Setback for Chávez in mission to free hostages

[Steve Gardner]

Source: The Guardian

Ed Pilkington in New York
Tuesday January 1, 2008
The Guardian

A mission spearheaded by Hugo Chávez and Oliver Stone to free three hostages held by Marxist guerrillas in the Colombian jungle was on a knife-edge last night after the rebels failed to deliver on the promised handover.

Venezuelan military helicopters bearing the Red Cross insignia sat for a third day in Villavicencio, a small town on the edge of Colombia's vast eastern jungles where the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as Farc, holds sway. They waited in vain for the guerrillas to tell them where to fly to inside the rebel-controlled zone to pick up the hostages.

The mission is being watched by Latin American leaders, the US, France and other countries with citizens among the 3,000 hostages being held by Farc. They hope that the championing by Chávez - the Venezuelan president - of a political solution involving the exchange of hostages for jailed guerrillas could open the door to further releases.

A group of 10 international observers from Latin America, France and Switzerland included the unlikely late addition of Stone, a Hollywood director, who was invited to join the rescue mission only a week ago when he met Chávez in Caracas. Chávez quipped that Stone was George Bush's emissary to the operation; Stone in return called Mr Chávez a "great man". The two flew together to Colombia at the weekend on the presidential jet.

In an interview from Villavicencio with Associated Press, Stone said he had no illusions about Farc, "but it looks like they are a peasant army fighting for a decent living. And here, if you fight, you fight to win."

Stone has been forbidden to leave his hotel room on the grounds that it would expose him to the risk of being taken hostage himself - Villavicencio is riven with drug gangs and rightwing death squads. "This release could be a new start, a break in the ice. The important thing is that we build momentum so everyone can be released," Stone said.

The film-maker is one of two Hollywood directors preparing works on Pablo Escobar, the cocaine baron who waged war with the Colombian state until he was killed in 1993. He is also filming a documentary about relations between the US and its Latin American irritants such as Chávez and Fidel Castro of Cuba.

As he boarded the helicopter on route for Colombia, Stone said that if he had the chance he would ask the Farc rebels one question: "Why are you holding on to these 3,000 people? These are not military hostages, these are civilians. Give them a break - let them out."

Two of the three hostages awaiting release, Colombian politicians Consuelo González de Perdomo and Clara Rojas, have been held for six years. The third is Rojas's son, Emmanuel, who was born in the jungle and is believed to be four. The story of the child fathered by a guerrilla and brought up inside the rebel zone has horrified and fascinated the Colombian media.

Rojas was kidnapped in 2002 while campaigning for the post of Colombian vice-president alongside the French-Colombian citizen Ingrid Betancourt who was also taken and is still a captive.

The release operation is at a critical stage, not only for the hostages but also politically. The Colombian president, Álvaro Uribe, has taken a strong line with the rebel movement, using US funds to help pursuing them deep into the jungle, and refusing to negotiate.

Officially, he broke off cooperation with the release initiative launched by Chávez last month but has grudgingly granted permission for the Venezuelan helicopters to fly deep into Colombian airspace.

The Chávez initiative has focused on 44 heavily publicised hostage cases involving high-profile and foreign captives.

[Steve Gardner]

Source: The Observer

Oliver Stone, the maverick American film director, speaks exclusively about his bizarre role in the abortive attempt by Hugo Chavez to release hostages held by the Colombian rebel group Farc

David Smith in London and Sybilla Brodzinsky in Bogota
Sunday January 6, 2008
The Observer

Oliver Stone, the maverick Hollywood director, has returned from the jungles of Colombia to launch a scathing attack on America's 'secret war' in the country and blame US President George Bush for the failure of an international mission to free hostages held by armed rebels.

Speaking exclusively to The Observer, the Oscar-winning maker of films including Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Wall Street gave the first full eyewitness account of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's effort to secure the release of captives from the rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).

Stone also spoke out in defence of Chavez, whom he called 'an honest man, a strong man and a soldier', and condemned the United States for treating Latin America like a backyard to 'throw trash, piss, do whatever the hell they want'.

Farc said last month that it was prepared to release into the hands of the left-wing Chavez two women politicians - Clara Rojas and Consuelo Gonzalez - held hostage for six years, as well as Rojas's four-year-old son, reportedly born of a relationship with a guerrilla fighter. Colombians hoped it might be a step towards peace in their decades-long civil war. If Farc was willing to make this gesture, many believed, it could pave the way for a broader agreement for the release of all 46 hostages, including French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, three American defence contractors and dozens of local politicians and military and police officers.

Chavez sent helicopters to the city of Villavicencio on the edge of the Colombian jungle. He rallied support from Latin American governments which made up an international verification commission. An acquaintance of Chavez who worked with Stone on his film Comandante, about the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, invited the director to witness the rescue for his next documentary, a study of the US relationship with Latin America.

At first Stone was told to remain in his hotel for his own safety in case he became a kidnapping target himself, but he soon ventured out and passed time in town talking to 'coke dealers and murderers'. His trip ended in frustration as he watched Chavez's negotiations unravel. 'Chavez played a poker game where he was trying to really make this work, and I think that he couldn't do it alone,' said Stone from his home in California. 'From where I was standing, he was beating the drum to rescue these hostages and to break the ice in the ongoing war between the state and the rebels. I thought that it was a significant first move, and there was resentment towards him for this on the part of Colombia and the United States.'

He says Farc had promised to provide coordinates for the location where the helicopters could go to pick up the two women and the child. Each day began with the hope that at last the hostages would be freed and for four days each day ended in discouragement for their families. Finally, on New Year's Eve, Farc announced it was 'suspending' the handover. It was not possible, it said in a letter to Chavez, to continue because Colombian military movements were compromising the safety of the hostages and their captors.

