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(Part One)
The empire is not resigning itself to being the
only loser at the Rio Group meeting held in
Santo Domingo on March 7th. It wants
to set up the bloody mess once more. It is not
difficult to demonstrate it.
On Tuesday March 11th, El Nuevo Herald,
a paper that is extremely hostile to Cuba and
destined to chart guidelines in Latin America,
under the title of “A Cuban is the Alleged
Leader of the FARC in Mexico”, signed by one of
its writers born in our country, states:
“A Cuban engineer living in Mexico was
identified by intelligence authorities as the
alleged leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia (FARC) support group on Mexican
territory.
“The intelligence report –quoted by the
newspapers El Universal and The Wall
Street Journal– indicates Mario Dagoberto
Díaz Orgaz, 48 years old, to be the main suspect
as organizer of the expedition of a group of
Mexican students to a FARC camp in Ecuador,
attacked by Colombian forces on March 1.
“Mexican agents say they photographed Díaz Orgaz
in Quito on March 5th at 6:25 p.m.,
while he was prowling around the Military
Hospital where Lucía Andrea Morett Álvarez, a
survivor of the armed operation, was being held.
“The young woman, known as ‘Alicia’ in the rebel
ranks, had traveled from Mexico to Havana on
January 10, and from there to Quito. Her return
to Mexico was scheduled for Tuesday.
“The report on Díaz Orgaz also presents him as
the financial operator of the FARC in Mexico…”
“The Cuban engineer had been found in Ecuador by
Mexican intelligence services after surviving
the military attack on the FARC camp.
“Last night, the El Nuevo Herald
telephoned a close friend of his in the city of
Queretaro, where Díaz Orgaz lives and works as a
researcher in the Engineering and Industrial
Development Center attached to the National
Science and Technology Council of the Mexican
government…
“In order to avoid being harassed by the press,
Díaz Orgaz has been at a friends’ house since
Monday.
“The source said that the Cuban engineer can
prove that the trip to Ecuador attributed to him
is false, since on the date that Mexican
intelligence has him located in the vicinity of
the Military Hospital in Quito, he was in the
city of Villa Hermosa, capital of the state of
Tabasco, with a group of colleagues from the
Engineering and Industrial Development Center.’
“Díaz Orgaz is originally from the town of
Bejucal, in La Habana Province, where he was
born on January 15, 1960. According to
information in the hands of the Mexican federal
government, Díaz Orgaz studied mechanical
engineering at the Vladimir Polytechnical
Institute, 112 miles from Moscow, and later he
took several specialization courses in
Metrology…”
“He would have played a key role in the
financial support given to FARC supporters at
the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM),
one of the largest and most prestigious academic
centers in Latin America…”
“Revelations in the case are coming up a few
days prior to the visit of the Mexican Foreign
Minister Patricia Espinosa to Havana, motivated
by a policy to resume relations between the two
countries.
“Last February, the Colombian army had captured
the Cuban doctor Emilio Muñoz Franco in Palmira,
department of Valle del Cauca. This optometrist
had been mentioned as a keystone in the FARC
logistical support network.
“Muñoz Franco had taken Cuban medical students
as trainees to the FARC camps between 2000 and
2001.
“The Colombian authorities consider that there
is enough evidence to accuse him of being a
foreigner associated with the guerrillas. His
neighbors in Palmira claim that they have never
seen him involved in anything shocking.”
The stupid intent of mixing Cubans into the
matter is very clear, besides the lie about the
impossible presence of our students of Medicine
in that faraway Colombian jungle. Whenever a
Cuban engineer or doctor abandons his country it
is someone who is walking away with the
knowledge that our people have paid for with
great sacrifice. Exactly on the 13th of this
month, 177 members of the Medical Brigade and 35
teachers have returned after fulfilling their
sacred mission in East Timor for two years.
I myself bid them farewell when they left.
In East Timor, where genocide was committed
before independence, internal conflicts arose
supported by Australia, a United States ally,
who took over the natural gas fields in the
proximity of the Timor coastline. Under no
circumstances did the Cuban doctors abandon
their patients who were all inhabitants of that
small nation. The personnel replacing them have
remained there. These are indeed Cuban doctors
and graduates, of which there are thousands, the
same ones which the empire tries to bribe away
making unmentionable efforts, but to very little
effect.
No other country in the western hemisphere or in
the world has such wealth. Today we are
training hundreds of young people from East
Timor in our medical schools. The doctors who
have just returned set an example of what
conscience can do.
