Colombian army officials say 12 soldiers killed by rebels

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Colombian army officials said Monday that 12 soldiers were killed in an ambush by leftist rebels who, according to one commander, “presumably” fled into Venezuelan territory afterward.

The soldiers were attacked Monday near Maicao, a border city in northern Guajira state, by 80 to 90 members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The soldiers were there to protect a group of civilian workers repairing an electric power line tower that the rebels had previously destroyed.

According to the army, fighting occurred less than a quarter-mile from the Colombia-Venezuela border. In addition to those killed, four soldiers were wounded. No rebels were reported killed.

“It was a fierce fight. A numerous group [of rebels] came presumably from Venezuela and presumably fled back into Venezuela” after the firefight, Army Gen. Sergio Mantilla told reporters.

The attack prompted a telephone call from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos to extend condolences for those killed, which included an  officer and a sergeant. Although he said the entry of foreign armed forces into Venezuela is prohibited, he acknowledged that the rebels may have entered the country.

“Some units of the guerrilla group may have crossed Venezuelan territory. We are reinforcing patrols and reconnaissance in the zone,” Chavez told a TV audience. “We don’t want to get involved in a conflict that isn’t ours.”

In an address to the nation Monday night, Santos said Chavez had promised to send some of his forces to the area to look for the rebels.

"This is a setback. It's not the first and it won't be the last," Santos said, referring to the four-decades-long fight with the rebel group.

Relations between Colombia and Venezuela have improved since March 2008, when a Colombian commando group briefly invaded northern Ecuador to kill a top FARC commander, prompting Chavez to briefly call up troops and tanks to Venezuela's border zone with Colombia.

But Colombian government officials have expressed their impatience for Chavez to follow through on promises to better patrol the frontier so the FARC rebels cannot seek haven in Venezuela.

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-- Chris Kraul and Jenny Carolina Gonzalez

Photo: Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos at a news conference in Bogota in April. Credit: Luis Acosta/AFP/Getty Images  

President Rafael Correa defends Ecuador's air defenses

QUITO, Ecuador –- Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa on Monday defended his country’s air defenses after a small plane linked to Mexican drug traffickers this month crashed undetected on the country’s northwestern coast, raising fears among foreign officials that cartels are trying to establish a new “air bridge.”

In a Twitter message, Correa rejected the notion that Ecuador’s “air defense is defenseless,” saying the country has a full complement of supersonic and propeller-driven aircraft to secure airspace, in addition to “powerful radar systems still being tested but which before didn’t exist.”

On May 13, a single-engine Cessna 210 crashed in coastal Manabi province, killing two Mexican pilots, one of whom had a previous arms-related conviction that linked him to the Sinaloa cartel. Found in the wreckage was a suitcase filled with $1.3 million in cash. Traces of cocaine were also in the plane, which apparently ran out of fuel, law enforcement officials told The Times.

That the plane managed to penetrate Ecuadorean airspace without being detected by local authorities has provoked criticism among Correa opponents for his refusal in 2009 to renew the U.S. lease of the Manta air base. The base, located in Manabi province, was used by reconnaissance aircraft to monitor smuggling operations in the eastern Pacific.

Two AWACS radar planes and one P-3 reconnaissance aircraft were based in Manta until September 2009, when the surveillance operation was transferred to bases in north-central Colombia. Ecuadorean fishermen complained at the time that U.S.-led counternarcotics operations based in Manta led to human rights abuses and financial losses.

The crash has prompted questions among Correa critics about the status of a $60-million Chinese radar system the country ordered after Colombian bombers and commandos briefly invaded northern Ecuador in March 2008 to kill top ranking rebel commander Raul Reyes of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Air Force officials on Monday did not respond to a request for a status update on its installation.

Foreign counternarcotics officials fear that Colombian and Mexican drug traffickers may turn to Ecuador as an air hub from which to fly drugs north toward North America, as well as to return cash to Andean cocaine producers. Ecuador already has seen sharp increases in maritime smuggling via fishing boats and submarine-like vessels leaving its shores.

The May incident is the first known example of an airplane flying illicit routes in a bid to land in Ecuador with suspected drug profits or take off with a cargo of drugs, officials told The Times. Residents in the crash area told reporters they heard the plane flying low and without its lights on just before the crash.

