Word: betancourt
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Among the 15 people liberated was the most high-profile FARC hostage of all, former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt - a French-Colombian whose six-year-long captivity had become a cause célèbre in Europe - as well as three American defense contractors who had been held for more than five years, one of the longest U.S. hostage ordeals ever. Surrounded by his top military brass, Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos said, "They were rescued safe and sound...
...they still held potent cards: one was the hundreds of millions of dollars they make each year via drug trafficking; the other was their more than 700 army, police and civilian hostages. And no captives were as valuable - or as much a symbol of their continued leverage - as Betancourt and the three Americans: Keith Stansell, Thomas Howes and Marc Gonsalves. "The FARC will never be able to recover from this," says Alfredo Rangel, a military analyst and head of the Security and Democracy Foundation in Bogot...
...operation was dubbed Jaque - which means "check," as in checkmate, in Spanish - and was indicative of how deeply Colombia's military intelligence has been able to infiltrate the FARC's top hierarchy, the secretariat, in recent months. A government mole had been able to convince those bosses to transfer Betancourt and the 14 other hostages to the encampment of the FARC's new No. 1 leader, Alfonso Cano. Under the yoke of a FARC unit led by Comandante Cesar, the group made its way to a smaller camp belonging to a friendly NGO. "They tied our hands and feet," Betancourt...
...news spread of Betancourt's release in Paris Wednesday night, drivers honked their horns in celebration. Betancourt supporters are planning a major celebration on Thursday night in the square outside city hall on Paris' Right Bank. The huge poster of a vibrant young Betancourt that hung for years on the façade of city hall there was changed last November to a haunting image of a drawn woman with downcast eyes, taken from a proof-of-life video released at that time. In April, fears had mounted that Betancourt, 46, might be near death - supposedly from hepatitis B. French...
...ally in Latin America, whose campaign against the FARC has made him perhaps the most popular President in the nation's history. The FARC was once respected by many Colombians for fighting the nation's epic inequality, but today it is viewed by most as a mafia. Betancourt's mother, Yolanda Pulecio, told TIME earlier this year that she feared Uribe's bellicose policy would mean interminable captivity for Betancourt, who looked emaciated and alarmingly despondent in her most recent photographs. "I'm killing myself every day," she said, "wondering why dialogue is so impossible for all sides in this...