Bogota - Colombia's largest leftwing rebel force FARC
Monday declared it would never lay down weapons and stop fighting -
an answer to demands by millions of demonstrators worldwide that such
groups release nearly 3,000 hostages, held often for years.
While the demonstrators concentrated on demanding hostage release,
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez added a call for rebels to lay down
weapons and stop fighting.
The response from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC) was signed by FARC commanders Rodrigo Granda and Jesus
Santrich and was delivered via the ABP news agency, often used by the
group to make announcements.
'We will never be the ones - never, a thousand times never - to
lay down our weapons,' they wrote.
FARC will continue unchanged in its fight 'for communist ideals
and against imperialism,' they proclaimed in the text.
ABP reported that Granda und Santrich, two top ideologists of the
44-year-old guerrilla group, submitted the declaration after internal
debate over demands by Chavez to release all hostages and lay down
their weapons.
Chavez, who has tried to help mediate a solution, told FARC and
other rebel groups that there was no room in today's world for
guerrilla warfare.
Granda is also known as FARC's foreign minister - freed by the
government of conservative President Alvaro Uribe last year at the
behest of French President Nicolas Sarkozy. France had hoped the
gesture would pry loose Ingrid Betancourt, the French-Colombian
citizen and one-time Colombian presidential candidate, from captivity
by FARC.
After nearly seven years in captivity, Betancourt was rescued on
July 2, along with 14 other high profile hostages, through a Colombia
commando mission that used a ruse to trick the rebels into releasing
them.
Sunday's demonstrators used the occasion of Colombia's 198th
independence celebrations from Spain to protest FARC and other
groups.
Three South American presidents marked the day in Leticia,
Colombia, in the Amazon jungle near the border with Brazil and Peru.
Uribe was joined by Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Peru's
Alan Garcia.
FARC has been weakened in recent months by a series of Colombian
government coups, including the killing of one FARC leader and the
death of another, and the successful rescue of Betancourt, three
American security contractors and some other high profile hostages
that FARC wanted to exchange for some of their own in prison.
But the end of four decades of civil conflict in the South
American country is hardly in sight, and rebels receive fresh
recruits daily from the poverty-stricken rural areas where they rule.
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