Guerrillas Colombia

Guerrillas attacked an army jungle outpost Friday, killing 19 military personnel and escalating a weeklong offensive that appears to be linked to protests against the government's cocaine eradication program. Army commander Gen. Harold Bedoya said in a televised statement that 17 soldiers, two officers and an unknown number of guerrillas died in the attack on La Carpa, about three hours up the Guaviare River from this provincial capital in southern Colombia.

Lars Hagg remembers that he had bought an ice cream for his 5-year-old daughter and that they were heading home along the uneven pavement of this capital city's congested Seventh Avenue. Then, as they passed a bookstore, the ground beneath them exploded. "It all happened in 10 seconds," Hagg recalled. "The bomb was inside a manhole, and we were right on top of it. A gentleman helped me to lift the manhole lid off my child, and then he fainted."

The government has succeeded in pacifying the notorious Medellin cocaine cartel, but recent attacks by a different public enemy have shattered fragile hopes for an end to terrorism in Colombia. Leftist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia are replacing Medellin traffickers as the country's most lethal armed group as they continue an offensive that has killed 41 police officers and soldiers so far this month.

The Irish Republican Army has not trained rebels in Colombia, the group insisted as a U.S. congressional report accused it of spreading terror in the South American nation. "The IRA has not interfered in the internal affairs of Colombia and will not," the IRA said in a statement issued in Dublin, the Irish capital. The U.S. report, released in Washington, said up to 15 IRA members, among them senior weapons designers and tacticians, have visited the rebel-held part of Colombia since 1998.

Drugdom's most wanted man, Pablo Escobar, is said to be finally planning to surrender after hiding for seven years, masterminding a deadly terrorist campaign and kidnaping some of Colombia's leading citizens. Anyone searching for an explanation for the sudden change of heart by the leader of Colombia's notorious Medellin cocaine cartel may find it among the extreme rightist groups that were formerly his allies here in the sun-scorched central Magdalena Valley.

At least 14 of 16 people reported killed over the weekend by Venezuelan border troops were peaceful fishermen rather than Colombian guerrillas, according to Venezuelan Interior Minister Simon Alberto Consalvi. Consalvi told reporters there was a "lamentable confusion" on the part of the troops in mistakenly killing the fisherman. He said President Jaime Lusinchi has ordered an investigation.

Hundreds of guerrillas from Colombia's largest rebel army launched a three-day attack on a police station, killing at least 17 people, including nine police officers and four children, police said Sunday. Eight other police officers were wounded and seven more taken prisoner in the weekend attack by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The attack, which ended Sunday, was one of the most deadly guerrilla assaults on civilians in memory.

Leaders of the Medellin drug cartel in 1986 offered U.S. officials a deal under which they would halt drug trafficking and provide information on leftist guerrillas in Colombia in exchange for amnesty from prosecution, it was reported Wednesday. The proposal in the fall of 1986 was never taken seriously or pursued by the Reagan Administration, the Washington Post reported, citing law enforcement sources and documents.

They are perhaps the oddest couple in Colombia's struggle to end three decades of guerrilla violence. From the extreme left comes Rafael Kerguelen, a Marxist who spent 15 of his 35 years in the People's Liberation Army and rose to command 450 guerrillas in the rural northern Department of Cordoba. And from the far right: Rodrigo Garcia, 65, president of the Cordoba Cattlemen's Federation, who sponsored paramilitary defense squads after Kerguelen's men burned his ranch for evasion of a "war tax."

Rebels have killed the kidnapped father of a Colombian boy whose plight came to symbolize the callousness of the country's insurgents, authorities said Saturday. Leftist rebels shot and killed policeman Norberto Perez and another officer, Victor Manuel Marulanda, after they apparently tried to escape, said Gen. Ernesto Gilibert, the commander of the Colombian national police.

The Colombian army on Saturday captured two suspected rebels accused of hijacking a jetliner to kidnap a senator on board--an incident that escalated the country's decades-long civil war. The Feb. 20 hijacking prompted the Colombian government to end three years of peace talks with the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

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.

Just beyond the fronded huts where negotiators used to talk peace, leftist rebels had a camp ready for war. There were wooden bunks for troops scattered among the trees and a classroom where rebel instructors gave lessons on radio communications. There was even a makeshift Jiffy Lube, a wooden rack designed to raise the rebels' many stolen four-wheel-drives for oil changes.

As this frontier town slept Saturday morning, Pvt. Daladio Torres and 300 comrades slipped into the main square at dawn, the first soldiers to enter the former rebel capital in three years. Torres strode through the silence to a rebel flag flying at the square's edge, tore it down and threw it in the nearest waste container. "This is a disrespect to Colombia," he said. "This flag belongs in the trash."

Alarmed by signs of weapons traffic between Colombian rebels and the Middle East, the Bush administration is weighing a proposal to declare the destruction of leftist guerrillas in the South American country an explicit goal of U.S. policy. Some senior officials are also pushing for the administration to assert, for the first time, that the Colombian rebels are a specific target of the worldwide U.S. war on terrorism, administration officials said.

Military special forces swarmed into an army base outside this sweltering frontier town Friday, three years after the government ceded it to leftist rebels along with thousands of square miles of surrounding territory. About 900 soldiers from the Colombian army's Rapid Deployment Force began landing at the base in Blackhawk helicopters about 1 a.m. By dawn, they had secured the abandoned facility. The troops met little rebel resistance.

Colombia plunged into all-out war Thursday, promising a bloody new chapter in the nation's history that heralds a violent and uncertain future for South America's oldest democracy. Air force jets dropped 1,500- and 500-pound bombs on rebel airstrips, camps and supply depots in the Switzerland-sized zone the government ceded to the main guerrilla group three years ago for peace talks.