The election of the candidate of hope and change as president of the most powerful nation on Earth (for now, whether we like it or not) was celebrated all over the world, from Kenya (where his father was born) to Japan (where there’s a city named Obama). In Colombia, of course, black people felt identified with Barack Obama and celebrated his win their way, as this clip from 7 p.m. Noticias Caracol newscast shows:

For those of you who don’t understand Spanish, this is a little summary:

• First, people from San Basilio de Palenque (located in Bolívar, northern Colombia, declared by UNESCO Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity) appear, celebrating Obama’s win. One of the members of the community says that all black people are family, no matter if Obama is African, because they all are black. People from this village preserve the traditions of their African ancestors to this day.
• Later, the former mayor of Turbaco, a small town also in Bolívar, created a local Obama chapter and organized a "symbolic" election on 4 November. The results (from a longer clip broadcast earlier by the same network) were as follows: void votes, 10; blank votes: 10; John McCain: 47; Barack Obama: 1,128 votes. The former mayor wants to call Obama’s attention on Colombia.
• Now we go to Nueva Colombia, a suburb in Barranquilla, a city near the Caribbean coast. Its school suspended temporarily its activities to celebrate with music Obama’s win. One of the community leaders speaks to the children about the US president-elect saying "he was a poor man like us."
• After that we see some people in Cali, Colombia’s second largest city by population, walking and cheering for Obama. In the longer clip linked above, we see two businessmen from this city who decided to give their employees a free day to celebrate Obama’s win.
• Finally, we go to Puerto Tejada, Cauca (southwestern Colombia, near the Pacific coast), where its inhabitants also celebrated this historic moment.

In Colombia, around 21% of population is from African descent, but they are heavily discriminated. Current Minister of Culture, Paula Moreno Zapata, was allegedly appointed there by President Uribe in order to satisfy some requirements from African-American Democrat congresspeople for the approval of a Free Trade Agreement between Colombia and the United States. A recently published book claims Colombia had a black president during six months in 1861: Bolívar State governor Juan José Nieto, from the Liberal Party, during the war that overthrew conservative president Mariano Ospina Rodríguez (at the time, Colombia was a federal state known as Granadine Confederation). Nieto, nevertheless, is not officially recognized as president of Colombia, and the few portraits known show him as a white man.

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Marulanda died and Colombia starts to get used to it. After the euphoria of the Uribista hawks who, headed by Interior Minister Holguín, came out to preach the enemy’s total extermination, everything will return to normal. The FARC are not over, and peace is not so close either.

The first thing should be realized is that Marulanda died because he was old. That simple. To claim victories or fabricating bombings lets a lot to be desired. He simply died because he was sick of the prostrate and it was his time now. That usually happens when you’re pretty old (78 years-old) and don’t have President López Michelsen’s genes to last until 93.

It does not make any sense to invent a telenovela about Cano. Deducting that his election is a victory of the political wing over the military wing shows crass ignorance. Alfonso Cano was chosen because of his seniority (31 years in the FARC), which is a Secretariat’s rule. With Reyes dead, Cano was the third in the row. Expecting something else is wishful thinking.

Now, it is curious the crossword puzzle some people are inventing, as the one stating that Marulanda was the one keeping the organization united and his death will irremediably divide it. Marulanda was important, of course. He was a symbol. But FARC have never worked around messianic men.

Its collegiate direction and the decisions taken by consensus are its advantage. And though it is true that Cano does not have Marulanda’s influence, the Secretariat brings itself together around him and when it comes to describe his position, you could use the British Prime Minister simile: first among equals.

Peace is another part of the telenovela. Cano will not make things easy because he studied anthropology, comes from an urban background or had become FARC’s ideologue after Jacobo Arenas’s death. He will negotiate as far as he can achieve some advantages for his, postrated and anything you want, but still important and dangerous organization.

Preaching his “softness” as a peace hope is far from reality. Cano is the only Secretariat’s member so far to be sentenced by Colombian justice for the murder of 40 of his own men, after torturing them, because of “fouls” as eating too much. The bodies were found in 11 common graves, in La Uribe municipality’s La Gaucha vereda, between March and April 1991.

As for his commitment with the truth, several doubts can be cast. The episode of the deputies’ death is one of them. Whereas Timochenko supported the FARC to assume its responsibility toward the country, Cano wanted to disguise it by proposing to attract military units to the area, in order to create a confusion enough to blame them.

