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.
