Colombian rebels attack village, kill security personnel

[dArKeR]

A Colombian police officer was killed and five other members of the armed forces were injured in combat on Sunday while chasing down Marxist rebels who killed a nine-year-old boy during an attack on a village three days ago, authorities said.
The military and police began hunting for a unit of Colombia's main rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) immediately after the rebels attacked Toribio, 400km southeast of the capital, on Thursday said Major Adriana Alba of the Colombian army's 3rd Brigade. Three police officers and the boy were killed in that attack.

Alba said it has been slow going for government troops in the mountains above Toribio because the FARC littered the entire area with land mines.

President Alvaro Uribe had visited Toribio on Friday and called the FARC cowards for attacking the village.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2005/04/19/2003251107

[Nothing Without Hope]

1. Terrible. The killing in that beautiful country just keeps going on

All the more reason to be glad that the experimental village Gaviotas, on the Columbian llanos, is still going on, even though its people deliberately remain unarmed. Do you know about it? If you don't I strongly recommend refreshing your hopes for the human race by reading the little book about it, available in both English and Spanish. I wrote about Gaviotas in this post:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=315&topic_id=1796&mesg_id=2065
post title: The single most hope-inspiring story I know: GAVIOTAS

[Judi Lynn]

2. Very sad. Here's another story........

Colombian soldier dies fighting for paramilitaries
Five far-right fighters killed in combat with government forces
Monday, April 18, 2005 Posted: 1720 GMT (0120 HKT)

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) -- Five far-right paramilitary fighters, including an army sergeant secretly belonging to the illegal group, were killed in combat with Colombian security forces on Sunday, officials said.

Army Commander Reinaldo Castellanos admitted that one of the dead militiamen was a member of the army, in the latest example of links between Colombia's security forces and right-wing squads set up by drug traffickers and cattle ranchers in the 1980s to combat Marxist guerrillas in the Andean country.

Castellanos said the government was investigating the case. The battle took place near the town of Cucuta on the Venezuelan border.

The paramilitaries have killed thousands of people in a war against leftist rebels and have earned international notoriety for massacring peasants, sometimes using crude weapons such as hammers and chain saws.
(snip/...)

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/04/17/colombia.violence.reut/

Also from the article:

President Alvaro Uribe, a strong Washington ally, says the rebels, who have been fighting since the 1960s, are terrorists more interested in drug smuggling and kidnapping than in liberating the poor.
(snip)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Quaint! More about Alvaro Uribe:

May 24, 2004

President Uribe’s Hidden Past

by Tom Feiling

Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe is, by his own admission, a man of the right. Unlike most recent Colombian presidents, Uribe is from the land-owning class. He inherited huge swathes of cattle ranching land from his father Alberto Uribe, who was subject to an extradition warrant to face drug trafficking charges in the United States until he was killed in 1983, allegedly by leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas. Alvaro Uribe grew up with the children of Fabio Ochoa, three of who became leading players in Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cocaine cartel.

President Uribe’s credentials are impeccable. He was educated at Harvard and Oxford, is as sharp as a tack, and a very able bureaucrat. At the tender age of 26 he was elected mayor of Medellín, the second-largest city of Colombia. The city’s elite in the 1980s was rich, corrupt and nepotistic, and they loved the young Uribe. But the new mayor was removed from office after only three months by a central government embarrassed by his public ties to the drug mafia. Uribe was then made Director of Civil Aviation, where he used his mandate to issue pilots’ licenses to Pablo Escobar’s fleet of light aircraft, which routinely flew cocaine to the United States.
(snip/...)

http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia185.htm

[dArKeR]

3. Rebels lay siege to Colombian town

Heavily armed rebels besieging the village of Toribio said they were eager for combat with government troops and vowed to resist efforts to force them from this mountainous region.
"I'm going to get to hit those guys hard," said a 17-year-old rebel, who identified himself only as Alexis, as he stood with other guerrillas less than 3km from Toribio on Tuesday.

He toted a mortar over his shoulder and his backpack was filled with tightly wound electrical wire used for explosives.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2005/04/21/2003251360