Fighting the Farc

[T_i_B]

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ben_whitford/2008/01/fighting_the_farc.html

Last week, with the world watching, two hostages - held for years by Colombia's Farc rebels - stepped onto a Venezuelan tarmac and into Hugo Chávez's warm embrace. It was a win all around: Chávez got his publicity coup, the hostages got their freedom - and Farc managed to regain some fraction of the face they'd lost after initially promising to release a hostage they no longer held.

Now, Chávez is trying to turn that qualified victory into a more sweeping triumph: he's declared that, as far as he's concerned, Farc are not terrorists but a "genuine army" with "a Bolivarian political project". He wants the world to join him in recognising the group as a legitimate political actor, a rebel insurgency rather than a terrorist organisation. That, Chávez believes, could open the way for a wider hostage release, and perhaps even a full-scale peace accord.

It's a worthy ambition, and one that resonates with the successes of Chávez's predecessor, Rafael Caldera, who during the 1960s persuaded Venezuela's leftist guerrillas to lay down their arms and rejoin the political process. But Caldera's promises of amnesty and political agency worked precisely because Venezuela's insurgency was an ideological movement with specific political goals. Fighting, for them, was merely a means to an end.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said of Farc. While the group's leaders still profess to share Chávez's leftist - and, increasingly, Bolivarian - ideals, the truth is that these days Farc is less a revolutionary outfit than a criminal enterprise with a vested interest in the status quo. Its struggle is inspired not by coherent ideological principles, but merely by avarice and the pursuit of power for its own sake.