Simón, Sonia and the Prisoner exchange

courtesy:www.farcep.org
By: Iván Márquez / Member of the Secretariat of FARC-EP


Comandante Iván MárquezJudge Roice Lamberth, who just changed to 25 million dollars the exemplary punishment he had to give as judgement against the United States bananera Chiquita Brand which has financed the paramilitary groups authors of appalling massacres in Colombia, is the same who two months ago condemned the guerrilla member of the FARC Simón Trinidad by means of fraudulent evidence and unprecedented pressures to the jury, thus confirming all the venality and rotting that distinguishes the North American "justice".

We cannot call Justice a system that condemns a man, a revolutionary, a thorough Bolivarian, without any proofs, only to punish or to send a despicable blackmail signal to a guerrilla organization which is not going to back down in its persistence to search with the people and its political and social organizations for the new sovereign, democratic Colombia, as Bolivar wanted it, with social justice and peace.

Simón and Sonia have been denied the universal right to legal defence. All the witnesses taken from Bogotá to recite lies against them in the empire courts are agents of the Colombian army; "snitches" or informants paid by the State to lie, sent in waves of 20 and 30. All of them have been defeated by the ideas and convictions of Simón, who has not been allowed to have supporting witnesses, and by the important role of his appointed counsels.

The first judge of the case, Tom Hogan, had to resign for authorizing members of the Office of the public prosecutor to attempt at the margin of the legal customs, to induce an adverse decision against Simón. He left for being immoral and for his lack of ethics.

The trials being conducted against Simón and Sonia in the United States are a sham from beginning to end. Both were taken away from the country circumventing with set-ups by the Colombian Office of the public prosecutor, the army and Uribe himself, the constitutional prohibition to extradite nationals for political reasons. It was more important for the State to close the doors and throw away the keys to the exchange than the legal sovereignty of the country.

Those trials are vitiated and should entail nullity because it is evident that Simón and Sonia are not what is portrayed of them by those who defraud public opinion in Bogotá and Washington. They are not condemning the campesina guerrilla or the insurgent spokesman in the peace dialogues with the State. They are condemning a military political organization, to punish its legitimate resistance to the oppression and to press for the liberation of three North Americans captured in Colombia as they engaged in technical intelligence missions against the FARC, by orders of the South Command.

The agent of the FBI, Alex Barbeito, confessed the latter to Simón when taking him extradited to the United States; and recently public prosecutor Ken Kohl has reaffirmed this somehow when offering reduced sentences to both guerrilla members in exchange for the liberation of Keith Stansell, Mark Gonsalves and Thomas Howes. They decided on the most winding route when the easiest way, the agreement for the exchange, has been suggested by FARC since before the year 2000. This is about the exchange of complete packages of prisoners in control of the contending parts.

It is evident that the sentences given by federal judges Lamberth and Robertson against Simón and Sonia will necessarily affect in the desired speedy solution to the case of the three United States military captive in the mountains. That is where Uribe’s blackmail leaded to with the extradition of the guerrillas. Today he cannot wash his hands clean as Pilatos adducing that Simón and Sonia have been left out of the exchange because now they depend on Washington’s institutions.

While FARC has given a respectful and dignified treatment to the three North Americans, Simón is kept chained and isolated in a cell of three meters of length by one and a half meter of width and Sonia is confined in punishment pits.

It is necessary to reiterate that the United States spies were legitimately captured, as they were involved in a war action in the middle of an armed conflict, in an act of hostility against the FARC, when the airplane they were flying in was shoot down in the jungles of Caquetá. The seized intelligence papers in which exact distances are indicated between guerrilla structures, attest this assertion.

The end of the captivity of war prisoners imposes the good sense that is needed for the negotiation of the agreement and the reduction to zero of the risks entailed by a military rescue by blood and fire.

The only factors left to be removed are Uribe’s irremovable conditions of no to the territorial clearing to negotiate the exchange and that absurd pretention that the eventually released guerrillas do not return to the mountains. We are sure that the world understands that in order for the exchange to be realized there must be a give and receive. An action in which one of the parts does not receive its members cannot be called exchange.

If the exchange has not been achieved and if it has continued to cause suffering, it has been due to the stubborn intransigency and the blindness of the President. It seems that the order from Bush would be the only thing needed for Uribe to consent to the national and international outcry for the exchange. Ex- president Lopez Michelsen said days before dying, that the problem is that Uribe is no looking for a solution, but for victory.

The case is that with the exchange we will all gain. The prisoners will return to those who wait for them and the perspective of a negotiated solution to the social and armed conflict that Colombia has experienced for more than 40 years will also return.

At heart we all want the success of the important mediation of President Chávez to make this possible