One official commenting on condition that he not be named said that police in Venezuela, where more than 90% of such illicit flights have originated in the past, recently have cracked down. On May 16, authorities in Ecuador raided a drug processing lab near the crash site, seizing half a ton of cocaine.

El Comercio newspaper of Quito on Saturday said it found three crude airstrips in Manabi whose use are barely monitored by civil aviation authorities. Residents told the newspaper they saw an aircraft resembling the crashed plane on one of the strips in Jama three months before the crash.

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-- Chris Kraul in Bogota, Colombia, and Cristina Munoz in Quito, Ecuador

Photo: A photo released by the Ecuadorean presidency shows President Rafael Correa, right, meeting with Diego Garcia Sayan, president of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, at Carondelet Palace in Quito in April. Credit: AFP/Getty Images

Colombia bomb injures ex-minister, kills 2 as new trade era dawns

BOGOTA, Colombia -- A former Cabinet member and close associate of ex-President Alvaro Uribe apparently was the target of bomb attempt Tuesday that wounded him, killed two people and wounded 24 others in a shopping district of Bogota.

President Juan Manuel Santos confirmed the bomb attack in brief televised comments, saying it was directed at former Interior Minister Fernando Londono. The bomb was hidden in a vehicle and, police suspect, detonated from a remote location. Another theory had it that two men on a motorcycle threw a bomb at Londono's armored vehicle.

Before Londono was identified as a victim, some police officials speculated that the bomb might have been exploded as a terrorist response to the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement, which takes effect in stages beginning Tuesday. Hours before the blast, which was heard across northern Bogota, police had deactivated a car bomb placed in front of police headquarters.

Londono’s driver and police escort were among those killed, Santos said. Television reports showed photos of the former minister bloodied but on his feet and apparently not seriously hurt. He was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment.

Peru ministers resign over antidrug sweep

LIMA, Peru -- Peru’s  defense and interior ministers resigned Thursday shortly after the Congress opened a debate to consider censuring them for their handling of an antiterror and antinarcotics operation in a valley known for coca cultivation and the presence of the leftist rebel group Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path.

Defense Minister Luis Alberto Otarola and Interior Minister Daniel Lozada resigned after legislators blamed them for the deaths of 10 soldiers and police officers conducting drugs sweeps over the last month in a region known as VRAE, or the Valley of the Apurimac and Ene rivers. Rebels are suspected in the killings.

The toll is higher than that suffered by the armed forces during all of 2011, when nine police officers and soldiers were killed in similar sweeps. Critics charged that the recent operations were poorly planned.

President Ollanta Humala is on a state visit to South Korea and Japan, but his office confirmed the resignations. Had the censure come to a vote in Congress, it could have provoked a political crisis for his administration.

The VRAE has become an increasingly important center of coca farming and cocaine processing because stronger law enforcement in Colombia is pushing traffickers southward to neighboring Peru and Bolivia. Peru may overtake Colombia this year as the world’s largest coca farming nation and cocaine producer in the annual survey that the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime is scheduled to release next month.

The recent sweep, which involved 1,500 police and soldiers, has been called off. The operation was prompted partly by the kidnapping of 36 natural gas workers near Cuzco last month. The Shining Path group, which released the workers shortly thereafter, claimed responsibility.

The rebels are active players in the upsurge of Peruvian cocaine production, counternarcotics officials here have said. The rebel group has reemerged from near extinction in the 1990s, when it steered clear of drug trafficking as a violation of revolutionary ethics. Now authorities believe the rebels traffic in drugs to finance their insurgency.

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-- Adriana Leon in Lima and Chris Kraul in Bogota, Colombia

Photo: Peru's defense minister, Luis Alberto Otarola, seen in a file photo, was one of two Cabinet members to resign over antidrug raids that saw 10 soldiers and police officers killed. Credit: Eraldo Peres / Associated Press

Colombian guerrillas kill 7 anti-narcotics police in attack

BOGOTA, Colombia – Seven Colombian anti-narcotics police were killed and at least 12 wounded in an attack by suspected guerrillas as they conducted a mission to destroy illegal coca crops and labs in northeast Colombia, authorities said Thursday.

The attack Wednesday night occurred in the rural Tibu area in North Santander province near the Venezuelan border, a zone known to be the center of coca crops and cocaine processing labs, said anti-narcotics police commander Gen. Luis Alberto Perez.

