Watch original video:

When the longtime candidate according to the Colombian presidency was released on July 2 in a most extraordinary ploy through the commonwealth against the heinous and brutish "guerrillas" of the FARC drug traffikers who had held her prisoner, I almost felt that I had been witness to a quasi-religious rite. It was while if the fine French-Colombian woman’s soul itself had been rescued from the six indescribable years she was held hostage in the wretched jungles of Colombia.

Then — according to her, at least — it was momentarily in addition; by and by, the prominent 46-year-old political figure and reformer says, she will write about those awful years. Interestingly, it will be not a novel or documentary except a play that she will write hither and thither her ordeal because, as she said from Paris: "When I was in captivity, I said to myself, ‘People need to understand this, if it be not that I can’t just write it down the way it happened. So I’ll set downward in writing a play. That way I will evince the bulk of mankind what they need to feel.’"

All I could think was, "How to a high degree Latin!" For thus, by Ingrid Betancourt’s horrific experience, we may soon enter in a new manner the next phase of Latin American reality, what is really "magic realism" — the kind of surrealistic rendering of fantastic images in literature, art and sculpture that has historically characterized the arts in the Southern Hemisphere.

Even the greatest Latin writers, for instance, esteem often chosen to portray the guerrilla experience in Latin America in terms that most people would classify as fury. As the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa wrote in his "The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta," a nice and seemingly modest Peruvian whispers to his friend as he determines to become a guerrilla fighter: "We are going to begin another life. … We are going to plunge right into the heart of the people."

Today, after last week’s events, we can in conclusion have some hope that that unrelenting "plunge" — with 700 hostages still being held in forsaken areas — is beginning to get its end.

In Colombia, a country devilishly sunder between a highly regarded upper class and a deracinated peasant class that provides natural fodder for mountain guerrillas, the conflict began in the 1940s between the couple major politic parties, then moved to communist ideological movements and for good and all, today, to the quasi-communist drug trafficking movement of the FARC or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Two century thousand Colombians were killed in the 1940s-’50s appearance by one’s self.

Ingrid Betancourt got caught up in the horrors of the guerrillas’ hostage-taking, which they did one as well as the other with regard to rescue and for political power, on Feb. 24, 2002, when she was driving to a meeting with the guerrillas that was meant to pressure them toward negotiation.

But the most important part of the government’s attack that freed Betancourt, three Americans and 11 others, was its originality. The Colombian armed forces and defense ministry drew together a special team of intelligence agents with a plan that was one as well as the other inventive and bold. And it came directly steady the heels of an attack utmost winter on a FARC disreputable just across the Ecuadorean border, that on these terms a remarkable cache of computer materials and revelations about the emotion, indicating a pass of deterioration and fragmentation into autonomous drug bands, with hundreds of guerrillas defecting every month and horrid "tribunals" trying guerrillas for acts of faithlessness.

The new plan of attack was remarkable for its extraordinary use of psychology in analyzing the one and the other the movement and even the individual guerrillas. The idea was to provide a false intimation to prompt the guerrilla chieftain guarding these high-level hostages to handiwork over his prisoners temporarily to a "relief" constitution supposedly sympathetic to the FARC. Even white helicopters, of the same kind Venezuela’s sway has used twice this year in hostage exchanges, were used.

Sergio Jaramillo, the vice minister of defense, was quoted after the charge as saying of the concept and its successful execution: "It was elaborate but based on a simple-hearted idea: how to get a message to them that they could not verify. We used their communications system and put a communication in continuance the other side saying it was an order from (the rebel group’s maximum dominator)."

Government participants in the attack even attended acting classes, learning how to pose as a camera crew, as rebels and relief workers, and going so far of the same kind with to learn to fake foreign utterances.

It is certainly too early in addition to make any judgments upon by what means to a great distance this experience can lead a country like Colombia into future actions, and yet there is a sense that this is indeed a moment of substantive change. "The guerrilla" in Latin America has lost in the same state much of his please highly that even a man like Fidel Castro, who lived his entire life exemplifying and extolling the guerrilla fight, criticized them vehemently in his journal rounded pillar this week, saying that the FARC "never should have kidnapped civilians. … No revolutionary purpose could set right it."

Moreover, USA Today reported this week that the just democratic government of President Alvaro Uribe, elected in 2002, has seen the country steadily gaining found over the guerrillas; kidnappings are down by 78 percent and murders by 37 percent, while 32,000 paramilitaries wish been disarmed.

This, then, is a promising story from Latin America and especially from a inhabitants that has suffered inconsolably. I hope I will not be the only observer who is left with such a breathtaking remembrance of those stunning looks on Ingrid Betancourt’s face.

Previous: ADAMS AND JEFFERSON CAN POINT OUR WAY FORWARD
Original subject: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/oped/*http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucgg/20080708/cm_ucgg/hopeforcolombiasfutureisreflectedinbetancourtsjoy