Colombia: A Make-Over for Stumbling Rebels

[Zorro]

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Colombia's Marxist guerrillas probably rue the day they kidnapped state legislator Sigifredo Lopez and his colleagues. Disguised as police agents, the rebels stormed a government building in the southern city of Cali in 2002, announced a bomb threat and then herded a dozen lawmakers, including Lopez, aboard a bus and drove them into the mountains. But the operation ended up in one of the ghastliest blunders of Colombia's four-decade-long civil war. In June 2007, guerrilla guards mistakenly thought they were under attack by the army and, in a panic, executed 11 of the hostages. Lopez alone survived the massacre because he was being held in solitary confinement in another part of the rebel camp.

Lopez, 45, was finally freed on Thursday, almost seven years after his abduction. All told, the guerrillas, the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), got nothing out of the Cali operation — and they finally seem to have come to the conclusion that their decade-long orgy of political hostage-taking has gotten them nowhere.

In 2000, the FARC, then one of the world's largest and fiercest insurgencies, started targeting Colombian senators, governors and other power brokers, hoping to swap them for imprisoned guerrillas. The rebels also demanded a demilitarized zone to negotiate prisoner exchanges with government envoys. But conservative President Alvaro Uribe, who took office in 2002, refused to play along. With strong U.S. backing, he beefed up Colombia's once dysfunctional military and started delivering body blows to the FARC. Last year was the guerrillas' most disastrous year ever. The rebels lost three of their top seven commanders (two were killed, one died of old age); but the most stunning coup was last summer's Entebbe-style army raid that outwitted the FARC and rescued 15 hostages, including three U.S. military contractors and former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt...

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