Noël Saez, a former French consul to Bogota, was the special envoy appointed by the French government to the task of securing the liberation of Ingrid Betancourt who was abducted by FARC on 23 February 2002. He fulfilled this role under the presidencies of both Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy. In the section of his book which deals with these negotiations- which he conducted alongside the Swiss emissary Jean-Pierre Gontard- Saez, without any indication of a soft attitude towards FARC, accuses the Colombian government of duplicity. ‘We have the unfortunate impression that [President Alvaro] Uribe is using us (…) We risk loosing FARC’s trust, they have observed with skepticism that following each of our incursions into their zone, their camps are attacked by government forces. Adding ‘in spite of all precautions taken by us, the army is using us to get at FARC’.

Following six years of negotiations, just as a favorable outcome was in the pipeline and the guerilla had softened its position, ‘ President Uribe insisted that contact be reestablished with FARC’ and to reactivate the attempt to free the hostages. Raùl Reyes, second in command of the guerilla was conducting secret negotiations from his side and had set up a camp in Ecuador close to the Colombian border. ‘Ingrid was to be set free in the ensuing days’ according to Saez. He continued to say that ‘Uribe’s objective- deftly supported by his High Commissioner for Peace- was to use us, once again, to establish the exact location where Raùl Reyes was to meet us and to get there before us and to kill him’. Reyes was killed by a commando unit of Colombian army on March 1st 2008.

In spite of the bombings and carnage which followed, the Colombian military supposedly found Reyes’ personal computers ‘intact’. The revelation of their alleged contents would give rise to a virulent campaign targeting the Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa and his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chàvez, both of whom were accused of ‘collusion’ with the guerilla movement. Personally Saez testifies that in ‘looking closely at the e-mails that I am supposed to have sent to Reyes [which Bogota handed over to him] I am astounded, I never said such things! Furthermore I cannot write Spanish that well. There is no doubt, this particular paragraph was added on. So much for the reliability of files found on Raùl Reyes computers’.

This particular negotiation being scuppered along with those which followed thereafter, the way was clear for the fake ‘humanitarian mission’ undertaken by the Colombian army (secretly supported by the US and Israel) which would liberate Ingrid Betancourt and fourteen other hostages on July 2nd 2008. An operation prepared with the help (knowingly or unknowingly) of the Colombian media, who during the previous days had reported on the existence of a ‘humanitarian mission’ which was to oversee the transfer of hostages to a new location. ‘This was so that the rebels, who read the papers like everyone else, would not be surprised when they saw these much talked-about helicopters coming in to land’.

Seen by many as ‘perfect’, Operation Jaque (check-mate) leaves Saez feeling skeptical. As far as he is concerned the guerilla commander- César- who was guarding the prisoners and whose wife had been captured a few months previously, ‘was not tricked, he was bribed. It is my firm belief (…) Uribe wanted to pass off as a military feat something which was actually the result of an act of treachery by a FARC commander’.