15 Hostages Rescued From FARC Clutches in Colombia

This is a developing story, but the Colombian military has rescued 15 hostages, including Ingrid Betancourt and three US military contractors from their FARC captors.

UPDATE:
FARC terrorists have been turning themselves in rather than face the Colombian military.

The FARC still holds an estimated 700 hostages as bargaining chips, including three U.S. military contractors and French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt. And it is fearful of disarming, given that when its movement tried to enter politics in the 1980s, far-right death squads killed some 4,000 activists.

As the FARC hunkers down, rebels are increasingly inflicting casualties with land mines and sniper attacks. Nearly half of the 471 soldiers and police it killed last year were land mine victims, the military says.

The FARC's biggest units and top commanders, meanwhile, are believed to be hiding out in barely accessible mountains and jungles in southern and eastern Colombia from which it is very hard to dislodge them, the U.S. military analyst said.

Meanwhile, the Colombian military's onslaught has cut FARC income from the cocaine trade to an estimated $200-$300 million a year - about half what it earned a decade ago, according to Bruce Bagley, a drug war expert at the University of Miami in Florida.

Canizares says his disillusionment began three years ago when a new front commander, alias "Rodrigo," alienated the locals by shortchanging coca farmers and enriching himself with skimmed cocaine profits.

FARC has also received support from Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, which has complicated matters further.

UPDATE:
Reuters reports that the freed hostages are in fairly good health. As Jammie reminds me, it's quite possible that today's rescue came about in part because of the capture of key intel - namely a FARC laptop, in operations at the beginning of March. Interpol verified that the laptop and its contents were legitimate, including links between FARC and Venezuela and Ecuador.

UPDATE:
The military operation began when Colombian commandos captured terrorists manning a security cordon around the hostages, and convinced the remaining terrorists to give up, which they did without a loss of life.

UPDATE:
Hot Air notes that the lunatic fringe is questioning the timing over the hostage rescue operation as John McCain was in Colombia promoting a free trade agreement between the US and Colombia that has been held up by Congressional Democrats.

UPDATE:
And there's plenty more hostages too - several hundred in fact. It's curious to look back at some of the reporting and punditry surrounding the March cross border raid and the opining of pundits that it put the lives of those hostages in jeopardy. It now looks like the raid helped gather intel to crush the terror group and rescue hostages. Far from putting lives in jeopardy, it appears to have been the straw that broke the camel's back.

UPDATE:
It took good intel to make this operation happen:

Colombia freed Ingrid Betancourt and three U.S. military contractors from leftist guerrillas on Wednesday after military spies tricked rebels into giving them up without a single injury, the defense minister said. In all, the operation freed 15 hostages including Colombian soldiers and police, Juan Manuel Santos said.

(snip)

Santos said the military intelligence agents infiltrated the guerrilla ranks and led the local commander in charge of the hostages, alias Cesar, to believe they were going to take them by helicopter to Alfonso Cano, the guerrillas' supreme leader.

Surrounded by military commandos, Cesar and the other guerrillas gave up without a fight as they helicopters took the hostages to a military base in Guaviare.

FARC has been compromised by the Colombian anti-terrorism operations, and I can only hope that they are able to secure the release of the hundreds of other hostages in short order.