This was vehemently denied by Colombia's President, Alvaro Uribe, who is credited with improving law and order in recent years, but is also accused of close ties with right-wing paramilitary groups. He claimed that Farc was not in possession of the four-year-old boy, called Emmanuel, who had actually been living in a state-run orphanage under the name Juan David since 2005. On Friday the Colombian government said that DNA evidence proved this to be true, and hours later Farc confirmed that it had placed the child in the care of 'honourable people' while a humanitarian agreement for a hostage release was hammered out.

Stone, speaking before Farc's statement was released, denied that the discovery of Emmanuel in the orphanage was a major blow to the rebels' credibility. 'Even if it were true, I would say to you, so what? What would be the motive for Farc to create such a build-up and not release the hostages? That would be such bad intention, such bad faith, that it would condemn them from the whole world, and if that was the truth I would be surprised and upset with them.'

Stone, 61, served in the US army in Vietnam, was wounded twice and received the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. He has won Oscars for his Vietnam dramas Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, as well as for his screenplay for Midnight Express. Among his other best known films are Salvador, The Doors, JFK, Natural Born Killers, Nixon, Alexander and World Trade Center. He is a trenchant critic of US foreign policy.

He blamed the collapsed deal not on Farc but on President Uribe and his American backer. 'It's Colombia's fault, Colombia did not want it to happen, and I think there were other outside forces, like Bush. Uribe went to great lengths to justify his behaviour that day. For the President to fly down to this place and give a long press conference and have his general give a long talk feels like a lot of over-justification to me. I think there was a lot at stake in getting Chavez out of the hostage situation. I heard that day from two rival sources that Uribe had made a phone call to Bush the day before or that day. The Bush phone call is significant.'

Stone continued: 'I said at the time, shame on Colombia, shame on Uribe, and I meant to say shame on Bush, too. I think Bush has a spiteful attitude towards Chavez, as does the American establishment. They want to see Chavez fail. The New York Times had an article the next day saying: "Chavez's promised hostage release fizzles, his second major setback in weeks." If that's the headline, that's certainly a surprise to all those people who were down there, including the families of the hostages. It was a genuine effort to free them.'

Uribe's war on drugs has been waged with the support of Bush's programme to eliminate one of the most plentiful sources of cocaine in the world. Stone regards it as another chapter in America's long history of interference and exploitation in Latin America, supporting dictators when in its own self-interest. 'America seems to treat it as its backyard. I guess people do all kinds of things in their backyards. They throw trash, piss, do whatever hell they want, let the weeds grow. I think we've always had that idea, that it's ours.

'Colombia is the last one we have left. It's a big investment, I gather we're talking almost a billion a year now. It is the equivalent of a secret war. In my time it would have been shocking, the equivalent of the Laotian war or the Cambodian war. The country is crawling with military equipment and American equipment and supervisory technologies - satellite technology, information technology. It exists for the Farc, I think they know that. They're very paranoid; they're right to be. Every Colombian that I spoke to was scared of the military in some way or another; they're the most dangerous people, not the Farc.'

Farc is regarded as a terrorist group by the US and the European Union and is thought to be holding up to 3,000 hostages in the country's eastern jungles. But Stone refused to condemn it outright. 'I do think that by the standards of Western civilisation they go too far; they kidnap innocent people. On the other hand, they're fighting a desperate battle against highly financed, American-supported forces who have been terrorising the countryside for years and kill most of the people. Farc is fighting back as best it can and grabbing hostages is the fashion in which they can finance themselves and try to achieve their goals, which are difficult. They're a peasant army; I see them as a Zapata-like army. I think they are heroic to fight for what they believe in and die for it, as was Castro in the hills of Cuba.'

Farc has said its intention to release the two women hostages still stands but it has returned to an intractable demand: the demilitarisation of two municipalities in southwestern Colombia to negotiate an exchange of the hostages for jailed rebels. Uribe has repeatedly refused that demand and, given his apparent political victory in the case of the boy Emmanuel, is unlikely to change his position any time soon.

As they waited in vain for the handover, Chavez quipped that Stone was Bush's emissary; Stone in return called Chavez a 'great man'.

Asked to explain this description, he said: 'Because he's really made a difference. You sense a revolutionary spirit throughout Venezuela. He doesn't seem like a tyrant to me at all, he doesn't seem even like a strongman, he seems like a man who respects the law. He's abided by the constitution far faster than Bush has abided by our constitution.'

Stone also said that he was impressed with the socialist President at close quarters. 'America has heavily invested in publicising anything negative about Chavez, but I have to admire him in person as an honest man, a strong man and a soldier.'

Hostage history

Q: Who are the Farc?

A: Colombia, the centre of the world cocaine trade, has endured civil war for decades between left-wing rebels with roots in the peasant majority and right-wing paramilitaries.

Manuel 'Sureshot' Marulanda named his guerrilla band the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia in 1966. Rebels make at least $300m from the drug trade yearly.

President Alvaro Uribe, in power since 2002, has launched a fresh offensive against the insurgents - backed by $3bn of US military aid.

Q: How many hostages are held by the rebels?

A: The Farc are thought to have about 800 hostages.Three have been the focus of international attention after rebels offered in December to release them - Clara Rojas, a former vice-presidential candidate; her young son, Emmanuel, believed fathered by one of her captors; and politician Consuelo Gonzalez. Rojas was kidnapped with Ingrid Betancourt, 45, in 2002.

Betancourt, 45, has won international attention because of her dual French-Colombian nationality and her children's campaign in France to keep her name in the headlines.

Q: How did Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez became involved?

A: In efforts to broker a swap four months ago, he was seen as someone to whom the Farc rebels could talk.