( Reuters ) - Efforts at freeing hostages held by Colombian rebels were stalled over the weekend after a guerrilla leader said he would not attend talks in neighboring Venezuela aimed at clinching a prisoner exchange.
Leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, asked by Colombia to facilitate hostage swap negotiations, had planned to host the talks in Caracas, but rebel leader Manuel Marulanda said he would not attend meetings outside of Colombia.
On Saturday Chavez urged conservative Colombian President Alvaro Uribe to pull troops from the southern town of San Vicente del Caguan to hold discussions there, an idea Uribe quickly rejected. The deadlock leaves the fate of hostages such as French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt in limbo.
"If it is true that Marulanda is not going to go to Caracas, it is very bad news for the hostages because everyone knows Uribe is not going to demilitarize Caguan," said Gustavo Duncan, a Bogota-based security analyst.
San Vicente del Caguan was the site of a failed peace initiative under which Colombia's previous president ceded a Switzerland-sized piece of territory to the rebels.
Hard-liner Uribe fiercely criticized those talks in his first presidential campaign and won a second term last year based on his military crackdown on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which has been leading a communist insurrection since the 1960s.
A video was released on Sunday in which FARC spokesman Raul Reyes said representatives of the rebel army would hold a preliminary meeting with Chavez on October 8. Reyes did not say where the meeting would be held and it was unclear when the video was recorded.