[NYTr] FARC Hostage Release Meets Yet Another Obstacle

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Venezuela Information Office (VIO)
http://www.rethinkvenezuela.com

excerpted from VIO Venezuela Daily News Roundup - Jan 2, 2008

[ Hopes of a new hostage for prisoner swap in Colombia suffered a set
back early this week when Venezuelan helicopters, outfitted with the
insignia of the red cross, were not permitted to fly into FARC
territory to retrieve 3 hostages agreed upon between President Chavez
and the leadership of the FARC.  Since late last week, the Venezuelan
president, other world leaders and even filmmaker Oliver Stone, were
on hand to witness what many hoped would be the beginning to a new
Colombian peace effort.  Unfortunately, the FARC alleged yesterday that
President Alvaro Uribe had ordered military operations in the jungle
region where the three captives were believed to be held and thus
distinguished chances of any prisoner retrieval mission for the
moment.  President Chavez said last night that, "Nothing has failed.
The operation is continuing," and left helicopters in Colombia for
future efforts. -VIO]


Associated Press - January 2, 2008
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g4KHTkP2iDNsZIPq48q97-4SvKOQD8TTKKQO0

ANALYSIS: Rebels Leave Chavez Hanging

By JOSHUA GOODMAN 

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) ? It was one of the boldest initiatives yet for
Latin America's emerging leftist alliance and it didn't even get off
the ground.

Answering a call by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, political
heavyweights from five governments attempted to break through a
deadlock in the region's most entrenched conflict: Colombia's
half-century guerrilla war.

But for all their devotion to Latin American unity, observers from
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba and Ecuador couldn't persuade the
secretive Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, to abandon
its deep mistrust of Colombia's government and fulfill a weeks-old
promise to free three hostages, including a 3-year-old boy.

The FARC, in a letter to Chavez, blamed operations by Colombia's
U.S.-backed military for their decision not to tell where in the
eastern Colombian jungles ? a region the size of France ? two
Venezuelan helicopters could pick up the captives.

As the mission fell apart Monday, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe
dismissed the rebels' accusation as more lies from a "terrorist group."

Chavez, in turn, sympathized with the FARC and accused Uribe of
"throwing a bomb" on his efforts to recover the hostages:
ex-congresswoman Consuelo Gonzalez, former vice presidential candidate
Clara Rojas and her 3-year-old son Emmanuel, fathered by a guerrilla
captor.

The truth about what led the FARC to get cold feet may never be known,
and Chavez has vowed to plow on for the hostages' release despite the
setback.

But by failing to deliver the hostages, the FARC left Chavez hanging in
a highly visible way that will likely force the firebrand leftist to
take a different tack.

The mission's collapse "shows Chavez doesn't have the ability to get an
express response from the FARC. He clearly can't influence FARC
leadership to make quick decisions," said Adam Isacson, a Colombia
analyst for the Washington-based Center for International Policy.

For the past month, Chavez has held out an olive branch to the FARC
while publicly vilifying Uribe, his ideological adversary, as
Washington's lapdog and puppet.

Fetching the hostages on Colombian soil was widely seen as political
payback for Uribe's abrupt ending of Chavez's efforts to broker a swap
of 47 hostages ? including three American defense contractors and
former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt ? for hundreds of
jailed rebels.

By inviting former Argentine President Nestor Kirchner and other
like-minded observers, it was also a chance for Chavez to rally an
alliance of leftist governments, many of which share the Venezuelan
leader's antagonism for President Bush.

So confident was Chavez of success, he even welcomed American filmmaker
Oliver Stone to film the handover as part of a documentary.

But the strategy backfired amid the FARC's recalcitrance.

"This reveals the FARC for who they are ? not a group that's responsive
to the outside world," said Michael Shifter, an analyst at the
Washington-based Inter American Dialogue. "Chavez thought since he's
the revolutionary leader, they'd fall in line. And he assembled all his
friends and they would be witness to this success."

Although Chavez is unlikely to suffer much of a setback among
Venezuela's already polarized society, the drawn-out, ill-fated mission
could be a blow to the ambitions of his leftist allies.

After being marooned three days in Colombia, the observers returned
home on New Year's Eve ? some of them visibly disgusted.

