In Today’s podcast at 11AM Eastern, and while we are focused on Tiger Woods’s marital travails,
Noticias 24/AFP report that students, workers, indigenous movements, and other leftist groups met in Caracas this week to create the Movimiento Continental Bolivariano (Continental Bolivarian Movement), which promotes “the union of the peoples of the Americas” against the “imperialist aggression” of the USA, for the purpose of “defending the Venezuelan revolution from the imperialist threats”, and “to reinforce the struggle against the Yankee military bases in Colombia.”
The meeting read a letter by FARC leader Alfonso Cano in which he pointed to “the horizon of the combative union of our peoples in defense of their dignity, independence, history, values, culture, territory, human resources, natural resources, and the inalienable right to forge their sovereign future”.
Counterterrorism Blog and Douglas Farrah have also posted on this meeting:
Little noticed by the outside world, Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez is hosting a gathering of global terrorist organizations in Caracas, featuring Colombia’s FARC, Spain’s ETA, the Communist Party of El Salvador, remnants of the Red Brigade and other armed groups seeking violent revolution in Latin America and beyond.
The conference shows how closely tied Chávez is to the FARC and other terrorist groups, despite the overwhelming evidence of the FARC’s enormous involvement in drug trafficking, its thousands of kidnappings, endless attacks against the civilian population and its kidnapping of children and women to serve as sex slaves.
The second global convention of the Coordinadora Continental Bolivariana (Bolivarian Continental Coordinator-CCB), founded by the FARC in Venezuela in 2004 and newly renamed the Bolivarian Continental Movement, has as its primary stated purpose to militarily support the Venezuelan revolution and contribute to the struggle against Yankee bases in Colombia. Its platform also vows to overthrow the United States and its “moribund capitalist system.”
Colombia’s Armed Forces Commander had asked that the summit reject Cano’s letter and not become a FARC accomplice.
Strategy Page has more on the Colombia-Venezuela-FARC situation,
The Colombian 8th Infantry Division has been moved to the Venezuelan border. Not in response to more Venezuelan saber rattling, but because the growing number of FARC camps across the border in Venezuela, which has led to an increase in FARC activity on the Colombian side of the frontier. Apparently FARC plans to use its growing number of Venezuelan bases to support a new offensive. FARC will wage guerilla war, using the Venezuelan bases as a sanctuary (where rebels can be trained, recuperate and receive supplies.) The Venezuelan army will keep Colombian troops away from the FARC camps. Venezuela denies any evidence to the contrary, and continues to insist that it’s build up on the Colombian border is in preparation for the coming U.S.-Colombian invasion.
The meeting was held at Caraca’s Parque Central auditorium, and was blessed by father Luís Barrios, who spoke about “God’s Communist Party.”
The English-language media mostly ignored this event.
Hugo Chávez is in Argentina, bloviating about South American unification (video in Spanish)
