[News] A More Plausible Scenario for Colombia Hostage Saga

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia286.htm

July 8, 2008

A More Plausible Scenario for Colombia Hostage Saga

by Garry Leech

In recent days, more plausible explanations for 
how the 15 Colombian hostages were liberated on 
July 2 have appeared in several international 
media outlets. The Colombian government claims 
intelligence officers infiltrated the 
highest-levels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces 
of Colombia (FARC), allowing them to convince the 
guerrillas holding the hostages to hand the 
captives over to undercover soldiers pretending 
to work for a fictitious aid organization. The 
whole scenario appears farfetched and there have 
been suggestions that the Colombian government 
actually paid $20 million to the guerrilla in 
charge of guarding the hostages and then 
exploited a decision already reached by the 
FARC’s central command to release the hostages by 
staging the elaborate rescue mission.

According to the Colombian government, military 
intelligence operatives infiltrated the highest 
levels of the FARC’s command structure. These 
operatives then convinced the guerrilla commander 
responsible for guarding the hostages that Jorge 
Briceno (alias Mono Jojoy), a member of the 
group’s seven-person secretariat, had ordered 
that three groups of hostages be brought together 
in preparation for a humanitarian exchange agreed 
to by the FARC’s Supreme Commander Alfonso Cano. 
The Uribe administration claims that Colombian 
soldiers disguised as aid workers and journalists 
then arrived at the rendezvous location deep in 
the jungle and retrieved the 15 hostages and 
captured the guerrilla commander and another 
rebel without a shot being fired even though 
there were some 60 other FARC fighters in the 
immediate vicinity. The government claimed it was 
an elaborate long-term operation that was conducted flawlessly.

However, there is a far more plausible scenario. 
The FARC had already decided to unilaterally 
release the 15 hostages following talks with two 
European envoys who had arrived in Colombia in 
late June to meet with high-ranking rebels in the 
region in which Supreme Commander Alfonso Cano is 
located. Consequently, it was Cano who gave the 
order to gather the hostages together from the 
three separate camps in which they were being held.

Meanwhile, the Colombian government was seeking 
to bribe FARC commander Gerardo Antonio Aguilar 
(alias “César”), who was in charge of guarding 
the hostages, in order to gain their release. The 
Colombian military had captured César’s rebel 
wife several months earlier and convinced her to 
contact her husband to offer him $20 million in 
return for the release of the hostages.

Ultimately, the coinciding events of FARC 
commander Cano ordering the hostages to be 
gathered in one place in preparation for their 
release, the interception of this information by 
Colombian and US intelligence services and the 
bribing of César allowed the Colombian military 
to exploit the situation and stage a rescue of 
hostages who would have been liberated anyway. 
The benefits of such a staged operation for the 
Uribe administration are clear: the government 
would receive the credit for the release of the 
hostages rather than the FARC; and the military 
could sow seeds of distrust in the ranks of the 
rebels by claiming it has infiltrated the 
guerrilla group at the highest levels.

This hypothesis is supported by various sources 
that have been quoted in the several media 
outlets over the previous few days and by certain 
events of the last few months. Several days prior 
to the liberation of the hostages, the Associated 
Press and other media outlets reported that two 
international envoys­Noel Saez of France and Jean 
Pierre Cotard of Switzerland­were seeking to meet 
with FARC Supreme Commander Alfonso Cano to gain 
the release of the hostages. Colombian President 
Alvaro Uribe’s press secretary, Cesar Mauricio 
Velasquez, confirmed the presence of the envoys 
in Colombia and acknowledged that they had the 
Colombian government’s permission to meet with the rebels.

According to an unidentified source quoted by 
Inter Press Service, the FARC Supreme Commander 
Alfonso Cano agreed to unilaterally release the 
15 hostages and ordered that they be brought 
together in one location. “Their release was 
planned for this weekend (Jul. 5-6) or the next, 
as agreed by the Secretariat (FARC’s governing 
body) and ‘Alfonso Cano’ (their top commander) 
himself, that’s why they were brought together,” 
the source claimed. “The (Colombian) armed forces 
found out, and intercepted their liberation to make it look like a rescue.”

The success of the military “rescue” may well 
have been guaranteed by the Uribe government’s 
ability to buy the cooperation of FARC commander 
César, who was responsible for guarding the 
hostages. Several months earlier, the Colombian 
military had captured the wife of César, and 
according to Swiss radio station RSR, quoting a 
“reliable source” close to the operation, she was 
trying to convince her rebel husband to release 
the high-profile hostages­former presidential 
candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three US military 
contractors­in return for a $20 million payment 
agreed to by the Colombian and US governments.

This claim is buttressed by recent public 
comments made by Colombia’s President Alvaro 
Uribe that his government had established a $100 
million fund to pay to individual guerrilla 
guards who released their hostages. And then, 
last month, Uribe publicly stated that his 
government was in touch with guerrillas guarding 
the hostages. Perhaps the most compelling 
evidence that César might have agreed to release 
the hostages and cooperate with the staged rescue 
mission is the fact that he and another guerrilla 
laid their weapons on the ground before boarding 
the helicopter unarmed. It is common knowledge 
that FARC guerrillas are trained to never leave 
their weapons and the fact that César did so 
suggests that he was quitting the armed struggle 
rather than following orders he believed had come from his superiors.

The Colombian government has vehemently denied 
that it paid any money to obtain the release of 
the hostages. The Uribe administration claimed 
that the unidentified “reliable source” quoted in 
the Swiss radio report was none other than Swiss 
envoy Jean Pierre Cotard and immediately set out 
to discredit him. However, in their attempt to 
discredit Cotard, they also validated his 
credibility as someone who would know such information.

On July 6, Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel 
Santos accused Cotard of providing the FARC with 
almost $500,000 in funding. Santos claimed that 
emails in the laptop of the late FARC commander 
Raúl Reyes suggested that Cotard was responsible 
for delivering the money to FARC envoys in Costa 
Rica where it was later seized. Santos did not 
make the alleged email public and did not explain 
why the Colombian government had approved 
Cotard’s role as a negotiator the week before the 
hostages were liberated if it believed he was 
affiliated with the rebel group. Ultimately, 
whether or not the alleged email exists­and if 
so, whether it does link Cotard to the FARC­it is 
evident that Cotard has been in a position to 
obtain sensitive information related to the 
hostage saga and his comments cannot be summarily 
dismissed­if he is indeed the “reliable source” 
quoted by the Swiss radio station RSR.

Ultimately, the government’s version of the how 
the liberation of the hostages occurred appears a 
too neat-and-tidy and a little far-fetched, even 
given the FARC’s current disarray. The 
alternative scenario seems far more plausible: 
that the liberation of the hostages resulted from 
a combination of the FARC agreeing to release 
them, government intelligence sources learning of 
the planned liberation, the bribing of the 
guerrilla commander in charge of guarding the 
hostages, and a staged rescue operation to make 
the Uribe government and the Colombian government 
appear heroic. The staged rescue also allowed the 
government to steal the positive public relations 
spotlight that the FARC would have enjoyed 
through a unilateral release of the hostages and 
to hide the fact that the Uribe administration 
paid for the liberation of the captives.




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