BOGOTA, Colombia – Results of a DNA test yesterday showed why leftist rebels failed to deliver on their promise to free a 3-year-old boy born in captivity: Little Emmanuel has spent the past two years not in a jungle rebel camp but in a Bogota foster home.
The story of Emmanuel has transfixed Colombia since a Colombian journalist first reported in a 2006 book that the boy was born to one of the rebels' most prominent hostages, former vice presidential candidate Clara Rojas, as the product of a relationship with one of her captors. The father of the boy reportedly is a rank-and-file guerrilla named Rigo.
The story drew in Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who has been negotiating with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, to release the child, his mother and another hostage.
But what Chávez called “Operation Emmanuel” fell through this week when the rebels said operations by Colombia's U.S.-backed military were preventing them from handing over the hostages.
Yesterday, chief federal prosecutor Mario Iguaran said DNA tests performed on Rojas' family members and a foster child proved that the boy known as Juan David Gómez is actually Rojas' son.
The boy had been handed over at the age of 11 months by José Gómez, a peasant farmer who said he was the child's great-uncle, to child welfare workers in San Jose de Guaviare, a town in a FARC-dominated zone of eastern Colombia. The baby had a broken arm and was sick from malnutrition and leishmaniasis, an infection common in the jungle.
The baby was rushed to Bogota for an operation on his arm, then was sent to a foster home in the capital; he is one of 6 million neglected and orphaned minors placed under the state's care. He lived there for two years in obscurity – until the hostage hand-over planned for late December.
The operation was delayed repeatedly as observers including U.S. filmmaker Oliver Stone and prominent Latin American leftist politicians waited.
Then prosecutors received a tip that Emmanuel was no longer in the FARC's control. Three days later, José Gómez emerged again, saying he was actually the boy's father and wanted him back.
The government put everything together with the help of the 2006 testimony of Frank Pinchao, a former police officer who escaped from nine years in captivity to tell of the birth of Emmanuel. Pinchao said rebel midwives accidentally broke the boy's arm in a risky jungle delivery.
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe announced Monday that Emmanuel and Juan David might be the same boy.
José Gómez then confessed that he had no relation to the child, saying a local FARC commander entrusted him with the baby in exchange for extra money he never provided. He said the FARC threatened to kill him if he didn't produce the child by Dec. 30, according to the Colombian government.