Shifter predicted that from now on, Chavez's allies "may not be as
drawn in by his bluster and bravado."

"He's shown he's not the miracle worker. Colombia's problems have been
around for a long time," Shifter said.

But Brazil's observer, Marco Aurelio Garcia, offered to return and said
he doesn't think the tensions between Chavez and Uribe would keep the
hostages from being freed.

And because the rebels have an ideological affinity for Chavez, the
socialist president remains a leading hope for reuniting the hostages
with their families, who see Uribe's hardline policies as an obstacle
to dialogue with the FARC.

Since Uribe took office in 2002, the two sides have never held
face-to-face talks. Instead, he's used aggressive American intelligence
sharing backed by $600 million in annual military aid to drive the FARC
deeper into the jungle.

Chavez says his mission continues despite the mistrust.

"Nothing has failed. The operation is continuing," Chavez said Monday
night, adding that Venezuela plans to leave its helicopters in Colombia
in hopes of still receiving pick-up coordinates from the FARC.

The direction of the hostage drama also may depend in large part on the
next steps by Uribe, who on Monday said the FARC might not even be
holding the boy, Emmanuel.

Uribe said a boy matching the description of Emmanuel was handed over
malnourished and suffering from malaria to child welfare authorities in
a FARC stronghold in July 2005. The boy has been living in a Bogota
foster home.

Uribe said DNA tests of Rojas' family were needed to prove or disprove
the "hypothesis." A group of Colombian officials arrived in Caracas on
Tuesday to carry out the tests among relatives.

                              ***

Reuters - January 1, 2008
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN01612491

Colombia Hostage Deal Fiasco Bad News for Captives

By Hugh Bronstein 

BOGOTA, Jan 1 (Reuters) - Colombia's government and Marxist rebels are
likely to toughen their negotiating stances, leaving dozens of kidnap
victims in limbo, after a deal to free three hostages crumbled on
Monday in a flurry of accusations.

Brokered by Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez, the plan to
release two women captives and a child born to one of them in captivity
had raised hopes for a broader deal to free high-profile hostages
including French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt.

But the rescue operation evaporated on Monday with the rebels and
Chavez accusing conservative President Alvaro Uribe of wrecking it by
ordering military operations in the jungle region where the three
captives were believed to be held.

Uribe denied the allegation and accused the rebels of lying. Analysts
say it will now be very difficult to revive the rescue mission or
negotiate the release of other hostages.

"After this, the guerrillas and the government will dig in their
heels," political commentator Daniel Coronell said on Tuesday. "The
hostages will probably spend years more in the jungle before another
serious effort can be mounted to try to free them."

The three hostages are Consuelo Gonzalez, Clara Rojas and her son
Emmanuel, who was fathered by a rebel fighter and is thought to be
about four years old.

Rojas was kidnapped during her 2002 vice presidential campaign and
Gonzalez, a former lawmaker, was taken in 2001.

Early last month, leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC, said they would hand the three over only to fellow
left-winger Chavez or someone designated by him.

DISTRUST

Uribe has clashed repeatedly with Chavez but agreed to let him send
Venezuelan helicopters marked with the Red Cross symbol deep into its
territory to collect the hostages.

As the deal collapsed, Chavez accused Uribe of sabotage. The Colombian
leader responded by suggesting the rebels might not even have Emmanuel,
saying he may have been secretly turned over to Colombian child welfare
officials in 2005.

"Considering the deep distrust between Chavez and Uribe and between
Uribe and the FARC, any future effort toward a hostage release will
require a wider international effort," said Mauricio Romero, a
Bogota-based analyst with the International Center for Transitional
Justice think tank

Uribe, whose father was killed in a botched FARC kidnapping over 20
years ago, is popular for cutting violence and crime with his
U.S.-backed crackdown on the FARC.

But the guerrilla army still controls wide rural areas used to produce
the cocaine that funds its insurgency.

Uribe has refused to grant the FARC's demand for a safe zone where
gun-toting guerrillas could hand over 47 kidnapped politicians, police
and military officers in exchange for jailed rebels. Among the 47 are
Betancourt, snatched in 2002, and three American anti-drug contractors
captured in 2003.

