BOGOTA, Colombia — The sensational rescue of 15 hostages from the grip of Latin America’s largest rebel group has highlighted the severely diminished state of an organization that just six years ago threatened to overrun the Colombian government.
Once fueled by Marxist ideology and awash in narcotics profits, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, now finds itself facing a more robust Colombian military led by a popular president.
The group has suffered the deaths of top leaders, seen large-scale defections of supporters and is being squeezed for the money it needs to sustain its operations.
Now the FARC has lost its trophy hostages: former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three U.S. defense contractors whom the rebels viewed as human shields against all-out government attacks.
The nature of the rescue mission, in which government agents posed as rebels and freed the hostages without firing a shot, was widely seen as a deep humiliation and public relations disaster for the FARC.
Security officials caution that the rebel group retains some sting.
The number of militants has dropped by about half in the past decade, but it still has about 10,000 armed guerrillas spread from the Caribbean to the isthmus of Panama.
It continues to hold 700 hostages, bargaining chips that preclude a quick end to the group’s 44-year-long insurgency.
But President Alvaro Uribe’s strategy of aggressively taking the fight to the FARC, backed by a $5 billion U.S. aid package, appears to have seriously degraded the rebels’ ability to challenge the state.
Uribe took office in 2002 at a time when the Colombian capital was virtually encircled by FARC forces.
The FARC no longer controls any significant towns and has been reduced to a series of bands operating in isolated redoubts with fragmented central command, according to intelligence officials.
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Betancourt knows of no ransom deal
PARIS — Ingrid Betancourt reiterated Saturday that she does not think her freedom or that of 14 other hostages was bought with a ransom to their Colombian rebel captors. But she suffered so much, she said, that had a ransom been paid, “Why not?”
Three days after her dramatic rescue, the 46-year-old French- Colombian underwent a battery of medical tests, saying later that doctors “filled me with joy,” suggesting that her health has not been permanently compromised from six years of jungle captivity.
Betancourt said she was still getting used to freedom.
While showering late last night, the light was accidentally turned off and “I lost the notion of where I was. . . . I said, ‘My God, the FARC is back.’ ”
Betancourt was running for president in Colombia when she was kidnapped in 2002. Asked whether she wanted to continue that quest, she shied away from the notion.
The Associated Press
