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Astrid Betancourt, whose sister Ingrid, a Green candidate for

president of Colombia, remains in FARC hands after six years

Colombia's kidnapping industry examined here

photo and article by Eric Jackson

A couple of dozen people of several nationalities gathered in the French Embassy's cultural lounge on April 12 to learn about a disturbing aspect of our Colombian neighbors' chronic violence and demand the liberation of those  held for ransom in Colombia by armed political organizations and ordinary criminal gangs.

The night's organizer, Belgian educator and long-time Panama resident Andre Dumoulin, explained with the help of a PowerPoint display that although "the dimensions of the problem can't be exactly quantified because it's illegal to pay ransom," more than 4,200 persons are being held, about half of them by hoodlums who have no political motives. Most of the rest, about 1,500 individuals, are held by the leftist FARC rebels, with other armed groups of both left and right holding their smaller shares of hostages.

Mostly FARC grabs people for the money their families can pay, and on the average it gets about $30,000 per abducted person after a captivity that usually lasts from eight months to two years. Sometimes criminal gangs kidnap people and then sell their victims to FARC, which is more expert at collecting ransom.

"It's not just the rich who are kidnap victims," Dumoulin pointed out, and their plight is aggravated by a public sense of resignation about the problem. Meanwhile, as public officials in Bogota and many of their constituents shrug, "the kidnap victims are humiliated by being turned into a trade commodity."

FARC also kidnaps politicians and their relatives, and holds onto Colombian army and police officers and NCOs that it captures in battle. The price that the guerrillas demand for their "political" kidnap victims and prisoners of war is an exchange for FARC members who are held by the Colombian government.

All of this sad story, Dumoulin pointed out, has developed against a backdrop of more than three million Colombians turned into "internal refugees" due to the breakdown of public order in the places they lived and the spillover of Colombia's violence into all neighboring countries. "Panama has everything to gain from a safer Colombia," Dumoulin opined. To accomplish that goal he advocated the application of international human rights laws to all sides in the Colombian conflict, the referral of cases in which kidnapping has been used as a war tactic to the International Criminal Court and a general breaking of "the code of silence" about Colombia's long-running reign of terror.

Although the turnout was rather small --- all Panamanian media were invited, yet only The Panama News showed up --- Astrid Betancourt was generally upbeat.

"My sister is alive today because of actions like this," she said. There are about 80 local committees to support Ingrid Betancourt's liberation in Colombia and more than a dozen other countries and the case is not being allowed to slip into obscurity. "FARC didn't expect that the eyes of the whole world would be focused on them and what they do."

She thanked the French Embassy for its support and the government it represents for lending its good offices to the search for an end to Colombia's violence, and in turn the envoy noted that "we support all the efforts of all of the countries that have tried to reach a solution for all of the Colombian hostages." Were something like Colombia's kidnap industry to emerge in France, Betancourt opined, "there would be an immediate revolution" by citizens demanding its suppression.

Betancourt expressed low regard for the Álvaro Uribe administration in Bogota. The government claims successes by an elite anti-kidnapping force, but she said that really this unit has only been able to occasionally help those held in cities by urban criminal gangs while being ineffective in cases where hostages are held in guerrilla camps in the countryside. Although the Geneva Conventions contemplate the exchange of prisoners in civil conflicts, she said that the Colombian government hasn't taken this possibility seriously. Uribe's claim that his family too has been the victim of kidnappers is dismissed by Betancourt, who says that the president's father became the victim of violence because he was a drug lord and thus can't be considered in the same light as those who are being held for ransom.

"The government hasn't won [its war against the guerrillas] in five years of operations," Betancourt noted, and said it's time time for a change in its policies.

But isn't this a hard thing to sell in Panama? After all, one of the reasons why the isthmus separated from Colombia more than a century ago was to put some distance from Colombia's incessant armed conflicts.

Panamanians, Betancourt urges, should see our neighbors' kidnapping industry "not politically, but as a humanitarian issue." It's also a matter of common crime, she pointed out, and given a recent increase in kidnappings here in Panama --- some of them committed by Colombians --- people in this country ought to find the issue worrisome.

Betancourt added that while many people would like to pretend that Colombia's problem doesn't affect Panama, the flight of refugees across our border and insecurity in those parts of this country adjacent to Colombia show that we can't just ignore the situation.

Torrijos defends "security law" proposals
Colombian kidnap industry discussed by high-profile victim's sister

High court to hear challenge to ACP's multi-billion dollar "reserve fund"

Terrorist whom Mireya pardoned gets bail in the USA
US media, a few gringos here are fascinated by grisly murder case

A peek down into a multiple urban pathology
Panama News Briefs