Colombia Expert: Hostage Rescue Will Cripple FARC | Newsweek International

NEW ALLIANCES
Medvedev Looks South
Mac Margolis 9/13/2008 12:00:00 AM
Moscow's invasion of Georgia is getting its strongest support, oddly, in Latin America. On September 2, President and former Marxist guerrilla Daniel Ortega made Nicaragua the first country to join Moscow in recognizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent republics. Soon after, Castro and Ecuadorian strongman Rafael Correa signaled their approval of Russia's actions, and Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez hailed Russia's return as a "great superpower" and announced joint Russian-Venezuelan naval maneuvers in the Caribbean.
MILITARY
A Smarter Way to Fight
Michael Hirsh 7/12/2008 12:00:00 AM
Strange things are happening in the jungles of Colombia. After years of fighting a fierce, conventional war against the leftist guerrilla group known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country's military accomplished a major feat earlier this month without firing a shot. The Colombians used a complex ruse to free 15 hostages, including three Americans and former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, eliciting international acclaim and comparisons to the Israeli hostage rescue at Entebbe. But what happened afterward—which hasn't been widely reported—was almost as remarkable, according to Colombian Vice Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzón. The Colombian Army cornered the hostages' captors, the FARC's notorious 1st Front—the latest success stemming from Bogotá's tactic of dropping its special forces into the jungle and keeping the weakened guerrillas on the run. "But we took the decision not to attack," Pinzón told NEWSWEEK, because the government wanted to convey it had a new "strategic concept." "We want to send a message to the FARC and to the world: not to exterminate the FARC but to welcome back anyone who wants to come into the system." Last week, to drive that point home, the Colombian military equipped helicopters with loudspeakers that began booming Betancourt's recorded voice over the jungle, saying "Hey, guerrillas … demobilize now … You'll recover your family, your honor, your liberty."
FAILED 'PLAN'
Joe Contreras
Until recently, the U.S.-backed war on drugs seemed to be paying impressive dividends in the sparsely populated department of Putumayo in southern Colombia. Five years ago fully half of all the coca cultivated inside Colombia came from Putumayo, and guerrilla units from the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) were directly involved in the region's flourishing drug trade. But an aggressive, U.S.-funded aerial-fumigation program has helped slash coca farming in Putumayo by more than 90 percent since 2000, and some territory in the department previously under FARC control has been recaptured by the Colombian military.
MAIL CALL

Colombia's President
PEACE AT ANY PRICE

Carlos Castano was 16 when Marxist guerrillas kidnapped and murdered his father in the humid hinterlands of Antioquia province in central Colombia. The right-wing paramilitary supremo has spent most of the ensuing two decades cutting a murderous swath through countless towns and villages in a crusade to avenge his father's death. One of the worst atrocities attributed to Castano's Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) occurred in the southern town of Mapiripan, where 30 suspected leftist sympathizers were rounded up, tortured and slaughtered by his foot soldiers in July 1997. In an interview that year the renegade was unrepentant: "I am not at all sorry for Mapiripan because there wasn't a single innocent among those who died," he thundered. "The type of people who were killed shouldn't worry anyone. I will never regret that." Last June Castano was sentenced in absentia to 40 years in prison for the massacre.
COLOMBIA'S HARD RIGHT
Joe Contreras
Alvaro Uribe Velez--slight and bespectacled--looks more like a high-school math teacher than a hard-charging ideologue. But there's nothing wimpy about his message: from the moment he declared his candidacy for Colombia's 2002 presidential election, the former state governor promised to halt peace negotiations with the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and restore law and order. At first, his tough talk didn't garner much support. But after languishing in third place in opinion surveys much of last year, he suddenly took the pole position in January. Now Uribe commands an approval rating of 59 percent, and it seems nothing short of an assassin's bullet can stop the maverick politician from winning the May election.