By all indications, The New York Times is perfectly okay with Marxist terrorists legitimately taking de facto seats in government and enjoying near-blanket immunity for more than 50 years of kidnap, rape, torture, murder and female mutilation.
As long as an embattled president gets a Nobel Peace Prize.
In its Sunday write up of the failed Colombian referendum on peace with the FARC militias, The Times laments first the personal implications for Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos’ political career as a result of voters’ decision. Santos was referred to as a “a possible contender for the Nobel Peace Prize.” The Colombian leader has pursued a peace deal for years, getting rebels to the negotiating table in November 2012 and finalizing a deal in August 2016 that was now pointlessly signed Sept. 26.
Just shy of 13 million Colombians showed up to the polls and 50.22 percent of those voters rejected the peace deal negotiated between the Colombian government with FARC fighters. Less than 54,000 votes was the difference between the proposed peace deal rejection.
Polls before the vote showed those in favor of the peace deal winning the day. Ultimately though, the Colombian people clearly felt that the government’s negotiators had come up short by not sufficiently punishing FARC fighters for their decades of brutal violence.
The Times swatted aside this “small majority” though, and instead offered sympathy to the suddenly disenfranchised terrorists of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (better known by the Spanish acronym FARC) who “dug into the forest for a hopeless insurgency.”
The terrorists “now see their hopes of rejoining Colombia as political leaders — including 10 seats in Congress — suddenly dashed.” Had Colombian voters approved, the terrorists were going to get 10 seats – assigned without having election – in the Colombian Congress from 2018 to to 2026.
Another condition of the peace deal was that most FARC fighters would have been allowed to simply re-join civilized society with no strings attached. Only some high-ranking leaders would stand trial for their crimes against the Colombian people, which included decades of brutal kidnappings, rape and murder.
“To many Colombians who had endured years of kidnappings and killings by the rebels, the agreement was too lenient,” the Times reports, omitting the precise number of kidnappings. To quantify just how many, “many,” is: 27,000 people were kidnapped between 1970 to 2010 and up to 90 percent of those kidnappings were the handiwork of FARC fighters.
It doesn’t stop with kidnap and murder either.
FARC fighters are infamous for having female fighters undergo “forced sterilization, forced abortion” and the terrorists were also fond of training child soldiers. In fairness, the NYT piece does clearly state that “an untold number of women were raped at the hands of fighters,” but it is a confusing admission, given that a piece written by one of the co-authors in March is titled, “In a Rebel Camp in Colombia, Marx and Free Love Reign.”
The aforementioned piece basically describes life in a FARC fighter camp as Woodstock with a few AK-47s lying around. FARC fighters reportedly in a rather romantic manner take advantage of their rural surroundings in the Colombian jungle and “slip off into the woods, with palm fronds for bedding.”
The troubling and inaccurate portrayal of what is the norm in FARC sex culture was thankfully, quickly debunked by The Washington Post in their response piece, “Why free love in the FARC isn’t so free. (You wouldn’t know it from reading the New York Times.)”
A full comparison of the two pieces can be found here.
After The Daily Caller News Foundation compared the two pieces, NYT reporter Nicholas Casey dismissed the reams of eye-witness accounts, human rights reports, and professional research presented with regard to the FARC in an email to TheDCNF, stating simply, “Few reporters have gone to see the rebels.”
Casey went on to tell TheDCNF in his email that he and the NYT “are trying to change that.”
FARC rape victim Francia Ibarguen also did not see the supposed romance in FARC sexual relations when four rebel fighters gang-raped her.
“Four men from the group stayed behind. They started to punch one side of my face and my ribs,” Ibarguen told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in 2014, regarding her 2011 assault. “They forced me onto the grass. Two men held me down, gripped my hips and hands so I couldn’t move. That’s when it started, the rape. They each did what they wanted to my body,” said Ibarguen.
The NYT writers then cite a Tweet by Colombian Sen. Alvaro Uribe. Uribe, who used to be the country’s president from 2002 to 2010, tweeted Sunday, “Peace is an illusion, the texts from Havana are disappointing.”
The former Colombian leader was speaking about what clearly a majority of Colombians feel was a highly flawed peace deal that came out of years of negotiations in Havana, Cuba, that conceded far too much to the murderous terrorists.
The NYT simply cited the first part of Uribe’s tweet, “Peace is an illusion,” which gives readers the impression of cynicism rather than, as perhaps Uribe intended, actually demonstrates genuine concerns as a result of the defeated deal, not least of which was to have the rules of democracy not apply to 10 arbitrarily empowered would-be-terrorists-turned-congressmen.
Furthermore, the text from Uribe’s tweet was simply a brief statement to introduce a two-minute video statement he made to the press.
It should be noted that in the half-century long conflict, 260,000 people lost their lives in Colombia, omitting the many more who died abroad from consuming cocaine that FARC fighters cultivated and smuggled. At its height, the FARC’s “earnings from the drug trade would be well over $200 million.”
The NYT concludes, “In the end, a small majority of Colombians agreed with him.”
“Him” being a reference to Uribe. That kicker omits Uribe’s confrontations of the FARC for years as president, confrontations that in large part led the FARC to come crawling to the negotiating table in the first place.
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