The quoted article from El Nuevo Herald
is also a clear intent to justify the fact that
among the victims there were young Mexicans who
were meeting with Reyes, as a matter of
curiosity or for whatever other reason, but they
hadn’t planted bombs nor did they deserve to be
murdered by Yankee bombs while they were in
their beds at dawn.
El Mercurio
of Chile, under the title “Deserter Warns that
the Leader of the FARC could be Assassinated”,
writes the following, in the words of Pedro
Pablo Montoya, former FARC guerrilla:
“The guerrilla deserter who last week killed
José Juvenal Velandia, a.k.a. ‘Iván Ríos’,
member of the top FARC leadership, yesterday
pointed out that the rebels in the middle and
lower ranks might assassinate their leaders,
among them the top leader of the Colombian
guerrilla group Pedro Antonio Marín, alias
‘Manuel Marulanda Vélez’ or ‘Tirofijo’ (Sharpshot).
Pedro Pablo Montoya, a.k.a. ‘Rojas’, who since
last Thursday is under Army protection after
surrendering with two other FARC members after
having assassinated ‘Ríos’, said in an interview
to the Bogota paper El Tiempo that the
non-ranking rebels are demoralized and without
incentives due to the ‘bad treatment’ they are
receiving from the guerrilla leaders…!
“After killing his leader, ‘Rojas’ chopped off
the man’s right hand and presented himself to
the soldiers who had surrounded the rebel unit
with the dead man’s identification papers and
his laptop computer.
“In statements to Radio Caracol, ‘Rojas’ said
that the FARC doesn’t want to liberate former
candidate Ingrid Betancourt. Not even for “the
big guy” --they wouldn’t free her for any
reason. Doña Yolanda, mother of Ms. Betancourt,
should know this…”
The rebel said that he is expecting to be paid a
juicy bounty that was offered by the Colombian
government, equivalent to 2.6 million dollars,
in exchange for information about the insurgent
commanders, while lawyers are debating whether
or not he should receive the booty. Last night
‘Rojas’ received backing, since the Attorney
General of Colombia, Mario Iguarán, indicated
that ‘in principle, the Attorney General’s
Office wouldn‘t press charges for the murder of
Iván Ríos, and with that the way would be
cleared for him to receive the bounty’.”
For its part, The Washington Post, a
well-informed paper on the prevailing mood in
Washington, last March 10th published an article
titled “The FARC’s Guardian Angel”, signed by
Jackson Diehl, where he points out:
“Latin American nations and the Bush
administration are just beginning to consider a
far more serious and potentially explosive
question: What to do about the revelation that
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez forged a
strategic alliance with the FARC aimed at
Colombia's democratic government.
“…but in their totality, the hundreds of pages
of documents so far made public by Colombia
paint an even more chilling picture…”
“All this is laid out in a series of three
e-mails sent in February to the FARC’s top
leaders by Iván Márquez and Rodrigo Granda,
envoys who held a series of secret meetings with
Chávez…”
“Assuming these documents are authentic –and
it’s hard to believe that the cerebral and
calculating Uribe would knowingly hand over
forgeries to the world media and the
Organization of American States– both the Bush
administration and Latin American governments
will have fateful decisions to make about Chávez.
His reported actions are, first of all, a
violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution
1373, passed on September 2001…”
The Washington Post starts from the premise that only Uribe could invent or deliver that
document to the United States government and
didn’t even consider any other possibility for
the complicated situation. However, it is known
that since Thursday the 13th, Chávez called
Uribe by phone and agreed with him to an
exchange of visits between the two presidents
and the normalization of trade exchange
relations that so benefit both their peoples.
Chavez, for his part, is not giving up on his
search for peace between the brotherly peoples
of Latin America.
More surprising is the very speech made by Bush
on March 12th and the speedy dispatching of the
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Brazil
and Chile, a subject about which the wire
agencies are writing reams and reams:
“BRASILIA, March 13, 2008 (AFP) – The U.S.
Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, and the
Brazilian Racial Integration Minister, Edson
Santos, signed an agreement this Thursday in
Brasilia to launch a joint action plan ‘for the
elimination of racial discrimination’.
“The text of the agreement emphasizes that
Brazil and the United States share the
characteristic of being 'multi-ethnic and
multi-racial democratic societies’.”
I read and I re-read these words. I think it is
the opposite of what is really happening in the
United States, while I am choosing dispatches
and I write. It’s amazing!
I shall continue tomorrow.
Fidel Castro Ruz
March 15, 2008
5:17 p.m.
Part 2 |
