(Adds comment from president, more color) By Patrick Markey BOGOTA, April 27 (Reuters) - Twelve Colombian lawmakers held hostage by leftist guerrillas sent a message on Friday to President Alvaro Uribe urging him to enter into talks with rebels over their release after five years in captivity. Families wept as they watched the video released by rebels showing the hostages as they praised their children, sent greetings to their wives and called on Uribe and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, to negotiate their freedom. It was the first public proof of life since last year from the lawmakers who are among hundreds of soldiers, politicians and others held in jungle camps. The captives also include three U.S. contract workers taken four years ago. "Five years, five years of pain, five years waiting for the government and the FARC to show their political and historic status by agreeing on our liberty," hostage Edinson Perez said, holding his palm scrawled with "Until When?" up to the camera. Uribe, whose own father was killed 20 years ago during a botched rebel kidnapping, is popular for his hard-line security campaign that has driven rebels back into the jungles and dramatically reduced violence from the four-decade conflict. But achieving the release of hostages, including French-Colombian citizen and former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, has become one his most sensitive tasks since the U.S.-educated attorney was re-elected last year. The lawmakers shown on Friday were snatched in a FARC raid on a Valle del Cauca province assembly building in 2002. The FARC, which has been fighting since the 1960s and is Colombia's oldest rebel group, wants the government to demilitarize two rural towns for talks on exchanging 61 key hostages for hundreds of jailed guerrillas. But the government, which says the FARC is deeply involved in Colombia's huge cocaine trade, wants more guarantees, fearing the rebels will use the area to regroup as they did during similar talks with Uribe's predecessor. Authorities say two municipalities, Florida and Pradera, are an important corridor for cocaine from southern provinces, where illicit coca leaf used to make the drug is cultivated. Uribe has ordered troops to hunt down rebels holding hostages. "The government can accept a meeting zone, but not a demilitarized zone," Uribe said in the city of Cali, where relatives of the hostages saw the video. "I am sorry, but if I do not say this here and now, when should I say it?" Uribe has received billions of dollars of U.S. military and counternarcotics aid and also has negotiated the surrender of illegal paramilitaries who once fought the rebels. He now faces a scandal linking some of his political allies to the militias, which Washington brand as drug-trafficking terrorists. France, Switzerland and Spain have presented a proposal for talks, but fledgling moves toward negotiations stalled last year after a series of bombing attacks the government blamed on the FARC.
