Petkoff in today’s Tal Cual Editorial used a very similar play on words that I did two nights ago in trying to show how Chavez (Chacumbele) is either trying to play innocent or does it in bad faith in his silly defense of teh FARC and why it should be recognized as a belligerent force:
The Great Farc(e) by Teodoro Petkoff in Tal Cual
What we could call the “Chacumbele Doctrine” about the Colombian conflict is either innocent or it is ignorant or it is bad faith or it is the three things at once.
The crux of the thesis of the Great Strategists is that if you recognize the FARC as a “belligerent force, they would immediately enter the Geneva Protocol (a convention that establishes certain rules in war to “humanize” them) and they could not use kidnapping (Chacumbele dixit). Just BS. The serene little angels from the FARC do not need to be protected by the Geneva Protocol to stop kidnapping civilians.
They know what they are doing. They know perfectly well that the kidnapping of innocent civilians, divorced from the armed fight, is a monstrous practice, abominable, that denies in itself any noble purpose that could motivate those that take up arms with a political purpose and that denies the rules of war.
They kidnap with a full conscience that they are doing it because this is a financing mechanism and not because the known the “rules of war” that came out of the Geneva Convention. Our Clausewitz is wrong when he points out that the kidnappings (which he claims to reject) are part of a policy, different from that of the common criminal, because these are political kidnappings, not to kill them or torture the but for humanitarian exchanges (Chacumbele redixit). For God’s sake, how can he lie like that! Not long ago the FARC assassinated 11 members of Parliament they had in their hands.
But the main thing is that 99% of those kidnapped by the FARC are non-political citizens, kidnapped to demand (and obtain) a monetary ransom. Bt even if the few political kidnappings had been taken to advance a humanitarian exchange, it is not possible to justify it. The jailed guerrilla members are uniformed combatants captured in combat. The ladies recently freed are civilians removed from the conflict.
To use them as an object of exchange does nothing but accentuate the monstrosity of the FARC’s procedure. The fight that claims to be revolutionary is in the end, a fight for the soul of the collective. Even with weapons in the hands, a revolutionary organization needs to again supporters not lose them. The means that it uses cannot deny the ends that it claims to pursue. To use monstrous procedures, such as kidnapping and drug trafficking, without mentioning the massacres of peasants, alienate sympathies. It is no coincidence that all of Colombia, from the rich to the poor, rejects the FARC, as demonstrated by numerous polls. Since the FARC devoted themselves to drug trafficking and kidnappings they lost all respectability and all credibility.
If kidnapping takes part of the outlaw panoply it is because it happens to be a fully conscious decision f its bosses and it is stupid to think that the Geneva Protocol would stop them from continuing with it. To stop the kidnappings the only thing the FARC needs, is to recuperate its political meaning. If they did it a small path could be opened towards peace in Colombia.
The Devil's Excrement 
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