Slain Colombian Insurgents Held Secret Talks With U.S. Diplomats

For Immediate Release:
March 4, 2008

Slain Colombian Insurgents Held Secret Talks with U.S. Diplomats

Declassified State Department Memo Describes Clandestine 1998 Meeting with Colombian Guerrillas Central to Current Saber-Rattling in Andean Region

For more information contact:
Michael Evans - 202/994-7029
mevans@gwu.edu

Washington, D.C., March 4, 2008 - Two senior Colombian guerrilla leaders killed in Ecuador last weekend in a cross-border raid by Colombian forces held secret talks with U.S. diplomats ten years ago in Costa Rica, according to a declassified memorandum of conversation published on the Web today by the National Security Archive and cited in today's New York Times.

The slain insurgents, Raúl Reyes and Olga Marín, met secretly in Costa Rica in December 1998 with a U.S. diplomatic mission led by Philip T. Chicola, then director of the State Department's Office of Andean Affairs. The meeting was particularly sensitive in that the guerrilla group represented by Reyes and Marín, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), was listed on the State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. The FARC remains Colombia's oldest and largest rebel army.

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http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20080304/index.htm