If Colombia's leftist rebels safely deliver three hostages to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, it will likely increase pressure for government concessions to achieve what has so far proven impossible: the swap of 44 other high-profile captives for hundreds of rebels imprisoned in Colombia and the US.
As relatives and international observers gathered in Caracas on Thursday, Chavez was preparing to send Venezuelan helicopters into Colombia's lawless jungles yesterday in order to retrieve the initial three hostages from a rebel hideaway.
The liberation of former congresswoman Consuelo Gonzalez, Clara Rojas and her three-year old son Emmanuel -- a child allegedly fathered by a rebel captor -- is expected to take place in an unspecified Colombian location as early as Friday.
It's the latest move in a violent chess game between the rebels and Colombia's US-aligned government, which have been at war for five decades. A larger swap of hostages for rebel prisoners would be a much bigger move toward peace.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia's (FARC) unilateral release of the first three hostages was announced as a goodwill gesture -- but it serves other purposes as well. Politically, the ploy has isolated the FARC's avowed enemy, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.
Allowing the Venezuelans to cross battle lines and extract the hostages is risky for the rebels, since Colombia's military is sure to track the two Russian-made MI-17 helicopters authorized to enter its airspace. But the handover also tests the waters for more direct negotiations, which haven't happened since Uribe took office in 2002.
With tremendous mistrust on both sides, they haven't been able to come to terms on a temporary demilitarized zone where unarmed rebels and government representatives might come together with international observers to discuss a larger prisoner swap.
For Chavez, the rebels' hand-picked foil, it's an opportunity to revive a peacemaking role Uribe abruptly ended only weeks earlier after accusing the firebrand leftist of overstepping his mandate by contacting Colombia's army chief.
Chavez still hopes to mediate a broader swap of all the hostages for jailed rebels, one of his top ministers, diplomat Rodolfo Sanz, said on Thursday.
Chavez invited an international commission of observers from France, Argentina, Brazil as well as other Latin American countries to monitor the delicate operation. A planeload of international journalists will be following shortly behind to meet the hostages in Venezuela.
Uribe, vacationing at his ranch, has been all but sidelined from the humanitarian mission.
Publicly derided by Chavez as Washington's "lapdog," the leader now faces the greater insult of seeing Venezuelan military aircraft on Colombian soil.
Washington has been more amenable to Uribe's public threats to rescue the hostages militarily. But families of the hostages fear a bloodbath. Many past military encounters have ended with hostages being killed.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS