Colombia

Authorities in Venezuela said Friday that Wilber Varela, the leader of Colombia's Norte del Valle drug cartel, had been found shot to death in the Venezuelan resort town of Merida. The location of the killing underscores the evolution of drug trafficking in the region. Increasing amounts of Colombian cocaine destined for U.S. and European markets flow through Venezuela, and as much as one-third of all the narcotic powder is now thought to transit there.

Hundreds of thousands of people marched in cities across Colombia and around the world Monday to protest continued abductions carried out by leftist guerrillas in the South American nation. But the massive outpourings in Colombian cities and the scattered gatherings in Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Madrid and elsewhere were shunned by relatives of some captives. Opposition politicians in Colombia who said President Alvaro Uribe had overly politicized the day reluctantly took part.

A Colombian army colonel and 14 soldiers were convicted Monday of killing members of an elite, U.S.-trained counter- narcotics police squad on the orders of drug traffickers, one of the most sordid of several recent cases of alleged corruption in the armed forces. A judge in Cali found Col. Bayron Carvajal and the soldiers guilty of aggravated homicide in the slaughter of 10 police officers and an informant in a May 2006 ambush outside a rural nursing home near Cali.

Father Acacio Belandria says openly what others in this run-down town in southwestern Venezuela are afraid to: Colombian rebels are all over the place. The 78-year-old Jesuit priest says his parishioners are increasingly complaining of extortion, kidnapping threats and killings by the leftist guerrillas, and that Venezuelan armed forces and President Hugo Chavez are either unable or unwilling to stop them.

Nature photographer Aldo Brando saw a horrible beauty in the destruction visited upon Colombia's national parks by outlaw coca growers. As his helicopter slalomed through a dozen sky-high columns of smoke from fires set by poachers clearing Macarena National Park, Brando saw endless "craters" of lime-green coca. He likened the park's once unbroken carpet of dark green primeval forest, now scarred by roads, fires and illegal chemicals, to "the black-and-white palette of war."

After six years of captivity at the hands of leftist rebels, four Colombian hostages gained their freedom in a jungle clearing Wednesday after captors turned them over to representatives of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The dismissal of a judge who handed down convictions and tough sentences in the slayings of several labor leaders came in for harsh criticism from an influential U.S. legislator as Congress considers a free trade agreement with Colombia. The judge sat on a special tribunal that last year began looking into the killings of 2,554 labor leaders and organizers since 1986, a panel formed at the urging of the U.S. government, which provided millions of dollars to fund it.

Ecuador and Venezuela said Sunday that they were moving thousands of troops to Colombia's borders, a day after Colombian forces killed a leftist rebel leader in Ecuadorean territory. Bogota later charged that high officials in Ecuador met recently with the slain rebel, Raul Reyes, to accommodate the guerrillas' presence there.

President Alvaro Uribe appears to have taken a calculated risk in ordering his armed forces to invade Ecuador to kill a top rebel leader, deciding to risk the ire of his southern neighbor to inflict a major loss in a decades-long war. Tensions continued to mount Monday after the clandestine operation in which Colombian soldiers and aircraft entered Ecuador to kill Raul Reyes, the nom de guerre of the No. 2 commander in Colombia's largest rebel group, known by its Spanish initials, FARC.

An increasingly isolated Colombia came under heavy criticism from its neighbors at an emergency Organization of American States session Tuesday for killing a top Colombian rebel leader in Ecuador last weekend. A sense of crisis has enveloped the region as diplomats worked to avoid an armed conflict that could be devastating to a continent that has successfully transitioned into a mostly democratic region after the military juntas and "dirty wars" of the 1970s and 1980s.