CARACAS, Venezuela — Colombian commandos in disguise spirited 15 hostages to freedom on Wednesday, including Ingrid Betancourt, a French-Colombian politician held for six years, and three American military contractors.

“I never expected to get out of there alive,” said Ms. Betancourt, 46, her voice sounding frail but charged with excitement, in comments broadcast on the radio.

On Colombian television, Ms. Betancourt wept and smiled as she recounted a chain of events that seemed scripted for film, complete with Colombian agents infiltrating guerrilla camps and borrowing Israeli tracking technology to zero in on their target.

The helicopters landed in the jungle at dawn, carrying personnel whom she presumed were part of a humanitarian mission intended to transport the hostages elsewhere, according to Colombian press reports.

The captives were handcuffed and “humiliated,” then put on the helicopters accompanied by two guerrillas who were guarding them, Ms. Betancourt explained.

But while boarding, when she saw crew members wearing T-shirts emblazoned with images of Che Guevara, she thought the hostages had been deceived. “I thought, this is FARC,” she said on television, referring to the rebel group that held her.

Once the doors of the helicopter closed, the guerrillas were subdued, and Ms. Betancourt said her handcuffs were removed and the crew told the 15 captives they were free.

She said she looked down at one of the men who had been her captor. “I saw him on the floor,” she said. “I did not feel happiness, but what a shame.”

In Bogotá, after a joyful reunion with her mother, she thanked the military for an “impeccable operation.”

She looked healthy, especially in light of reports that she had been despondent recently and images showing her thin and distraught in a video captured from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

Taken captive in 2002 while she campaigned quixotically for the presidency, Ms. Betancourt, over her years as a hostage, became a symbol of suffering, courage and endurance.

The rescue was a major victory in Colombia’s struggle with the FARC, a Marxist-inspired insurgency that has been trying to topple the Colombian government for more than four decades.

Colombia’s defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, said the captives, who also included 11 former members of Colombia’s security forces, were removed from the jungle on Wednesday by an elite commando unit in Guaviare after Colombian intelligence operatives infiltrated the FARC’s seven-member secretariat.

The United States was involved in the planning of the operation and provided “specific support,” the White House said. But officials there would not describe the nature of that support.

One American official who was briefed on the operation but spoke on the condition of anonymity confirmed the intelligence support to Colombia for the mission, but would not provide details.

The three Americans, Marc Gonsalves, Keith Stansell and Thomas Howes, were captured in 2003 while working for the Northrop Grumman Corporation after their surveillance plane went down on an antinarcotics mission for the Pentagon.

After they were freed they went on a military plane to San Antonio, to be taken to a military hospital at Fort Sam Houston.

Ms. Betancourt and the Americans were among more than 40 captives used by the FARC to bargain for political concessions. The rescue came during a period of fragmentation in the FARC after the killing and capture of several senior commanders in recent months.

The guerrillas are thought to hold hundreds of other abductees in jungle camps. The American ambassador to Colombia, William R. Brownfield, and the United States combatant commander in the region, Adm. James G. Stavridis, were “engaged in the planning stages,” according to Gordon D. Johndroe, the deputy White House press secretary.

“This was a Colombian-conceived and led operation; we supported the operation,” he said, adding, “This rescue was long in the planning, and we’ve been working with the Colombians for five years, since the hostages were taken, to free them from captivity.”

He said that President Bush was kept apprised of the planning and that he called after the rescue to congratulate President Álvaro Uribe, calling him “a strong leader.”

Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee, released a statement that said Mr. Uribe and Mr. Santos had briefed him about the operation on Tuesday night, during his visit to Colombia.

Late on Wednesday night, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, appeared on live television with Ms. Betancourt’s grown children and her sister.

“Ingrid is in good health,” Mr. Sarkozy said of Ms. Betancourt, who holds dual French and Colombian citizenship. “My first words would be to say how happy we are.”

