Mexican Student Survivor Is Colombia’s Latest Public Enemy

[Judi Lynn]

Mexican Student Survivor Is Colombia’s Latest Public Enemy
April 19, 2008 By Supriyo Chatterjee

For Lucia Morett, the sole survivor of Colombia's March 1 attack on a guerrilla encampment in Ecuador, the journey back home is fraught with dangers and will have to be staged through a period of exile in Nicaragua, closer to her native Mexico but further from Colombia and, perhaps, a little safer. President Daniel Ortega has offered her exile and protection in Nicaragua while she weighs up if and when she can return to Mexico.

Lucia had every reason to fear for her life in Quito. As Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa found out, the Colombians and the gringos have so thoroughly infiltrated his country's police and military intelligence services that these no longer answer to his government in any real sense. It would not have been past Colombia to kidnap Lucia through its proxies in Ecuador and throw her in prison for decades or simply eliminate her.

Fears for her safety have grown since the Colombian President, Alvaro Uribe's intemperate language against Lucia and four of her compatriots who died in the camp. In his recent visit to Cancun as part of the World Economic Forum's Latin America summit, Uribe provoked a storm by denouncing the dead Mexican students as terrorists, guerrilla accomplices, criminals and drug dealers and refusing compensation for their deaths. Uribe's outburst managed to alienate even those Mexicans who were not too happy about Lucia and her dead compatriots' presence in the FARC camp, even if they were there as social researchers.

For a country four of whose nationals were killed in violation of international law, the official Mexican response has been tepid at best. Complicity with Colombia is perhaps a better description of President Felipe Calderon's approach, helped by the support of the mainstream media. He grudgingly expresses sorrow for the deaths but refuses to blame his "good friend" Uribe while his equally supine foreign secretary thanks the Colombian leader for "understanding" Calderon's compulsions of having to make sympathetic noises.

Neither has the Mexican establishment ruled out charging Lucia with terrorism if she returns to Mexico and the ambiguity is perhaps their way of keeping her in exile. Not that she will be free from danger in Mexico. Colombian intelligence and its drug-dealing, paramilitary assets have a presence in the country and Bogota has admitted to spying on presumed Colombian guerrilla sympathisers in the past without informing the hosts, for which again Calderon's government never rebuked the Uribe regime. Protests in Mexico against Uribe's propaganda exercise have come from the UNAM national university, students and legislators of the Opposition PRD who demanded that the Colombian President be declared persona non grata.

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