More details on the rescue from FARC

NY Times:

At 5 a.m. on Wednesday, the sun had yet to peek through the jungle canopy in this country’s Guaviare Department when the guerrillas told their captives to gather their belongings. A call had come in from a top advisor to Alfonso Cano, their new supreme commander. He said to move. Immediately.

Or so the guerrillas thought. In fact, the gravelly voice that sounded so full of authority belonged not to Mr. Cano, 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, this spring, and some 3,000 combatants have deserted in the last year.

The rescue, described by commanders of the Colombian Army and officials in Washington and Bogotá, was almost exclusively a Colombian operation that highlighted the growth of a military that has benefited from $5.4 billion in aid from the United States since 2000. And while many here and in Washington stressed that the FARC remained a powerful force of several thousand fighters, earning around $200 million a year from drug trafficking, some analysts suggested that the raid combined with continued pressure might push the rebels to negotiate for peace.

“It’s reaching the point where most of the leaders of the FARC are going to say, ‘We’re not going to win, we don’t have a chance,’ ” said Peter DeShazo, director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “And when they reach that point, then political negotiation becomes more possible.”

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FARC has lost its main bargaining chips with the loss of the hostages. It may try to continue as a RICO terrorist operation but its command and control has been completely compromised and its ability to operate significantly reduced. It is very close to the tipping point. Its main ally, Hugo Chavez is worried about finding himself before the International Criminal court for his support of their terrorist operations, not to mention the facilitation of narcotics traffic to Africa and Europe.

This makes it difficult for him to bail out the commie narco terrorist. In recent months at least two high level arms merchants have been arrested in sting operations that implied FARC as a purchaser. This is going to make any arms merchant warry of wanting to deal with them.

With the revelation of the infiltration by Colombia intelligence, the apranoid leades of FARC will probably go on an internal witch hunt that may furter destroy the organization. The FARC troops that were left behind when the hostages were snatched from benath their noses will possibly be killed by the FARC leadership. It is not a forgiving organization.