(Adds Colombian government's comment, details)

By Enrique Andres Pretel

CARACAS, Jan 9 (Reuters) - Colombia's 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.

"I hope that early tomorrow Venezuelan helicopters, with the Red Cross aboard, will leave our country," said Chavez, who has good relations with Colombia's rebels. "Hopefully in a matter of hours, they will be free."

Over Christmas, Chavez sent a convoy of aircraft and representatives from several countries to neighboring Colombia in a highly publicized operation to pick up the captives, but the rebels backed off at the last minute.

The fiasco strained relations between the two countries, but Colombia's conservative government said on Wednesday it would back the new mission.

"We are offering all guarantees to ensure the liberation of Clara Rojas and Consuelo Gonzalez will be carried out successfully," the government's peace commissioner, Luis Carlos Restrepo, told reporters.

The International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed it would take part in the new rescue operation.

Leaders of the FARC, which began as a peasant army in the 1960s, agreed in December to hand over Colombian politicians Gonzalez and Rojas along with Rojas' young son Emmanuel, who was born in jungle camp. His father is a guerrilla fighter.

But that attempt to free them crumbled on Dec. 31 when the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, said army operations made it too dangerous to move the hostages and failed to reveal where they were held.

It later emerged the child was actually living with a foster family in Bogota.

In the wake of the fiasco, Chavez bickered with Colombian 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 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, who was kidnapped with Rojas in 2002 while running for president. (Additional reporting by Hugh Bronstein in Bogota and Patricia Rondon in Caracas; Writing by Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Kieran Murray)

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