'WE'RE THE national army," one of the Guevara-T-shirted crew of the helicopter said as it lifted them above the Colombian landscape. "You're free." There must have been a moment of complete disbelief. And then, Ingrid Betancourt later said, "the helicopter almost fell from the sky because we were jumping up and down, yelling, crying, hugging one another."
Her six-year ordeal was over. For some others who shared her captivity it was the end of 12 years of wretched imprisonment, like her, often in chains, often stricken down by disease, filthy, and often hungry. For up to 700 others, however, the hostage purgatory as prisoners of the murderous Farc guerillas continues.
But it is to be hoped that the heartwarming Hollywood-like, bloodless rescue of the French-Colombian politician and her 14 companions, barely four months after the death of the group's long-term leader, Manuel Marulanda, may mark an important landmark in its sorry history. Forty-four years after the Farc launched its bloody, pseudo-Marxist war against the Colombian authorities there is evidence that it is in military and political decline, increasingly weakened by the US-funded and trained campaign against it, ostracised internationally and internally by erstwhile allies, and suffering from a steady stream of defections, some very senior, by war-weary militants. Wednesday's coup was almost certainly made possible by some of them.
At its peak in the 1990s, Farc, Latin America's oldest left-wing insurgency, was a formidable force of 17,000-plus under arms (assisted, it is widely accepted, to some degree by Provisional IRA technical know-how). It was supported by thousands of civilian militias providing food, medical supplies and information and funded by narco-cash in a war that has claimed as many as 3,000 civilian lives a year. It controlled 45 per cent of Colombian territory and was even seen as a threat to the capital city, Bogotá. Today it is reported to have barely half that number and is confined to remote rural areas.
The rescue is a huge success for the country's hardline and popular president Alvaro Uribe, who has always preferred military to political solutions. He insisted however on Wednesday evening as he greeted the freed hostages that he isn't interested in "spilling blood" and that he wants the Farc to know he seeks "a path to peace, total peace". Observers may well be cynical about his real intentions, but Farc's new leader, Alfonso Cano, must now understand that the group's options are increasingly limited. It is time for a step towards that open door.