Newsreal Looks at the World: this Week, Columbia

Luis Francisco Cuellar, another victim of Marxism 

 

For those needing constant reminders as to how evil Marxism truly is, the latest act of brutality committed by members of the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia, known by its Spanish acronym FARC, offers another poignant example of the true nature of Marxism.

Disguised as security forces, FARC members pulled up outside the house of Luis Francisco Cuellar, a provincial governor, killed his police guard and blew the door off its hinges. They took the 69-year-old lawmaker, in his pajamas and bare feet, to a waiting pickup truck and sped away.

With security forces in pursuit, they crashed the vehicle and set it on fire. Heading for the dense jungle with their captive (who had just celebrated his birthday), they were losing ground to their pursuers, for their hostage could not keep up due to his bad knees. With police closing in, they did what comes natural to Marxists—they savagely slit Cuellar’s throat (nearly severing his head), and made their escape.

A shocked Manuel Uribe, Columbia’s President, described the incident:

As law enforcement was in hot pursuit, the terrorists, most likely to avoid firing shots, went ahead and slit the governor’s throat. The cowards slit his throat.

Governments, the United Nations, and activist groups on all sides of the political spectrum condemned the killing. Amnesty International, the Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) and dozens of other organizations all expressed their horror and issued condemnations.

“With this savage crime,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco at the Washington-based Human Rights Watch, “the FARC is once again showing its ruthlessness and complete disregard for the laws of war and the well-being of civilians.”

The FARC’s actions should not be a surprise to anyone.

Latin America’s oldest and largest Marxist terror group, they derive vast sums of income from drug dealing, assassinations, arms smuggling and kidnapping. They are currently holding dozens of hostages in the Columbian jungle. The FARC is responsible for nearly 3000 kidnappings per year, including the kidnapping of former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, who spent a staggering 2,321 days as a hostage before the Columbian government duped a local commander into handing her and 15 other high-profile hostages to a phony rebel group (Betancourt, incidentally, was nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, but lost to Barack Obama, who had shown the world his greatness in a mere 14 days as president).

The FARC has links to neighboring socialist states, and documents captured in a Columbian raid on a FARC camp in Ecuador last year proved a direct link between the terror group and the governments of Venezuela and Ecuador. Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, stooge of Venezuela’s soon-to-be-President-for-life Hugo Chavez, has been actively supporting the FARC, as witnessed by numerous letters and documents seized in the raid.

Columbia’s President Uribe has been a good ally and friend of the United States. He is a staunch anti-communist, whose government has made huge advances in battling a ruthless Marxist insurgency supported by the despotic Marxist rulers of neighboring states. Until the FARC is destroyed, he deserves our undivided support.