Colombia Farc rebels free 10 soldiers and police

Guerrilla group claims the hostages represent its last police and military captives but president tempers peace hopes

guardian.co.uk, Associated Press in Villavicencio, Tuesday 3 April 2012

A Brazilian air force helicopter emblazoned with the Red Cross logo
 takes off to pick up the captive soldiers and police. Photograph:
Fernando Vergara/AP

Colombia's main rebel group has freed what it says were its last 10 military and police captives, returning the men to their families after at least 12 years spent in jungle prisons.

The release of the six police and four soldiers highlighted efforts to seek peace talks by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Latin America's oldest and most potent guerrilla band, which has been weakened by Colombia's US–backed military.

Flown from a jungle rendezvous aboard a loaned Brazilian air force helicopter painted with the Red Cross logo, the freed captives waved jubilantly.

They were escorted by nurses to awaiting relatives for reunions behind closed doors. Some jumped for joy on the tarmac.

Pets accompanied some of the men: a peccary, a monkey, two small birds. A few wore the Colombian flag over their shoulders. All looked newly shaven.

Their loved ones were overjoyed.

"I shouted! I jumped up and down!" said Olivia Solarte when she got first word her 41-year-old son, police officer Trujillo, had been freed. He had been held since July 1999.

The group was flown to Bogota where other relatives were waiting and medical checks in hospital were scheduled.

The rebel group, known as the Farc, had announced Monday's liberation on 26 February in tandem with a halt in ransom kidnappings.

President Juan Manuel Santos called the release "a step in the right direction, a very important step" but cautioned against "pure speculation" of imminent peace talks.

He said he wanted proof the Farc, which took up arms in 1964, is truly abandoning ransom kidnapping. "When the government considers that sufficient conditions and guarantees exist to begin a process that brings an end to the conflict the country will know," he said.

It is not known how many ransom kidnap victims the Farc holds.

The head of Colombia's anti-kidnapping police puts the number at least six, including four Chinese oil workers seized last June. Other officials put the number closer to two dozen.

The citizens' watchdog group Fundacion Pais Libre maintains a list of at least 400 people the Farc kidnapped or has otherwise held against their will since 1996 who were never freed. It does not expunge a name from its records until the person is released or a body is found.

Two serious goverment-Farc peace negotiations have failed over the past three decades and recent weeks have seen increased violence in the conflict.

The Farc killed at least 11 soldiers in a mid-March attack in Arauca near the Venezuelan border and the military responded with two precision bombings on rebel camps that killed more than 60 insurgents.

The rebels have in recent years suffered their worst battlefield setbacks ever, beginning when Santos was defence minister from 2006 to 2009 and thanks to billions in US military assistance and training.

Their main source of funding is the cocaine trade and military pressure has made holding kidnap victims increasingly difficult for the Farc.

Monday's mission was brokered by leftist former senator Piedad Cordoba, a friend of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez

Cordoba has served as a go-between in the release of 20 Farc hostages since January 2008 and said her work would be done with this week's releases as she had no desire to become involved in cases in which money rather than politics was involved.

She said, however, that the activist group she leads, Colombians for Peace, planned to send letters to the Farc asking it exactly how many civilians it holds.

The Farc has only publicly acknowledged holding captives it considered "exchangeable": police, soldiers or politicians it held hoping to swap them for imprisoned rebels.

It held scores of such prisoners in the late 1990s when it controlled about half the countryside but gradually released them all, never obtaining the hoped-for exchange.

Some captives were rescued. The Franco-Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three US military contractors rescued in 2008 by Colombian soldiers posing as members of a phony international humanitarian group. At least 25 others have died in captivity, many killed by Farc insurgents to prevent their rescue or escape.

Among those in attendance for Monday's release was Rigoberta Menchu, the Guatemalan rights activist who won the 1992 Nobel peace prize.

She said it was time for Colombia's government to respond to the Farc's gesture with its own display of political willingness to attain peace.

But analysts caution that peace talks, even back-channel negotiations, could be a long time coming.

Many do not believe they could happen before the 2014 presidential elections.

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Colombia's Farc rebels release hostages