While much of the world was busy celebrating the end-of-year holidays, a political drama played out in the Colombian jungle that showed how even the powers of France and Venezuela can be embarrassed by a group of Marxist rebels holding civilian hostages for years.
In a bold plan, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez assembled a high-profile team - including former Argentine president Nestor Kirchner, representatives of France, Brazil and several other countries and even Hollywood director Oliver Stone - on Colombian soil to witness the anticipated liberation of three hostages, among them a toddler.
But after four days of cooling their heels on the edge of the Colombian jungle, in the heat of the international news spotlight right before New Year's, the team was left empty handed and the plan fell through.
The rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) failed to deliver the hostages they had promised to hand over to Chavez, but there was more than that.
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who allowed the operation but was not directly involved in it, ventured a startling hypothesis: FARC could not release the three hostages because one of them - Emmanuel, born in captivity less than four years ago to FARC hostage Clara Rojas - was not actually in their hands at all.
According to the Colombian president, the boy is thought to have been in foster care since June 2005, under the name Juan David Gomez Tapiero, apparently released by FARC to a local rural family due to his poor health.
In a column in the Colombian daily El Tiempo, Fernando Londono Hoyos, a former interior minister under Uribe, pointed to the folly of the operation and to the duplicity of FARC, which he said had mocked "the whole world." "The foreign ministries of France and Brazil will be ashamed of their miscalculation for a long time," Londono Hoyos wrote.
In fact, the whole failed process once again brought home how helpless the world is in tackling the complex Colombian conflict, which has devastated the South American country for some 40 years with its mixture of involvement in the drug trade and politics.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has made it one of his foreign policy priorities to secure the release of the highest-profile hostage held by FARC, former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, who holds dual French-Colombian citizenship and has been held for six years.
Many of the hundreds of hostages have been held by FARC for seven years and more, and when Chavez - a true maverick in the international political sphere - decided to get involved and met with Sarkozy in Paris, there was a renewed sense of hope that at least some hostages could be released.
Chavez seemed indeed the right man for the job. His abundant oil money, his relative ideological proximity to FARC and the leverage afforded to him by a long, porous border between the two countries which the rebels use at whim appeared perfect to exact compromises from the Colombian Marxist guerrillas.
The initial goal was to swap 50 politically-relevant hostages for hundreds of imprisoned FARC rebels. Colombian President Uribe, despite being on the opposite end of the political spectrum, allowed Chavez to move forward with the negotiations under pressure from the international community - but put the brakes on the operations when Chavez overstepped the bounds and talked directly to Uribe's military commanders.
FARC later promised to release the boy, his mother Clara Rojas - Betancourt's former vice-presidential candidate - and former legislator Consuelo Gonzalez. In fact, Chavez was in dire need of a resounding success.
The year 2007 was unquestionably bad for the Venezuelan. He had high-profile spats with Spain and with the Brazilian Senate, he caused uproar at home and abroad over the closure of a popular television channel and his "21st century socialism" was defeated in a referendum in December, in the first electoral defeat for Chavez since he became president in 1999.
The most recent disappointment over the three-hostage-release shows moreover that even a politically-needy Chavez, with the active assistance of France, Brazil, Argentina and others, cannot secure the freedom of a toddler and two women in Colombia. And that does not bode well for the South American country.
Colombians are used to the unlikely turns of a conflict they have suffered for over four decades. They are not easily impressed either by promises of headway or by hurdles along the road, and many were hardly surprised at the recent developments.
Colombian leader Uribe was quick to stress that FARC generally lie, and less conservative elements of Colombian society agreed. FARC "have little to lose in terms of image," said analyst Daniel Samper, whose brother was once president of Colombia.
And yet the possibility of the liberations inspired hope. "There are times when one would like to be wrong. This was precisely one of them," Londono Hoyos wrote. Less importantly, Hollywood director Stone was deprived of the film he had hoped would show the joyous release of the hostages. But he delivered fodder for the black humour with which some Colombians deal with the ongoing conflict.
One Colombian satirist sardonically summed up the drama, captioning a cartoon in El Tiempo: "The Delay, directed by Oliver Stone." And yet the real losers of these developments were undoubtedly the families of FARC hostages - not just the three whose liberation had been promised, but more than 700 hostages thought to be in the hands of the leftist rebels.
Colombia now awaits the results of DNA tests on the young boy that may in fact be Emmanuel. If, as Uribe claims, the boy is proved not to be in rebel hands at all, his family would finally be able to give him the care he has lacked so far.
However, FARC would be totally discredited, and any promise they ever make, even to Chavez, would be worth nothing. That would be terrible news for Chavez, for Sarkozy, for FARC hostages and for anyone seeking peace in Colombia.
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