COLOMBIA: Colombia's judiciary is independent and there is no interference in the case of three Irishmen on terrorist charges, Vice-President Francisco Santos tells Deaglán de Bréadún.
It's not every day a man walks out of the pages of a book and speaks to you. Francisco "Pacho" Santos features prominently in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's News of a Kidnapping, a factual account by the Nobel Prize-winning author of the abduction of a number of Colombian citizens in the early 1990s by the drug baron, Pablo Escobar.
In the course of the abduction, Santos's driver was shot with two bullets in the head. Santos himself spent eight months chained to a bed before he was finally released. Escobar was subsequently assassinated by an anti-drugs hit squad.
Although described in the book as "an incorrigible talker", I had been told that Santos was not easily drawn on the subject of his kidnapping. But it clearly altered his life: "That ordeal changed me, in terms of making me realise the pain that people were undergoing."
Up to then he had been a journalist but felt now he had to do more than "just looking at the bullfight from the stands". How did he feel now about his captors, did he hate or pity them? He said he did not think about it much: "I would rather spend the rest of my life helping others."
After his release, he organised a series of massive marches against violence and terror in Colombia. He says that, as a result, the FARC guerrillas were going to kill him in the year 2000. "I found out via intelligence information, etc."
He was in such imminent danger that he decided to go to Spain where he spent two years working as a journalist on El País newspaper before returning to run for election with Alvaro Uribe, who became president of Colombia in August 2002 and made Santos his vice-president.
He is here because Ireland holds the EU presidency. But inevitably we discuss the case of the three Irishmen facing terrorist charges in Colombia. Santos is very familiar with the case at this stage and has met the Bring Them Home Campaign several times.
He draws attention to the high level of international attention and observation given to the trial. "If there is a process that has had international vigilance, it is that one." He continues that "99.99999 per cent of people who are judged in Colombia don't have the overview that this case has been having".
He says the three accused men went into a restricted area, namely the zone controlled at the time by the FARC guerrillas, without a government permit. "Journalists had to get permits, everybody had to get permits to go into the area. They went on their own. So obviously it raised suspicions. When they were asked, they said they were journalists, and that story fell through in the first 10 seconds."
He continues: "The last thing is that there is obviously a suspicion in Colombia because, very soon after they were captured, the FARC started using a very different approach to explosives and they were using explosives techniques that were very similar to the ones the IRA used here. Obviously that is for a judge to decide, and the justice system. There is separation of powers, but in Colombia obviously there is a lot of suspicion."
He says that, in Colombia, "You have judges who are very independent - very independent. It's a totally different branch of government, thank God." The judge's decision "will probably be coming soon".
Supporters of the men have highlighted various statements from political and military leaders in Colombia to the effect that the three were guilty as charged.
"In Colombia, it's not like here where officials can't say anything. You can. But the judicial system is independent in those terms and no article by President Pastrana in the Washington Post and no declaration by General Tapias will influence [the outcome\]."
He thinks the judge must be assessing the evidence very carefully: "I don't talk to him: the people from the Bring Them Home Campaign have talked to him many times."
I pointed out that the trial ended on August 1st but there had been no verdict so far. "That's usual for Colombian law, that terms are long. That's one of the things that we are changing as a matter of fact, by the year 2005 we are changing the system so that it becomes a lot quicker. Unfortunately, those guys were captured before the law was changed."
Commenting on claims that Colombian jails were dangerous he said: "High-security jails are a lot safer and they have special places where you can be a lot more protected."
He rejected suggestions he had come to Ireland to negotiate about the case: "No, no, no. I have no authority, I have no possibility of doing so. The pressure has really come from the Bring Them Home Campaign, to tell you the truth. They are very active, there has been a lot of presence, to say the least, in regard to this case. If you can talk about pressure, it is not the government's pressure."
More generally, he rejects allegations of human rights abuses by the Colombian administration: "One of the big mistakes is that people are mixing authority with authoritarianism." He claims this is bringing results: "We have a 20 per cent reduction in murders, that means, last year, there were 5800 people less killed." There was "a 26 per cent reduction in kidnappings".
He describes the FARC as terrorists who disregard the lives and safety of civilians. "They are involved in drug-trafficking, totally. That is how they finance their organisation." From being a Marxist organisation it had become a drug cartel, he said.
His government has a policy of "zero tolerance" towards cocaine which is now Colombia's best-known, if illegal, export. He believes the middle-class cocaine users in developed countries are not sufficiently aware that they are subsidising criminality and terrorism: "They don't realise that every time they inhale a gram of cocaine they are inhaling blood, Colombian blood."
He says the intensity of the conflict has dramatically reduced. So where does he think Colombia will be in five years? Francisco Santos takes a deep breath: "In five years, we will probably have solved this problem."