Mission
President of Venezuela Hugo Chávez said that the plan consisted of three phases. The first phase was to send two Mil Mi-17 helicopters to Colombia carrying five International Red Cross Committee delegates. Both helicopters were to be equipped with medical aid apt for the humanitarian mission and in accordance with International Red Cross standards. Chávez personally inspected the two helicopters in Santo Domingo before departing along with former president of Argentina Néstor Kirchner, who was also invited to supervise the operations. Besides the two Mi-17 helicopters, two Bell 412 helicopters and three French-made executive jets Falcon 200 were also used for support tasks.
Along with the ICRC delegates there were representatives from Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, France, Cuba, Bolivia, Colombia and Switzerland. Hollywood director Oliver Stone was contacted by Chávez to film a documentary about the ordeal.
Family members of the three hostages traveled from Colombia to Caracas to wait for the end of the operation, set to conclude in Caracas with President Chávez receiving them, as previously petitioned by the FARC as a condition.
Read more about this topic: Operation Emmanuel
Famous quotes containing the word mission:
“The mission of men there seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of the country, from every solitary beaver swamp and mountain-side, as soon as possible.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.”
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907–1961)
“We can come up with a working definition of life, which is what we did for the Viking mission to Mars. We said we could think in terms of a large molecule made up of carbon compounds that can replicate, or make copies of itself, and metabolize food and energy. So that’s the thought: macrocolecule, metabolism, replication.”
—Cyril Ponnamperuma (b. 1923)