President Juan Manuel Santos promised decisive retaliation Sunday after Colombia’s main rebel band killed 19 soldiers in a single day in the biggest blow to the military since peace talks began in November. …read more
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Fifteen Colombian soldiers were killed Saturday in an ambush by leftist FARC rebels, the country’s president said, raising concerns about peace talks launched last year. …read more
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Six guerrillas from the leftist FARC rebel group and four Colombian soldiers died Saturday in clashes in southwest Colombia, the military said. …read more
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Colombia’s leftist FARC rebels said they captured a US soldier last month and are offering his release as a “gesture” toward peace with Bogota. …read more
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Alvaro Uribe did more as president than any Colombian leader to weaken the South American nation’s main leftist rebel group and he has been among the most vocal opponents of peace talks with the insurgents. Now, he’s finding that his strident opposition to the negotiations is bringing him some unsought attention.
Uribe’s high-profile role in what has become a fierce battle for this Andean nation’s future has drawn new scrutiny to his ties to provincial politicians, military officers and landowners accused of backing illegal right-wing death squads that killed thousands of noncombatants in Colombia‘s decades-old dirty war.
Formal talks to end the half-century-old conflict with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, began in November in Cuba, and a seventh round has just begun.
Uribe has been relentlessly attacking his successor, Juan Manuel Santos, the instigator and champion of the negotiations. Uribe insists Santos, who is up for re-election in May 2014 but has not declared his candidacy, is leading the country to ruin.
Any peace pact reached at the Havana talks with the FARC, Latin America‘s oldest and most potent rebel army, would only rekindle instability in the conflict-scarred nation Uribe led from 2002-2010, the former president maintains. Uribe vehemently opposes Santos’ plan to pardon and grant amnesty to FARC commanders so they can participate in political life. To him, the rebels are nothing more than criminals.
“He’s not the president of peace,” Uribe told reporters Monday in his latest attack on Santos. “He’s the president who asks the courts for impunity for terrorists, the president who got elected in the name of security and who is leading the country on the road to the re-establishment of violence.”
Uribe has been both speaking and tweeting relentlessly against the talks.
“What democracy sits down to negotiate with terrorists who continue to murder its police and soldiers?” he tweeted last month after publishing a photograph of the corpses of three slain police on a roadside.
This week, he pointed out that rebels killed two police officers as they accompanied government workers on a land-restitution mission. Santos has refused to negotiate under a cease-fire, instead preferring to keep the FARC under constant military pressure.
Santos’ initial response to Uribe’s withering verbal attacks was to hold his tongue. But lately he has been returning …read more
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Colombian government delegates at peace talks with the hemisphere’s largest guerrilla army say negotiations are at a critical juncture and must yield concrete results.
Humberto de la Calle is chief of the government negotiating team. He says talks have advanced on the recovery of illegally held terrain and landless rural families gaining access to plots.
De la Calle says talks are still centered on agrarian issues, the first on the six-item agenda. He says the government recognizes that the rebels’ stance on victims of the decades-old conflict has evolved, and adds that this is a “crucial moment” for peace in Colombia.
De la Calle spoke Friday at the close of the third round of talks, underway since last fall in Havana. They will resume March 11.
Colombian authorities say at least seven soldiers have been killed and five others have been wounded in fighting with rebels.
Army Gen. Emiro Barrios say the gunbattle erupted on Wednesday in the southern state of Caqueta when rebels tried to seize the town of Milan and were repelled by dozens of troops.
It was the deadliest clash between Colombian troops and rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia so far this year. On Jan. 29, four soldiers were killed in fighting with rebels elsewhere in the country.
The violence came while the Colombian government and FARC rebels are pursuing peace talks in Cuba.
Colombia‘s biggest guerrilla army is calling on the country to legalize the cultivation of marijuana, poppy and coca leaf.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, is also floating the idea of decriminalizing personal drug consumption.
Ivan Marquez is a high-ranking rebel leader. He says the FARC favor legalization combined with educational outreach to prevent drug abuse.
The FARC made the proposal Wednesday in Havana as part of months-old peace talks with Colombian government representatives.
The 9,000-strong FARC funds its struggle in part by taxing cocaine traffickers. Colombia is asking the rebels to help end the drug trade as one condition for peace.
Colombia‘s main rebel group has denied that peace negotiations with the government are foundering.
A spokesman for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia has accused that country’s media of trying to derail the talks.
Marco Leon Calarca says negotiations are “continuing in a normal way.” The FARC negotiator was reading off a statement from rebel command ahead of another day of talks Monday at a Havana convention center.