"It would help if the United States could be more involved in hostage
talks to balance the influence of left-wing governments like
Venezuela's and Argentina's," Romero said. "This would give Uribe more
confidence in the negotiations."

The United States has kept a low profile in the negotiations, while
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has proclaimed the liberation of
Betancourt a top foreign policy priority.

                               ***

The New York Times - January 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/world/americas/02colombia.html

Chávez's Promised Hostage Release Fizzles, 
His Second Major Setback in Weeks 

By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

RIO de JANEIRO ? Last week, Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez, seemed
on the verge of one of his biggest triumphs to date. Now, amid renewed
acrimony with the Colombian leader, Álvaro Uribe, he is staring at his
second major political defeat in just over a month.

Using his credibility as a former rebel leader, Mr. Chávez orchestrated
a plan to release three hostages being held for years in the jungle by
a Colombian guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, known as the FARC.

Bristling with confidence, he assembled his allies in Latin America,
including the former Argentine president, Néstor Kirchner, to witness a
breakthrough in the decades-old conflict between the Colombian
government and the FARC. The movie director Oliver Stone was part of a
multinational group of observers that included diplomats from seven
countries, including France and Switzerland.

Then on Monday, Mr. Chávez's showman moment seemed to turn from
history-making success into his latest failure.

For reasons that remain unclear, the FARC refused for four days to give
the exact location of the hostages to Venezuelan helicopter pilots. Mr.
Chávez read a letter from the rebel group late Monday that said the
promised security conditions had not been met.

"This is an important defeat for Hugo Chávez's regional agenda to
promote his Bolivarian revolution and utilize his contacts with armed
groups to win political influence," said Román Ortiz, the director of
security and post-conflict for the Ideas for Peace Foundation, a Bogotá
research institute focused on Colombia's armed conflict.

A successful mission would have been likely to have embarrassed Mr.
Uribe, a conservative who has made little progress in negotiating the
release of any of the several hundred hostages held in jungle camps,
some for nearly a decade. Mr. Uribe has been skeptical of Mr. Chávez's
attempts to spread his Socialist ideology across the continent.

At the same time, the operation would have helped Mr. Chávez bounce
back from a narrow defeat in a referendum early last month on a
proposal that would have tightened his grip on power. For several days,
at least, Mr. Chávez and Argentina's president, Cristina Fernández de
Kirchner, also managed to divert attention from the brewing scandal
involving a suitcase filled with $800,000 in cash believed to be a
secret Venezuelan donation to her campaign.

Mrs. Kirchner dispatched her husband to Colombia, and several other
countries joined in a scramble to claim credit for helping to break the
impasse in the only armed conflict in the Western hemisphere.

But the FARC, which appeared to want to help Mr. Chávez while showing
up Mr. Uribe, did not cooperate.

"Clearly, Chávez did provide the best chance for making some progress,
but it wasn't enough," said Michael Shifter, a vice president at the
Inter-American Dialogue, a policy group in Washington. "In the end, the
distrust that the FARC felt for the Colombian government trumped any
good feelings they felt for Chávez."

Mr. Uribe accused the FARC of lying about its reasons for scuttling the
promised transfers, even suggesting that the rebels did not have one of
the three hostages, a 3-year-old boy named Emmanuel who was born in
captivity to a rebel soldier and Clara Rojas, another of the hostages.
Ms. Rojas and Consuelo González were to have been delivered with the
boy to the Venezuelans.

Hopes ran high that the transfer of the three hostages would lead to
wider prisoner exchanges for more of the 700 hostages reportedly still
in guerrilla hands. They are believed to include a former Colombian
presidential candidate, Ingrid Betancourt, a dual French-Colombian
citizen kidnapped in 2002.

France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has been lobbying for Ms.
Betancourt's release since videos and photos were seized late last
month that apparently showed her alive. The materials also appeared to
show that three American contractors, Thomas Howes, Marc Gonsalves and
Keith Stansell, who were captured in 2003 when their plane went down in
the Colombian jungle, were alive as well.

Now the failed mission has exposed Mr. Chávez to criticism of misplaced
priorities. As he worked to mediate the release of hostages in
Colombia, in Venezuela kidnappings are spiraling. Some estimates show
that Venezuela has more abductions per capita than Colombia now, but
the Venezuelan government has done little to tackle the problem.

