The killing of Raul Reyes, the FARC second- in- command not only interrupted negotiations to release Ingrid Betancourt. In the FARC camp the Colombian army also “found” a group of Mexican students who were attacked prior to their interview with Raul Reyes. There were five of them. One survived, the others were killed. Among the images shown after the raid were nearly naked bodies. Scattered human remains; the students had hung up their jeans overnight.

Colombian authorities immediately called the five students guerrillas. Their parents and the survivor stated on the contrary that they were there to question the rebels about whom they were doing research at the History Faculty in the University of Mexico. Their stay in Ecuador was not confined to this meeting with Raul Reyes. In Quito they had met political leaders and attended lectures. As far as the South-American media is concerned, there’s no doubt that they were not fighters. The Chilean magazine Punto Final devoted an investigation to them entitled “Neither angels nor delinquents: the murder of five Mexican students in the FARC camp in Ecuador” (read the article in Spanish in Bolpress).

How did they die? Victims of a bombing prior to the attack or killed on the spot by the Colombian army? Why were they killed? Their relatives fear they will never get answers to these questions. What will their country, Mexico, do to get justice? Ecuador does not patrol its border to the south where FARC have pulled back, what will it do? Apart from blaming terrorism for its militarism, what will Colombia do? On 11 March, relatives of the victims set up the Association of relatives of those killed on 1st March, to try to bring the truth about these events to light, to do this so that the war that saps the region and took the lives of their children has no right to its version of justice.

State-sponsored murder?

While the campaign for the freeing of Ingrid Betancourt keeps Colombia in the headlines, this murder was not covered in the French media. One of the risks of the media coverage of Ingrid Betancourt’s detention is the loss of the political importance of her situation. Demanding her freedom is not just an obvious humanitarian gesture. It is also a protest against the barbarism of hostage taking, now an established aspect of war. It also criticises the violence and the weakness of democracy in Colombia. The danger of excessively personalising the drama of Ingrid Betancourt would be to slip from political awareness to pure compassion.

The humanitarian freeing of hostages is a diplomatic strategy that is valid. But their captivity is part of a political and geo-political game that is wide and more complex. To forget it would betray the very meaning of the struggle led by the French-Colombian Senator who couldn’t have been more critical of the corruption and the numerous restrictions on freedom, justice and democracy that weakens her country. To speak about the murder of these young people, carried out by the Colombian government in Ecuador and the denial of justice against which their relatives currently campaign, is to continue her fight against murder and in favour of justice. If silence was to fall again on the tragedy of the Mexican students without the benefit of an enquiry and its circumstances clarified, their deaths would become a state sponsored murder. And regarding the humanitarian aspect of this tragedy is not this same tragedy that Ingrid Betancourt is experiencing