IN NOVEMBER 2006, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), the Marxist terror group that has waged a nearly half-century war against the Colombian state, circulated an open letter to the academic and Hollywood left, requesting that their "always generous solidarity" with Third World liberation movements again be marshaled to "pressure President Bush and his government to support a prisoner exchange in Colombia." The mediation request was addressed to Oliver Stone, Michael Moore, Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, and, bizarrely, Denzel Washington. It was signed, with comradely greetings, by FARC "foreign minister" and second-in-command Raul Reyes.

Last Saturday the Colombian military briefly trespassed the border of neighboring Ecuador and, in a combined arms raid, disposed of Reyes. Acknowledging his military's one mile incursion into Ecuadorian territory, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe offered the country's chavista president, Rafael Correa, a perfunctory apology. Predictably, he refused to be assuaged. When Colombia claimed that the terrorists were killed during a "hot pursuit" operation that spilled across the border, Correa complained that Reyes, along with 23 other members of his execution and kidnap gang, had in fact been killed "in their pajamas."

Reyes's killing has had a curious effect on Venezuela's buffoonish president Hugo Chávez, whose borders have not been traversed in combat with FARC. In a fist-shaking, spittle-flecked television speech, Chávez announced the Venezuelan military would be mobilized for war and ordered ten tank divisions and 10,000 troops to the country's border with Colombia. It was, he told reporters, a "defensive" action.

Chávez's belligerence can't simply be attributed to revolutionary fraternalism with his dreary Ecuadorian acolyte. It is increasingly clear that his 'Bolivarian' revolution is guided by an ideological affinity with FARC. On his meandering weekly monologue program, Aló Presidente, Chávez eulogized the "revolutionary hero" Raul Reyes and decreed a minute of silence to honor those killed in Uribe's "cowardly assassination." Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega echoed Chávez, denouncing the "murder" of his "dear brother" Reyes. (Missing from American media accounts, though outlined in the Venezuelan opposition newspaper Tal Cual, was the telling detail that Reyes was sent for "political and ideological training" in the Soviet Union.)

That Chávez lauds the villainous and murderous--Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, he says, is a "freedom fighter," the jailed terrorist Carlos the Jackal is "a good friend"--is hardly surprising. In January, he called for the rejection of the American and European Union designation of FARC as a terrorist organization, arguing that the group possesses "political and Bolivarian goals, and [in Venezuela] that is respected."

While most media accounts of the tensions in South America have provided little in the way of context, it is worth reminding readers of the utter cruelty, depravity, and barbarism that animates the FARC; the methods employed to achieve those "respected goals." A chilling, and by no means anomalous, news report from the June 2, 2001, edition of the Washington Post is illustrative: "[W]hat has most shaken people in this region of timber and cattle is that the FARC's methods were more ostentatiously brutal than the gunshots the group usually employs. The bodies that have been recovered all showed deep wounds to the neck, and one of three women killed showed evidence of having been raped." Such an orgy of killing was common, in other words, and only remarkable in its brutality. The 23 victims, the Post noted, were hacked to death using machetes.