The rescue operation involved years of planning. But it was also testament to the army’s new sophistication in intelligence and infiltration. The army built on its recent successes in disrupting the FARC’s communications and isolating its leaders. An attempt to rescue other guerrilla hostages in 2003 had ended in disaster, when a dozen were killed by their captors.
This time the army relied on trickery. A former hostage who escaped last year supplied details of the jungle camps in the remote south-eastern departments of Guaviare and Vaupés. Army intelligence agents, posing as senior FARC members, made contact with the guerrilla commander guarding the hostages. They gave him a false order purporting to be from the FARC’s new leader, Alfonso Cano, that the hostages were to be taken to two helicopters sent by a humanitarian organisation—mimicking the arrangements when five other captives were released earlier this year after mediation by Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez.
Once on board the helicopters, the two guerrilla escorts were overpowered and the army agents, dressed in Che Guevara T-shirts, broke the news to the hostages that they were flying to an army base and freedom. “We couldn’t believe it. The helicopter nearly fell because we jumped for joy,” said Ms Betancourt.
The operation is the latest of several devastating blows suffered this year by the FARC, which mixes an antiquated Marxism-Leninism with drug-trafficking and racketeering. In March, the army bombed a guerrilla camp just over the border in Ecuador, killing Raúl Reyes, a member of the group’s seven-man secretariat. The incident yielded a huge haul of documents from Mr Reyes’s computers. Days later another member of the secretariat was killed by his own bodyguard. Then Manuel Marulanda, the FARC’s founder and undisputed leader, died, supposedly of a heart attack.
Comment