FARC commander 'Mono Jojoy' killed

Top FARC commander "Mono Jojoy" was killed by Colombian state forces. President Juan Manuel Santos confirmed the death of the rebel leader from New York City, where he is attending the U.N. General Assembly. The head of the FARC's Eastern Bloc and member of its Secretariat was killed in a massive air strike in a region called La Macarena in the central Colombian Meta department, 200 miles south of Bogota. Some 20 other guerrillas were reportedly also killed in the attack.

Mono Jojoy, also known as "Jorge Briceño Suárez," but born under the name Victor Julio Suarez Rojas, was thought to be group's second-in-command, and military leader of virtually all guerrillas in the rebels' war with the state. Mono Jojoy was considered a hardliner within the command structure of the country's largest guerrilla group. He was responsible for holding hostages including politicians, policemen, and soldiers.

The veteran guerrilla had a $1.3 million reward on his head, and 62 arrest warrants against him. The United States had requested his extradition to face drug trafficking charges. The FARC has faced serious setbacks in recent years, with high-level commander "Raul Reyes" killed by a Colombian air strike on Ecuadorean territory in March 2008. The group's founder and supreme leader "Manuel Marulanda" died of natural causes in 2008. An airstrike by the Colombian armed forces on Sunday killed FARC commander "Domingo Biojo," political leader of the organization's 48th Front, along with at least 26 other rebels. Current supreme commander "Alfonso Cano" remains at large.

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Violence Returns to Colombia

Although Colombia delivered some heavy blows in its war against the FARC guerrillas over the past decade, the country is facing violence on an entirely new front. Just three years ago, top U.S. officials were touring the city of Medellín to demonstrate how successfully then-president Alvaro Uribe had rescued the country from Marxist rebels and paramilitary drugrunners. But in August, Medellín’s mayor took to the streets to march with protesters through ghettos racked anew by gang warfare. And just last week, Colombia’s new president, Juan Manuel Santos, deployed troops to the city, where more than 1,200 murders have occurred so far this year, with 503 gang-related deaths in the first four months of 2010 alone—a 50 percent jump from the same period last year.

Alarmingly, Medellín is not alone. Across Colombia, cities that once served as symbols of the country’s turnaround, such as Bogotá and Cali, are witnessing a drastic increase in violence. In mid-August, a car bomb in Bogotá’s financial district injured nine people, and both the FARC and right-wing extremists have been blamed for the attack. The same week, three teens from the embattled Putumayo state in southern Colombia, whose names were on an online list, were shot dead, apparently the victims of gang violence. And Cali’s mayor has called on the national government to address the city’s spiking homicide rate.

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Colombia's marijuana feeding Europe's habit

These are the mountains of Colombia's southwest Cauca province, far from the reach of the law and just as far from market -- making it difficult, the dirt-poor peasants say, to scrape a living selling legal produce. Around every bend and in every village there's a surprise. Marijuana plantations stretch sometimes for several acres, clinging to steep-sided canyons. Farmhands wielding machetes disappear amid a "forest" of thousands of plants, two or three times taller than a person. They reappear minutes later with a bundle of marijuana over their shoulder and head for rudimentary drying houses made of black plastic slung over wooden branches. In some of these shacks hundreds of pounds of marijuana are hung out to dry.

In other communities, old ladies take advantage of a brief break in the rain to toss marijuana up to dry on the tin roofs of their homes. Others hang the herb in the rafters of the kitchen, where the strangely sweet smell mingles with the aroma of a stew cooking on a smoky fire. In Cauca province at least, there's a new bonanza. This is one of the few regions of Colombia where, according to United Nations' anti-drug officials, the production of marijuana and coca leaves, the raw material for cocaine, is increasing. At the same time, Colombia is once again exporting good quality pot and has become a "major supplier" to Europe, according to the DEA.

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Al Jazeera English - americas - Drug wars haunt Colombian city

Al Jazeera - Americas - Drug wars haunt Colombian city (VIDEO)

The Colombian city of Medellin has seen a resurgence of deadly violence that has brought back memories of its notorious drug kingpin, Pablo Escobar. Since the beginning of last year, more than a thousand people have been killed in confrontations between street gangs working for rival drug cartels. Sadly, most of the victims fit the same profile - young men between the ages of 18 and 26. From Medellin, Al Jazeera's Teresa Bo has this report.

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Dictators and democracies

Colombia and Venezuela are both Latino nations in the South American continent, in fact, they are next-door neighbours. But that's about where the similarities end, at least politically. One, Venezuela, is led by a populist madman with delusions of grandeur, who is taking his country on the path to great hurt, for his own sake. The other, Colombia, is ruled by an imperfect but capable man who has gracefully accepted the Colombian Constitutional Court's rejection of a referendum that would have allowed him to pursue a third term in power. Alvaro Uribe's actions give me great hope for the future of this beautiful country. The two men could not be more unlike in their attitudes, performance and behaviour.

