Rebels blamed for Colombian governor’s kidnapping; 1st major political abduction in years

Colombian rebels blamed for governor’s abduction

BOGOTA — At least 2,000 police and soldiers searched Colombia’s southern jungle highlands Tuesday for a state governor abducted by leftist rebels in the country’s first major political kidnapping in years.

Between eight and 10 men in camouflage uniforms took Gov. Luis Francisco Cuellar from his home in Florencia, capital of the southern state of Caqueta, late Monday.

Arriving in a pickup, they killed a police guard, blasted open the door with explosives and seized the governor in his pajamas, Gen. Orlando Paez, operations chief for the national police, told The Associated Press. Two other police guards suffered shrapnel wounds that weren’t deemed life-threatening.

Cuellar was driven into the mountains that border Florencia, where the pickup was abandoned and found in flames, Paez said.

A furious President Alvaro Uribe, whose rancher father was killed by leftist rebels in a botched 1983 kidnapping, ordered soldiers and police to rescue Cuellar, who is also a cattle rancher.

“We cannot continue to submit to the whims of the terrorists, of the terrorists who bathe this country in blood,” Uribe told reporters in Bogota.

Defense Minister Gabriel Silva blamed the kidnapping on the elite “Teofilo Forero” unit of the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and announced a $500,000 reward for information leading to Cuellar’s rescue.

Paez said at least 2,000 police and army special forces soldiers were creating a ring around the heights where the rebels were believed to have taken Cuellar.

The 69-year-old Cuellar already had been kidnapped for ransom four times since 1987. His wife, Himelda Galindo, told the AP that he was held from two to seven months in past abductions. She said she did not remember how much ransom they paid.

Caqueta has long been a FARC stronghold and is among Colombian states with the highest military presence, including an army division headquarters in Florencia.

It was in Caqueta where the FARC abducted French-Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt in 2002.

That was the last year in which the FARC registered a kidnapping of a major politician, also seizing state governors and congressmen.

After Uribe was elected that year to his first term, kidnappings that had been common in Colombia’s countryside sharply diminished.

The conservative president launched a full frontal assault on the FARC that he called “Democratic Security,” nearly doubling the size of Colombia’s military and benefiting from $700 million in annual U.S. military aid.

His government’s July 2008 rescue of Betancourt was a triumph of Uribe’s determined campaign to decimate the rebels.

Nevertheless, Silva said in a newspaper interview last weekend that Colombia’s largest rebel army is “neither vanquished nor in its death throes” — though it has been reduced by desertions and killings to about 8,000 fighters, half its size in 2002.

The 45-year-old FARC did not immediately take responsibility for the kidnapping, but analysts had little doubt it was behind the bold, pre-Christmas action. The FARC has a history of staging attacks at this time of year.

On Dec. 21, 1997, the rebel group killed at least a dozen soldiers and captured several others in an attack on the remote highlands outpost of Patascoy. One of those captured, Cpl. Pablo Emilio Moncayo, is now among the longest-held of 24 soldiers and police the rebels hold as bargaining chips.

Through intermediaries, the FARC has in recent weeks been negotiating Moncayo’s release.

The soldier’s father, Gustavo Moncayo, said Tuesday that he feared Uribe was putting his son’s life in jeopardy by ordering a military rescue of Cuellar.

“This man doesn’t care about the lives of the abducted. He doesn’t care a thing about the lives of the soldiers and the police,” Moncayo said in a telephone interview.

The rebels, who finance their insurgency chiefly from the cocaine trade, released the last of the high-profile politicians they held in February.

Associated Press writers Frank Bajak, Luisa Fernanda Cuellar and Cesar Garcia contributed to this report.