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BOGOTA, Feb 23 (IPS) - The mother of former Colombian presidential candidate and senator Ingrid Betancourt, Yolanda Pulecio, says President Alvaro Uribe is actively boycotting the possibility of reaching an agreement to release her daughter, who was kidnapped by the FARC insurgents three years ago.
”On several occasions when contact has been made with the guerrillas through the United Nations, the Catholic Church, the Red Cross or friendly countries, to discuss a humanitarian accord, and in particular to arrange a face-to-face meeting in a specific spot agreed by both sides, it is President Uribe who, after he finds out, cleverly intervenes to block a solution,” said Pulecio.
She was speaking at a talk held Monday to mark the kidnapping of her daughter, the highest profile hostage held by FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- the largest rebel group).
The left-wing FARC, which has been fighting for 40 years, carries out kidnappings for ransom, but it also holds hostages with the aim of trading them for around 500 guerrillas who are in prison.
These ”exchangeable” captives include 34 soldiers and police, three U.S. military contractors, 26 politicians and the 43-year-old Betancourt, who was kidnapped three days after the government of Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) broke off peace talks with FARC.
But the right-wing Uribe administration argues that a prisoners-for-hostages swap would only lead to an increase in kidnappings, demoralise the troops (if the rebels released from prison took up arms again), and weaken the state, because it would imply official recognition that the army is fighting an armed opposition group rather than ”terrorists” as the government insists.
The administration has merely taken a few unilateral steps that are seen as a farce by the guerrillas.
In July 2004, the government proposed releasing 50 imprisoned insurgents. And when 23 were released in December after signing a pledge that they would not continue fighting, the rebel group, which had not reached any agreement with the government, made no comment whatsoever.
Also in July, the Uribe administration suggested that Switzerland and France help facilitate a humanitarian swap. ”Up to that time, the mediation was carried out by the Catholic Church, and the government's proposal came as a bucket of cold water for the bishops,” Darío Villamizar, director of the Latin American Human Rights Association (ALDHU) in Colombia, told IPS.
”By that time it was clear that the government had turned its back on (James) LeMoyne (the U.N. special envoy to Colombia),” he added. LeMoyne's ”good offices mission”, which is to help bring about peace talks, ends in two months, and no replacement has been named.
The government also proposed that a potential meeting be held in a church to be chosen by FARC -- a suggestion that according to the guerrillas lacks the necessary security guarantees.
As time passes and the armed conflict intensifies, some of the soldiers held hostage by FARC are reaching their eighth year in captivity in the jungle.
Vice-President Francisco Santos told this journalist back in May 2002 that the government would give the guerrillas a military beating, and get them to negotiate in two years, ”but under our conditions.”
A year ago, the government launched Plan Patriot, a vast counterinsurgency military operation aimed at attacking FARC's rearguard that receives financing and training from the United States.
FARC commander Manuel Marulanda responded to the offensive by ordering a tactical retreat, which has just ended, according to an announcement made Saturday by guerrilla spokesman Raúl Reyes on the Noticias Uno news station.
There have recently been growing reports of military casualties, mainly caused by explosives, the main weapons of attack used by the rebels. But troops deployed to the jungle as part of Plan Patriot have also been dying of tropical diseases.
Betancourt and the rest of the hostages are apparently being held in the heart of the rural war zone, where the government's offensive has been launched, and are at risk of being killed by bombs or in armed clashes, not to mention the dangers posed by constant exposure to the climate.
”Unlike those who say the guerrillas are going to be finished off in one, two, five, ten or 20 years, we have always believed that this is highly improbable,” said Marleny Orjuela, spokeswoman for Asfamipaz, which groups the families of the military and police captives.
The insurgents ”have been fighting for 50 years, they know the jungle like the palms of their hands,” Orjuela said in an interview with IPS.
”And we, the families of police and soldiers, believe that what is needed is a political, negotiated solution, and the door to that dialogue is a humanitarian exchange, which is what could bring the two sides together,” she added.
”That is our great hope: not only that a humanitarian accord will be negotiated, but that a peace agreement will be signed,” said Orjuela.
”We are opposed to a military rescue,” said Pulecio, who described the three years that Betancourt has been held hostage as ”a three-year parenthesis in the life of a woman, a mother, a politician.”
”A parenthesis in the fight against corruption and in the search for negotiated solutions for the country,” Betancourt's main aims as a politician, she added.
”The only instrument is a humanitarian accord, which has been discussed...by different sectors in the country,” Betancourt's mother told a packed university auditorium in Monday's gathering, which she organised to seek new ways of bringing about a humanitarian swap.
Her audience included former president Alfonso López Michelsen (1974-1978), the ambassadors of France and Belgium, the German Embassy's business attaché and a multiparty delegation of Belgian lawmakers.
With respect to the intensification of the war, Pulecio told IPS that ”the government provokes (the guerrillas), saying that it has already crushed them, that its 'democratic security' policy has triumphed, so they come out to say 'here we are', and to demonstrate” that they are still strong.
Pulecio said she expected things to only get worse now that FARC announced that its tactical retreat has come to an end, and added ”How could (President Uribe) even consider a policy of extermination, as he recently announced, when there are so many innocent people caught in the middle?”
Juan Carlos Lecompte, Betancourt's husband, said on Feb. 1 that the capture of senior FARC guerrilla official Rodrigo Granda in Caracas had put an end to national and international efforts in favour of a humanitarian exchange.
According to Lecompte, Uribe knew that Granda, who was living in Venezuela, was the contact for the hostages' families and international actors (like the United Nations, the Red Cross and the governments of France and Switzerland) working towards a humanitarian agreement.
”Granda had contacts with the Swiss and they were arranging or beginning a process of negotiation of a humanitarian swap with FARC. Uribe found out, and gave the order to have him seized,” Lecompte told Caracol Noticias, a TV news programme in Colombia.
Granda's Dec. 13 capture by a Colombian commando that bribed members of Venezuela's security forces sparked a diplomatic row between Caracas and Bogota that was not formally resolved until last week, in a meeting between Uribe and his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chávez.
A year ago, Fabrice Delloye, Betancourt's French ex-husband and the father of her children, told the newspaper Le Monde that the family had been manipulated by Uribe to abort a U.N. contact with FARC spokespersons in Brazil.
The meeting had been suggested by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in response to a letter from FARC.
And on Jan. 13, 2004, FARC reported that guerrilla leader Simón Trinidad was arranging a meeting in Ecuador ”with representatives of the French government with the aim of coming up with a solution to the captivity of Ingrid Betancourt and the rest of the prisoners of war through a humanitarian exchange.”
Trinidad was the FARC spokesman in charge of negotiating a swap until he was arrested in Quito in December 2003. On Dec. 31, 2004 Bogota extradited him to the United States.
The families of the captives agonise when we see the government and guerrillas taking increasingly intransigent stances without any consideration whatsoever for the human lives that are at stake, Lecompte wrote in his book ”Searching for Ingrid”, an account of the three-year nightmare he has lived since her kidnapping, published this month in Spanish and French.
The book, put out by the Aguilar publishing house, carries an inscription, a quote by one of the captive soldiers: ”You pray to God, but you know the solution is in the hands of men.” (END/2005)
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