Colombia:Chained, weakened by disease and racked with despair, Colombian hostages in jungle camps cling to hopes a deal with their Farc rebel captors will free them, letters from the captives show.
The notes and pictures from guerrilla hostages were brought back to Bogota by former congresswoman Consuelo Gonzalez who was freed last week after nearly six years in rebel captivity in a deal brokered by Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez.
The release of Ms Gonzalez and fellow captive Clara Rojas has raised hopes for an accord to free other hostages held by Latin America's oldest insurgency, including French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and three Americans.
But letters from those left behind, such as police colonel Luis Mendieta, captured nearly a decade ago, show the toll on their physical and mental health after bouts of illness, long jungle marches, and frustration after years in insect-infested camps.
"It is not the physical pain that wounds us, or the chains on our necks that torment us or the constant sickness . . . it's the mental agony of the irrationality of all this," says one letter signed by Col Mendieta and others read on local radio.
"It seems that we are worthless, that we do not exist."
Details of suffering from recent hostage letters have shocked Colombians even as violence from their four-decade conflict eases under President Uribe, who has led a campaign to drive the rebels into the jungles.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the Farc, still holds several hundred hostages for ransom or political leverage. Authorities said the rebels kidnapped six Colombian tourists on Sunday from a remote Pacific beach.
Col Mendieta wrote that he has been chained to a pole and spends days trying to pass time playing cards and learning English and Russian in informal classes from another hostage.
One letter reveals hostages bet dishwashing duties on the outcomes of local football matches they hear on the radio. In another, a father describes to his children the jungle animals at his camp.
Sickness has forced Col Mendieta to be carried several times in a hammock. At times he cannot walk. "I had to drag myself to the bathroom for my necessities through the mud with just the strength of my arms because I could not get up," he wrote in a letter read by his daughter.
Blurry photographs show Col Mendieta with former local governor Alan Jara and ex-congressman Luis Eduardo Gechem and other police hostages who have been held for more than five years.
In one letter read by Mr Gechem's wife he appealed for help from Cuba. He suffers from a bleeding ulcer and a heart ailment.