Dear Mr. Acuña:

While your piece on Colombia offers an excellent overview of 20th century Colombian history, your assessment of present-day Colombia is clearly written by someone who sits half a world away. With no evidentiary support, you write that the FARC “hardly looks defeated” and that U.S. assistance has done “nothing but garner support for the rebels." Neither of these statements is based in reality.

According to a January 2008 Gallup poll, the FARC's favorability rating among the Colombian public is one percent. (http://www2.elcomercio.com/noticiaEC.asp?id_noticia=163751&id_seccion=5) The group has never been more detested than it is now, after the lies it told earlier this year in connection with its promised release of a four-year-old child. Earlier this month, more than four million Colombians (nearly ten percent of the population) took to the streets to denounce the FARC.

Every week brings new headlines reporting the arrest, conviction, or killing of FARC leaders and desertions by rank-and-file fighters. Terrorist attacks in Bogota and other major cities are now rare and tourism is resurgent. Colombia is far safer than it was just five years ago, and a large segment of the Colombian public already lives in peace.

All of this is due in part to U.S. assistance, but much more so to the Colombian government's fearlessness in taking on the terrorists. Perhaps that is why the Colombian president now enjoys an 80-percent approval rating.

It is no surprise that the FARC's few remaining sympathizers are calling for an about-face on U.S. assistance to Colombia (or, as you put it, an "independent stance from Washington.") After all, that's what you'd expect a group to do when it is facing annihilation.

That's your whole response?