Colombian Marxist rebels agreed to release an army general captured by their comrades over the weekend, a move that may lead to a resumption of peace talks and diffuse a crisis that threatened to extend five decades of war.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) promised to free General Ruben Dario Alzate and four others captured in the past two weeks “as soon as possible” after reaching an agreement on liberation terms with the government and guarantor nations Cuba and Norway.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos’ office responded immediately to the announcement, pledging to resume talks as soon as the hostages are free.
Photo: EPA
Alzate and two others were seized on Sunday by a FARC patrol as they left a boat in the poor and crime-ridden coastal region of Choco, prompting Santos to halt talks and throwing into doubt the two-year peace process under way in Cuba. Just days earlier, the rebels had kidnapped two soldiers in eastern Arauca department.
“The government will give its total collaboration to guarantee the safe return of these people to their homes, which we hope will be in the shortest time possible,” Santos’s office said in a brief statement. “Once they are all free, the government’s delegation will return to Havana.”
The FARC’s decision to release the captives may counter critics of the peace process who say the rebels are not serious about ending Latin America’s longest-running war, which has killed more than 200,000 people since it began in 1964.
Alzate is the highest-ranking military hostage ever taken by the FARC. A soldier and a civilian lawyer were captured along with him.
The FARC says it has stopped kidnapping for ransom but maintains military personnel are fair targets in the absence of a ceasefire. Alzate was considered a prisoner of war.
Certain undisclosed conditions must be met before the FARC will free the hostages, representatives from Cuba and Norway said in Havana.
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