The video that shows FARC commander ‘Mono Jojoy’ saying the guerrillas
financially supported the 2006 election campaign of Ecuador President
Rafael Correa is fake, Correa said in his weekly television broadcast.
According to the Ecuadorean Head of State, the video is part of an international conspiracy to discredit leftist governments in Latin America.
“Let them investigate the stupidity that they showed yesterday [as
part as] this campaign that, not just on Ecuadorean-Colombian level,
but on a regional level, where there is an onslaught of the right wing
and all their instruments and weapons, among them the media, to
destabilize the progressive governments.”
Correa’s administration appointed a commission to research the video wherein FARC commander Mono Jojoy tells a group of guerrilla the FARC financially supported the 2006 presidential campaign of Correa, something the Colombian government had said for more than a year.
The commission will investigate both the Colombian bombing of a FARC
camp on Ecuadorean soil on March 1, 2008 as the information gathered
from computers found in that camp and that was shown in the ‘Mono
Jojoy’ video, the Ecuadorean government said in a press statement.
“They can investigate whether the candidate or campaign
ever got as much as 20 cents from the FARC or any other foreign
source,” he added.
Correa’s predecessor Lucio Gutierrez believes nothing of Correa’s words and wants him to step down and face justice.
“The video is authentic,” Gutierrez said in an interview with Canal
UNO, adding that the recording has “outraged the Ecuadorans.”
“Faced
with so much indignation, we demand the resignation of Rafael Correa,
…. he has to resign and the competent authorities have to issue an
arrest warrant against him,” said Gutierrez.
“People are
wondering where he got that [money for] a multimillion dollar
campaign,” the former Head of State said, adding that using “dirty and
blood-stained money” Correa “committed electoral fraud” in the April
elections he lost to Correa.
Colombian authorities have remained quiet after the airing of the incriminating video. Also Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, an ally of Correa, has not publicly spoken about the matter.