Perez said members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, led the attack, which included crude home-made explosives. The police were accompanied by a civilian team of eradicators whose job is to uproot coca plants.

The police killed one guerrilla and captured five.

“We had put ourselves in the heart of the illegal crops of these guerrillas" Perez told reporters. “We say to the people of North Santander that we will not abandon them.”

The FARC is thought by Colombian and U.S. counter-narcotics officials to traffic in cocaine to finance their war on the government. Much of the drugs processed in the rural Tibu area are shipped over the border to Venezuela and on to the U.S. via Central America and Mexico.

The incident Wednesday and other attacks by the FARC reflect the area’s strategic importance to the rebels not only as a drugs production and transit zone but as a refuge for those who use the rugged area and adjoining Venezuelan mountains to flee from Colombian military operations.

Perez said Thursday that President Juan Manuel Santos had ordered police to take control of the area after weeks of rising violence. In late March, a mine planted by suspected members of FARC in the nearby Convencion township in North Santander left one policeman dead and five wounded.

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-- Chris Kraul and Jenny Carolina Gonzalez

 

High-ranking Colombian FARC rebel captured in Ecuador

QUITO, Ecuador, and BOGOTA, Colombia --  An Ecuadorean judge on Tuesday ordered the indefinite jailing of a suspected Colombian rebel leader captured a day earlier by Ecuadorean forces just a few miles from the border.

Wilson Tapiero, the alleged financial chief of the 48th Front of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, was captured near the spot where Colombian commandos briefly invaded in 2008 to kill the FARC's second-ranking leader.

Three men and three women were also arrested on a farm in northeastern Ecuador.  Army units also recovered arms, motorcycles, uniforms and FARC literature.

Army Col. Arturo Coral said the purpose of the suspected rebels’ presence and activities was unknown, although the Colombian rebel group has been known to use lightly patrolled Ecuadorean border jungle areas as sanctuaries from pursuit by the Colombian military.

In March 2008, Colombian military commandos briefly crossed one mile into Ecuadorean territory and killed the FARC's then second in command, alias Raul Reyes, and 24 others. The incident nearly led to war as Ecuador and Venezuela called up military units to their borders with Colombia.

Colombian police announce the surrender of top narco to the DEA

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Authorities on Monday announced the surrender of one of Colombia's most wanted drug traffickers and leader of the notorious Rastrojos criminal band that allegedly funnels Colombian cocaine to Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

Javier Antonio Calle Serna, a member of a clan known as the Combas, or warriors, surrendered to U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials in Aruba on Friday and then was flown to New York City, where he faces a federal indictment on drug trafficking charges, Colombian police said.

Calle Serna had been negotiating terms of his surrender for weeks, sources told The Times. The U.S. State Department had offered a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the 43-year-old’s arrest, alleging that he and his associates had shipped 30 tons of cocaine into Mexico bound for the United States. Calle Serna was once a member of the leftist rebel group FARC.

The Rastrojos are thought to be among the most powerful of half a dozen Colombian cocaine cartels known as bacrims, which is Spanish shorthand for criminal bands. The gangs filled the vacuum created by the demobilization of paramilitary militias, which along with the FARC were thought to have controlled the bulk of the illicit drug trade here.

At a news conference in Bogota, Colombian National Police Gen. Roberto Leon Riaño said the agreement leading to Calle Serna’s surrender was the end product of Colombian authorities’ “relentless pursuit” of the fugitive. A months-long operation that involved 3,000 wiretaps and the seizure of 15 tons of cocaine led to his arrest, he said.

As part of the same operation, Calle Serna’s brother Juan Carlos was arrested in Quito, Ecuador, in March by police who had been tipped to his presence there.

According to an indictment filed by prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York in 2009, Calle Serna  was responsible for various aspects of transporting loads of cocaine to Central America and Mexico via so called go-fast outboard motor boats and semi-submersible submarines.

The Calle Serna clan was part of the North Valley drug cartel until a falling out led to a bitter and bloody power struggle. At the news conference Monday, Riaño said Calle Serna was responsible for the 2008 murder in Venezuela of Wilber Varela, a former North Valley capo turned sworn enemy.

According to the State Department, the Rastrojos also conduct extortion of businesses and individuals in several areas of Colombia. Calle Serna has been linked to kidnappings, tortures and assassinations in Colombia, Venezuela and Panama.

