Bold Colombia rescue built on rebels’ disarray

Or so the guerrillas thought. In fact, the gravelly voice that sounded so full of authority belonged not to a grizzled leader of Latin America’s most feared insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, but rather to a Government officer.

The fighters had been duped. With the help of satellite telephone intercepts and a spy who infiltrated the FARC’s upper echelons, the Colombian military had managed to plan and execute an operation that ended a long-running international hostage saga and upended Colombia’s four-decade civil war.

The voice was simply the most dramatic touch in a daring rescue that exploited the recent disarray within the FARC. The insurgency has now lost many of its top leaders and its most prized hostage: Ingrid Betancourt, the French-Colombian politician whose captivity since 2002 has attracted attention worldwide. Its founder, Manuel Marulanda, has died; security forces killed its second-in-command, Raúl Reyes, in March; and some 3,000 combatants have deserted in the last year.

The rescue alone could reverberate across the region. Hugo Chávez, the leftist leader of Venezuela who negotiated previous releases of hostages held by the FARC but failed to free Betancourt or three American contractors also rescued on Wednesday, has lost the regional spotlight to Colombia’s president, Álvaro Uribe, his top rival and a staunch ally of the Bush administration.

But for the FARC, the game has changed. The gritty leftist insurgency, which has survived for decades in the jungles of this Andean country and provided military cover to the world’s most productive coca growers, fell prey to an elaborate ruse that Colombia’s defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, likened to a Hollywood script.

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