Posted on 03/07/2008 10:56:22 AM PST by NormsRevenge
BOGOTA, Colombia - Colombian security forces carrying out an arrest warrant Friday for a top rebel leader killed a man in a shootout, and were trying to confirm his identity, an official in the chief prosecutor's office said Friday.
The raid targeted Ivan Rios, a member of the FARC guerrillas' ruling junta. If the body is identified as his, it would be the second member of the ruling secretariat of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, to be killed in a week.
That would be a huge blow to Latin America's oldest and strongest insurgency, shaken by the death Saturday of spokesman Raul Reyes in a cross-border raid in Ecuador that has set off an international diplomatic crisis.
The official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was awaiting an official announcement, said Friday's raid occurred in a mountainous area of the western Colombian province of Caldas.
The State Department had a standing bounty of $5 million for Rios, whose real name is Jose Juvenal Velandia.
In a 1999 interview with The Associated Press, Rios said he joined the insurgency as a student in Colombia's second city of Medellin to avoid being killed by right-wing death squads that had attacked other student activists.
Rios became known across Colombia as one of the rebels' main negotiators in failed peace talks that ended in 2002.
He was thought to be around 40 years old.
Ping
finally! And standing up to the bullies Venezuela and Equador in a big way
Hugo’s panties will bunch even tighter now.
Good on ‘em.
>> That would be a huge blow to Latin America’s oldest and strongest insurgency
AP sounds deeply saddened
“Hugo’s panties will bunch even tighter now.”
So tight in fact that his balls strangulate and fall off - ooops, sorry. Hugo has no balls....
American intelligence and Columbian guns. You can bet on it.
>> That would be a huge blow to Latin America’s oldest and strongest insurgency
AP sounds deeply saddened
They probably are.
only good FARC is a dead FARC....
BBC thread
Colombian military kills another senior FARC leader: Iván Ríos ^
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1982032/posts
Sounds to me like 7th SF Group Advisors to Columbia Military are having an effect.
If he was 40 years old and he was a 19 or 20 year old college student in Medellin, and he was discussing "student activists" then here's the real context:
In 1985-1990 there was a Colombian terrorist group known as M-19 which was really just the domestic arm of the Medellin cocaine cartel run by Pablo Escobar.
In 1985, M-19 murdered half the judges on Colombia's Supreme Court because they refused to be bribed by Escobar.
M-19 was staffed with college-age youths from the Medellin area.
These left-wing death squads were opposed by anti-Escobar vigilante groups that tracked down and killed M-19 members.
After the government's Search Bloc task force tracked down Escobar and terminated him, some members of M-19 demobilized and formed a pro-cocaine political party.
Other M-19 members rejected this move and linked up with FARC.
My guess is that this guy was a young leader of the militant deadender wing of M-19 and became a high-ranking captain of FARC when he brought M-19 into the group.
"Rios" was the youngest member of the FARC Secretariat and a member of its political wing. Second HUGE blow in a week.
Let there be no mistake, Chavez and Correa are FARC, too, and deserve the same fate.
Yup. The Ecuador raid yielded intel that has now bagged another top FARC leader as well as a global arms dealer in Thailand.
It appears that the Colombian intel agencies have gotten inside FARC. Once you penetrate the proper weak point, these type organizations are easy to unravel. In most cases unfortunately, there are plenty of dumbasses to follow them up.
How does FARC differ from Shining Path, aside from their geographical separation? Is FARC also Maoist?
They started out as Marxists and finished as Narco, kidnappers.
You heard how they identified the first guy in Ecuador......from his Rolex.
They say right now they have about 6 thousand down from 20,000 or 30,000 at their peak. My defections than recruits.
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