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.
