Oppenheimer: Chavez comes off a big loser in the Colombian hostage liberation

The biggest loser of last week's Hollywood-styled Colombian army rescue of 15 hostages in the hands of the FARC guerrillas, in addition to the rebels themselves, was Venezuela's narcissist-Leninist President Hugo Chavez. Judging from Chavez' own public statements and the contents of thousands of e-mails found in FARC laptop computers seized March 1 when Colombia's military raided a guerrilla camp inside Ecuador, Chavez was hoping to use the hostage crisis to become the ultimate power broker in the Colombian armed conflict and become South America's most powerful political leader. Chavez, as well as Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, had been openly asking for international diplomatic recognition of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia rebels as a ''belligerent force.'' This would have given the Colombian guerrillas much-needed political oxygen after a series of crushing defeats by the Colombian army.