Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Stone and Chavez to stage hostage rescue

A Venezuelan-led mission to rescue three hostages, including a 3-year old boy, from leftist rebels in Colombia’s jungles fell apart Monday as the guerrillas accused Colombia’s military of sabotaging the promised handoff.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe dismissed the claim as a lie by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, instead suggesting the guerrillas could be backing out of the deal brokered by President Hugo Chavez because they don’t have the boy hostage.

“The FARC terrorist group doesn’t have any excuse. They’ve fooled Colombia and now they want to fool the international community,” Uribe said Monday from the central Colombian city where Venezuela helicopters have been waiting since Friday for word from the guerrillas on where the hostages could be picked up.

Shame on Colombia, shame on Uribe,” Oliver Stone, the American filmmaker, told The Associated Press shortly before boarding one of three Venezuelan jets carrying the observers back to Caracas. Stone, who was invited by Chavez to document the handover, added “the FARC have no motive not to release these hostages.”

Uribe said a 3-year old child named Juan David Gomez, matching the description of Emmanuel provided by escaped hostages and suffering from malnutrition, malaria and jungle-born leishmaniasis, may have been living for the past two and a half years with at a foster home in Bogota.

The child was turned over in the eastern city of San Jose del Guaviare, a FARC stronghold, in 2005 by a man who said he was the boy’s great uncle and who authorities now believe was his father. The boy’s mother was reported as disappeared, according to the child welfare agency case file read to journalists by peace commissioner Luis Carlos Restrepo.

“Hopefully the hypothesis of Uribe is correct. The FARC would look very bad to the entire world in light of such a lie,” he added.

Speaking earlier on Venezuelan state television, Chavez said the rebels wrote in a letter that “the military operational attempts in the zone impede us for now from turning over” the three hostages.

Venezuela and the FARC could consider “another option, a clandestine option” to evade Colombian patrols and turn over the hostages, Chavez said.

The FARC, in the letter read by Chavez and dated Sunday, said that “insisting on (a handover) in these conditions would be putting at risk” the lives of hostages and guerrillas sent to turn them over.

Uribe last month abruptly ended Chavez’ efforts to broker a wider swap of 44 high-profile hostages _ including three American defense contractors and former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt _ for hundreds of jailed rebels.

The U.S.-allied Uribe has used some $600 million in annual military and intelligence aid from Washington to push the half-century-old insurgency deeper into the jungle.

(AP)