Rosemberg Pabón

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Rosemberg Pabón (born c. 1950) is a Colombian politician and senator.

Pabón came into the public spotlight in 1980, when he led a group of members of the 19th of April Movement (M-19) guerrilla group and seized the Dominican Republic's embassy in Bogotá.

Pabón gained instant fame across Latin America and in the United States, partly because he and his group held sixteen ambassadors and one cardinal from those two regions captive for up to sixty one days. Apart from the American ambassador, other ambassadors held hostage were the Costa Rican, Mexican, Peruvian and Venezuelan ambassadors, as well as Colombia's top representant in the Vatican City, among others.

A minor boy was also initially held hostage; he was one of the first hostages to be let go, along with the women ambassadors, as a "humanitarian gesture" of the M-19. The M-19 initially demanded the release of 300 "political prisoners" (including members of its guerrilla organization) and a payment of 50 million U.S. dollars from the Colombian government.

During the initial crossfire with Colombian Army troops, one of the guerrilla operatives, a woman, was injured and she required a medical doctor to attend to her, who advised her to be hospitalized but she refused and later died. The Venezuelan ambassador was also injured.

A tense environment continued as Colombian troops and snipers surrounded the embassy and at times the M-19 believed that a counterattack was imminent. Colombian President Julio César Turbay Ayala, however, specifically rejected petitions from the military and from political sectors asking for a direct and fullscale military assault.

On March 2, 1980, four days after the initial takeover, the Colombian government authorized direct contacts with the M-19 guerrillas. The guerrilla's spokesperson, Natalia Mendoza Arias (La Chiqui), met with the government's representatives, Ramiro Zambrano Cárdenas and Camilo Jiménez Villalba, inside a yellow van stationed in front of the embassy. Mexico's ambassador, Ricardo Galán, was present as a witness to the meeting.

The negotiations were very tense, and throughout the total of 24 reunions between the government and M-19 representatives there were several apparent deadends.

The events filled the headlines of newsmedia outlets worldwide, something which led the then M-19 leader Jaime Bateman Cayón to state that the embassy takeover, as a political propaganda action, was more than a thousand times as useful to the M-19 as normal military operations, since according to him it gave their cause and its stated objectives a higher international profile. That being the case, Bateman informed his comrades in that the most important thing was now to avoid the death of the M-19 guerrillas already in the embassy.

After practically fifty-two days of tense negotiations and sixty-one days since the takeover, Pabón and the Colombian government agreed to have Pabón, his comrades and the remaining hostage ambassadors fly to Cuba, from where those ambassadors still held hostage were allowed to return to their home countries. Allegedly, the M-19 also received a 1 million U.S. dollar payment, instead of the initial 50 million that they had originally demanded from the government.

Pabón lived for many years in exile at Cuba, though still continued being a member of the M-19. Later on, when the M-19 signed a peace treaty with the Colombian government turning the revolutionary guerrilla movement into a political party, he was allowed to return to Colombia, where he would go on to become a mayor of a city before obtaining a seat as a senator.

Rosemberg Pabón later publicly recognized that president Turbay's handling of the situation contributed to preventing a tragedy from occurring due to any possible military escalation, appreciating that efforts to find a peaceful solution to the embassy takeover had prevailed.

Pabón's participation in the 1980 embassy takeover has been immortalized in movies (such as Ciro Duran's 2000 "La toma de la embajada", a Colombian, Mexican and Venezuelan co-production) as well as in literature.

According to some analysts, just like in Puerto Rico's Los Macheteros' case, Pabón has been regarded by many as either a dangerous subversive or terrorist, and by others as a would be revolutionary hero.