COLOMBIA - VENEZUELA

Colombia's Uribe to meet hostage release envoys

Monday, December 31, 2007

Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe will travel Monday to the city of Villavicencio to meet with international envoys monitoring the FARC's possible release of three hostages.

BOGOTA, Dec 31 (Reuters) - Marxist rebels kept hold of
three hostages in Colombia on Monday despite a deal to free
them after years in secret camps, worrying Venezuela's leftist
President Hugo Chavez who negotiated the handover with the
guerrillas.


First scheduled for Thursday of last week, the mission to
free two Colombian politicians and a child born to one of them
in captivity has been postponed from day to day as the rebels
have failed to divulge their whereabouts.


Early this month, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC, said it would hand the long term hostages
over to Chavez or one of his envoys.


Venezuela sent helicopters to neighboring Colombia to pick
up the captives but nothing has been heard from the
four-decade-old rebel army since then about where it is keeping
Consuelo Gonzalez, Clara Rojas and her son Emmanuel, who was
fathered by a guerrilla fighter and is thought to be four years
old.


Chavez warned over the weekend that the mission may be
scuttled if it cannot be carried out in the days to come.


The International Committee of the Red Cross, which is
helping coordinate the mission, late on Sunday called on the
FARC to cooperate.


"This is an exclusively humanitarian call ... for the FARC
to divulge the coordinates as soon as possible," Barbara
Hintermann, head of the Red Cross in Colombia, told reporters.


Rough terrain and bad weather in the jungle stronghold
where the hostages are thought to be held might be to blame for
the delay, said Chavez, a fierce critic of the United States
who also speculated that U.S. radio interference could to be
blame.


'NERVES OF STEEL'


Last week Piedad Cordoba, a Colombian senator involved in
the hostage talks, said Colombian army movements could threaten
the relief mission.


Rojas was nabbed by the guerrillas during her 2002 vice
presidential campaign and Gonzalez, a former lawmaker, was
taken in 2001.


Venezuela's Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro said the
handover might not happen for days. He called for patience and
"nerves of steel."


Family members of the captives are waiting in Venezuela to
be reunited with them. In television interviews the families
said they remained hopeful the hand-over would happen soon.


Colombia's conservative government is wary of Chavez and
his goal of uniting South America under socialism. But it has
let him fly Venezuelan helicopters marked with the Red Cross
symbol deep into its territory to collect the hostages.


Foreign envoys arrived in the central Colombian town of
Villavicencio on Saturday to observe the mission. Among them
were former Argentine President Nestor Kirchner, officials from
France and Switzerland and U.S. film director Oliver Stone, who
is making a documentary about Latin America.


Villavicencio is a gateway to Colombia's sparsely populated
southern jungles, where the FARC controls areas used to produce
the cocaine that funds its insurgency. The group is holding
more than 700 hostages for ransom and political leverage.


The mission is being closely watched by French President
Nicolas Sarkozy, who believes it could lead to freeing other
high-profile captives, including French-Colombian politician
Ingrid Betancourt, in exchange for jailed guerrillas.


The rebels also hold three American anti-drug contractors
captured in 2003.

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