His political bias does not call into optimism. He is convinced that FARC should go international. His leading role in the creation and consolidation of the so-called Coordinadora Continental Bolivariana (Bolivarian Continental Coordinating Board, CCB), whose second congress held last February in Caracas summoned 800 delegates from all over Latin America, should be a call to reflection.

The CCB movements are all convinced that the only way to seize power is through the arms. And if Cano assumes a pragmatic attitude, for example, releasing the kidnapped, there is the uncertainty that he will do that to open some political spaces for peace or just to improve FARC’s battered image.

Perhaps having suffered the failures of the peace conversations during Belisario Betancourt and César Gaviria administrations, and the extermination of the Patriotic Union, a political party which sought to open spaces for FARC’s reintegration to civil life, may have influenced his mood.

Is armed way a FARC’s “fixed” position? Does Uribe administration really want peace? It is up to the answers to thse questions the duration of the conflict, because peace cannot be built in one day. It is a long, complex process which begins by establishing confidence between the parties and drops “exterminations”, “combinations of way of struggle” or hidden cards behind the table.

Peace does not need warriors but statesmen. Will FARC Secretariat and President Uribe this willingness?

This article was originally published 29 May 2008 on equinoXio. Translated by Carlos Raúl van der Weyden Velásquez

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This time was for real, and on a bed. In the past, the newspapers’ headlines held a wake for him 18 times, in step to military prayers, but he ran away every one of them. From Marquetalia to Venezuela, this man with sallow look, who Pastrana made Caguán’s Star, always mocked death.

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Here it comes again. Venezuela-Colombia relationships enter a limbo which gets them closer to hell, this time because of the INTERPOL report claiming the absence of manipulation on the laptops seized at the camp where FARC’ second top chief aka Raúl Reyes was killed in March.

Hugo Chávez is right on this issue, excluding of course his adjectives. What happened today was indeed a show. Besides if the INTERPOL report is reliable, because it seems it is indeed, there is no reason to set up such a platform to make it public, knowing the effects it would cause and, furthermore, to prepare the climate by leaking information from the laptops’ content to the mass media, going as far as let know, likewise, excerpts from the INTERPOL’s report itself, since the day before.

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INTERPOL has confirmed it: the files and contents of the three laptops seized in FARC strongman Raúl Reyes’s camp were not modified, nor adultered or deleted by the Colombian authorities.

This is the second blow against FARC and its allies in a little more than two months, because INTERPOL’s certification implies an independent warranty that the proofs found at the Ecuadorian camp were not contaminated. If the Colombian government had not taken the decision to ask an audit on the devices and their content, the opposition -specially the people mentioned in the Reyes dossier- would be screaming that Uribe and his "thugs" manipulated the information to start a persecution on his political opponents, for sure.

Another crucial point is that Ronald Kenneth Noble, INTERPOL’s Secretary-General, stated that the laptops belonged to FARC and specifically to Raúl Reyes. But, how can INTERPOL guarantee that the terrorist owned the laptops and the USB flash memories? The same way an investigation can certify a gun was fired by a specific individual, that is, through the rigour of the chain of custody.

The involved and their puppies, scared, have pointed that the chain of custody of Raúl Reyes’s devices was broken and therefore they would be useless before a judge’s stand. But they are wrong. Let’s start at the beginning: the chain of custody, according to Colombia’s General Attorney’s Office, "is the application of a series of rules intended to insure, pack, and protect each probative material element in order to avoid its destruction, supplanting, or contamination."

This means that the chain of custody begins when the official packs and labels the probative material at the place where the evidence is located, in this case Raúl Reyes’s laptops.

After the operation in Ecuadorian soil, specialized units of the Colombian National Police abseiled down to the place and when they found the devices, they were properly labelled and stored. Anyway, if the laptops were not protected in special bags but in ordinary battle backpacks, the chain of custody would still be valid, because the important thing was not the physical preserving of probative elements (DNA, prints, blood, etc.) but the conservation of the contents, because of that the transportation medium turns to be irrelevant.

Besides, the Attorney’s Office’s instruction manual says this: "In order to demonstrate the material’s authenticity, the chain of custody is applied taking into account both the identity factors, original status, recollection, preservation, packing and shipping conditions; as the places and dates of stay and changes every custodian. The names and the identifications of every person who had been in contact with those elements will be registered."

