Word: bogota
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...November, during the arrest of several FARC guerillas in Bogota, Colombia, the police confiscated a video of Betancourt as well as a 12-page letter that she had written to her mother and family last year as proof that she was still alive. The poignant letter, penned in cramped handwriting, was immediately published as a book in France, where Betancourt grew up, and quickly became a best seller. An English edition was published by Harry N. Abrams in the U.S. this...
...jail in 1990 with his huge political movement intact and a nation to run. Mandela's leadership was unquestioned. In stark contrast Betancourt has emerged as a lone woman with no political constituency and no clear home, geographically or politically. (She has apparently also left her husband in Bogota, after giving him a perfunctory hug the day she was freed.) That outsider status is familiar ground for Betancourt, who was raised not among the poor masses, as Mandela was, but as an aristocratic expatriate on the plush Avenue Foche in Paris, where her father was a diplomat...
...seemingly more concerned with spoils than social justice - and increasingly despised among even Colombians who once saw the group as a corrective to their country's admittedly epic inequalities. The U.S. and later the European Union designated the FARC as a terrorist organization. When the U.S. finally came to Bogota's aid in 2000 with the multi-billion-dollar Plan Colombia, a counter-insurgency mission disguised as a drug-interdiction project, Colombia's once laughable military began knocking the FARC to the mat. As a result, conservative President Alvaro Uribe is enjoying approval ratings as high as the Colombian sierras...
...Governor Bill Richardson, a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations who has extensive experience negotiating the release of U.S. prisoners around the world. They convinced Richardson to fly south over the weekend and explore the possibilities of exchanging Stansell, Howes and Gonsalves for captured rebels. After conferring in Bogota with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and then in Caracas with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez - a FARC sympathizer who has helped broker freedom for other guerrilla captives - Richardson urged patience. "While I believe this initial trip was successful," he told reporters, "the process of freeing the hostages won't happen quickly...
...FARC a terrorist group and can't negotiate with it. But U.S. sources say they're hearing signals the FARC might accept significantly reduced sentences for Sonia and Trinidad, which the two could win during their appeals. Says Alfredo Rangel, director of the Security and Democracy Foundation in Bogota: "If a U.S. appellate judge cuts Trinidad's sentence to, say, below 20 years, it puts the ball in the FARC's court." Another possibility: the pair's transfer to, and lighter sentences in, prisons in France as part of the possible Betancourt exchange. "We aren't discounting [either] scenario," says...