After years of refusing to talk with the Colombian government, the leftist paramilitary Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has announced its willingness to negotiate the release of hostages in holds, including former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, who it says is "well" after more than four years in captivity.
The Associated Press reports that Raul Reyes of the FARC told French newspaper L'Humanite that Ms. Betancourt "is doing well, within the environment she finds herself in. It's not easy when one is deprived of freedom." Mr. Reyes added that the FARC is "willing" to hand over Betancourt along with other hostages, including three American defense contractors and numerous Colombian police officers and politicians.
AP notes, however, that some, such as Herve Marro, who leads a French group demanding Betancourt's release, have doubts about the FARC claim.
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"We have been disappointed so many times. If he says she is doing well, then give us proof," he said. "Then we will have reason to believe it." The family has not seen evidence that Betancourt is alive since 2003.
The Colombian Embassy in Paris would not comment on the claim.
Betancourt was a candidate in the Colombian presidential election in 2002, and was kidnapped on February 23 that year. The Christian Science Monitor reported that though she holds dual French-Colombian citizenship and was raised in Paris, she felt she "owed a debt to her country," and entered Colombian politics on an anti-corruption platform.
The FARC statement on Betancourt comes on the heels of a similar declaration last week. AP reports that Reyes told Venezuela's Telesur television network that the group had "all the political will" to negotiate a humanitarian exchange. But while the Colombian government has been seeking the hostages' release for months as a prelude to peace talks, it expressed hesitance about the new overture.
Colombia's vice president Francisco Santos promised to study Reyes' comment in detail but cautioned about reading too much into his words.
"A complex process like this requires prudence — it can't be handled with declarations before microphones," Santos said.
The BBC reports that Reyes said the group would begin negotiations if the government "ended US-backed operations against them and demilitarised swathes of jungle territory." He added that the FARC would only negotiate on its own terms.
"The Farc won't accept talks under the table, in private, outside the country or any place in Colombia with this government until these areas are demilitarised," he said.
"It is Alvaro Uribe who will decide whether to continue the war or seek to sit down with the Farc."
AP notes that the FARC's new willingness to negotiate is a significant departure from previous policy.
In past months, [the FARC] had rejected out of hand any negotiations with President Alvaro Uribe, whose beefed-up military has kept the 12,000-strong insurgency on the run for the last four years. But Uribe's re-election by a landslide in May could be forcing the FARC to re-evaluate its position.
However, the new FARC position is unlikely to soften Colombia's aggressive stance toward the paramilitary group, reports Reuters.
"Reyes is setting tough conditions, which mark a new try at negotiations now that Uribe is re-elected," said German Espejo, an analyst at Bogota think tank Security & Democracy.
"You can expect more gestures and counter-gestures but Uribe is not likely to decrease military pressure on the FARC," he added. "The combination of military pressure and political posturing could result in the start of peace talks before the end of Uribe's second term in 2010."
The Colombian military's pressure on the FARC may be exacerbated by the FARC's recent declaration of hostilities against Colombia's other major leftist paramilitary group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), reports the BBC. The FARC has been trying to take over ELN sources of income.
Analysts say the conflict is likely to play into the hands of the government. The BBC's Jeremy McDermott in Bogota says that although the Farc are supposedly allied with the ELN, in practice the groups have never worked closely together....
There is nothing likely to make the Colombian army happier than the prospect of the two principal Marxist rebel groups fighting each other, our correspondent adds.... [He says] this declaration of war, although geographically restricted, may give the government the opportunity to remove the ELN from the conflict and concentrate its full military effort on the Farc.
The ELN is currently in peace talks with the Colombian government. The talks began in September 2005.
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