“The theater is here!”

Today’s main editorial in El Tiempo had a clumsy bit of irony in its title “¡Llegó el teatro!” referring to the XI Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de Bogotá, an annual theater festival about to kick off in Bogota. How can a festival ever surpass the grand theater that played out over the past week? An article by Tim Padgett in Time Magazine got it right….a war would have been too costly for all involved and Chavez and Correa were doing nothing more than a bit of good old-fashioned theatrical saber rattling.

As the story played out during the “Grupo de Rio” summit in Santo Domingo, which produced an agreement which essentially ended the diplomatic stalemate, the Colombian defense ministry announced that another member of the FARC secretariat had been killed, presumably by one of his own men. “Ivan Rios” the youngest member of the 7-man secretariat was killed by his security chief, after having been surrounded by the Colombian army and reportedly running out of food.

This deals yet another serious blow to the FARC leadership and one can only wonder if the FARC will retaliate in some manner against a “soft” civilian target at some point. Let us hope that instead they focus on pursuing a humanitarian accord. Today, Chavez openly asked FARC leader “Manuel Marulanda” to release one of the most high profile hostages, Ingrid Betancourt.