Rebels wreak havoc in Colombia

[bemildred]

FWIW, the March Harper's has a nice interview with an
ex-child-soldier with FARC.

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- Explosives planted in a hotel blow up, killing five people. A major TV and radio network is bombed. An electrical substation is dynamited. A bus is torched on a major highway after passengers are forcibly removed.

Rebel attacks across Colombia over the weekend blacked out towns, shut down roads and have shattered notions that Colombia's main rebel group is on its knees and poses little threat to this Andean nation. A rebel commander warned that "this is only the beginning."

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, have not been this aggressive since President Alvaro Uribe took office two years ago, pledging to impose order on a nation plagued by drug trafficking and a leftist insurgency, now in its 40th year, waged by two rebel groups.

Uribe, backed by billions of dollars in U.S. military aid, has waged an unprecedented crackdown on the FARC, centering on a year-old Plan Patriot offensive against the rebels' jungle strongholds in sparsely populated southeastern Colombia. But the FARC, said to number from 12,000-17,000 combatants, are present in the Andes mountains which slice across the center of the country, along the Pacific coast in the west, in the oil-rich northeast, in the south along Ecuador's border and even have "militia" operating in the cities.

Corporate News Network