Liberen a Emmanuel

From: Townhall.com

Few people have seen the 3-year-old boy born in captivity to a Colombian politician kidnapped by Latin America’s biggest guerrilla army five years ago.

Yet little Emmanuel is soon to become the face of Colombia’s legions of kidnap victims, the centerpiece of an international campaign by President Alvaro Uribe to pressure their captors to free them.

Since his birth, Emmanuel has been raised by guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The group abducted his mother, Clara Rojas, and her boss, former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, in 2002.

Rojas and Betancourt are among some 60 hostages, including three U.S. defense contractors, who the guerrillas want to swap for hundreds of imprisoned comrades.

News of Emmanuel’s birth and extraordinary upbringing have provoked soul-searching in Colombia.

“We can’t keep living the way we are in this country, where a child is abused like this since birth, a child who has no type of rights,” said Ivan Rojas, the child’s uncle and Clara Rojas’ brother.

Capitalizing on widespread sympathy for Emmanuel _ television programs begin with a plea for his freedom _ the government says it plans to launch an international awareness campaign on how the FARC treats its hostages.

It “will show the levels of cruelty of this organization that has reached the point where a human being is born kidnapped,” said Vice President Francisco Santos, who was abducted in 1990 and held for eight months by followers of the late drug lord Pablo Escobar.

Santos’ office was unable to provide details of the campaign, saying it was still being designed.

With leftist rebels, far-right paramilitaries and common criminals all kidnapping for money or political ends, Colombia has one of the world’s highest abduction rates. Nearly 700 victims were taken last year by an official count, and the anti-kidnapping organization Pais Libre estimates more than 3,000 people are now being held.

For years, Rojas was overshadowed by Betancourt, who as a dual French citizen became a cause celebre in Europe.

That changed last year when a Colombian journalist published a book revealing that Rojas had given birth to a boy fathered by one of her guerrilla guards.

Last month, a police officer, Jhon Frank Pinchao, escaped from the rebels after nine years in captivity and revealed Emmanuel’s name, wrenching hearts with the news that mother and son are kept apart.

“They don’t leave the baby with her,” Pinchao said. “They let her see him and all, but it’s the guerrillas who care for him.”

He also said hostages who tried to escape, including Betancourt, were made to sleep with thick metal chains tying their necks to trees.

Pinchao’s statements, while welcomed for confirming that Clara Rojas and her son are alive, were cause for more anxiety for the family.

“If all the time Emmanuel is in an environment of the jungle, helicopters flying overhead, and as he grows up all he’s seeing are men in uniform, he’s growing up to be a guerrilla,” Ivan Rojas said.

He said the ordeal has been hardest on their 76-year-old mother, also named Clara, who “feels she could die at any moment and never see Clara again.”

On Tuesday, the elder Clara Rojas circulated a letter addressed to her grandson.

“You have no idea of the risks you face. You need your mother … to catch you, to reach out to you when you trip and when you fall,” she wrote. “We want you free, dear Emmanuel, so one day you will grow and you can read these lines. I just hope it won’t be too late for me.”

E-mailed requests for an interview with the FARC went unanswered. The 15,000-member rebel army, fighting for more than four decades for a leftist revolution, has retreated deeper into Colombia’s jungles and mountains since Uribe’s election in 2002.

The Emmanuel campaign comes after two weeks of unprecedented moves by Uribe to seek the hostages’ freedom.

At what he said was the urging of newly elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Uribe is releasing nearly 200 imprisoned FARC rebels. And on Tuesday, Uribe freed a guerrilla commander, Rodrigo Granda, in the hopes that he would act as an intermediary to restart talks with the rebels.

Granda refused the role, however, and the FARC has rejected Uribe’s overtures, insisting a demilitarized zone be created as a first condition for a prisoner swap.

While Betancourt’s family worries that Uribe’s moves may leave the government with fewer bargaining chips, Ivan Rojas supports the president’s plan.

“At first it sounds like a crazy idea to simply hand over 200 rebels, but the more one thinks about it, the more one realizes this could turn out to be fantastic,” he told the Associated Press. “When the government has gone ahead and released these prisoners, the world will then see who really wants this agreement.”