Posted on 08/09/2002 2:24:46 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
BOGOTA, Colombia -- Although 19 people died in an audacious inauguration-day attack by leftist rebels, Colombian authorities said Thursday that the carnage could have been worse.
Urban guerrillas, they said, had planned a far more ambitious strike in which they would have lobbed 96 homemade mortar shells simultaneously at the presidential palace and the Congress building where President Alvaro Uribe took the oath of office Wednesday.
"If they had shot almost 100 mortars at the same time, explosives would have rained down in all different directions," said Juan Carlos Cortes, an explosives expert with the DAS, Colombia's version of the FBI.
"The damage would have been huge," Cortes said, pointing to a pile of unexploded 120 mm shells, gunny sacks of explosives and coils of detonator cord that had been confiscated from the Bogota house used by the rebels to launch their attack.
Police arrested one of the guerrillas before he had time to detonate all of the explosives by remote control, said Gen. Hector Dario Castro, chief of Bogota's police force. He said that the rebel had managed to fire 13 shells but that several were duds.
Those that did explode created havoc on a day that was supposed to be marked by the pomp and decor of Uribe's swearing-in ceremony.
Two shells destroyed parts of the impoverished Cartucho neighborhood, killing more than a dozen people. Two more shells hit the grounds of the presidential palace. Mortars also hit an empty elementary school and several houses, causing more casualties.
On Thursday, Bogota officials said that the death count had reached 19 and that more than 60 people had been injured.
"It was a miracle that I survived," said Edgar Ramirez, 34, who was walking through Cartucho when hit in the leg by shrapnel. "There was a man standing in front of me who lost his limbs and his head."
Authorities said the rebels had prepared a second battery of about 90 mortars aimed at a military academy in northern Bogota. But the guerrillas only managed to fire about a dozen of the shells on Wednesday, causing only minor property damage and no deaths.
No one has taken responsibility for the attacks, but Castro and other authorities have blamed them on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the nation's largest guerrilla group that has been fighting for nearly four decades.
Castro identified a suspected mastermind of the attack as Carlos Antonio Lozada, a former head of the FARC's urban militias in Bogota. Lozada served as a rebel negotiator during the failed three-year peace process under former President Andres Pastrana, whose four-year term ended Wednesday.
Uribe, who was elected in May on a pledge to crack down on the guerrillas, was not injured in the attack. He sounded defiant on Thursday, his first full day in office, when he traveled to the northern city of Valledupar.
In a speech, Uribe urged average Colombians to lend a helping hand to the armed forces. One of the pillars of Uribe's security plan is a proposed network of 1 million Colombians who would serve as the eyes and ears of the police.
"Everyone must collaborate," Uribe said. "If we all get involved, we will defeat the violent ones."
Still, Colombian officials suggested that a lack of citizen vigilance may have helped the FARC pull off Wednesday's attack.
The rebels had rented a three-story house in the Santa Isabel barrio, about a mile west of the presidential palace and the Congress building, authorities said.
Cortes, the DAS official, said the rebels would have made a lot of noise loading the shells, bags of explosives and heavy industrial pipes that were used as launchers. Neighbors told police an elderly couple and a man in his 20s occupied the site and put up dark curtains in the windows.
But residents said Thursday that, aside from the curtains, they saw nothing out of the ordinary and had no contact with the three strangers. They described Santa Isabel as a working-class neighborhood full of upright citizens.
"How could we have known?" said one woman who refused to give her name.
One man admitted that residents tend to mind their own business. "It's only when something affects you personally that you take action," he said.
On Thursday, the house was sealed off by yellow police tape. Inside, agents found 96 pipes, most of them still armed with mortar shells and aimed in the direction of the Congress building and the presidential palace.
The FARC usually fires home-made rockets fashioned from canisters of cooking gas. The devices are cheap and destructive but can travel only a few hundred yards and are notoriously inaccurate.
The mortars, by contrast, would represent a technological leap for the FARC, because they have a longer range and are more precise, Cortes said. That may account for what appears to have been security lapses.
About 20,000 police and soldiers were patrolling Bogota at the time of Uribe's swearing-in ceremony. A U.S. Customs Service P-3 surveillance aircraft circled overhead.
President Bush condemned the attacks Thursday and said that those responsible are trying to "kill the aspirations of the Colombian people for a free, prosperous and democratic state."
U.S. Trade Representative Rober Zoellick, who attended Uribe's swearing-in ceremony, said the attackers tried "to kill innocent people in an effort to stop the inauguration. ... They failed."
Still, some Colombians described the attack as an embarrassment.
"Colombia ended up looking ridiculous before the international community," said Bogota business leader Eugenio Marulanda.
But authorities defended their security measures. Cortes noted that the rebels had selected a safe house well outside the extremely tight security cordon that had been set up in the vicinity of the Congress building. The mortars that the FARC fired have a range of nearly two miles.
"This type of attack was very difficult to prevent, because we didn't realize that it was within the capacity of the Colombian terrorists to do it," Castro said. "It's like what happened to the twin towers in the United States. You knew that an attack was possible, but the method of the terrorists was never discovered."
Note Uribe calls them violent ones which they are: thugs and murderes. The left wants to call them rebels. Even calling them terrorists implies there is some ideological or policitical justification for their actions.
No civilized country can give such people any quarter at all. There are no negotiations with such people. Only their destruction will restore peace.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.