delicate time when some lawmakers in
Wa****ngton are pressing for Venezuela to be included on a list of
countries that are state sponsors of terrorism. But with Venezuela
remaining a leading supplier of oil to the United States, such a move is
considered unlikely because of the limits on trade it would entail.
Moreover, interpretations of the files from Mr. Devia’s computers have
already led to some mistakes.
For instance, El Tiempo, Colombia’s leading daily newspaper, issued an
apology this month to Gustavo Larrea, Ecuador’s security minister, after
publi****ng a photograph obtained from the computers in which the
newspaper claimed Mr. Larrea was shown meeting with Mr. Devia at a FARC
camp. In fact, the photograph was of Patricio Etchegaray, an official
with the Communist Party in Argentina.
Still, the files from Mr. Devia’s computers are expected to haunt
relations between Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela for some time.
For instance, one piece of correspondence dated Nov. 21, 2006, and
circulated among the FARC’s secretariat, describes a $100,000 donation
to the campaign of Mr. Correa, Ecuador’s president.
Of that amount, $50,000 came from the FARC’s “Eastern bloc,” a
militarily strong faction that operates in eastern Colombia, and $20,000
from the group’s “Southern bloc,” according to the do***ent.
President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia referred this month to files from Mr.
Devia’s computers showing financing of Mr. Correa’s campaign by the
FARC, but he stopped short of releasing them after tensions eased at the
summit meeting in the Dominican Republic.
“Any archive is not valid until it is verified,” said Pedro Artieda, a
spokesman at the Ecuadorean Foreign Ministry, when asked for comment.
“Therefore, the government cannot comment on something that is not
confirmed.” Mr. Correa had previously disputed the campaign-finance
claims based on the computers files, saying they lacked “technical and
legal” validity.
Other files offer insight into the methods employed both by the FARC and
Colombia’s government in their four-decade war. In one letter by Mr.
Devia dated Jan. 5, 2007, to Manuel Marulanda, the most senior member of
the FARC’s secretariat, he described a woman in their ranks who was
discovered to be a government spy.
“The new thing here,” Mr. Devia wrote, “was that she had two microchips,
one under her breast and the other beneath her jaw.”
Mr. Devia went on to describe the reaction to this discovery, explaining
in the rebels’ slang that she was given “a course.”
“Yesterday they threw her into the hole after proving what she was,” he
wrote, “and giving her the counsel of war.”
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