I imagine that years from now, military instructors will show this story to recruits and tell them, "This is how you perform a rescue operation."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7486552.stm
French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other hostages have been freed after rebels holding them were tricked into handing them over.
Colombian soldiers - apparently posing as members of a non-government organisation - flew them to freedom in a helicopter.
Ms Betancourt said: "This is a miracle. There is no historical precedent for such a perfect operation."
Ms Betancourt was held by the left-wing Farc rebels for more than six years.
When the head of the operation to free the hostages told them they were free, "the helicopter almost fell from the sky because we all jumped, shouted, cried and embraced," Ms Betancourt said.
"We couldn't believe it," she added.
Political aspiration
The Farc has been fighting to overthrow the Colombian government for 40 years, and Ms Betancourt was their highest profile captive.
Also released were three Americans and 11 members of the Colombian security forces, all said to be in relatively good health.
President Alvaro Uribe congratulated the army on the operation, in which no shots were fired, and urged Farc to release its remaining hostages and seek peace.
A pale Ms Betancourt smiled as she emerged with other hostages from a military plane in the Colombian capital, Bogota, to be greeted by her mother and husband.
She appealed to Farc to free the other hostages and make peace.
She thanked Mr Uribe, against whom she was running as a presidential candidate when she was kidnapped, and said he "has been a very good president".
"I continue to aspire to serve Colombia as president," she said.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who had made the rescue of Ms Betancourt a foreign policy priority, was joined by her family at his residence, the Elysee Palace in Paris.
The freed hostage's son, Lorenzo Delloye-Betancourt, told the news conference it was "the best moment of my life". His sister Melanie said it was like "emerging from a bad dream".
The siblings are flying to Colombia to be reunited with their 46-year-old mother.
Video pictures released last November had shown Ms Betancourt looking gaunt and frail.
Accounts from freed hostages that she was in danger of dying had heightened the sense of urgency surrounding her fate.
Naked and blindfolded
Also released were three US defence department contract workers who were captured after their light aircraft crashed in the Colombian jungle in 2003.
The trio - Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes and Keith Stansell - have now arrived back in San Antonio, Texas, where they will undergo medical tests and be reunited with their families.
The 11 members of the Colombian security forces who were released had been captured in various rebel attacks.
Colombian Defence Minister Juan Manuel Santos said the Farc rebels had been tricked into handing over the hostages by soldiers posing as members of a fictitious non-government organisation that supposedly would fly the captives to a camp to meet rebel leader Alfonso Cano.
"The helicopters, which in reality were from the army, picked up the hostages in Guaviare and flew them to freedom," he said.
Intelligence agents had infiltrated the guerrilla ranks and duped the local commander in charge of the hostages, alias Cesar, the defence minister said.
Cesar and another rebel who boarded the helicopter had been quickly overpowered and would now face justice, he added.
'Without a scratch'
Ms Betancourt later told a press conference she at first had had no idea she was being rescued until she saw her captor naked and blindfolded on the floor of the aircraft.
"I saw this guerrilla commander, who had so often been cruel to us, on the floor," she said. "But I did not feel happiness. I felt sad."
Armed forces chief Gen Freddy Padilla said: "We wanted to have it happen as it did today. Without a single shot. Without anyone wounded. Absolutely safe and sound, without a scratch."
The US ambassador to Colombia, William Brownfield, said there had been "close co-operation" from the Americans, including sharing of intelligence, equipment and training advice.
World leaders welcomed the news, and celebrations erupted on the streets of Colombian cities as crowds hailed the jungle rescue in a country plagued for decades by kidnappings.
The BBC's Jeremy McDermott in Medellin says the successful operation by Colombian security forces is a political and military coup for the country's government.
He adds that it is a major blow to the Farc, which had hoped to exchange some 60 political hostages for hundreds of rebels held by the Colombian government, and has now lost a powerful negotiating tool with Ms Betancourt's rescue.
The Farc still holds more than 40 high-profile hostages, among up to 700 other captives.
Ms Betancourt has dual citizenship as the result of marriage to a French diplomat - since dissolved - which produced her two children, who worked hard to keep her captivity in the spotlight.
The politician was kidnapped in February 2002 while campaigning in territory controlled by the Farc.
In short, they had their personal infiltrate the army, work their way up, and then conned them into sending some of the hostages to a pickup point. No shots, no deaths. FARC must be red in the face right about now.
Posts
Edit: also remind me to marry a French diplomat!
Ok I'll admit it, I laughed.
I have a couple of discussions about this but would it be interesting for D&D!? maybe its not juicy enough or just too colombia-centric for any of you to care, I think I would have to "godwin" it to make it more entertaining. :P
Well, I can start with how baffling is the attitude towards our conflict. People saw with horror the hostage situation in the middle east few years ago with beheading videos and everything, but not for one second people in general blamed anyone but the kidnappers themselves, while for our conflict some countries, specially in Europe, have this image that the government is equally responsible, and sometimes even more responsible than the kidnappers themselves. Its just frustrating. Things like groups in Holland selling T shirts and CD to support farc are just mind boggling. why is there so much romanticism about the "revolution"? I can't think what kind of atrocity would make these people realize what farc really is, they have pretty much done everything imaginable and unimaginable.
