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Judi Lynn Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-14-08 05:36 AM
Original message
Colombia Hostage Reunited With Son
Source: Sky News

Colombia Hostage Reunited With Son
Updated:08:45, Monday January 14, 2008

A hostage freed by rebels in Colombia has been reunited with the son fathered by one of her captors.
(snip)

During the two-hour encounter at a foster home on Sunday, Emmanuel and his mother hugged as they began the slow process of getting to know each other.

Rojas has worn a photo of her son around her neck since she was freed, and child psychologists showed the boy pictures of her before their meeting to try to ease the transition away from foster care.

She has not revealed much about Emmanuel's father.




Read more: http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-1300496,00.html?f=rss
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Judi Lynn Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-14-08 05:37 AM
Response to Original message
1. Ex-hostage Rojas has emotional reunion with son in Colombia
Ex-hostage Rojas has emotional reunion with son in Colombia
14/01/2008 06h32

BOGOTA (AFP) - Newly-freed Colombian hostage Clara Rojas had an emotional reunion Sunday with her son Emmanuel, three years after he was taken from her while she was held captive by leftist rebels, a government source told AFP.

"They have met each other. It was a very emotional moment," the official said of the meeting, which came three days after the FARC rebel group released politician Rojas after holding her nearly six years.

Rojas, who only found out her jungle-born three-year-old son was alive in a New Year's eve radio broadcast, met the toddler Sunday afternoon after flying into Bogota's military airport with her family from Caracas.

The child, whose father is a guerrilla from the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), was handed over to Rojas by the Colombian Family Welfare Institute, a local government organization.

More:
http://www.afp.com/english/news/stories/080114063009.xfgwcy3x.html
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dipsydoodle Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-14-08 08:53 AM
Response to Original message
2. When she was interviewed on televison
she didn't seem quite sure exactly who the father is. I must emphasise that is not to say it could have been one of number - simply that she didn't know.
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Peace Patriot Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-14-08 02:32 PM
Response to Original message
3. It's kind of amazing how much is left out of these stories, isn't it?
For instance, Uribe's bad faith (probably instigated by Donald Rumsfeld--see WaPo 12/1/07*) in abruptly ending the first hostage negotiation, blaming that on Hugo Chavez (with a lame excuse), grabbing the FARC negotiators who were in transit to Caracas with "proof of life" documentation, trying to claim credit for obtaining the "proof of life" (quickly contradicted by the hostages' families and world leaders like the president of France, who credited Chavez, and urged him to continue his efforts), and likely located the child Emmanuel from info in the seized "proof of life" documents (or someone in the Colombian child care system ratted Emmanuel out to the government--or both). Uribe and the Bushites have done nothing but try to sabotage these negotiations, and Uribe's initial invitation to Chavez to try to negotiate hostage releases was more than likely a trap for Chavez (which Chavez evaded). (See Rumsfeld's first paragraph.*)

That this child has been reunited with his mother is no credit to Uribe or his puppetmasters in Washington. The hostages are just pawns in their war games, and in particular in Rumsfeld's plan to instigate Oil War II in South America*. This is not to excuse FARC for separating mother and child in the first place (though his surreptitious placement in a foster care home in Bogota was probably to insure his safety and welfare--jungle war camps, and guerrilla forces under frequent attack, and often on the move, being the only alternative, from FARC's point of view). According to Amnesty International**, the Colombian government security forces and their rightwing paramilitary associates have so far exceeded FARC (92% to 2%) in violence against non-combatants (such as union leaders) that FARC's activities really must be understood in that light. In Colombia, the government and its paramilitaries have murdered thousands of union leaders, peasant farmers, political leftists, human rights workers and journalists. They simply do not permit normal democratic activity to occur. So what can people who see their leaders and their brothers and sisters murdered for innocent activities--often with horrible torture--do? Some have taken to the jungle as an armed force, and have been fighting this dreadful fascist government for 30 years. Others have courageously continued to try to create civil democracy, at risk of their lives. This is the story that our war profiteering corporate news monopolies and their sources--the Bush CIA and local fascists--don't tell you, and have actively suppressed: why FARC exists. There is no such leftist guerrilla army in countries that have held transparent elections (for instance, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, also Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile--with Venezuela exceeding them all for transparency and fairness).

In a free and open society, in a democracy where people can organize, speak out and vote, without fear of government-sponsored rightwing death squads killing them, and also without fear of corporate-controlled voting machines stealing their votes, and in a society that consequently seeks social justice, because it is ruled by the majority, that is, in a county in which the people are able to correct the course of the ship of state when it goes awry, there is no need for violent conflict, and lawless elements who engage in it (such as the rightwing coup plotters in Venezuela and Bolivia, and those in Colombia plotting against their democratic neighbors) deserve to be caught and punished. Not funded with billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars from the Bush Junta--as is the case with the lawless government of Colombia.

I don't condone these 2% of violent incidents that FARC has apparently committed, even if they were somewhat justifiable (or at least understandable) frontier justice (--AI states that FARC was not likely targeting innocents, but rather people who were colluding with the rightwing death squads). Nor, of course, do I condone kidnapping. But that really is not the issue in a 30 year civil war. The issue is how to stop it. And with the government committing 92% of the murders of innocent parties, the way to stop it is for the U.S. to withdraw all forces and funds, now--and let the good governments of South America broker a peace. We are feeding this war, as we did in Vietnam, and that is where it is heading--to mass U.S. intervention and slaughter, in this case on behalf of Occidental Petroleum, Exxon Mobile, the World Bank and associated global corporate predators.

Read Donald Rumsfeld's PNAC II: South America*, in the Washington Post, published the very weekend that the first hostage release negotiated by Chavez (the bigger one) was to occur (12/1/07), and tell me how I have read this wrong. Chavez wants peace in Colombia--as do all good people--and Rumsfeld & Co. are desperate to prevent peace from being negotiated, and are quite anxious to widen this war while Bush is still in office.

------------------

**AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL REPORT

"...cases in which clear evidence of responsibility is available indicates that in 2005 around 49 per cent of human rights abuses against trade unionists were committed by paramilitaries and some 43 per cent directly by the security forces. Just over 2 per cent were attributable to guerrilla forces (primarily the FARC and ELN) and just over 4 per cent to criminally-motivated actions."

http://www.amnesty.org/en/alfresco_asset/26e626d7-a2c0-11dc-8d74-6f45f39984e5/amr230012007en.html

-------------------

*"The Smart Way to Beat Tyrants Like Chávez," by Donald Rumsfeld, Washington Post, 12/1/07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/30/AR2007113001800.html
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