Opinion: Colombian rebel who held Betancourt and U.S. hostages captive, indicted

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The world rejoiced last month when the Colombian military rescued Franco-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, three American military contractors and other hostages who had been held for years by leftist rebels. Now there’s the grim satisfaction of learning that one of their captors, Hely Mejia Menoza, better known as ‘Martin Sombra,’ has been indicted on terrorism and weapons charges for his part in kidnapping the contractors: Keith Stansell, Marc Gonzalvez and Thomas Howes.

Still, it’s too early to celebrate. Hundreds of hostages remain in the Colombian jungle, enduring torturous treatment. After the rescue, Gonzalves described his captors as people so base and brutal that they once withheld milk from a newborn infant. Anyone who thinks the FARC represents a cause or ideology, as it did 40 years ago, doesn’t understand what the group has become. These aren’t revolutionaries, they’re hardened gang members whose drug trafficking has given them access to technology and guns.

La Opinion has a story today in which the children of an elderly couple taken hostage by the rebels revealed Sunday that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia shot and killed their parents because the pair could not keep up on arduous forced marches through the jungle.

Gerardo Angulo y Carmenza Castañeda de Angulo said a former member of the terrorist group told them that their parents were taken captive in 2000 and executed three months later. Here’s a translation: ‘They were killed because they couldn’t walk; my mother’s varicose veins burst in her boots and my father never abandoned her,’ Gerardo said.