Colombian Military Captives Freed After 14 Years in Jungle

Colombia’s biggest guerrilla group released its last police and military hostages yesterday, some of them held captive in the country’s jungles for 14 years.

The 10 men arrived in Bogota after their helicopter earlier landed in the eastern city of Villavicencio following their release by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. They were met by their families, including grown children who were infants when their parent was kidnapped, in images aired on Caracol Television.

Military bombardments under President Juan Manuel Santos and a crackdown on drug trafficking in the past decade have weakened the guerrillas, who lost leader Alfonso Cano in an attack in November. The hostages are being released into a “completely different” Colombia than existed in the late 1990s, when rebels strengthened by revenue from cocaine sales overran towns in a wave of violence that dissuaded international investment in the South America nation, said Juan Pablo Vieira, an analyst at Interbolsa SA, Colombia’s largest brokerage.

“It was an everyday occurrence that the FARC would take over towns and kidnap and kill police and military as a pressure tactic,” Vieira said by phone from Medellin, Colombia. “Now the hostages aren’t a negotiating chip and may even be a burden for the FARC.”
On landing in Villavicencio, the six policemen and four soldiers were met by medical personnel. They wore knee-high black rubber boots often worn by guerrillas and new green military shirts provided en route by the International Committee of the Red Cross, television images showed.

Prisoners of War

The FARC, Latin America’s oldest guerrilla group, had released images of the men, who it called “prisoners of war,” during their captivity. Photos on the Colombian Army’s website show them seated on a small hammock strung between two bamboo poles with locked chains strung around their necks against the backdrop of camouflage. The FARC still holds civilian hostages.
The men released include Luis Arturo Arcia and Luis Alfonso Beltran, both taken hostage in southern Colombia in March 1998, and Robinson Salcedo and Luis Alfredo Moreno, both captive since August 1998.
They were the last military and police hostages held by FARC, according to Maria Cristina Rivera, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross. The FARC, a Marxist group founded in the Colombian countryside in 1964, promised to stop kidnappings for ransom in February.
The guerrilla group kidnapped 2,678 people between 2002 and 2011, and more than 400 haven’t been returned, according to Fundacion Pais Libre, a Bogota-based group that tracks the conflict. Some victims are presumed dead, the foundation said.
“There are hundreds of families that don’t know, have no idea about the whereabouts of their loved ones that were kidnapped,” President Santos said. “So it’s not enough to stop kidnapping -- the civilian kidnapped have to be freed.”