As far as I’m concerned, IISS’s version of the Raul Reyes files is the Mother of All Internet Time-Sinks. It’s Wikileaksesque in that it often doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already sort of imagine must be happening, but it sure does fill in the gaps, adding a ton of detail and nuance to the broad outlines of our suspicions.
One tid-bit that surprised me with its brazenness is the matter-of-fact way FARC proposed, and the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry accepted, an idea to basically let FARC decide who gets to work in Venezuela’s consulates in Colombia.
- In I.1890 (undated from 2006) Raul Reyes flatly relates how he agreed with a Venezuelan diplomat to send the names of “people we trust for the consulates in Riohacha, Barranquilla, Cúcuta, Bucaramanga and Puerto Carreño.”
- In the following email, he confirms that the proposal has proceeded without difficulties.
- In I.1893 (July 14, 2006) Reyes confirms he will send this list of names.
We don’t get any more information after this. As far as details go, this one is a tiny but telling one: FARC just took it for granted that the Venecos would accept this kind of request, and they were right!
Reading the dossier is kinda fun. I mentioned earlier that if you download the dossier to pdf format, you can easily search by terms. So, I have been having a little fun with terms such as fraude (no smoking gun here), trampa (nothing either), Danilo Anderson (nary a mention). Diosdado is trashed, though. So, is Jesse here and there. Rosales is thoroughly trashed.
Am gonna have to stop this. It’s a little addictive.
You can actually build automatically a beautiful mindmap with this.
Sadly, it’s not just tax dollars; it’s oil money, so it’s the poor pitching in the most for this, not the rich.
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