Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez speaks during a news conference in Caracas, where he told the media the detailed plan of releasing three Colombian hostages.
In Latin America, New Year's Eve is a more important celebration than Christmas. It is the one night when families make certain they're together. In Venezuela's most beloved poem, "The Grapes of Time," by Andres Eloy Blanco, an expatriate in Madrid weepily laments that he's not toasting midnight back in Caracas with his mother. That made it all the more emotional last week when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, in his new role as mediator between the Colombian government and Colombia's fierce Marxist guerrillas, raised hopes that three of the rebels' hundreds of civilian hostages would be reunited with their families on New Year's Eve.
But what Chavez discovered as he rang in 2008 last night is that the grapes of time sour pretty quickly in violence-torn Colombia. The hostage release collapsed as 2007 ticked away. Many had hoped it would not only revive peace talks to end Colombia's bloody, four-decade-old civil war, but also be a precursor to freeing three Americans held by the guerrillas. The debacle has now left Chavez looking humiliated, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe looking churlish and the leftist rebels, the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces — known by their Spanish acronym, the FARC — looking more than ever like the deceitful thugs their critics insist they've become over the years.
Worse, it left the Colombian peace process looking as tangled as the jungle where waiting Venezuelan helicopters were supposed to retrieve the hostages. Nearby in Villavicencio, Colombia, south of Bogota, observers from France, Switzerland and six Latin American countries, as well as celebrity onlookers like American film director Oliver Stone, packed their bags and left shaking their heads. As he departed, Stone, who has a penchant for things guerrilla, said, "Shame on Colombia," referring to what was widely seen as meddling by President Uribe that may have helped sink the release operation.
There's enough blame to go around. In principle, the FARC agreed earlier this month to release former Colombian Congresswoman Consuelo Gonzalez and politician Clara Rojas, who were kidnapped six years ago. The third hostage was Rojas' 3-year-old son, Emmanuel, whose father is said to be one of the FARC captors. They were to be freed days before New Year's Eve. But when nothing happened last weekend, and when the FARC kept failing to provide Venezuelan officials with geographical coordinates for the release site, doubts began to rise.
And so did reminders that principle is hardly a reliable currency in FARCland. The left-wing Chavez learned an important lesson about the 20,000-strong rebel army: it couldn't care less about its public relations image because it is powerful and rich enough not to have to care. Maybe it could have been counted on to keep its word a generation ago, when combating Colombia's epic social inequalities was still its primary objective. But today the FARC, which controls a mammoth swath of southern Colombia, is widely considered to be a ruthless mafia that earns as much as $1 billion a year via ransom kidnapping and protecting the country's cocaine trade. The U.S. State Department has listed both the FARC and Colombia's right-wing paramilitary armies as terrorist groups.
Standing up to the FARC has made the conservative Uribe a widely popular President, with both Colombians and the Bush Administration, which counts Uribe as its closest Latin American ally. But Uribe didn't exactly help matters late Monday when, as observers still held out hope that the FARC might come through, he seemed to break his own promise to stay clear of the process and arrived in Villavicencio with stunning news. Colombian government intelligence, he said, suggests that 3-year-old Emmanuel was released two years ago to a foster family. Whether that's true or not, Uribe left the impression that he was passively-aggressively scuttling the release effort to avoid the embarrassment of having FARC hostages delivered to Chavez; last month Uribe all but cut off the Venezuelan leader from the government-rebel negotiations when a dispute erupted between the two Presidents and their notoriously oversize egos. Chavez wondered the same thing aloud to reporters. Uribe, whose government is embroiled in a scandal over alleged ties to the right-wing paramilitary armies, denied it, insisting the FARC "has no excuse."
Chavez, however, may have set himself up for embarrassment. The New Year's debacle capped what has been a dismal few months for the radical, anti-U.S. leader, who controls the hemisphere's largest oil reserves. He started the year seemingly at the height of power, taking office after a landslide reelection and with crude prices breaking records by the day. But in November, during one of Chavez's rants at a summit in Chile, the King of Spain publicly told him to "shut up." That rebuke was followed this month by another from Venezuelans, who in a constitutional referendum voted down his bid to deepen his "21st-century socialism" and eliminate presidential term limits. As a result, Chavez and his backers no doubt saw the FARC hostage release as a way to revitalize his hemispheric influence — leading him, perhaps, to a naïve trust in the FARC.
This week's setback could, by the same token, make Chavez a smarter and more effective mediator in the long run. Many still believe that his leftist bona fides make him the right man to persuade the guerrillas to release hostages and the government to free hundreds of jailed rebels. All that could in turn help end a war that has killed almost 40,000 people, displaced millions more and drawn the U.S., albeit indirectly, into the conflict with some $1 billion a year in anti-drug aid.
February, in fact, marks the fifth anniversary of the FARC's capture of three U.S. defense contractors — and the sixth for the rebels' best-known captive, liberal Colombian Senator and presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, whose dual Colombia-French citizenship has made her a cause celebre in Europe. Chavez said he still believes the FARC will release Gonzalez and Rojas, who was Betancourt's running mate. But if they don't, 2008 will begin as yet one more year of shame for Colombia.