Freedom for the Hostages

Source: http://www.thewideawakecafe.com/?p=2003

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In this file photo released by the Colombian government on Friday, Nov. 30, 2007, shows Colombia’s former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt in an unknown location

BOGOTA, Colombia — Colombia said its military rescued former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, three U.S. military contractors and 11 other hostages from leftist rebels, who had been held for years, on Wednesday.

Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos says no one was hurt in the operation in eastern Colombia.

He said army commandos captured rebels manning a security ring around the hostages and got them to persuade their comrades to turn over the captives, without any loss of life.

• Click here for photos.

Santos says the other 11 hostages freed were Colombian soldiers and police.

Betancourt, the Americans Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes and Keith Stansell, and the other hostages were taken to a military base.

In Paris, Betancourt’s son Lorenzo Delloye-Betancourt called her release after six years of captivity, “if true, the most beautiful news of my life.”

There was no answer at the homes of American families of the three U.S. hostages.

On ABC’s Good Morning America, just yesterday, during his visit to Columbia, Senator John McCain said the following…

John McCain: “I’ve come down here [to Colombia] on two previous occasions. We have the issue of the drug trafficking from Colombia up through our Hemisphere across Mexico and into the United States of America. Drug cartels have basically taken control of some towns on the Mexican border. There are still a couple of thousand people being held hostage by the FARC here. There is clearly a continued threat of drugs pouring into the United States of America, which can harm us and our young people very badly. I’m happy to say there has been some success. The cost of cocaine on the street is up. I also think it’s important for our economy to pass a free trade agreement between ourselves and Colombia.”

From Investors Business Daily..

Hat tip: Instapundit

It’s an impressive and unconventional campaign stop for McCain, 1,600 miles off Florida on Colombia’s Spanish Main coast in Cartagena.

The media are baffled by it, wondering where the electoral votes are. The Wall Street Journal even said that McCain somehow needed to “to pad his foreign policy credentials.”

But McCain’s top Latin America adviser, Otto Reich, a former top diplomat under President Reagan and both Bush I and Bush II, told IBD they’re only flummoxed because it’s more about principles than politics: That is, McCain’s commitment to the region and free trade.

“In supporting our allies in Colombia and Mexico, he is carrying forward the enterprise for the Americas initiative first envisioned by Ronald Reagan in 1979, the one that changed everything,” Reich said.

Reagan’s vision of a free trade zone from Barrow, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, Chile was what led to the free-trade deals now passed with Mexico, Central America, Dominican Republic, Peru and Chile, according to Reich. Those pacts have strengthened those democracies and kept populist predators at bay, as Reagan wanted.

But Colombia (and Panama) are still left out. In fact, Colombia has been hideously mistreated by the Democratic establishment in Congress, which broke its own 2007 promise to pass a free-trade deal.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insulted Colombia’s democratically elected president last year, and then went one worse by shutting out all 44 million Colombians from a free-trade pact they’d spent years earning. She did so using a legislative technicality, not a clean vote.

McCain stressed in a recent ad that the U.S. “can’t go back on its word” to allies like Colombia. That’s why he’s making a show there.

There’s more….

Sometimes history sneaks up on us on balmy Wednesday afternoons. Free trade. Freed hostages.

Shades of January, 1981?

UPDATE:

Statement by John McCain on Today’s Hostage Rescue in Colombia

ARLINGTON, VA — U.S. Senator John McCain issued the following statement on today’s hostage rescue in Colombia:

“Today, I spoke by phone to President Uribe. He told me some of the details of the dramatic rescue of the people who were held hostage. Three Americans are now free and Ingrid Betancourt is now in good condition. I’m pleased with the success of this very high-risk operation. Sometimes in the past, the FARC has killed the hostages rather than let them be rescued.

“So I congratulate President Uribe, the military and the nation of Colombia. It is great news. Now we must renew our efforts to free all of the other innocent people held hostage. With regard to the three Americans and Ingrid Betancourt — they had been held many years, as many as six years.

“Last night, President Uribe and the defense minister did brief us that the operation was going to take place today.”

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