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COLOMBIA: Hostage Rescue, According to Captured Guerrilla Leader
Constanza Vieira
- “Occupation: Guerrilla. Address: Colombian mountains. Distinguishing marks: Combat scars.” That is how Gerardo Aguilar, alias “César” and Alexander Farfán, “Enrique Gafas,” answered questions on forms for their extradition to the United States.
The emblem of the International Committee of the Red Cross, as represented by its Spanish acronym. Credit:
“I did not sell out. I am a FARC [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia] fighter,” César told his lawyer, Rodolfo Ríos. He also asked his lawyer what prison cells in the U.S. would be like. César’s extradition was formally requested Jul. 10 and Colombia has said it will agree.
Ríos fears that his client and the other guerrilla may be treated in the U.S. like members of the Islamic extremist network al Qaeda.
The two rebels were captured in Operation “Check” (as in chess). Former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt – one of 15 hostages freed by a Colombian army commando unit on Jul. 2 – described the operation as “perfect”.
Three U.S. contractors working in an anti-drug programme, Keith Stansell, Marc Gonsalves and Thomas Howes, and 11 Colombian police and soldiers were also safely liberated in the operation.
The hostages had been held for at least five years – some up to 10 years – by the leftwing FARC, which planned to exchange them for imprisoned rebels. Three political hostages and 27 police and military troops remain captives in the jungle with the rebels.
César’s account of Operation Check is, in outline, similar to the description given by the Defence Ministry. His lawyer, Ríos, told IPS what César – known as the FARC’s “jailer”, and until last week commander of the insurgents’ First Front, the unit guarding Betancourt and her fellow hostages – had to say about it.
The hostages guarded by César’s guerrillas were indeed being kept in three separate groups, as General Freddy Padilla, the commander of the armed forces, has said. Padilla had added that the groups were 50 kilometres apart from each other.
About a month and a half before the operation, César started to receive text messages on the Front Command’s satellite phone. Some time earlier, the FARC had started using this form of communication, avoiding radio contact or voice conversations by satellite phone because they were being intercepted.
The text messages came – so César thought – from the commander of the Eastern Bloc, Jorge Briceño, known as “Mono Jojoy”, and other members of the Secretariat of the FARC High Command, including “Alfonso Cano”, the current commander-in-chief, himself.
The messages were orders to bring the different groups of hostages together. A message would arrive from Cano, another from Briceño, and more from several different commanders, all confirming that there was to be a liberation operation. He described the flurry of messages as “a zigzag”.
César thought this was strange, but he carried out the orders and assembled the hostages into one group.
“César” said there was never a messenger to confirm the orders “from above” in person – as stated in the official description of Operation Check – and that the messages he received remained on the satellite phone in the hands of his Front comrades.
In the last 20 days leading up to the operation, the text messages became more frequent. They told him the rendezvous site where he should take the group of hostages – which according to Padilla was 150 kilometres north of the point where the groups had been brought together – a clearing which turned out to be a coca plantation.
From there they would be airlifted to Alfonso Cano’s camp, César was led to believe.
When the guerrilla unit and their captives arrived at the place, “I had some doubts; I was excited but nervous at the same time,” César said, according to lawyer Ríos who was relating the story to IPS.
The first thing the veteran guerrilla saw were two airplanes at a great height, circling the area. These had not been mentioned before in any of the accounts of the operation.
Then he saw the helicopters, white with a red stripe in the same design as those used in January and February to transport hostages unilaterally released by the FARC after mediation by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, in operations coordinated by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which César had watched on television in the jungle.
One helicopter landed and four civilians wearing jeans and T-shirts got out. Two wore T-shirts with the image of Argentine-Cuban guerrilla Ernesto Che Guevara and a stripe at stomach height saying “International Red Cross.” The other two had the ICRC logo on their T-shirts, the insurgent said.
“According to César, he could make out the International Committee of the Red Cross, the ICRC logo perfectly clearly,” his lawyer Ríos told IPS.
Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe has since admitted the unauthorised use of the ICRC emblem in the rescue operation – a ruse that is specifically prohibited by the Geneva Conventions – and apologised to the humanitarian group, saying is was a mistake.
The men wearing the Che Guevara T-shirts greeted him with “¡Qué hubo, camarada!” (What’s up, comrade?), the customary greeting among Colombian guerrillas, also commonly used in Venezuela.
The fifth person to get out of the helicopter was a woman in FARC uniform and insignia, who was unarmed. The government’s reports of the mission mentioned a woman disguised as a nurse.
Then a “double” looking very like Colombian journalist Jorge Enrique Botero appeared, according to César. Botero is the only journalist who has been able to visit the hostages’ camps, and has written several books on the FARC.
The presumed Botero was followed by another man who had a Venezuelan accent and wore press identification for the multi-state owned South American television network Telesur, based in Caracas.
At that point, César relaxed. The woman in the FARC uniform, who was later identified as a captain in the Colombian army, starting tying the hostages’ hands. At first, César said he could not ride in the helicopter because he could not leave his guerrilla unit, and delegated others to go instead. But the supposed FARC woman and the other members of the operation told him that Cano needed him. “You are the one who must go and talk with him,” they said.
César was not carrying his rifle at that point because he had handed it over to another guerrilla in order to “help with the logistics” of getting the hostages on board, his lawyer said.
Gafas and he were the last to board the helicopter. “You cannot bring your weapons,” said someone from the presumed humanitarian mission, and so they left their nine-millimetre pistols on the ground too. The official report said that the guerrillas were asked to hand over their weapons once they were on board.
In the helicopter, they were told to sit at the back.
As they were about to sit down, the four agents wearing the Che Guevara and ICRC T-shirts pounced on them, punched and overwhelmed them. César felt an injection and lost consciousness while they were still hitting him.
The captured guerrillas received medical care, although when Ríos first saw them, the day after they were captured, they were still partially under the effects of the sedative injection. They both wear glasses, which were broken to pieces.
“I was taken in by military intelligence,” César admitted to his lawyer, “All the satellite phones and radios are tapped.” The Defence Ministry spoke of “message diversion.”
Ríos asked César several times if he was sure that the troops in the operation were wearing the ICRC logo, and he has always answered, “Yes, I’m absolutely sure, and that is what gained my confidence, because I had a lot of doubts.”
The ICRC symbol is a red cross surrounded by a double circle in black, with the inscription “COMITE INTERNATIONAL GENEVE.”
“The International Red Cross symbols gave me confidence,” César told Ríos.
The apparent presence of the Telesur network also gave him confidence, because a Venezuelan cameraman had recorded the previous unilateral hostage releases brokered by Chávez. So did the presence of journalist Botero’s look-alike.
The lawyer also said that, “the fact that there were young men there in Che Guevara T-shirts, who behaved like guerrillas, people who had undergone guerrilla training, really boosted César’s confidence.”
The first meeting between President Álvaro Uribe and his top generals, and the released hostages, was televised on the night of Jul. 2.
Uribe stressed three times at that press conference that “the helicopters had no markings, of the Red Cross or anything like it, nor of a humanitarian mission,” but he did not mention the T-shirts. “It was a special mission with the goal of transporting the hostages to another camp, with the consent of the FARC,” he summed up.
However, on the three-minute video taken during the operation – which was edited by the Defence Ministry and publicly broadcast – a double black circle with the last three letters of the word “GENEVE” is visible on a T-shirt.
On Jul. 6 the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo published a reconstruction of the planning and execution of Operation Check, based on the story of “one of the masterminds behind the greatest coup in history against the FARC.”
“This did not depend on our weapons or our shooting skills, but on the atmosphere we had to create to convince the guerrillas, especially César, that we were really a humanitarian mission. We also designed some logos to be worn by the members of the mission and the supposed journalists,” the interviewee told El Tiempo.