Evidently this was conformed, because the evidences (the documents) were not contaminated, adulterated, or deleted by the authorities having under their custody the devices. Furthermore: INTERPOL’s intervention perfectly fits in the technical survey it should be carried out before the evidences, guaranteeing that an independent organization, with more than 180 countries as its members, made the respective technical validation process of the evidences. The Attorney’s Office states the following:

“Both judicial police and the experts will certify the chain of custody. Such certification is the affirmation that the element found at the place, date and hour indicated in the label is the one collected by the judicial police and is the same taken to the laboratory to be examined by the expert.”

So far, the chain of custody was the following: the Police collected, packed and labelled the evidences. The custodians travelled 24 HOURS LATER to Bogotá to hand the material to their commander, Colombian National Police’s director, general Óscar Naranjo. The next day, that custodian delivered the material to INTERPOL for it to evaluate the evidences and determine if they were contaminated and adulterated or not. In this case INTERPOL acted as a forensic laboratory to determinate the purity of the evidence. The important thing is that INTERPOL has guaranteed that during all that time, the evidences contained in Raúl Reyes’s devices were not contaminated and that the custodians worked professionally and rigorously.

In the last few hours INTERPOL delivered the certification and pointed out that it was ceding the chain of custody to the General Attorney’s Office, which ends the proof validation phase and starts the judicialization process which evaluates the quality and the scope of them against those people who turn out to be involved by the evidences.

Things being so, the failure of the chain of custody, which some hopeful people pointed as the debacle of the so-called FARC-politics process, was an illusion quickly dispelled by INTERPOL, the Attorney’s Office and the professionalism of the Colombian National Police, whose director had proposed the participation of the international organization in the technical evaluation of the devices… FARC’s allies ran out of a way to refute the evidence which within a short time should take them before the justice.

CLOSING NOTE: Why Chávez and Correa entirely accepted INTERPOL’s survey and now they say they do not believe in the certification?

*The author is a Colombian journalist who keeps since 2005 the Sistema Informativo Atrabilioso, one of the oldest and most important centre-right political blogs in Colombia, where this article was originally published 15 May 2008. Translated by Julián Ortega Martínez

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The unexpected extradition of 14 important paramilitary bosses to the United States galvanized again the so-called "parapoliticians" and covers with a smoke screen the re-election fraud.

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President Álvaro Uribe made the decision: to send to the United States the paramilitary leadership for them to respond for drug-trafficking related crimes to the American justice system.

How does the outlook change with the presidential measure? There are several issues which may be affected with the extradition of the top United Self-defence Forces of Colombia bosses: the truth, the justice, and the redress (or reparation) to the victims, as well as the parapolitics judicial proceedings.

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There is something really absurd on asking about cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo’s legacy. If there is something worth granting to this frantic bishop from the Roman Catholic Church, is the toughening of the most conservative, traditional and alienating of its sections. Besides that, he left nothing but a trail of persecution and hatred.

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With the 4 April demonstration the issue of a coming release of French-Colombian former presidential candidate Íngrid Betancourt, or at least, the medical treatment scheduled unilaterally by the President of France, is over.

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Bay of Pigs Museum (Jim Snapper / Flickr, CC-BY licence)

With Fidel Castro’ stepping down, Cuba comes back to the world headlines with the unavoidable question: and now what? Nothing, for now, and as long as he lives, nothing. Fidel continues as the protective shadow of the Cuban Revolution.

A forgotten land

Cuba stopped being an important country in world geopolitics a long time ago. With the end of the Cold War and the United States as the world’s only superpower, Fidel’s role became reduced to the annoying neighbour’s one, the one you can’t charge his debts because he does not let you to do so, and the one you must wait for to die to see if you can enter his inventory’s drawing.

Cuba was a significant country when it provided weapons for armies in order to mess in other’s wars, such the Angolan War, it had guerrilla fighters with martyr’s vocation, sponsored the “two, three, many Vietnams” and hugged the Soviet Kremlin, making its neighbour’s hair stand on end.

The disappearance of the USSR and the huge economic issues caused because of the absence of its main ally, the American embargo and its own economic mistakes, which forced Cuba to abandon the proletarian internationalism to prop its domestic revolution up, caused its own disappearance from the news headlines and the CIA’s priorities.

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