He also asked the FARC “to stop this absurd and medieval conflict,” promising to take in all the FARC fighters who renounced violence.

In France, numerous groups were founded by artists and public intellectuals to support Ms. Betancourt’s cause, and as her health appeared to worsen her release became a priority for Mr. Sarkozy and his new government.

Mr. Sarkozy had made various appeals for her freedom, and in April, offered to go to the border to personally accept her release. He tried to work through the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, and sent a French medical team by air to Colombia to wait for her.

In her years in Paris, Ms. Betancourt, the daughter of a diplomat and a beauty queen, lived a wealthy life, went to elite universities and married a career diplomat whom she had met when she was a student. But she returned to Bogotá in 1990 to start a political career after drug dealers assassinated a presidential candidate her mother knew. She divorced and later married a Colombian, Juan Carlos Lecompte.

Her two grown children took part in protests in Paris, where they lived with their father, her first husband. Ms. Betancourt’s 2001 autobiography, “Rage in the Heart,” was hailed in France as the story of a crusader against corruption and injustice.

In January, in a deal brokered by Mr. Chávez, the FARC freed Clara Rojas, 44, who was captured along with Ms. Betancourt, and Consuelo González de Perdomo, 57, a former Colombian lawmaker who was abducted in 2001.

During captivity Ms. Rojas bore a child, who was found to be living in foster care in Bogotá shortly before her release, and not with the guerrillas, as they had claimed.

After the discovery of the 3-year-old boy, Emmanuel, Colombian officials said Wednesday, they sensed disarray within the FARC and stepped up efforts to rescue the other captives. Hopes for the hostages’ freedom had increased after the death or surrender of several top leaders in recent months. In late May, the FARC’s senior leader, the legendary guerrilla Manuel Marulanda, was reported to have died of natural causes.

Mr. Marulanda, whose real name was Pedro Antonio Marín, built a rebel army from the remnants of a rural guerrilla group. The FARC remains Latin America’s largest insurgency, with thousands of fighters.

Alfonso Cano, an urban intellectual from Bogotá, ascended to replace Mr. Marulanda, but the FARC has been weakened by the desertion or surrender of about 300 combatants a month, according to Colombian officials.

Although the guerrilla group retains substantial might from operations financed by cocaine exports and abductions, its apparent disintegration has drawn comparisons to that of the Shining Path, the once-fearsome Maoist insurgency in Peru that is now limited to several hundred combatants involved in drug trafficking in the Peruvian Amazon.

Last month, Colombian officials announced that the American contractors had been spotted in the jungle a few months earlier, but said that it had been impossible to attempt a rescue at the time. In the operation on Wednesday, Colombia’s military appears to have drawn inspiration from one of the FARC’s own most brazen actions, in which its combatants disguised themselves in 2002 as soldiers and abducted 13 lawmakers in Cali.

Six years later, Colombian agents infiltrated the FARC’s ranks and persuaded a guerrilla commander called Cesar to allow captives held in three groups to be united for a trip by helicopter to southern Colombia.

Ms. Betancourt suffered illnesses, pain and indignities during her captivity, but doggedly persisted in trying to escape. Toward the end of her six years as a hostage, Ms. Betancourt’s missives to the outside world showed signs of depression.

“I am tired of suffering, of carrying it within me every day, of lying to myself and of seeing that every day is the same hell as the one before,” she wrote in a 2007 letter to her mother, Yolanda Pulecio. In the letter Ms. Betancourt said, “These almost six years of captivity have shown me that I’m not as resistant, nor as brave, nor as intelligent, nor as strong as I had thought.

“I have fought many battles, I have tried to escape on several opportunities, I have tried to maintain hope, as one does keeping head above water. But mamita, I have been defeated.”

The letter was taken from rebel emissaries last Nov. 29, part of a package intended to prove to captives’ families that they were still alive.

