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| Caribbean-Latin America |
| Colombia's President Seeks More Gov't Informants/Says Don't Pay Ransoms |
| 2004-09-06 |
| (Colombia's President Ãlvaro) Uribe Seeks More Government Informants & Tells Public Not to Pay Ransom for Their Kidnapped Loved Ones (Colombian)President Ãlvaro Uribe asked Colombians that have kidnapped family members not to pay money to rescue them & to strengthen the networks of government informants that the government maintains for use against crime (& subversion.) Uribe, (speaking from the Colombian Department of) Antioquia said, "We need to better integrate the public with the government forces," & he added that there is a resurgence of guerrilla groups committing (crimes such as) kidnapping since the demobilization of various (right-wing) paramilitary scuadrons involved in peace negotiations with the (Colombian) government. He underlined the fact that "this obliges us to strengthen even more the government forces, to integrate the public even more with the government forces. All over (the country) we need groups of collaborators to integrate themselves with the government's forces (...) & we need everyone to stop paying ransoms so that we can avoid kidnappings & rescue the hostages. He explained that the authorities have mechanisms to facilitate & ease the process of providing information to the government by collaborators & informants. He insisted that "If we all work together with the government forces we can avoid kidnappings & we can get the hostages back. If we pay the kidnappers we just give them incentive to continue kidnapping." According to official data, the policy of "democratic security" that the (current) administration (of Uribe) promotes has succeeded in reducing kidnappings by almost fifty percent. via El Espectador-Colombia translated especially for Rantburg by Kentucky Beef |
| Posted by:Kentucky Beef |