If France nolonger seems to command the world's attention as it did a few years ago, could this be because it lost its singularity when Mr Sarkozy returned the country fully to NATO in 2009, reversing Charles de Gaulle's 1966 withdrawal from its military structure?
The FARC is widely dispersed and has a decentralized command so the group's leaders may not have realized they nolonger had the boy or they may have thought they could quickly recover him.