Colombia launched an all-out effort to free politician Ingrid Betancourt today, offering cash and reduced jail terms to leftist guerrillas in exchange for releasing her after years of captivity in jungle camps.
Ms Betancourt, a French-Colombian national snatched by the rebels during her 2002 presidential campaign, is suffering from malnutrition and hepatitis B, according to Colombia's human rights ombudsman.
President Alvaro Uribe, a conservative US ally, said his government will maintain a $100 million fund to pay rewards to guerrillas who free any of the hundreds of kidnap victims held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
"We will resolve their legal problems and offer financial compensation," Mr Uribe said today. He signed a decree late yesterday allowing for a mass release of guerrillas from jail if Betancourt, a 46-year-old mother of two, is set free.
The moves were meant to speed up efforts at swapping rebel-held politicians, police and soldiers for jailed guerrillas. The exchange plan has been bogged down in months of haggling over conditions.
"The immediate release of Betancourt would be enough for us to consider the humanitarian exchange underway, in that we would conditionally suspend the sentences of guerrillas who are part of the agreement," the government's peace commissioner, Luis Carlos Restrepo, said late yesterday.
The FARC, which took up arms in the 1960s, is holding hundreds of hostages for ransom and political leverage, including three American anti-drug contractors captured in 2003.
But Ms Betancourt's case has drawn the most attention. Colombia's Roman Catholic Church called on the FARC on Friday to release her and all other kidnap victims, describing it as an issue of life or death.
"We don't even know who to go to as the head of the FARC, so we are sending a general call out to all of them," a Church spokesman told reporters. The FARC and the government have been deadlocked over conditions for exchanging dozens of high-profile hostages for rebels held in government jails.