Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

COLOMBIA: Hostage-Prisoner Swap a Mirage

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTÁ, May 28 2008 (IPS) - “It is painful to die without seeing my son free,” said 62-year-old Pedro Manuel Pérez eight days before he died of leukaemia. His funeral in the northern Colombian city of Riohacha put an end to his 10-year wait for the release of his hostage son by the FARC guerrillas.

Army corporal William Pérez was 23 years old when the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) attacked the El Billar military base in southern Colombia, in March 1998.

In the attack, “62 professional soldiers were killed, 31 managed to escape, and 43 were captured by the guerrillas, including officers and non-commissioned officers like our son,” Pedro Manuel Pérez told journalist Yosmery Magdaniel, who sent IPS the news of his death last week in Riohacha.

The majority of the 43 military personnel captured in El Billar were rank-and-file soldiers, who were released by the insurgent group in 2001 in a unilateral gesture in the framework of peace talks.

Today the group of hostages held by the FARC with the hope of swapping them for imprisoned rebels is made up of 34 members of the armed forces and police, three U.S. military contractors, and three civilians, including French-Colombian former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt.

Since 2003, 13 civilian and eight military hostages have been shot and killed in failed military rescue attempts and other circumstances, and a military officer died of health problems.

In addition, the FARC’s chief negotiator on the hostage issue, known as “Raúl Reyes”, was killed in a Mar. 1 Colombian military aerial bombing of his camp across the border in Ecuador, which led to a rupture in diplomatic relations between the two countries.

The positive news in the hostage crisis was the release of six former politicians by the FARC, and the escape of two hostages in 2007: a police officer and a politician, Fernando Araújo, who is now foreign minister.

It was the dizzying official negotiations carried out from August to November by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Colombian opposition Senator Piedad Córdoba that secured the unilateral release of the six civilian hostages in January and February.

But that was achieved at the cost of a dangerous confrontation between the leftist Venezuelan leader and his political antithesis in the region, rightwing Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, who abruptly cut short Chávez’s mediation efforts.

Since Reyes’ death, “the big problem is that the FARC has not named a negotiator,” said journalist Carlos Lozano, director of the Communist weekly publication Voz, who was named by Uribe on May 2 as a facilitator of hostage talks, along with conservative former minister Álvaro Leyva.

“There is a great deal of mistrust” in the FARC, which means that negotiating a hostage-prisoner swap “is a risky role to take on,” because the guerrilla leaders’ communications equipment can be used to identify their location, added Lozano in a public dialogue on the hostage crisis with former minister Camilo González Posso, director of the Institute of Studies for Development and Peace (INDEPAZ), held last week in the Bogotá offices of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a non-profit German organisation.

Lozano and González Posso both stressed that military hostages like Pérez, who have spent the most years in captivity in remote FARC jungle camps, have been basically forgotten.

In 2006, former U.S. ambassador to Colombia, William Wood, compared them to the “terminally ill.” And the army has reported that all of the officers and non-commissioned officers seized by the guerrillas have been replaced.

This year, Colombia, the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world, after Israel and Egypt, will earmark 6.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to military spending.

Nevertheless, Uribe, an adherent of U.S. President George W. Bush’s “war on terror”, denies that Colombia is in the grip of an internal armed conflict, referring instead to the insurgents as “terrorists.”

If Uribe admitted that the country was involved in a war, said Lozano, he would have to accept that the origins of the civil war date back to the 1940s, and “would have to conclude that no military solution is possible.”

The search for a humanitarian hostage-prisoner swap is just one of many battles waged in Colombia’s armed conflict, the crux of which is the struggle over land and areas rich in natural resources, from which hundreds of thousands of peasant farmers have been forcibly displaced, mainly by the far-right paramilitaries.

The FARC has been dealt “very strong blows” this year, said Lozano. The laptops that the government says were found in Reyes’ camp have revealed FARC military secrets, and have provided thousands of emails and internal memos on the group’s political and diplomatic activities.

And just a few days after Reyes was killed, another FARC leader, known as “Iván Ríos”, was murdered on Mar. 7 by his own men, who were paid a 1.4 million dollar bounty by the government.

