By Enrique Andres Pretel
(Corrects spelling of Chavez in the headline)
By Enrique Andres Pretel
CARACAS (Reuters) - Colombian Marxist rebels are set to free two women hostages to Venezuela after a previous mission to pick them up collapsed on New Years Eve, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez said on Wednesday.
The leftist president said he could send helicopters within hours to collect the hostages held for years in jungle camps after guerrilla leaders told him where to find them.
!ADVERTISEMENT!"I hope that early tomorrow Venezuelan helicopters, with the Red Cross aboard, will leave our country," Chavez said. "Hopefully in a matter of hours, they will be free."
Despite strained relations with Chavez over his mediation to free hostages, Colombia's government agreed to support the new mission, and the International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed it would take part.
An earlier attempt to free the captives crumbled on December 31 after the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, failed to reveal where their captives were held.
Rebel leaders had agreed to free Colombian politicians Consuelo Gonzalez and Clara Rojas, along with Rojas' young son Emmanuel, who was born in jungle camp.
Chavez sent an air convoy accompanied by foreign dignitaries deep into neighboring Colombia to pick up the three, but the rebels said army operations made it too dangerous to move the hostages and the deal fell through.
It later emerged the child was actually living with a foster family in Bogota.
The fiasco prompted Chavez to bicker with Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe, who he accused of blocking the hostage release plan. Relations between the two presidents were already strained, after Uribe tried to exclude Chavez from hostage talks earlier in the year.
Patricia Perdomo, the daughter of Gonzalez, said she was preparing to see her mother again, more than six years after the former lawmaker was kidnapped.
"We are so, so happy to know that, God willing, tomorrow Clara and my mom will be free again after so much time," Perdomo said.
The FARC, which began as a peasant army in the 1960s, is now largely funded by Colombia's cocaine trade and uses kidnapping as a weapon in its war against the state.
It holds hundreds of hostages, including three U.S. anti-drug contractors and French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt.
(Additional reporting by Hugh Bronstein in Bogota and Patricia Rondon in Caracas; Writing by Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Saul Hudson and Kieran Murray)