In the letter, she also wrote of the death of her father, Gabriel Betancourt, who was well known in Colombia for his work educating the poor. He died a month after her kidnapping, and in her letter, Ms. Betancourt said the she longed “to be with my papito, whose mourning I have not been able to complete, because every day, for the last four years, I have cried over his death.”

And she spent much time writing about her two children in France, Mélanie and Lorenzo, and of how much she missed seeing them grow.

“I feel like the life of my children is on standby, waiting for me to be free, and their daily suffering makes death seem like a sweet option,” she wrote.

She said she made them birthday cakes on their birthdays from her ration of rice and beans. “I look for them in my memories and I nourish myself in the images I guard in my memory of each of their different ages.”

She will soon see them, as she recuperates at a military base. France has sent them in a state plane to join their mother.

原文參照
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/world/americas/03colombia.html

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/03/america/03colombia.php 

Video: Hostages Freed in Colombia

http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=d4de5d6c4b3b3ffd0c5e38e76252d137c8b7ec66

哥國臥底誆叛軍 救貝當古等15人質

哥倫比亞軍方情報人員二日深入叛軍「哥倫比亞革命武裝部隊」（FARC）的蠻荒營地，謊稱奉叛軍頭目之命前來以直升機帶走人質，靠機智成功救出被綁架六年的哥國前總統候選人英格麗•貝當古和另外十四名人質，全程沒開槍，沒流血。軍方稱為「完美」，貝當古驚呼「奇蹟」的營救行動，戲劇性圓滿落幕。

一如許多智取對手，全身而退的電影情節，情報人員也完成了「不可能的任務」。任務圓滿達成，靠的是數月的情報蒐集、數十架待命的直升機，以及高明的騙術。

軍方人員偽裝成叛軍，滲透進軍營，並以假命令誆騙對方，讓對方將人質送上一架白色，並無任何記號的MI-17直升機，以為僅是移送他們到另一營地。

獲救者除了貝當古，尚有三名美國的軍事包商，十一名哥國軍警。四十六歲的貝當古具法國與哥國雙重國籍，二○○二年二月遭叛軍綁架曾轟動一時，歐洲數十城市並因而授予榮譽市民身分。貝當古遭挾持期間，不時有她受到凌虐的傳聞。

貝當古二日清晨四時醒來，以為又將麻木過一天。聽完收音機中母親與女兒的新聞後，有人告訴她打包行李，看到直升機無任何標誌時，讓她心生畏懼。上機後，發現乘員均穿T恤，貝當古研判這些人不是援助工作人員而是叛軍。

待直升起飛後後她一轉身，見到化名西薩的當地叛軍指揮官被蒙上眼罩，剝光衣服壓躺在地上。接著她聽到不可思議的話，機上有個人告訴她：「我們是政府軍，妳自由了。」貝當古說：「老天爺，這真是奇蹟。這是一首非凡的交響樂曲，太完美了。」

軍方去年開始策畫營救，為能步步為營，計畫進展緩慢。人質中有親人反對搭救，因為二○○三年曾發生救人不成，反使十名人質遭處決報復的慘禍。那次行動因為叛軍聽到直升機靠近，以致行動露餡，無功而返。

軍方決心不再犯第二次錯。負責監視與管理人質的西薩，對以為是來自上級的命令不疑有它，將關在不同地方的三批人質押到哥國東部叢林中的集合點，等待直升機二日接人，以為他們將被送往叛軍最高領袖卡諾處，作談判人質交換的籌碼。帶領弟兄執行行動的蒙托亞將軍說：「直升機待在地面廿二分鐘，是我這輩子最難熬、最長的一段時間。」

所有的哥國人質於數小時後搭機抵達波哥大。美國人質則直接從哥國飛往美國，並在二日晚抵達德州。在獲救人質環繞下，哥國總統烏利貝於記者會中強調，他對流血不感興趣，希望能夠與FARC謀求完全的和平。

2008/07/04 聯合報 國際 編譯王麗娟