Colombian Guerrillas

Left-wing guerrillas have kidnaped eight Colombian soldiers who were going home on leave, authorities said Tuesday. The bus and a car in which they were traveling on Monday were stopped at a rebel roadblock between Caucasia and El Bagre, 200 miles northeast of Bogota, officials said.

Reacting to a deal that gives the Pentagon use of seven bases in Colombia for flights to combat drug trafficking and insurgency, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said this month that his country should prepare for war with its neighbor. It was only the latest belligerent statement directed at his Colombian counterpart, Alvaro Uribe. Should Chavez be taken seriously? Yes, says Maruja Tarre, former international relations professor with a degree from Harvard Kennedy School and now a Caracas-based consultant to multinational firms.

Leftist guerrillas ambushed a truck carrying workers and soldiers guarding a new oil pipeline in northern Colombia, killing five people, military officials said Sunday. The guerrillas blew up a road near Remedios, 185 miles northwest of Bogota, as the truck was passing. They then opened fire with rifles and machine guns, killing four soldiers and one civilian and wounding two civilians, the military officials said.

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...

In a bit of high political drama, a handful of Colombia's presidential candidates faced off Thursday with the nation's largest rebel group as part of an ongoing effort to rescue the country's peace process. The meeting marked the first time that guerrillas from the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, were given a nationally televised platform to explain their goals and hopes for the process.

This is the end of the road, the place where nature defeated technology. The mid-20th century vision of a thoroughfare linking the Americas, from Alaska to southern Chile, foundered here in the mud, mountains and dense jungle of Panama's Darien province 35 years ago. The final 67-mile segment of the Pan-American Highway was never built, leaving a wilderness where the rivers are the highways.

Independence Day came a bit early to Peoria this year. The city, which raised the funds to win the release of kidnaped Scott Heimdal, is welcoming him home, in the same neighborly but matter-of-fact way it went about helping win his freedom from Colombian guerrillas. No parade. No big hero's welcome. Not a lot of self-congratulation for the way they came to the aid of this native son they hardly knew.

Last week, just after the Irish Republican Army announced it would put its arsenals beyond use (a plan it later renounced), three of its operatives were detained at Bogota's international airport. The trio of IRA commandos was returning home after five weeks in southern Colombia, where guerrillas operate freely. Tests on the clothing of the Irish nationals turned up traces of four types of explosives as well as cocaine and amphetamines.

Reacting to a deal that gives the Pentagon use of seven bases in Colombia for flights to combat drug trafficking and insurgency, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said this month that his country should prepare for war with its neighbor. It was only the latest belligerent statement directed at his Colombian counterpart, Alvaro Uribe. Should Chavez be taken seriously? Yes, says Maruja Tarre, former international relations professor with a degree from Harvard Kennedy School and now a Caracas-based consultant to multinational firms.

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...

The U.S. government announced charges in Washington on Wednesday against 50 leftist Colombian guerrilla leaders in connection with shipments of $25 billion in cocaine to the United States and other countries. The guerrillas, all leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, were charged with managing the smuggling of 60% of all the cocaine consumed in the United States over the last decade or so, shipments that allegedly have totaled 2,750 tons.

Marxist rebels tried to organize an assassination attempt against President Bush during his visit to the port city of Cartagena last week, a top Colombian official said Saturday. Defense Minister Jorge Alberto Uribe told reporters in Bogota that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a 17,000-member rebel group known as the FARC that has been fighting Colombia's government for four decades, had plotted to kill Bush.

A leftist rebel accused of participating in the killing of three Americans here in 1999 was extradited Wednesday, marking the first time Colombia has turned over a guerrilla to face justice in the United States. Nelson Vargas Rueda, 33, a member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, was shown on television surrounded by more than two dozen Colombian police officers as he was led away handcuffed from a Colombian maximum security prison.

Colombian guerrillas are using a new generation of complex explosives, including suspected poison gas on at least one occasion, to mount a more aggressive style of urban warfare that they hope will allow them to influence approaching elections, U.S. officials say. With training from members of the Irish Republican Army, the rebels have learned to lob gas-filled mortar shells, the officials say.

In a bit of high political drama, a handful of Colombia's presidential candidates faced off Thursday with the nation's largest rebel group as part of an ongoing effort to rescue the country's peace process. The meeting marked the first time that guerrillas from the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, were given a nationally televised platform to explain their goals and hopes for the process.

Last week, just after the Irish Republican Army announced it would put its arsenals beyond use (a plan it later renounced), three of its operatives were detained at Bogota's international airport. The trio of IRA commandos was returning home after five weeks in southern Colombia, where guerrillas operate freely. Tests on the clothing of the Irish nationals turned up traces of four types of explosives as well as cocaine and amphetamines.

Rebels ambushed a military convoy in the jungles of southern Colombia, killing at least 32 soldiers in the worst guerrilla attack against the army in 15 years, the Ministry of Defense announced Wednesday. Officials said that 25 soldiers were injured and that 10 are missing after Tuesday's attack in the Caqueta jungle region 300 miles south of Bogota.

Analysts are calling it one of the largest oil finds in the Americas in the last quarter-century, but the discovery of the so-called Cusiana field in northeastern Colombia has produced a notably muted reaction from the Colombian government and three foreign petroleum firms developing the area. Dampening their celebration of billions of barrels in new oil reserves are two other groups demanding part of the take.

The killers came at Easter. They butchered 18-year-old Gladys Ipia first, slicing off her head and hands with a chain saw. Next, they killed six people at a restaurant just down the trail. They shot some, stabbed others. They hacked one man to death and then burned him. And so they traveled, 200 men and teens belonging to Colombia's largest ultra-right paramilitary group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia.

Ten oil workers, including at least five Americans, were kidnapped from an Amazon jungle oil field in a hijacked helicopter on Thursday in an act that Ecuadorean officials blamed on Colombian guerrillas. Ecuadorean Vice President Pedro Pinto charged that the predawn abduction, which occurred in a remote area of Ecuador near Colombia's main coca-growing region, is rebel revenge for a $1.3-billion U.S. anti-drug package.