Calarca blamed sectors of the Colombian media for hyping the disagreements. His real name is Luis Alberto Alban.
Reports that the talks were near collapse began shortly after the FARC lifted its unilateral cease fire on January 20. Attacks since then have occurred mostly in southern Colombia and resulted in the death or capture of several soldiers and police.
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Colombia‘s main rebel group says it intends to free two police officers and a soldier it recently captured. Their detentions had cast a pall on peace talks under way in Cuba between the group and the Colombian government.
The police officers were seized Jan. 25 while on an intelligence mission. The rebels said the soldier was captured Tuesday during combat.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, announced the planned releases in an online statement Saturday. It did not set a date for the releases.
As a condition for the talks, the FARC said it was halting kidnapping as a funding source. Last week, it insisted that taking security force members prisoner was justified.
The FARC imposed a unilateral cease-fire for the first two months of the talks but abandoned it after the government refused to join.
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Colombia‘s peace talks are resuming in Cuba amid acrimony over the rebels’ insistence on their right to take security force members prisoner.
Chief government negotiator Humberto De la Calle scolded the insurgents Wednesday as he departed Bogota for Havana after a one-week break.
De la Calle said the rebels needed to take responsibility for “their victims” in a clear reference to last week’s capture of two police officers. He said there would otherwise be no possibility of an accord.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, vowed to halt ransom kidnappings nearly a year ago.
But it said Tuesday it reserves the right to take security force members prisoner.
A two-month rebel unilateral cease-fire expired on Jan. 20. The rebels had hoped the government would join but it refused.
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A unilateral cease-fire by Colombia‘s main leftist rebel group set to end at midnight Sunday was deemed largely successful by analysts, who say it showed that divisions in the insurgency’s ranks are relatively minor.
The rebels’ main negotiator in peace talks taking place in Cuba, Ivan Marquez, offered Sunday to extend the two-month cease-fire if the government would agree to embrace it.
An alternative, Marquez told reporters in Havana as he headed into peace talks centering on agrarian reform, could be to “regularize the war” by obtaining promises from the government that it would stop placing military bases in population centers.
There was no immediate response from Colombia‘s government, though President Juan Manuel Santos has refused to halt hostilities during peace talks that formally began in Havana in November after six months of secret negotiations.
In a communique published Sunday, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, said it had not mounted “even a single attack on bases or fixed installations of the armed forces, nor on police barracks or posts.”
It said that any casualties suffered by Colombia‘s security forces were dealt in self-defense. The FARC said that during the same period a year earlier it had killed at least 284 security force members and wounded 278.
The rebels did not say how many casualties it had suffered during the unilateral cease-fire but at least 33 were killed in at least two major aerial bombardments on rebel camps.
There were sporadic guerrilla attacks but analyst Jorge Restrepo of the independent CERAC think tank said they exhibited “relatively minor divisions within the FARC” about whether a unilateral cease-fire was appropriate.
The Nuevo Arco Iris think tank said guerrilla actions during the period were down 87 percent from the year-before two-month period, according to its director, Leon Valencia.
He said it counted nine hostile offensive actions out of a total of 41, with the rest being defensive or resulting from unintentional contact with security forces.
Military officials said they were prohibited from providing numbers on combat or casualties during the two months.
The national ombudsman, Jorge Armando Otalora, said in a report Friday that there had been 57 attacks by rebels against civilians or security forces, an average of one per day.
One of them was an attack on a police post in the municipality of Guapi on Dec. 31 in which two police and four civilians were wounded.
The FARC is believed to number about 8,000 fighters, down from about twice that amount a decade ago. Colombia‘s U.S.-backed military dealt it a series of withering blows during that time, including killing three members of its ruling Secretariat.
Colombia‘s nearly half-century-old conflict has claimed tens of thousands of lives, most of them civilians.
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Associated Press Writer Anne-Marie Garcia contributed to this report from Havana.
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Colombia‘s delegation to peace talks with FARC rebels is heading back to Cuba to resume negotiations, and its chief says it’s time to accelerate the pace and get some measurable results toward ending the half-century-old conflict.
Humberto de la Calle told reporters Sunday after the team met with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos that a “faster pace” is needed. He asked society and the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia for help.
The talks formally began in Havana in November and paused for a holiday break. They have been focusing on agricultural reform, the thorniest topic on a five-point agenda.
Analysts say Santos will need to show results sooner than later if he wishes to win re-election next year.
A FARC unilateral cease-fire is set to end Jan. 20.
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