Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #491 | June 27 1999Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York
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Weekly News Update on the AmericasIssue #491 | June 27 1999Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York CSN Home | WNU Home | This Month's News |
2. Wall Street Chief Meets With Colombian Rebels
3. Colombian Army Seems to Back Paramilitaries Against Rebels
9. Europeans and Latin America Hold Trade Summit
10. Socialist Summit Debates "Humanitarian Intervention"
Richard Grasso, president of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), flew into southern Colombia on June 26 where he met for an hour and a half with spokesperson Raul Reyes of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country's largest leftist rebel group. Grasso was accompanied by Finance Minister Juan Camilo Restrepo and presidential commissioner for peace Victor Ricardo. The Argentine daily Clarin reported that Grasso was also accompanied by NYSE vice president Alain Murban and adviser James Esposito. The meeting took place inside the rebel-controlled peace zone in an area near the village of La Machacha, in southern Caqueta department. Grasso's presence in Colombia was kept secret until June 26; he was expected to return to New York on June 27. Local media said Grasso had asked to meet a representative of the FARC's high command to discuss foreign investment and the future role of US businesses in Colombia.
The conversation with Reyes focused on topics related to the upcoming peace talks, including the role of multinational corporations in the Colombian economy. The state-run news agency ANCOL quoted Grasso as having stressed the importance of negotiations between the government and FARC. Formal talks are set to begin July 7 with a 12-point agenda worked out in prior discussions.
At an improvised press conference in San Vicente del Caguan, at which Restrepo acted as translator, Grasso said he had come to Colombia to bring a message of cooperation from US financial circles, who view with great interest the peace process being promoted by President Andres Pastrana Arango. Grasso said the meeting with Reyes basically dealt with economic issues, and that the exchange of opinions was very interesting. He said he explained to Reyes how some 200 million North Americans participate in one way or another in the stock market, and how these markets could prove useful to businesses in places like Colombia, since they could put their shares on the market to get capital for social and economic development.
Citing sources in Bogota, Clarin reports that Grasso's visit was organized by the Colombian government, in particular by Colombian ambassador to the US Luis Alberto Moreno, said to be a close personal friend of Grasso. According to these sources, the Pastrana administration's interest is to show the world--and particularly business executives--that the peace process is moving along. Also of concern to the government is the risk rating that Moodys is about to assign Colombia, which would put Colombia among those countries with "negative perspectives" for growth. In recent years Colombia's growth rate has been around 3% of the annual GDP; this year it will barely hit 0%. [ABC News 6/26/99 from Reuters; CNN en Espanol 6/26/99; El Nuevo Herald (Miami) 6/26/99 from AP; Clarin 6/27/99]
[The Colombian peso fell 2% against the US dollar June 22-23, leading to fears that the government may be forced to devalue the currency. The first quarter of 1999 saw a 4.8% decline in the economy, the largest decline since the government started issuing quarterly figures in 1977. Unemployment is at a record 19%. The banking sector is in its worst crisis since 1982, and the government might have to spend as much as 10% of the gross domestic product (GDP) to restructure the sector. A team from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) arrived on June 21 to review the situation, although Finance Minister Restrepo insists that Colombia doesn't need a formal agreement with the IMF. [Financial Times (London) 6/22/99, 6/25/99]]
ANCOL reported that Grasso extended a personal invitation to leaders of the FARC--which is considered a "terrorist" organization by the US State Department--to visit Wall Street as soon as possible. "I invite members of the FARC to visit the New York Stock Exchange so that they can get to know the market personally," Grasso was quoted as saying. "I truly hope that they can do this," he added. [ABC News 6/26/99 from Reuters]
In early June, US congressional representative William Delahunt (D-MA) also traveled to Colombia and met with FARC spokesperson Reyes. [ENH 6/26/99 from AP]
Meanwhile, the Colombian government appears to be cracking down on the country's second-largest leftist rebel force, the National Liberation Army (ELN). On June 21, Attorney General Alfonso Gomez Mendez ordered the arrest of top ELN commander Nicolas Rodriguez and his second- and third-in-command, Erlington Chamorro and Pablo Beltran, on charges of murder, kidnapping and extortion. The ELN is still holding some 63 hostages from three dramatic high-profile kidnapping operations over the past few months [see Update #489]. [Miami Herald 6/22/99]
Some 30,000 people--including kidnap victims previously freed by the ELN and relatives of others still being held--marched on June 20 in the city of Bucaramanga to demand and end to kidnappings and the release of all people abducted by armed groups. Several hundred people marched the same day in Cali to protest the kidnappings. [La Republica (Lima, Peru) 6/21/99 from AFP]
On June 22 and 23, Colombian army helicopters dropped 46 of its troops into an area of Cordoba department to fight the FARC, which had some 500 troops in the area. At least 35 soldiers were killed, and another five are believed to have been captured. Gen. Jorge Enrique Mora Rangel said 19 rebels were killed in the clash; the army claimed on June 24 that it had retaken control of the zone. Another army officer, Gen. Nestor Ramirez, said on June 23 that local army commanders may have miscalculated when they deployed troops directly into the jungle area occupied by the rebels.