Riaño issued a public ultimatum to Daniel “El Loco” Barrera, perhaps the nation’s most powerful drug trafficker still at large -- and Calle-Serna’s associate in the Rastrojos -- to surrender. Giving himself up, Riaño said, is the “only way out for narco traffickers and terrorists.”

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Colombian rebels say they have French journalist Romeo Langlois

-- Chris Kraul

Photo: Javier Antonio Calle Serna in an undated photo. Credit: Colombian police

Colombian rebels say they have French journalist Romeo Langlois

BOGOTA, Colombia -- In a video posted on YouTube, a self-described commander with the Colombian rebel group FARC said the insurgents are holding French journalist Romeo Langlois, whom they captured April 28 during a bloody firefight between the rebels and government forces.

The leader, who identified himself as a member of the 15th Front of the FARC, also said the rebels hope to "overcome the impasse" surrounding negotiations for Langlois' release, a hint that the Frenchman might soon be liberated.

The video posted Sunday is the first apparent confirmation that the journalist working for Le Figaro newspaper and France 24 cable channel was in rebel hands. The rebel spokesman also said Langlois had been shot in the arm but was in no danger. Military officers quoted by local media Sunday said the rebel leader speaking in the video is a known insurgent.

Langlois was traveling with an army unit tasked with destroying illicit cocaine laboratories in southeastern Caqueta province when they were ambushed by members of  the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. In the video, the commander described Langlois as  a “prisoner of war.”

Must Reads: Landfill living, Egypt's gas and Africa's richest man

From the richest man in Africa to the rag pickers living off an Indian landfill, here are five stories you shouldn't miss from the  last week in global news:

Nigerian billionaire leaves his imprint in cement

For many in India, landfill is a livelihood and a home

Gas-deal dispute reflects change in Israel-Egypt relations

Conviction of Liberia's Charles Taylor seen as double-edged

At 80, Colombian artist Fernando Botero has no plans to retire

-- Emily Alpert in Los Angeles

Photo: Rag pickers, as they are called, scavenge for recyclable materials at New Delhi's 70-acre Ghazipur landfill. Credit: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

Venezuela's Chavez breaks silence with lengthy phone call

REPORTING FROM CARACAS, VENEZUELA, AND BOGOTA, COLOMBIA -- After 10 days out of sight and with rumors swirling that he had died while undergoing cancer treatment in Cuba, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez made a half-hour telephone call to a state-run television  station, claiming reports of his demise were part of a “dirty war.”

“These are desperate rumors,” Chavez said. “I’m coming out fine from all the exams.”

Chavez announced in February that he had a recurrence of the cancer diagnosed last June, which he had previously declared to be in remission. He said Monday that his treatments were going well, and that he would return to Venezuela this weekend, possibly as early as Thursday.

The 57-year-old leader has undergone four rounds of chemotherapy and three surgeries to treat tumors in his pelvic area. He has never said precisely what kind of cancer he has, nor its exact location.

Chavez also dismissed the electoral prospects of Henrique Capriles, the opposition candidate he will face in October. He said even polls conducted by canvassers not associated with the government are giving him a 20-point lead over Capriles.

He referred to Capriles as “majunche,” a term meaning someone of poor quality and no consequence. Capriles in recent days has accused Chavez of governing by Twitter, a reference to Chavez’s medical absences and the social medium the president uses frequently.

Chavez also took the opportunity to comment on the flight this month of a former judge, Eladio Aponte, to Costa Rica and then on to the United States in a U.S. government airplane. Aponte gave an interview to a U.S. Spanish-language television station saying that Chavez government officials had personally pressured him to release or go easy on suspected drug traffickers.

“This person is a delinquent,” Chavez said, denying Aponte’s charges that he had personally called the judge by adding that “eagles don’t hunt flies.”

The Venezuelan government had accused Aponte of complicity with suspected drug trafficker Walid Makled. Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro said Aponte had “sold his soul” to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

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--Special correspondents Mery Mogollon in Caracas and Chris Kraul in Bogota

Photo: A picture provided by Venezuela's presidency shows President Hugo Chavez, center, and his daughter Rosa Virginia being welcomed by Cuban Vice President Jose Ramon Machado at Jose Marti International Airport in Havana on April 15. Credit: European Pressphoto Agency