The FARC must be feeling the heat especially after the landslide reelection of President Uribe. From the EFE News Service:
The FARC guerrillas on Wednesday sent a letter to the president of the European Union, Matti Vanhanen, asking the EU to take the group off its list of "terrorist" organizations. The missive, signed by Raul Reyes, the spokesman for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, appeared on the Web site of Colombia's Anncol news agency, where the guerrilla group's communiques habitually are published. "We accept the solidarity of governments without conditions or blackmail, and without discrediting lists claiming the alleged fight against terrorism," said the member of the FARC leadership council in the letter to Vanhanen, who is also prime minister of Finland. The EU and the United States both place the FARC among the groups they consider terrorist entities, which include the leftist National Liberation Front and the ultra-rightist United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, the latter of which are in the process of demobilizing. The FARC, Reyes noted in his letter, had been included four years ago "on the list of terrorist groups by the foreign ministries of the 15 then-members" of the EU, a decision Reyes called a "regrettable error." The FARC, which has an estimated 20,000 fighters, sometimes employs car bombs - attacks which have killed scores of civilians - as well as selective assassination of civilian authorities it considers linked to the government.