Guerrillas Free Teen Captive as ‘Peace Gesture’

BOGOTA, Colombia —  Colombia’s largest guerrilla group freed the teenage daughter of a leading businessman as a “peace gesture” Friday after holding her hostage for three months, authorities said.

The left-leaning Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, released Juliana Villegas unharmed to the government’s top peace negotiator in jungle filled with rebels near the city of Neiva, in southwestern Colombia.

Villegas, 18, the daughter of Luis Carlos Villegas, president of the National Assn. of Industrialists, was snatched Nov. 28 outside an exclusive Jesuit university in Bogota.

The high-profile kidnapping highlighted the ability of the rebels, who fight right-wing paramilitary groups and Colombia’s security forces, to strike at the upper classes of this South American nation. Colombia has one of the world’s highest kidnapping rates.

Television images showed a tired-looking Villegas, wearing a blue T-shirt and being hugged by relatives, in the central coffee capital of Pereira, where she flew to the family ranch accompanied by peace commissioner Camilo Gomez.

The FARC, which is engaged in protracted peace talks with the government to end a 37-year-old war that has killed 35,000 civilians in the last decade, said it released Villegas after “checking that neither she nor her father have links to [right-wing] paramilitary groups.”

“The liberation is a humanitarian gesture and a contribution to the peace process,” the 17,000-strong FARC said in a statement read by a rebel somewhere in a vast area in southern Colombia, where the government has withdrawn troops to hold peace talks.

While recent polls have shown that many of Colombia’s 40 million people have little faith in the negotiations, Gomez said the FARC’s release of Villegas showed progress in the government’s peace efforts.

“There are a lot of people who have a hard time believing that the peace process is advancing, but it is advancing,” Gomez told reporters later Friday after meeting in the enclave with FARC leader Manuel “Sure Shot” Marulanda.

Officials and rebels said no extortion money had been paid for Friday’s release.

“Juliana is fine and in good spirits. We have already forgiven her kidnappers,” Luis Carlos Villegas, a close ally of President Andres Pastrana, said as his daughter smiled shyly at the cameras.

Pastrana, who was voted in on a peace ticket in 1998, is trying to negotiate an end to the war.

Last year, more than 3,000 people were kidnapped in Colombia, most of them at the hands of leftist rebels seeking hefty extortion payments to bankroll their uprising.