Demoralised by the war and besieged by the army, another battle-hardened FARC commander, “Karina”, surrendered earlier this month and urged the FARC leadership to end hostilities and sit down to negotiate.

But the biggest blow was revealed on Saturday: the death of FARC founder and chief “Manuel Marulanda”, who reportedly died of a heart attack on Mar. 26.

In Lozano’s view, “a guerrilla group is prepared to deal with the death of its leaders.” But, he added, “it is obvious” that in the face of the sustained military pressure from the Uribe administration, the territory under FARC control has shrunk “a great deal.” According to a 1996 German intelligence report to the Bundestag (parliament), the rebel group controlled 45 percent of the country at that time – mainly sparsely populated rural areas in the south of the country.

But the FARC, Colombia’s largest insurgency, still has “the capacity to react,” and is not “at the end of the end,” as the military maintains, said Lozano. And “when we do get there, there will still be 10 more years of war,” warned former minister González Posso.

The military bog-down is reflected in conditions set by the government and the FARC in the hostage crisis, on which neither will budge. Meanwhile, the hostages are paying the price.

“I agree that hostage-taking is an error on the part of the guerrillas. We have to draw them into politics. I don’t believe in armed, revolutionary struggle as an option,” said Lozano, who is also a leader of Colombia’s Communist Party.

He said he supports a negotiated exchange of hostages for prisoners because “it is altruistic and humanitarian, which are the fundamental principles of the left.”

Although he said “there are no great reasons” to be optimistic, he added that “neither of the two (government and FARC) are closed” to the possibility of a swap, although “they lack political will.”

France and the families of the hostages, meanwhile, defend Chávez’s involvement in the mediation efforts.

Lozano, who is considered the best-informed Colombian reporter on the hostage crisis, said, without elaborating, that “things are moving,” and “I hope things will continue going this way.”

But for INDEPAZ director González Posso, a humanitarian agreement is like a mirage. “The more we want it, the more remote it becomes.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a humanitarian agreement is dead, because sometimes you’re wrong, but the chances of achieving one are at a low point. The prisoner-hostage swap chapter is closing, and has been caught in a trap,” he said.

González Posso believes the FARC is not principally seeking the release of imprisoned rebels, but is using the question of a swap to achieve, above all, political returns by demonstrating its strength – a view that Lozano does not share.

“Nor does the government care about securing the release of the hostages, because it puts a military defeat of the FARC ahead of (the possibility of a humanitarian accord). Its main interest is to win the war,” said González Posso.

And even if the two sides did begin to negotiate a swap in a demilitarised zone – the aim of the hostages’ families and the mediators – “they would sit down to argue about the same things they are arguing about today,” he said.

Hostage talks have long been blocked by Uribe’s insistence that the FARC is nothing but a gang of terrorists, and by the insurgent group’s view of the president as a “narco-paramilitary chief” – a reference to the paramilitary groups that are heavily involved in the drug trade, act in collusion with the army and have supported pro-Uribe candidates in elections by threatening and intimidating voters.

It’s almost as difficult to attain a humanitarian agreement for a hostage-prisoner swap as it is to achieve peace negotiations, because the correlation of forces against the FARC is growing stronger, said González Posso.

The so-called “humanitarian cordon” ordered by Uribe in late 2007 “is the forerunner to a military rescue” of the hostages, said the former minister.

The hostages’ families are staunchly opposed to any attempt to rescue their loved ones by force. The FARC guerrillas guarding the hostages have standing orders to kill them if the armed forces close in on them. A number of hostages have already died in failed rescue attempts, including a provincial governor and a former cabinet minister.

In the “humanitarian cordon,” army troops are ordered to track down the hostages, surround the rebel camps where they are being held, and inform Uribe, so that he can call on the international community to send representatives to convince the guerrillas not to shoot the hostages, and to turn them over without offering resistance.

Before engaging in eventual talks with the Uribe administration, the FARC is planning to deal a blow that is “equivalent” to the loss of Raúl Reyes and Iván Ríos, González Posso warned.

According to the former minister, hostage talks are not a real option in today’s Colombia, as long as a growing majority of the population believes it is possible to defeat the FARC on the battlefield.

“Whatever alternative there may be must lie in the international arena,” he said, referring to the support for hostage talks provided by Venezuela, France and other nations.