The last known politician held hostage by Colombia’s main leftist insurgency was airlifted to freedom on Thursday after six years in captivity.
Provincial lawmaker Sigifredo Lopez was the sixth and latest hostage released this week by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in what the rebels said was a unilateral act aimed at starting talks on an exchange of hostages for imprisoned guerrillas.
At a news conference, Lopez firmly blamed the FARC for the deaths of all 11 colleagues who were abducted with him in April 2002. He said he survived because he had been separated from the other prisoners previously as punishment for arguing with a rebel guard.
“My companions never deserved to die the way they did,” the 45-year-old lawmaker told reporters in the provincial capital of Valle del Cauca. “The FARC massacred them on June 18, at 11:30 in the morning, of 2007.”
The FARC said at the time only that the lawmakers died under confusing circumstances involving an unidentified military group, and that Lopez survived because he was being held in a different location. The Colombian government blamed the FARC for the deaths.
After being isolated from the group, Lopez said he could hear short bursts of gunfire and then the sustained firing of automatic weapons. Days later, he learned from a radio broadcast that his colleagues had been killed. He said the rebels did not explain why they were killed.
With Lopez’s liberation, the FARC have released the last politician on a list of prominent hostages it published in October.
The FARC says it still holds about 20 police and military officials.
International Red Cross spokesman Yves Heller confirmed that the FARC on Thursday handed Lopez over to a humanitarian mission led by the Red Cross and an opposition senator.
Descending from a helicopter in the western city of Cali immediately after his liberation, a tearful Lopez embraced his wife, Patricia Nieto, and full-grown sons Lucas and Sergio.
Clad in a dark shirt and wearing a small wooden cross around his neck, Lopez lifted his right hand in triumph and wept.
“I’m well, I’m well. Thank you,” he told a cluster of reporters.
Previously this week, the FARC released three police officers, a soldier and the former governor of the southern state of Meta, Alan Jara.
Leftist intellectuals hope the goodwill gestures will prod the government to open a dialogue that might end the FARC’s 45-year-old insurgency.
But Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has resisted. His US-backed military has dealt the FARC a series of crippling blows in recent months. Uribe has called the releases attention-grabbing antics staged by the rebels to deceive Colombians. He and foreign governments have urged the FARC to renounce kidnapping and free all its hostages.
Opposition Senator Piedad Cordoba, who led the recovery missions, said earlier on Thursday that she sent a message to a member of the FARC’s top leadership asking for the rebels to soften their demands to facilitate a prisoner exchange.
The wife of one of the dead lawmakers originally kidnapped with Lopez said there were mixed feelings about the latest hostage release.
“Not all the 12 have been able to return, only one,” Consuelo Mesa told Caracol radio.
In July, Colombian military agents posing as members of a humanitarian mission spirited to safety US captives Marc Gonsalves, Tom Howes and Keith Stansell, along with French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS