"After nine, eight and seven years of captivity, we've reached the conclusion that kidnapping's suffering knows no limits," Mendieta wrote to Caracol Radio, which broadcasts messages to the hostages every Sunday morning.
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BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- A satchel of letters carried out of the jungle by two women freed by Colombian rebels details the heart-wrenching suffering and deprivation of the hostages still held captive.
The letters catalog the misery of eight captive politicians, police and soldiers who've become pawns in a bitter conflict. Often chained by the neck, they suffer from malaria, tropical parasites, heart ailments and diarrhea so severe that one captive couldn't walk.
"I've been crying so much, my eyes are inflamed," Maria Teresa Mendieta told The Associated Press on Wednesday in her Bogota apartment. She said she's managed her police officer husband's nine-year absence with help of psychotherapy and anti-anxiety medication.
"This is the only country in the world where this many people have been held hostage for so long."
Colombia estimates the rebels still hold 750 hostages in small groups in far-flung jungle hideaways.
Lt. Col. Luis Mendieta's testimony is among the most eloquent and painful in the letters Clara Rojas and Consuelo Gonzalez carried after a tearful parting from the other captives.
Mendieta wrote that he is frequently tethered with two fellow captives by chains around their necks. In a December 21 letter, his first communication to his family in five years, he describes surviving two bouts of malaria, current chronic chest pains and being so stricken by tropical ailments that he had to crawl on his hands and knees for five weeks.
"I had to drag myself through the mud to relieve myself, with only my arms because I couldn't stand up," wrote Mendieta, the highest-ranking Colombian security officer still held.
Mendieta wrote that he had to be carried on a makeshift stretcher from camp to camp, and lost nearly all his meager possessions.
"They need to be freed now," Mendieta's 21-year-old daughter, Jenny, said.
One hostage often chained to Mendieta is former state governor Alan Jara, who was kidnapped in July 2001. His letter says he suffers chronic headaches due to a parasite that has apparently infected his brain, Jenny Mendieta said. "He could die at any moment."
"Authentically repugnant" is how U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield described the revelations.
Mendieta was a police commander when guerrillas of the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, overran his city on November 1, 1998. Most people seized with him were freed in the rebels' last major hostage release, of 300 police and soldiers in 2001.
The eight captives held with Rojas and Gonzalez are among 44 hostages, including three U.S. military contractors and former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, whom the rebels hope to swap for hundreds of jailed comrades.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez brokered last week's release, and relatives of those still surrounded by barbed wire in jungle prisons pray he can help get the others out.
Former congressman Jorge Gechem wrote his wife that he had a serious heart condition and could no longer walk due to a badly injured back. He asked if Fidel Castro might get him transferred to a Cuban hospital. "If I recover immediately I could be moved to a jail in Havana as a political prisoner," he offered.
Gechem was seized in February 2002 when the FARC hijacked his commercial flight, an attack that prompted then-President Andres Pastrana to dissolve a Switzerland-sized safe haven he had created to facilitate peace talks. The incident is one of many reasons President Alvaro Uribe has rejected the rebels' current demand for another demilitarized zone.
"After nine, eight and seven years of captivity, we've reached the conclusion that kidnapping's suffering knows no limits," Mendieta wrote to Caracol Radio, which broadcasts messages to the hostages every Sunday morning.
"But it's not the physical pain that wounds us, not the chains that we wear around our necks that torment us, nor the incessant ailments that afflict us. It's the mental agony caused by the irrationality of all this. It's the anger produced by the perversity of the bad and the indifference of the good."
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