Librarians harbor a terrible secret. Find it.
Edit: Hey quick related question to you since you are Columbian. How do you feel about the U.S companies like Dole who paid the FARC protection money. Dole claims that if they hadn't paid the money their workers would have been killed, but other people say that Dole just gave them money to be used for weapons so they could make a profit.
Pretty cool if you ask me. I can't imagine being held for 6 years like that.
Yes he does.
The excuse of democrats is really stupid too, they constantly reject the trade because union leaders are killed in the country. However they completely ignore that murders of union leaders are at an all time low, that the government has put special care in protecting them and that the situation is nowhere near what it was before. The truth from what I've read, is that they simply reject it because is a Bush iniciative and they will blindly oppose anything that comes from him.
I would love free trade, I'm tired of paying $90 for games. But being more objective, we will obviously get screwed, the smaller economy will always be at disadvantage.
I didn't know about that company, but I know about Chiquitas who payed to the paramilitaries instead. That was regular business around here. Before Uribe I doubt there was a single company, national or international, that did not have to pay paramilitaries or guerrillas (many times both), the payments are called "vaccines" and if they wanted to operate at all in the rural areas they are imposible to avoid, or the armed groups would indeed kill workers and burn down factories and transportation trucks.
Unfortunately the phenomenom hasn't been completely eliminated but its much more lower now, mostly from rearmed paramilitaries groups since guerrillas have been pushed back deeper into the jungles.
What's to discuss?
Imprisoning people who are not trying to gun you down sucks.
Freeing people rocks.
the whole Colombian conflict and the stance presidential candidates have on it
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/i-fell-in-love-with-a-fema=le-assassin-791978.html?prn=3D0
Seemed to really point out the situation there from an outside perspective, the article seems to be written with an "everyone there except the peasants are *evil*" slant. I was wondering what a Columbian would say about that.
Damn straight, gave him some freebies too.
On the black screen
Well there's certainly a case for arguing free trade would damage the infant industries in Colombia. But union lobbies in the US are worried the FTA could mean loss of American jobs, so they clearly don't think it will be all bad for Colombia.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
More than anything Colombia is really a proxy for trade with Mexico and China, as trade is associated with a loss of lower class jobs. The fact that Colombia is extremely tiny and that the tariff on US goods going to Colombia is many times higher than the tariff on Colombian goods coming to the US is ignored. Reality in general in regards to trade is ignored in favor of cheap political stunts that are used to drum up support from ignorant people who are scared for the safety of their jobs.
I hate the way trade is handled as an issue in the US.
Well if you are talking about the government they are of course not "good", corruption is rampant as it is with all latinamerica, but thats just something expected from polititians, and I would even say thats something I expect from any polititian in the world.
The army has issues of course, their own "abu ghraib" episodes, but overall if I had to call someone the good guys it would be them. Last year was the first year not a single town was attacked by guerrillas, we can finally travel safely and bombings and other terrorist attacks have been reduced to nearly zero, I can't do anything but thank them.
Has FARC commented on any of this officially?
Well we can do nothing but laugh at this. It's obviously farc's PR machine trying again to discredit the government, there's no surprise at all the information is coming from Switzerland, where many farc exiles are. The information is also pretty dumb, the radio that said this mention 20 millions for a reward. First Farc makes above $300 million alone from narcotraficcing and ransom kidnappings (the ones you never see on TV and are never mentioned anywhere), second the government itself has a huge reward program of $100 million for insurgents that depose weapons and return hostages, and now they settled for a mere $20 million!? if there was a reward the government would be the first one to say it, it wouldn't be the first reward given either. It shows how desperate farc are at the moment.
Betancourt and the three americans were their biggest assets. They placed farc in the international map and made France and other europeans countries involved in the problem, giving them away for money, and by doing so raise even more the popularity of its worst enemy, president Uribe, is nothing but retarded. It just shows there's a huge ignorance out there of what really is happening in Colombia, and how farc will take every oportunity it can to take advantage of this ignorance for their own ends.
Now for farc's official statement we probably have to wait a while, they are experts at missinformation and propaganda so they will try to spin this in their favor, however this time the have a pretty uphill battle to make this look good for them.
edit
now they are not even coordinating anymore, from chavez news agency, comes the "news" that the colombian government "stole" the helicopters which were originally from some humanitarian international mission from Switzerland and France (both countries have already denied any mission), and that the whole thing was a montage, that farc actually wanted to deliver the "prisoners" as they call them to this imaginary mission. We here are already used to the BS of these kind of statements and news, but I imagine abroad is probably easier to fall in these traps.
I guess farc's official statement will be along those lines, since they can't say they exchange them for money, thats actually a huge blow for the morality of their members, another reason why the theory of ransom payment is just ludicrous.