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From Ezilon.com Central America
BOGOTA (Reuters) - Marxist rebels kept hold of three hostages in Colombia on Monday despite a deal to free them after years in secret camps, worrying Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez who negotiated the handover with the guerrillas. First scheduled for Thursday of last week, the mission to free two Colombian politicians and a child born to one of them in captivity has been postponed from day to day as the rebels have failed to divulge their whereabouts. Early this month, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, said it would hand the long term hostages over to Chavez or one of his envoys. Venezuela sent helicopters to neighboring Colombia to pick up the captives but nothing has been heard from the four-decade-old rebel army since then about where it is keeping Consuelo Gonzalez, Clara Rojas and her son Emmanuel, who was fathered by a guerrilla fighter and is thought to be four years old. Chavez warned over the weekend that the mission may be scuttled if it cannot be carried out in the days to come. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which is helping coordinate the mission, late on Sunday called on the FARC to cooperate. "This is an exclusively humanitarian call ... for the FARC to divulge the coordinates as soon as possible," Barbara Hintermann, head of the Red Cross in Colombia, told reporters. Rough terrain and bad weather in the jungle stronghold where the hostages are thought to be held might be to blame for the delay, said Chavez, a fierce critic of the United States who also speculated that U.S. radio interference could to be blame. 'NERVES OF STEEL' Last week Piedad Cordoba, a Colombian senator involved in the hostage talks, said Colombian army movements could threaten the relief mission. Rojas was nabbed by the guerrillas during her 2002 vice presidential campaign and Gonzalez, a former lawmaker, was taken in 2001. Venezuela's Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro said the handover might not happen for days. He called for patience and "nerves of steel." Family members of the captives are waiting in Venezuela to be reunited with them. In television interviews the families said they remained hopeful the hand-over would happen soon. Colombia's conservative government is wary of Chavez and his goal of uniting South America under socialism. But it has let him fly Venezuelan helicopters marked with the Red Cross symbol deep into its territory to collect the hostages. Foreign envoys arrived in the central Colombian town of Villavicencio on Saturday to observe the mission. Among them were former Argentine President Nestor Kirchner, officials from France and Switzerland and U.S. film director Oliver Stone, who is making a documentary about Latin America. Villavicencio is a gateway to Colombia's sparsely populated southern jungles, where the FARC controls areas used to produce the cocaine that funds its insurgency. The group is holding more than 700 hostages for ransom and political leverage. The mission is being closely watched by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who believes it could lead to freeing other high-profile captives, including French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, in exchange for jailed guerrillas. The rebels also hold three American anti-drug contractors captured in 2003. © Copyright 2004 by YourSITE.com |
