Carefully planned Colombia rescue exploited FARC weaknesses

BOGOTÁ: At 5 a.m. Wednesday, the sun had yet to peek through the jungle canopy in the Guaviare Department of Colombia when the guerrillas told their captives to gather their belongings. A call had come in from a top adviser to Alfonso Cano, their new supreme commander. He said to move. Immediately.

Or so the guerrillas thought. In fact, the gravelly voice that sounded so full of authority belonged not to a leader of the most feared insurgent group in Latin America - the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC - but rather to a government officer.

The fighters had been duped. With the help of satellite telephone intercepts and a spy who had infiltrated FARC's upper echelons, the Colombian military had managed to plan and execute an operation that would end a long-running international hostage saga and upend the four-decade civil war in Colombia.

The voice was simply the most dramatic touch in the daring rescue that exploited the recent disarray within the FARC. The insurgency has lost many of its top leaders and, now, its most prized hostage: Ingrid Betancourt, the French-Colombian politician whose captivity since 2002 had attracted attention worldwide.

The founder of FARC, Manuel Marulanda, died recently; security forces killed the second in command, Raúl Reyes, this spring; and about 3,000 combatants have deserted in the past year.

The rescue, described by commanders of the Colombian Army and officials in Washington and Bogotá, was almost exclusively a Colombian operation that highlighted the growth of a military that has benefited from $5.4 billion in aid from the United States since 2000. And while many here and in Washington stressed that FARC remained a powerful force of several thousand fighters, earning about $200 million a year from drug trafficking, some analysts suggested that the raid, combined with continued pressure, might push the rebels to negotiate for peace.

Hugo Chávez, the leftist leader of Venezuela who negotiated previous releases of FARC hostages but failed to free Betancourt or three American contractors who also were rescued Wednesday, has lost some of the regional spotlight to the president of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe, his top rival and a staunch ally of the Bush administration.

For FARC, the game has changed. The gritty leftist insurgency that has survived for decades in the jungles of the Andes and provided military cover for the world's most productive coca growers fell prey to an elaborate ruse that Colombia's defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, likened to a Hollywood script.

No other rebel movement is as well known in South America as FARC, nor as widely reviled.

Founded in 1964, after more than a decade of political violence that became the basis of the country's armed struggle, the group's power grew during the 1980s and early '90s when the guerrillas joined a partnership with Colombian drug cartels.

FARC's combination of ideology and money earned from protecting peasants growing coca gave it a force of as many as 17,000 fighters a decade ago and the ability to strike at will. Drug money fueled the violence.

The drug money poisoned the government with corruption as rightist paramilitaries and FARC killed, kidnapped and competed for control of cocaine trafficking and the country.

In 2002, the FARC seized Betancourt, a Colombian senator who was campaigning, somewhat quixotically, to become president of the country on a platform of fighting corruption. A year later, the guerrillas captured three American military contractors - Keith Stansell, Thomas Howes and Marc Gonsalves - after their small Cessna crashed in the jungle.

The U.S. military flew thousands of spy flights over Colombian jungles, trying to find the three contractors, who had been hired to help find coca fields from the air.

Meanwhile, the ordeal of Betancourt, 40 years old at the time of her capture, the daughter of a diplomat and a beauty queen, pushed the conflict in Colombia conflict to the front pages of the largest newspapers in Europe.

Her two children living in Paris rallied support in France and around the world, even as her health slowly deteriorated. In letters and interviews since her release, she has described a routine of cruelty that left her at many points without the will to live. Her captors chained her and others by the neck to trees. She rarely changed her clothes.

Tropical diseases, long marches through the mountains and a lack of nutritious food shriveled her to a thin post with stringy hair flowing to her waist.

"It was not treatment that you can give to a living being," Betancourt told France 2 television Thursday. She added: "I wouldn't have given the treatment I had to an animal, perhaps not even to a plant."

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