Rebels likely to seek vengeance in Colombia

BOGOTA, Colombia – Although Colombia’s armed forces delivered a serious blow to the country’s largest rebel force with the killing of its leader, analysts Saturday held out little hope for a peace initiative by the decimated but still potent leftist insurgents.

The 63-year-old rebel leader, who went by the alias Alfonso Cano, was killed in a military operation Friday in southwestern Colombia. At a news conference Saturday, President Juan Manuel Santos called on the rebels to lay down their arms.

“Violence is not the way,” Santos said. “Demobilize, because as we have said many times, you will end up in a grave or in jail.”

A decade ago, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, had up to 20,000 fighters and controlled one-third of the country’s land. But under Santos’ predecessor, the hard-line Alvaro Uribe, the Colombian military knocked the FARC on its heels with the help of $7.6 billion in mainly military aid from the U.S. under Plan Colombia.

Analysts now estimate that the rebel forces who have battled the government for four decades number 8,000 or fewer.

Still, analyst Alfredo Rangel said he sees little chance of any peace overtures from the FARC, which Cano had headed since May 2008 when the group’s founder, Manuel Marulanda, died of apparent natural causes.

“What his death is more likely to bring is an upsurge in violent incidents against the armed forces, infrastructure and Colombian society generally,” said Rangel, of the Security and Democracy Center think tank in Bogota, the capital. “Their first order of business will be to avenge the death of their leader.”

National University of Colombia political scientist Alejo Vargas agreed, saying he doubts there will be any short-term changes in the FARC’s policy of belligerence toward the government.

Both agreed that the FARC will now undergo the collective process of choosing its next leader, probably among survivors of the rebels’ ruling secretariat, of which four members have died violently since March 2008.

Topping the list of possible candidates to succeed Cano is a rebel leader going by the alias Ivan Marquez, who is thought to be holed up in the northeastern border area with Venezuela. Marquez made a highly publicized visit to leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, in November 2007 when Chavez briefly tried to broker a peace settlement between the Colombian government and the FARC.

Cano, whose real name was Guillermo Leon Saenz, was killed after a three-year military operation targeting him. His principal base of operations had long been thought to be to the east, in the wild Delicias Canyon area of Tolima state, but Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzon said intelligence last month located him farther west.

Cano was considered the FARC’s ideologue during much of his 33 years in the rebel ranks.

The government also held him responsible in the planning of some of the FARC’s most spectacular attacks, including the 2002 kidnapping of 12 state legislators in the city of Cali and the 2003 car-bombing of an exclusive Bogota club in 2003 that left 33 people dead.