Colombia is possibly the most democratic country in the region while Venezuela seems to be plunging back into the dark ages, propelled there by a dictator who has too much in common with the likes of Saddam Hussein. Venezuela is not a place I would like to do business, feel safe from corruption, or have any confidence that my civil rights would be protected. Colombia, on the other hand, has problems of it's own with drug cartels and Marxist-Leninist terror organizations within it's borders. But I know where I would be more likely to enjoy a good life and have the opportunity to prosper. It wouldn't be where Hugo Chavez was the boss of anything.

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Postcards from the Edge: Colombia

Power vacuum fuels vicious drug war

Since the time when undisputed cocaine king Pablo Escobar held sway here, the "northeastern commune" district has forged a fearsome reputation as a recruiting ground for drug cartel hit men and violent gang wars. Medellin is once again in the grip of a vicious drug war. In January to September this year, city authorities say the murder rate has more than doubled with almost 2,000 killings. Officials at the Medellin public prosecutor's offices say the vast majority of victims were shot, likely victims of rival drug gangs and cocaine capos. That makes Medellin as dangerous as Ciudad Juarez, the frontier town dubbed Mexico's most dangerous city as a result of the ongoing cartel war there. Authorities in Juarez say killings are up from last year and are hitting record highs.

Colombian authorities estimate there are around 130 street gangs -- known as "combos" -- in Medellin, totaling some 6,000 members. Their only real loyalty is to the money that drug capos dole out to hire a gang's services. Capos will supply them with drugs to retail on street corners and occasionally issue them weapons to take on rival gangs loyal to another crime boss. Until earlier this year, Medellin's drug underworld was ruled by the so-called "Office of Envigado," named after a district of the Medellin metropolitan area. The "office" was a syndicate of the top cocaine bosses who agreed on the basic rules of doing business in the area. They shared smuggling routes and acted as the ultimate enforcers if cartel members reneged on deals or debts.

Colombian hitmen reveal horror of the kill

My destination: a single-story home in the city's notorious "Commune 13" district where I had set up a meeting with two hit men, who have for years hired their lethal services out to the cocaine cartels. Inside the house, a man called "Red" sat on a couch toying a fully loaded 9mm Ruger pistol. "This will stop somebody nicely," he said, as I glanced at it. His face and arms were covered in burn marks. He said it was a testament of the day a barrel of acid spilled onto him as he was working in a clandestine cocaine processing lab in northern Colombia.

Red explained that after the accident, the lab foreman tossed him out, half-dead, into a jungle clearing. What little strength he had left, he said he used to bat away vultures. And, against the odds, he made his way to safety and slowly recovered. When Red left the clinic months later, he said he went straight back to the drug lab and gunned down the foreman and three of his henchmen. That wasn't his first killing though, he told me. When he was just 11 years old, Red recounted, he took a razor to the throat of a neighborhood drug pusher who had been molesting his little sister.

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Columbian FARC Rebels May Have Venezuelan Weapons

Shoulder-launched anti-tank weapons purchased by Venezuela have ended up in the hands of guerrillas, Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos said.

In an interview with Caracol Radio Monday, Santos addressed local reports of anti-tank weapons manufactured in Sweden being seized from members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and traced to Venezuela.

"This is not the first time that this happens," Santos said. "In several operations in which we have recovered weapons from the FARC, we have found powerful munitions and powerful equipment, including anti-tank weapons, from a European country that sold them to Venezuela and that turned up in the hands of the FARC."

• "Venezuela Still Aids Colombia Rebels, New Material Shows", New York Times, 8/2/09.
• "Colombia: FARC weapons traced to Venezuela", CNN, 7/28/09.

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FARC you!

On July 8, 2008, BBC News announced that French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other hostages had been freed after FARC rebels holding them were tricked into handing them over. Colombian soldiers - posing as members of a non-government organisation - flew them to freedom in a helicopter. Betancourt said at the time, "This is a miracle. There is no historical precedent for such a perfect operation." She had been held by the left-wing FARC rebels for more than six years.

This event was believed to have dealt a serious blow to the lifeblood of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, better known as FARC. Combined with action by the Colombian military, 2008, was said by many to signal the beginning of the end for the Marxist-Leninist guerrillas, who are listed by the U.S., Canada, the European Union and Colombia as a terrorist organisation. However, this year has seen a resurgence of their activity in an attempt to prove that they are still a force to be reckoned with.

For the International Terrorism analyst, three links are shown below. The first two are the most recent actions by FARC and the last is a detailed backgrounder.

• Colombian rebels turn to urban warfare after battlefield losses. Bloomberg. 7/8/09.
• FARC kills six soldiers in east Colombia. Colombia Reports. 7/1/09.
• FARC, ELN: Colombia's Left-Wing Guerrillas. Council on Foreign Relations. 3/11/08.
  

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