Colombia’s FARC guerrillas on Wednesday set free the first of five promised hostages as they began the most significant release of Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos’ tenure.
The guerrillas freed Marcos Baquero, 33, to intermediaries at an undisclosed site in the central Meta department. He was flown to Villavicencio, 95km south of Bogota, aboard a Brazilian air force helicopter with Red Cross markings.
The remaining four hostages will be released in different parts of the country in staggered intervals over the next few days.
Photo: Reuters
A crowd of supporters and co-workers cheered and clapped as Baquero’s wife Olga and sons Samir, 10, and Emmanuel, two, rushed to meet him on the tarmac and covered him with hugs and kisses.
The ex-hostage presented his children with an ocelot — a wild cat common in parts of South America — that he brought from the jungle, along with a sketchbook full of pictures.
“I’m enormously happy to know that I’ll be going to my home, to my wife,” Baquero told reporters in Villavicencio.
Guerrillas with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) kidnapped Baquero, a local councilman and member of Colombia’s Green Party, in late June 2009.
He was released earlier on Wednesday to a team of intermediaries that included former senator Piedad Cordoba, two International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegates and a representative of the NGO Colombians for Peace, ICRC spokeswoman Maria Cristina Rivera said.
“We are very happy that this first operation was very successful,” the ICRC delegate in Colombia, Christophe Beney, told reporters in Bogota.
FARC rebels have pledged to release a Colombian marine and another municipal council member today near the town of Florencia in southeastern Colombia, and a police major and a soldier on Sunday in Ibaque in the center of the country.
The five were kidnapped in separate incidents over a two year period between 2007 and 2009.
Baquero said he plans to organize a march to demand that the FARC release all their hostages.
“It’s very difficult, painful and sad to be in the jungle,” he said. “We have to end this kidnapping because it is very tough on the country and there are many families that are suffering this, not just mine.”
Baquero said that the ocelot “was my companion in captivity. I talked to him.”
Brazil provided two helicopters and crews for the mission, and the Colombian military cooperated by suspending operations in a huge swath of southern Colombia from 2300 GMT Tuesday to 1100 GMT yesterday.
FARC, which has been at war with the Colombian government since 1964, has between 7,000 and 11,000 fighters and is holding at least 19 soldiers and police officers hostage.
FARC last released hostages in March last year, when they freed a Colombian soldier they had held for more than 12 years.
The rebels have long demanded a hostage-for-prisoner swap, something both Santos and his predecessor, Alvaro Uribe, have refused to consider.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema