[News] A More Plausible Scenario for Colombia Hostage Saga
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Tue Jul 8 14:04:18 EDT 2008
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
FARCs 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 FARCs command structure. These
operatives then convinced the guerrilla commander
responsible for guarding the hostages that Jorge
Briceno (alias Mono Jojoy), a member of the
groups seven-person secretariat, had ordered
that three groups of hostages be brought together
in preparation for a humanitarian exchange agreed
to by the FARCs 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 Césars 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 Uribes press secretary, Cesar Mauricio
Velasquez, confirmed the presence of the envoys
in Colombia and acknowledged that they had the
Colombian governments 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 (FARCs governing
body) and Alfonso Cano (their top commander)
himself, thats 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 governments
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 Colombias 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
Cotards 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 governments version of the how
the liberation of the hostages occurred appears a
too neat-and-tidy and a little far-fetched, even
given the FARCs 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.
Freedom Archives
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