Colombia: Another Rebel Submarine Taken Out

Archives

August 1, 2007: The ELN is willing to make a peace deal, it's only a matter of working out the terms. FARC remains defiant, having joined more closely with the drug gangs to defy government attempts to shut them down.

July 30, 2007: The government announced that it had earlier captured FARC documents showing that senior army and intelligence officials were selling information on police investigations. This made it possible for senior FARC and drug gang leaders to constantly escape arrest. The named army officers have been arrested. Such corruption is not unknown, nor unexpected.

July 29, 2007: The chief financial man for FARC, Rosember Rodríguez, was captured in Venezuela, in an operation combining the efforts of Colombian and Venezuelan police. Usually, FARC keeps the local police paid off in Venezuela, but something must have gone wrong for a guy as high up as Rodríguez to get nicked.

July 26, 2007: Military intelligence has discovered why eleven prominent hostages were killed by FARC last month. The hostages were ordered killed when the FARC commander mistook approaching gunmen, from another FARC unit, for soldiers known to be operating in the area. Believing his hideout was about to be overrun, he followed his orders not to allow the hostages to be liberated by the army. FARC tried to blame the death of the hostages on crossfire from a clash between FARC and the army.

July 25, 2007: The peace deal with the AUC rebels is unraveling because the Supreme Court unexpectedly ruled that AUC leaders could not run for office after they had confessed and made restitution.

July 24, 2007: For the fourth time in the last decade, police have captured a submarine used by drug gangs to move drugs. Last year, the navy seized a 57 foot long fiberglass submarine 45 kilometers off the Pacific coast. The sub was built for, and used by, drug smugglers, to get the drugs to high speed boats off the coast, which would move the cocaine north, towards Central America, and eventually the United States. Both subs could was carrying four tons of cocaine. In March, 2005, police caught a drug gang building a small submarine to smuggle cocaine out of the country. This one was found, under construction at a small Pacific coast port. This sub could carry about ten tons of drugs, past police and navy patrols, to larger ships offshore. Four years earlier, police had interrupted another submarine construction effort. All these submarines are, technically, "submersibles." That is, they operate just beneath the surface, in order to avoid navy patrols.

 

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