New Colombian president heads attempt to free kidnapped tourists

The new Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has travelled to the country's rugged north-west coast to take personal charge of efforts to free 27 tourists taken hostage at Utria, an eco-tourism park.

President Uribe, who arrived in Choco province on a navy frigate, is risking his political reputation on a rescue operation that has little chance of success. The tourists are being held by Marxist rebels from the National Liberation Army (ELN), who with the country's other guerrilla army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), are threatening to respond to his planned crackdown by stepping up attacks with sophisticated new weapons. Last week, the Farc rebels spurned a United Nations offer to mediate in a peace process.

The captive tourists, fishing enthusiasts from the southern city of Cali, were grabbed at gunpoint last week and force-marched into dense jungle. Their trail disappeared at a remote beach. Earlier, a dozen teenagers had been kidnapped by armed rebels at La Fortuna, 100 miles north.

The ELN, which raises an estimated 40 per cent of its war chest through ransoms, is one third the size of the Farc, with 5,000 fighters. The group frequently stages mass abductions, once taking an entire church congregation hostage.

In last week's statement to the High Court to justify declaring a state of emergency and a special war tax levied on the rich, the new government said rebels planned fresh assaults, aiming to destroy entire populations and ruin the country for good.

Mr Uribe, whose own father was killed in a bungled abduction by Farc fighters nearly 20 years ago, was elected on a pledge to end the bloody insurgency that has plagued Colombia for nearly four decades.

He has proposed training and supplying weapons to a new 20,000-strong peasant army and to institute a network of a million civilian informers. Critics say this will put unjustifiable pressure on civilian populations who are already menaced by right-wing paramilitaries for sympathising with rebel forces.

But analysts say Mr Uribe's hardline stance has gained unprecedented approval from Colombians, who are weary of government appeasement attempts that have failed to stop the bloodshed. An estimated 5,000 Colombians, nearly all civilians, are killed every year in fighting and another 3,000 are kidnapped.