Columbia says rebel leader killed
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) - March 7, 2008 Ivan Rios was the second top rebel killed in a week, a major
setback for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the
country's largest rebel force.
No top Colombian rebel leader had ever been slain until Raul
Reyes was killed Saturday in a cross-border raid by Colombian
troops into Ecuador that set off an international diplomatic
crisis.
"The FARC has suffered a new, major blow," Defense Minister
Juan Manuel Santos told reporters, calling Rios' death "yet
another demonstration that the FARC is falling apart."
He said troops launched an operation designed to capture Rios on
Feb. 17 after receiving tips that he was in a mountainous area
straddling the western Colombian provinces of Caldas and Antioquia,
and engaged the guerrillas' outer security ring seven times.
Thursday night, he said, a guerrilla known as Rojas came to the
troops with Rios' severed right hand, laptop computer and ID,
saying he had killed his boss three days earlier.
It was unclear what motivated the killing, but Santos said it
was to "relieve the military pressure" because the rebels were
"surrounded, without supplies and without communication."
The U.S. State Department has a bounty of $5 million for Rios'
capture.
Santos said Colombia waited to make the announcement until it
had confirmed Rios' identity, which it did Friday.
He did not say what happened to Rojas, nor whether authorities
had recovered the rest of Rios' body. He did not take questions.
Rios, whose real name has been given as Jose Juvenal Velandia
and Manuel Jesus Munoz, faced U.S. federal charges of drug
smuggling, and was on a U.S. Treasury Department list of terrorists
and drug traffickers.
The 46-year-old Rios became known across Colombia as one of the
rebels' main negotiators in failed peace talks that ended in 2002.
Unlike the FARC's mostly peasant leadership, he was a former
university student who engaged journalists and foreign envoys in
political and economic discussions.
"He was the youngest member of the secretariat. He was very
important to the rebels," said Alfredo Rangel of the Bogota-based
think tank Security and Democracy. "This shows the army is capable
of taking down the rebels' most important pillars and that any of
the leaders can fall at any time."
In a 1999 interview with The Associated Press, Rios said he
joined the insurgency as a student in Medellin to avoid being
killed by right-wing death squads that had attacked other student
activists.
He commanded the FARC's central bloc, which operates throughout
Colombia's northwestern coffee region. Security forces say he
frequently accompanied the FARC's senior leader, Manuel
"Sureshot" Marulanda, in recent years.