In Colombia, Betancourt freed, the rebels embarrassingly weakened

Javier Casella/Colombian Defense Ministry/Handout, via Reuters

The Colombian-French politician Ingrid Betancourt (center, flanked by uniformed military personnel), and other hostages liberated from their rebel captors, arrived yesterday at a military airport in Bogotá

“What I’m feeling now is something very close to paradise.”

So declared Ingrid Betancourt, fresh from her liberation from the Marxist rebel group that had held her captive for more than six years, to reporters yesterday on the runway of a military airport in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital. Along with the Colombian-French politician (a former candidate for Colombia’s presidency), three Americans and 11 Colombians who also had been held hostage by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Spanish abbreviation: FARC) were set free in a meticulously planned rescue mission organized and carried out by the Colombian military. The daring operation “hinged on soldiers posing as members of a fictitious group apparently sympathetic to the rebels. Supposedly they were going to transport the hostages to a FARC commander’s camp by helicopter.” Instead, however, “[o]nce the aircraft was in the air, the soldiers disarmed two guerrillas and informed the hostages that they were free.” (Reuters)

John Vizcaino/Reuters

At the airport, Betancourt (second from right) celebrated her release with some of the other hostages who also had been rescued; she pledged to work for the liberation of all hostages still held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a Marxist, rebel organization

Background: The FARC emerged more than four decades ago “after a communist commune [that] had declared itself an independent republic in central Colombia was attacked by government forces, and 48 members, led by Manuel Marulanda, escaped into the jungle to form the rebel group. After 20 years as a small militia, [the] FARC took the decision to expand, using money from cocaine trafficking to build a rebel army” that grew to number many thousands of members. In recent years, though, the government of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, “flush with U.S. money to pay informants and fund anti-rebel operations, has reduced [the] FARC to a chaotic state. With Marulanda’s death of a heart attack in March…, and the rescue of Betancourt, [the] FARC has fallen to its lowest ebb in 44 years of fighting.” (Telegraph)

Now, observers say, the success of the Colombian military’s rescue mission will put pressure on remotely stationed FARC fighters to end their war-making and negotiate with the government. “The bloodless…operation increases public confidence in the short, bespectacled and iron-willed Uribe, whose father was killed in a botched FARC kidnapping two decades ago. He is hugely popular [among Colombians] for his anti-rebel offensive and his growth-oriented economic policies. The rescue shored up Uribe’s support at a time when many of his followers want to change the constitution to let him run for a third term in 2010. Stocks and the [value of the Colombian] peso…surged as investors showed increased political confidence in Colombia. The rescue followed the death of three FARC leaders this year and a call from the group’s top ally, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, for them to negotiate for peace.” (Reuters)

Reuters

Betancourt looked gaunt and withdrawn in a video clip her captors released earlier this year

Being duped by the military was both embarrassing and debilitating for the FARC’s current leaders. Eduardo Mackenzie, a Paris-based, Colombian journalist, is the author of a book about the history of the rebel organization. After yesterday’s liberation of Betancourt and the other hostages, Mackenzie, analyzing the dramatic rescue caper, suggested that the rebels simply “didn’t have the means to verify the information they had been given” about who was coming to see them “because they [knew] very well that their radio communications were being monitored by Colombian intelligence officers. Military planes do surveillance over their territories and record their conversations.” (Le Monde)

Op-ed writer Jorge Alberto Torres notes in Colombia’s El País that the FARC was beat at its own game of identify theft by the members of the military’s rescue team who posed as the rebels’ own comrades. Alberto Torres writes: “Congratulations to our government for such a great accomplishment! And we hope that [the leaders] of the FARC will realize [theirs] is not the way and that they will liberate the rest of those who are being held captive.”

John Vizcaino/Reuters

Betancourt’s mother, Yolanda Pulecio (left), kissed her daughter upon her arrival at the military airport yesterday

El Tiempo, another Colombian newspaper, observes that, now, after the successful rescue operation, there is no way “that the FARC will not react.” “Not only because the jubilation at the liberation [of the 15 long-held hostages] must definitively show them that the whole country unanimously rejects the horrendous practice of kidnapping,” the paper states, but also because now “the war equation has changed irreversibly.” El Tiempo advises: “The time has come not only to let the rest of the hostages go – 42 military personnel [and] hundreds of [other] kidnapped persons… – but also, in good faith, to enter into a definitive negotiation process to bring an end to the armed conflict.” Will the FARC’s leadership take such a step, the newspaper editorial wonders, or will the rebel outfit “insist on carying on a struggle that even Hugo Chávez is asking it to abandon?”

At the military airport in Bogotá yesterday, Betancourt remarked: “I am going to work for those hostages still being held [, n]ot just to get them home, but to get them home soonest.” Britain’s Telegraph reports: “She added that she still aspires ‘to serve Colombia as president.’”

Posted By: Edward M. Gomez (Email) |
July 04 2008 at 11:54 AM