The Senator is pretty insistent that the Colombian army (the successful one that gave Raul Reyes what he deserved) not attempt a rescue. Yet at the same time, he says that the hostages themselves pray for one – which is the same thing that John McCain, once a tortured prisoner subject to Marxist war crimes in Vietnam, said he wanted too. McCain said that when he was being held hostage, he was thrilled when the US started bombing Hanoi because it raised the prospects of rescue.

Why would the Senator not want what the hostages themselves want? I get the feeling he hasn’t sorted everything out in his mind and may still have lingering Stockholm syndrome. Did anyone ask the Senator why he was carefully selected for release and some 800 other hostages, high-value and low-value, were not? Could it be because he’s urging the same ‘let-FARC-off-scot-free’ approach that FARC itself would be happy to see, now that it is on its last legs.

And did anyone ask the good Senator if he’d be the first to complain if the Colombian army did execute a successful rescue mission, blowing the terrorists to hell, instead of the Marxist appeasement they would like? Would the Senator really complain about that?

Admittedly, my analysis was still primitive at that point, since the conversation with the El Tiempo reporter took place at 8:45 Tuesday morning, just after he told me that the paramilitary leaders’ planes were in the air. The U.S. and Colombian governments had not yet issued any statements.

But yes – for now, the para-politics process has indeed ground to a screeching halt, and it is fair to wonder whether it will now be able to go beyond the few dozen regional politicians who have been caught up in the investigations so far. It will only recover if the paramilitaries’ access to those investigating non-drug crimes is truly guaranteed. Over the past six days, the U.S. and Colombian governments have been saying the right things about such access. They must be held to these statements.

On the other point, Senator Perez did not mention any hostages getting treatment that could be considered much kinder. However, he did mention that the guerrilla captors deliberately sought to divide the military and police prisoners – whom they considered to be class allies from “el pueblo” – from the “bourgeois” civilian politician hostages. There appears to be a marginal difference in how the two groups were/are treated.

“Beg pardon? Due to the Pérez visit taking up nearly every waking moment, this blog post was the only statement I was able to make about the extraditions last week. My position didn’t evolve at all, I only had time to express it once, and rather hastily at that.”

Then where did El Tiempo get this?-

“…(E)l analista Adam Isacson (afirma) que esta (la extradición) podría ser el fin del escándolo conocido como la ‘parapolítica’. ‘Si Uribe o su entorno estaban preocupados estaban preocupados por lo que dijeran los ex ‘paras’, esta sería una forma de callarlos’, agregó Isacson.”
(”Nuevo cruce de críticas de Uribe con Vivanco” Page 1-6 El Tiempo, Weds. 14 May)

If El Tiempo did not fabricate your remarks, then your position did evolve, because what appeared in your blog was almost the opposite:

“Now that they have little to lose…the paramilitary leadership may be more willing than before to talk about who helped them over the years, what their financial and logistical networks looked like, and perhaps what happened to their victims….”

If El Tiempo fabricated your remarks, or if there has been some other misunderstanding, sorry.

As for today’s topic-

“Their guerrilla captors are unspeakably cruel, chaining the hostages by their necks, shooting at their feet to silence them or force them to walk faster, and denying medical care beyond provision of a single aspirin.”

By and large this coincides with the general body of hostage testimony that is on record. However, once in a blue moon you hear about hostages who were treated well, no chains or razor wire, befriended by their guerrilla captors, treated to barbecues, etc. allowed to sleep with their spouses if the spouses were also taken–I wonder why? If I’m going to be kidnapped, how do I make reservations with those guys and not the ones who shoot at my feet?

I can’t generalize, but according to one hostage testimony in particular, the conditions in a hostage prison camp depend a lot upon whether or not hostages have tried to flee, or whether or not the guerrillas consider them a flight risk, as they would in the case of Perez or any other high profile hostage.

I feel quite worried for the hostages in that camp in Putumayo, for example, where that police guy (name escapes me at the moment) managed to escape last year and then wrote a book about it, explaining how he had cut through his handcuffs over the course of several months etc. By going on TV and writing that book, this guy consciously worsened the condition of his fellow hostages by a factor of ten, probably also incited reprisal FARC attacks against surrounding indigenous communities (because he told how he was helped by an indigenous woman during his flight) and ensured that the technique by which he escaped can never be used again. What an asshole. There should be some protocol in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

Re: the aspirin-I’ve heard that medical provisions are not distributed to hostages because the army controls the entrance of medical supplies into a guerrilla controled zone. I’ll bet most of Perez’s guerrilla captors themselves were suffering from hepatitis, malaria, and so forth.