Colombia will ask Brazil to help control rebels

www.orlandosentinel.com By Kevin G. Hall | Knight Ridder Newspapers Posted March 7, 2003

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- The presidents of Colombia and Brazil will meet today under heavy U.S. pressure to isolate the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the region's cocaine-financed guerrilla movement that is labeled a terrorist organization by the Bush administration.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe wants Brazil's support for Plan Colombia, a joint U.S.-Colombian military effort to quash cocaine trafficking and the guerrilla groups funded by cocaine.

For Brazil, Latin America's largest and most influential nation, that would mean an end to years of neutrality and an unpopular yielding to Washington's will.

Brazilians are worried about cocaine trafficking in their country, however, and a leader of the FARC -- the guerrilla's group's initials in Spanish -- is thought to have protected Brazil's top trafficker until the trafficker was captured in April 2001.

Uncomfortable with a growing U.S. presence next door in Colombia, Brazil so far has balked at branding the FARC a terrorist organization.

"It is not convenient for Brazil to classify the FARC as terrorist or not," a Brazilian diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Brazil keeps no such list of terrorist groups, so it is not necessary to add them to a list. This could make more difficult future efforts by Brazil to mediate the conflict in Colombia."

Brazil's new president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, is already trying to broker an end to Venezuela's political turmoil, leading a Group of Friends trying to stave off a civil war. A longtime leftist, da Silva and his closest foreign-policy aides feel the previous Brazilian government should have worked to discourage the U.S. military buildup under Plan Colombia.

The United States has spent more than $2 billion since 2001 in military aid to curb cocaine flowing from Colombia, the largest producer of cocaine and grower of coca, the plant from which the narcotic is made. U.S. military advisers are also now training the Colombian military to protect an oil pipeline owned by the U.S. Occidental Petroleum Corp. and Colombia's Ecopetrol.

Uribe, under constant U.S. surveillance because of recent assassination attempts, took office last year promising to wage war on rebels.

On Feb. 13, the FARC downed a small aircraft carrying contract personnel working for the Pentagon. American Thomas Janis of Montgomery, Ala., was executed along with a Colombian pilot. FARC rebels confirm they are holding three Americans working for a division of the U.S. defense contractor Northrop Grumman.

The FARC announced on its Web site Monday that it would not negotiate with the United States for their release but is willing to negotiate with Uribe's government.

A Colombian diplomat in Brazil, speaking on condition of anonymity, responded, "The door to dialogue [with the FARC] is always open when they show the will for peace by stopping terrorist acts."

The diplomat referred to the Feb. 7 bombing of a chic Bogota nightclub, which killed 35 and injured more than 100. The attack, and several other recent ones, was blamed on the FARC. Guerrillas have responded to the heightened military activity with an urban terror campaign.