The breakdown in the deal with the FARC led to a new round of harsh
accusations between Mr. Chávez and Mr. Uribe. Mr. Chávez said he had
"plenty of reasons to doubt Uribe's team and their analysis and
hypotheses." He accused Mr. Uribe of trying to "dynamite" the
operation, a claim Mr. Uribe denied.

                                 ***

Washington Post - January 2, 2008
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/01/AR2008010102341.html?hpid=sec-world

Colombia: Child Born to Hostage Is Not With FARC

By Juan Forero

BOGOTA, Colombia, Jan. 1 -- A 3 1/2 -year-old boy whom Marxist rebels
pledged to include in a hostage release that collapsed Monday is not in
their hands, and has almost certainly been living in a foster care
program in Bogota, Colombian officials said in interviews on Tuesday.
They believe they have located the boy and are conducting DNA tests to
confirm his identity.

In an intricate operation overseen by Venezuela, helicopters from that
neighboring country were to have picked up the boy, his hostage mother
and another female prisoner in the jungle and flown them to Venezuela.
But anguished families who have waited as long as six years to see
their loved ones freed were instead shattered as the mission unraveled.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, blamed government
military operations in the area for the failure of the long-negotiated
release. But Colombian officials questioned how the release could have
gone forward at all, saying they had learned that the boy, born in
captivity to hostage Clara Rojas, had passed out of rebel hands in
2005. ad_icon

An emissary working for the rebels turned over the boy, named Emmanuel,
to child protective services in the isolated town of San Jose del
Guaviare in 2005, two senior officials said Tuesday. From there, he
apparently wound up with a foster family in Bogota, his real identity
unknown to anyone, the officials said.

The astonishing twist in a saga that captivated Colombia before the
Christmas holidays began to go public Monday when Colombian President
¿lvaro Uribe flew to the operation's staging area in the town of
Villavicencio. The rescue attempt, mediated by Venezuelan President
Hugo Ch¿vez, drew prominent observers to Villavicencio, including
filmmaker Oliver Stone and former Argentine president N¿stor Kirchner.

Uribe, known for his intense hostility toward the FARC, publicly
accused the rebels of reneging on their pledge to liberate the three
hostages because the group did not have control of the boy.

"When the FARC began to say that they were not turning over the
hostages, supposedly because of military operations, when we had done
everything possible within our reach to facilitate the hand over, we
saw that the FARC was trying to fool Ch¿vez, the international
community and us," said Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos in a
telephone interview.

The FARC, responding on its de facto Web site, denied that the boy was
not in its care and said the government had launched a "ball of smoke"
to divert attention from the real reason for the operation's collapse:
Uribe's intransigence.

The Uribe administration said it is hoping to scientifically match DNA
from the boy, who is being closely guarded by child protection
authorities in Bogota, with samples from the family of Clara Rojas, a
kidnapped politician who is believed to have given birth in a rebel
camp in 2004. A rebel commander is reportedly the father.

On Tuesday, a special team was dispatched to Caracas to take DNA
samples from Clara Gonzalez de Rojas, mother of Clara Rojas, and the
prisoner's brother, Ivan Rojas. They and other relatives of the
hostages have been in the Venezuelan capital since last week, awaiting
the release of their loved ones. DNA samples are also being sought from
other relatives of the boy, said Santos, who said that authorities
hoped for a clear match within a few days with samples from the boy
found in Bogota.

"We don't lose anything by doing this," Ivan Rojas told reporters in
Caracas on Tuesday. "Why would we put things in doubt?"

Last year, the boy's existence received broad news coverage in Colombia
and beyond after a policeman, Jhon Frank Pinchao, escaped from a FARC
camp and spoke of how he had been with Rojas and her newborn son in
2004. He said the boy was named Emmanuel. The guerrilla group received
widespread condemnation for holding a child prisoner.

On Dec. 18, it announced it would hand over three hostages to
Venezuela's government: Consuelo Gonzalez, a former congresswoman held
since 2001; Rojas, a politician kidnapped in 2002; and the boy.

