Thursday, January 13, 2005

What's the Spanish for chutzpah?

We know that governments should be held to a higher standard of conduct than rebels/terrorists/insurgents/freedom fighters. But we can't resist laughing at the indignant complaints of the drug-smuggling kidnappers of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the FARC, that one of their senior officials was, yes, kidnapped, in Venezuela and delivered to Colombian custody.

The Colombian government initially claimed that he was captured on their soil, but cellphone data put the detainee, Rodrigo Granda, in Caracas right before the supposed capture in Colombia. The government has now effectively admitted that they used bounty hunters to spirit him out of Caracas and into their custody.

Bear in mind, amidst all the FARC squealing about the illegality of it all, that kidnapping is part of their MO, and spare a particular thought, amidst the thousands of kidnapping victims, for Colombian opposition leader Ingrid Betancourt, held by the FARC for 3 years now and counting.

A couple of other comments. This idea of using bounty hunters to push the envelope in the War on Terror -- we're surprised there haven't been more revelations about this tactic in Dubya's WoT, except for that weird case in Afghanistan. And we wonder if three veteran monitors of the Colombian political situation will pop up to make a statement about this obvious injustice against the FARC.

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