Ex-hostage hugs children after blow to Colombia rebels

By Hugh Bronstein

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Ingrid Betancourt, the symbol of rebel hostages in Colombia, hugged and wept with her children for the first time in six years on Thursday after a military rescue that dealt a severe blow to already weakened guerrillas.

The rescue was a coup for U.S. ally President Alvaro Uribe and raised the possibility that Latin America's oldest left-wing insurgency is in collapse after it was duped into handing its biggest bargaining chip to the military in the steamy jungles.

Betancourt, a French-Colombian citizen kidnapped during her 2002 presidential campaign, threw her arms tightly around her two adult children, their eyes tearful a day after her captors unwittingly freed her, three Americans and 11 Colombians.

"What I'm feeling now is something very close to paradise," Betancourt told reporters on the runway of the airport in Bogota.

"These are my babies, my pride, my reason for living, my light, my moon, my stars, she said. "Forgive me for saying it, but I think they are very good looking."

Her son and daughter, Lorenzo and Melanie, flew from Paris with French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner as soon as they got news of their mother's rescue from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Betancourt, 46, said her captivity in secret camps, sometimes chained by the neck and desperate for medicine to relieve jungle illnesses, had driven her to think of suicide.

The bloodless rescue operation increases public confidence in the short, bespectacled and iron-willed Uribe, whose father was killed in a botched FARC kidnapping two decades ago.