The FARC pledge prompted hope that the group, which has more than 750
hostages, including three U.S. Defense Department contractors, was
prepared to make other unilateral releases.

The pledge came shortly after the Uribe government had terminated an
effort by Venezuela to mediate the release of prisoners. Colombia
approved the renewed role for Ch¿vez, and he began orchestrating a
complex operation in which Venezuelan helicopters would fly deep into
rebel territory to pick up the hostages.

But Santos and another senior government official, who spoke on
condition of anonymity, said Tuesday that military intelligence and
infiltrators into the rebel group determined that while Ch¿vez was
overseeing the preparations, the FARC was frantically trying to locate
Emmanuel. The FARC is widely dispersed and has a decentralized command.

The guerrilla leaders who offered to give up the boy may not have
realized they no longer had him, the Colombian officials said. Or they
may have thought they could quickly recover him.

The guerrillas began accusing the Colombian military of launching
operations, which Santos and the other senior official denied.

After the government received a tip about the boy's real whereabouts,
authorities began to go through the records of about 100 children who
had been turned over to child protection services in southern Colombia
in 2005. They quickly narrowed their search to three boys and, by
Friday, felt that they had located Emmanuel, now bearing a different
name.

Santos and the other official said the boy they found had suffered an
injury at birth, the same kind of injury that the escaped police
officer reported Emmanuel had suffered. The boy had burn marks on one
hand, a wound that Emmanuel also had. He also had suffered from jungle
maladies, including malaria and leishmaniasis, which are unheard of in
this chilly capital 8,000 feet above sea level.

"The coincidences are many," Santos said. "When we saw that the
information coincided, well that gives us a certain level of confidence
that the hypothesis that they didn't have the boy was true." The
defense minister also said that the man who turned the boy over to
authorities in 2005, whom he identified as Jos¿ Gomez, had gone back to
child protection authorities in recent days to try to retrieve the boy.

On Tuesday morning, the officials said, Gomez confessed to prosecutors
in San Jose del Guaviare that the FARC had turned the boy over to him
in 2005. Claiming to be the uncle of the boy's mother, he had then
given the boy to authorities.

The Colombian government's account at first irked the Venezuelan
government. But after receiving details Tuesday, Ch¿vez struck a more
conciliatory tone, wishing Uribe a happy holiday and calling for the
two to work together for peace in Colombia. 

                              ***

PA (UK) - Dec 30, 2007
http://ukpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5h4uB0M1Jx7u0tWTM_Af2aFj-SOxw

Stone Set for Hostage Mercy Mission

Press Association

American film-maker Oliver Stone has praised President Hugo Chavez as
the Venezuelan leader launched a mission to airlift three hostages held
by left-wing rebels from Colombia's jungles.

Mr Stone, who stood near Chavez as two Russian-made helicopters took
off from an airfield in western Venezuela, said he was working on a
film and hoped to accompany the humanitarian operation into Colombia.

"I'm doing a documentary about Latin America and also about North
America. You have to wait around to see it," Mr Stone told reporters.

He said he planned to take part in the mission, calling it a
"beautiful, great process".

"I'm hoping it works. I'm all for this," Mr Stone said. "I've never
been in such a thing. I'm very proud to be a part of this."

The Oscar-winning director, who made a 2003 documentary about Cuban
president Fidel Castro as well as the movie Platoon, called Mr Chavez a
"great man" and said: "I'm a fan."

Urging Mr Stone to speak to reporters, Chavez told him: "The girls want
to see you!" He joked that Stone was an "envoy" for Mr Chavez's
capitalist arch-enemy, US president George Bush.

"There are some good Americans. That's why I'm here, to remind you," Mr
Stone said.

Mr Chavez revealed that Stone was in Venezuela on Thursday, saying they
had met for two hours and noting the director was a Vietnam veteran who
now questioned the reasons for that war. He said he did not know
whether Mr Stone's documentary would be about the Colombian hostages,
including three -- two women and a boy -- who may soon be freed after
being held for years by left-wing guerrillas.

"He's going around doing research. He says he wants to know and learn
deeply the history of these nations," Mr Chavez said. "He's an
anti-imperialist, Oliver Stone. He's a good man."