BOGOTA: Colombia’s FARC rebels raised questions Monday about the ostensible kidnapping of an army general that has interrupted 2-year-old peace talks between the government and the guerrillas.
“The suspicious and murky delivery of the ‘big gun’ of the imperial counterinsurgency war, Gen. Ruben Dario Alzate, has led President (Juan Manuel) Santos to suspend the conversations in Havana,” FARC said in a statement posted on Anncol, a website run by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
“Once again, Colombians’ desire for peace … is frustrated, making it plain that the strategy of stick and carrot, or negotiating amid gunfire … has failed, subjecting the country to a harmful uncertainty,” the FARC said in the statement entitled “It’s the Conflict, Stupid!”
The Santos administration rejected a rebel proposal for a cease-fire during the peace talks.
Alzate, commander of Task Force Titan, which has been in the vanguard of government offensives against the FARC, fell into guerrilla hands over the weekend as he was traveling in a remote area of the northwestern province of
Choco.
Pointing to Alzate’s 31 years in the army and his doctorate in military science, the FARC expressed skepticism that a soldier of his skill and experience would have ventured without escort into a rebel-dominated region by accident.
The editorial asked why Alzate, accompanied only by a single soldier and a lawyer, boarded a small boat and sailed to a deserted hamlet on the banks of the Atrato River “where a few FARC guerrillas were waiting to seize him and spark a rupture of the dialogue in Havana.”
Such “stupidity” is inconceivable on the part of a military man of Alzate’s stature, the FARC said.
The insurgents also found it suspicious that the first news of Alzate’s abduction came not from the government, but from former President Alvaro Uribe, a fierce opponent of Santos’ peace process with the FARC. BERNAMA-NNN-EFE