SIDEBAR: FARC Say it Was “Betrayal”
A communiqué from the secretariat of the Central High Command of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), dated Jul. 5 but published Jul. 11, says that the two rebels captured during Operation “Check”, “César” and “Enrique Gafas”, are thought to have absconded with the hostages in their charge, one of whom was Ingrid Betancourt.
The secretariat of the FARC High Command accused both fighters of “despicable conduct” and betrayal.
The communiqué makes no reference to an ongoing liberation operation by the FARC itself, a version IPS received from a source close to the FARC, located on the Colombia-Ecuador border, which was further supported by sources in Bogotá on Jul. 10.
The reaction from the guerrilla high command, on the other hand, strengthens international accounts that suggested that the hostages’ guards might have been bought off, to which IPS sources very close to the negotiations between European facilitators and the FARC lent support.
The rebel leadership confirmed its “policy to reach humanitarian agreements” to protect civilians from the effects of the war and to “achieve an exchange” of the hostages still in their hands, three of whom are civilians, for imprisoned guerrillas.
“If the government persists in direct rescue attempts as the only way of freeing the hostages, it must take responsibility for all the consequences of its risky and reckless decision,” said the FARC, who have ordered their fighters to execute hostages if there is an attempt to rescue them by military means.
“The most important thing, in our view, is that 15 families have ceased to suffer the pain” of family members being held hostage, Marleny Orjuela, head of ASFAMIPAZ, the association of relatives of military and police hostages held for exchange, told IPS.
Families of the remaining hostages began to drive in a series of convoys towards the south of Colombia on Jul. 10 to demand a humanitarian agreement, which they regard as the only safe means to obtain their loved ones’ release.
“Give them all back to us, alive and free,” said Orjuela, about the “27 police and soldiers still rotting in the jungle, who have been in captivity for nine, 10 or 11 years,” the three political hostages, and all those kidnapped by the FARC for ransom, numbering about 700 according to official figures.
“We will continue to be stubborn, insistent, persistent and determined in pursuit of the humanitarian agreement,” but we also call on government and guerrillas “to move towards peace,” she said.
When a Ruse Turns into ‘Perfidy’
“Ruses are not forbidden in war. In fact, they are praised because they save lives. The condition is that no humanitarian matters are interfered with,” Gustavo Gallón, head of the Colombian Commission of Jurists (CCJ), told IPS.
But if those who planned and executed Operation “Check” “used a humanitarian mission as cover, that is perfidy, and a breach of International Humanitarian Law (IHL)” under the Geneva Conventions.
“It’s like using a white flag of truce to get close to an enemy and then killing him,” Gallón said.
He said “humanitarian missions are protected, and cannot be used in any way, either for acts of war or for confrontations with the enemy. Their absolute inviolability is the grounds of their credibility.”
“If combatants perfidiously makes use of any humanitarian organisation, they simply annihilate the action capability of legitimate humanitarian organisations in future, because they lose their own credibility and also undermine the confidence” of the other side, the jurist said.
The CCJ, which has consultative status at the United Nations, issued a communiqué requesting “government authorities to make known to society at large the details that have not yet been revealed of the Jul. 2 military operation.”
It also asked “judicial authorities to investigate, put on trial and punish perpetrators of kidnapping crimes,” the CCJ added. (END)
Impersonating Journalists May Be Criminal Offence
“Journalists who are covering armed conflicts are protected by International Humanitarian Law (IHL),” Andrés Monroy, legal adviser at the Solidarity Centre run by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), told IPS in Bogotá.
“Soldiers passed themselves off as journalists, which is unlawful because they posed as persons protected by IHL,” said Monroy, referring to the Jul. 2 military intelligence operation that freed Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other hostages held by guerrillas.
The impersonation of a team of journalists as part of the operation was made public by the Colombian Defence Ministry itself.
Monroy said that “journalists on missions to war zones are also protected by the Colombian Criminal Code, Article 135, which defines such journalists as protected persons.”
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