Villavicencio: Colombian rebels handed over a 23-year-old soldier to the International Red Cross on Sunday in their first release of a captive in more than a year. The insurgents are promising to soon free a second soldier they've held for far longer.
Private Josue Calvo had been held since he was wounded and captured last April. He walked out of a loaned Brazilian helicopter emblazoned with the Red Cross logo and into the long embrace of his father and sister after being picked up in the jungle and flown to this provincial capital at the eastern foot of the Andes.
"Joy came home again," said the father, Luis Alberto Calvo. Calvo is the first of two soldiers the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, says it is freeing this week in what the insurgents call their last goodwill unilateral release.
The other is Sergeant Pablo Emilio Moncayo, who has been held for more than 12 of his 32 years and whose father gained fame for walking halfway across Colombia to press for his release.
Although the rebels had reported him recovering from leg wounds and not ambulatory, Calvo did not use the wheelchair that awaited him. He walked on his own, with the aid of a staff. But he did not speak — only giving a thumbs up — at a news conference at which his father explained that Calvo's mother had abandoned the family when Josue was a boy. Afterward, the soldier and his family were flown to the capital, Bogota, where Calvo was treated at the Military Hospital for dehydration and was in stable condition, its director said.
