Jan 10 (Reuters) - Colombia's main guerrilla group released two women hostages on Thursday and handed them over to Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chavez.

Clara Rojas and Consuelo Gonzalez, both Colombian politicians, were freed after spending years in jungle camps. Rojas had a son with one of her Marxist rebel captors but the young boy was secretly taken from the camps and put into foster care in 2005.

Here are some key facts about the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and the dozens of politicians, soldiers and police they hold hostage.

* The FARC began as a Communist peasant army in the 1960s. President Alvaro Uribe has pushed the insurgents onto the defensive with a U.S.-backed security campaign, but the group is still fighting, kidnapping and trafficking in cocaine.

* Clara Rojas was snatched in 2002 while campaigning on a rural road with Colombian-French politician Ingrid Betancourt, who was running for president and was also captured. The FARC kidnapped Consuelo Gonzalez in southern Colombia in 2001.

* Rojas gave birth to a boy, Emmanuel, while in captivity in jungle camps.

* Colombia's guerrilla war is fed by the country's multibillion-dollar cocaine trade and involves a mosaic of armed groups who kill thousands of people every year.

* Betancourt and three Americans captured in 2003 are among around 47 key hostages the FARC wants exchanged for jailed rebels. Some have been held for nearly a decade.

* Uribe says the FARC holds a total of about 750 hostages, mostly poor farmers, for ransom and political leverage.

* Late last year, the army arrested a group of guerrillas as they delivered documents including a video that showed a gaunt and depressed Betancourt sitting in the jungle. In a letter to her mother, the politician said she was barely eating and that her hair was falling out in clumps.

* Three U.S. Defense Department contract workers -- Keith Stansell, Thomas Howes and Marc Gonsalves -- were kidnapped when their aircraft crashed while on a counter-narcotics mission in 2003. A police officer who escaped from the rebels said he saw the men and Betancourt at a camp in April last year.

* The FARC wants Uribe to pull troops back from a New York City-sized rural area for a safe haven to negotiate a hostage swap. Uribe, whose father was killed in a botched FARC kidnapping, says that would allow the rebels to regroup.

* French President Nicolas Sarkozy last year persuaded Uribe to release a top jailed rebel in an effort to break the deadlock. (Compiled by Frank Jack Daniel in Caracas; Editing by Kieran Murray)

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