A statement from the FARC's propaganda arm on the Internet declared that the army "suffered one of its worst military defeats." The FARC statement maintained that the army column was deployed to help rightwing paramilitary forces fend off a FARC offensive. It said the army troops serve as "saviors of the so- called paramilitaries." The army operation took place after some 500 FARC troops attacked four villages near Nudo de Paramillo, the stronghold of rightwing paramilitary chief Carlos Castano and his United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). The FARC killed eight campesinos they accused of collaborating with rightwing paramilitaries; their attack followed a four-day killing spree by paramilitaries in which 28 people were killed at four different locations across Colombia. [CNN en Espanol 6/22/99 with info from Reuters, AFP; ENH 6/25/99 from AFP; MH 6/25/99]
"The apparent fact that the army always seems to show up when the FARC or other armed opposition group is engaged in fighting with the paramilitaries... seems to once again highlight the close nature of the relationship between the Colombian security forces and the paramilitaries," noted Carlos Salinas, head of the Americas section of Amnesty International, in a telephone interview with Reuters. [Reuters 6/25/99]
Meanwhile, some 150 FARC troops attacked a federal prison in southern Colombia early on June 25 with explosives and automatic weapons, blasting holes in the walls, overwhelming the jail's 20 guards and freeing at least 15 comrades, authorities said. One inmate was killed and one guard injured in the predawn attack outside Neiva, the capital of Huila department, said national prisons spokesperson Rocio Devia. [MH 6/26/99]
Heads of state from the 15 countries in the European Union (EU) and 33 Latin American and Caribbean countries are scheduled to meet in Rio de Janeiro on June 28 and 29 in the first summit of the two regions. Helio Jaguaribe of Rio's Institute for Political and Social Studies says that the summit itself will be "largely rhetorical." The "real business," he says, will be the discussion of possible negotiations between the EU and Mercosur, a trading bloc made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay (Bolivia and Chile are associate members). Mercosur is the third largest trade group in the world and the EU is the second largest; the largest is the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which is composed of Canada, Mexico and the US. Western Hemisphere countries are slated to form one huge Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) by 2005, a plan pushed by the US, but the Mercosur countries have been playing the EU and the US off against each other for trade concessions [see Update #421]. [New York Times 6/26/99]
Local workers in Brazil's National Health Foundation (FNS) said they planned to protest on June 28 and 29 at Rio's Museum of Modern Art, where the summit will be held. About a thousand FNS preventive care workers demonstrated at the museum in the middle of the preceding week to protest what they said were government plans to lay off 6,000 employees; the workers charge that this will lead to an increase in cases of dengue, cholera, yellow fever, leptospirosis and other diseases. [La Republica (Lima) 6/26/99 from EFE] Some 8,000 police will provide security for the summit, and beggars are being cleared from the streets--but more discreetly than during the 1992 Rio summit on the environment, when security was provided by 35,000 soldiers and police agents backed with tanks. [CNN en Espanol 6/24/99, some from AP]
Some European officials arrived in South America early to attend a summit in Buenos Aires June 25-26 of the 139 parties in or connected to the Socialist International (SI). Thirteen of the 15 EU countries are now governed by social democratic parties or center-left coalitions in the SI, and three center-left candidates have a shot at winning in presidential elections in South America this year. Ricardo Lagos (Concertation of Democratic Parties) is a frontrunner in Chile's Dec. 12 presidential election; Fernando de la Rua (Alliance) is leading slightly in the campaign for Argentina's Oct. 24 vote; and Tabare Vazquez (Broad Front) is considered a possibility for Uruguay's Oct. 31 election. [El Nuevo Herald 6/26/99 from AFP; CNN en Espanol 6/23/99, some from Reuters]
On June 27 the summit adopted a statement, the "Consensus of Buenos Aires," saying unregulated markets were "a principal factor in the widening of the gap between rich and poor" and emphasizing "the fundamental role of the United Nations (UN) in the regulation of world conflicts." Behind the statement were strong disagreements between the Europeans and the representatives of the developing world. Lagos, De la Rua and Vazquez all politely refused to endorse British and German calls for a "Third Way" between socialism and capitalism. [Clarin 6/27/99; ENH 6/26/99 from AFP]
Many Latin American participants objected strongly to the Europeans' participation in the US-led 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in the spring; there was little support for suggestions from SI president and former French prime minister Pierre Mauroy and Italian prime minister and former Communist Massimo D'Alema that the UN Charter should be amended to permit "humanitarian interventions" into internal conflicts of sovereign states. "I think in our region we ought to take into consideration the risks implied in the intervention of a very powerful force against a little country...without the UN being the one to make the decision," various Latin American political leaders told the Buenos Aires daily Clarin, off the record. "What happens if in particular conflicts of interest NATO [the North Atlantic Treaty Organization] and the United States decide to intervene militarily and unilaterally in Latin America?" [Clarin 6/27/99]
On June 25 representatives of Argentina's Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo delivered a letter to Mauroy repudiating him for his stand on the NATO war. The organization--made up of women whose children were killed by the military government during the 1976- 1983 "dirty war"--denounced "all those who like you promote themselves as socialists before they're in the government, and later depend entirely on the most savage capitalism that is bringing hunger and misery to the countries of the Third World)... Don't lie to us any more, calling yourselves socialists." [LR (Lima) 6/26/99 from AFP]
Former Spanish prime minister Felipe Gonzalez paid a 24-visit to Chile on June 23 before attending the SI summit; he is currently president of the SI's Global Progress Commission. He told the Chilean media that actions to have Great Britain release former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet are "respectable." Pinochet has been held in England since October on a Spanish extradition request for crimes against humanity. [El Diario-La Prensa (NY) 6/24/99 from AP] On June 24 Gonzalez explained that he himself wouldn't try to intervene in the case. "I'm not a useful channel," he said. [ENH 6/25/99 from Reuters, AP, EFE, AFP]