Leftist Colombian senator removed from office over allegations she collaborated with rebels

Colombian Sen. Cordoba kicked out of Congress

BOGOTA, Colombia — Colombia’s inspector general ousted an outspoken opposition senator Monday, barring her from public service for 18 years for allegedly “promoting and collaborating” with Latin America’s last remaining rebel army.

Sen. Piedad Cordoba gained international notice by brokering the release of more than a dozen hostages held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

A flamboyant Afro-Colombian known for her trademark turban, Cordoba has been a polarizing force in domestic politics and is a close ally of Venezuela’s leftist president, Hugo Chavez.

Cordoba, 55, has not been charged with any crime.

But Inspector General Alejandro Ordonez is constitutionally empowered to dismiss her — and any other member of Congress — by virtue of his jurisdiction over nearly all public servants save the president and top judges.

Cordoba, who has been in the Senate since 1994 and last year was mentioned as a possible Nobel Peace Price candidate, did not answer telephone messages left by The Associated Press.

But in a Twitter message, Cordoba said the inspector general’s “disciplinary investigation has no legal merit whatsoever and less moral and ethical value.”

She thanked supporters for “the innumerable expressions of affection” and said she was meeting with her lawyers. “We continue forward,” she added.

Her attorney, Ciro Quiroz, said he would immediately challenge Ordonez’s ruling but acknowledged he lacks the option of appealing to a higher authority. Cordoba could, as an option, sue Ordonez before the Constitutional Court.

Leftist Rep. Ivan Cepeda, a close friend of Cordoba, called the decision unjust and said Ordonez has long “demonstrated public hostility to Cordoba’s work.”

Venezuela’s president said he was “absolutely certain” of Cordoba’s innocence, calling her “a courageous woman in every sense of the word.”

Cordoba’s firing comes less than a week after the FARC’s military mastermind and No. 2 leader, Jorge Briceno, was killed in a bombing raid in the country’s south. President Juan Manuel Santos on Sunday called the death “the beginning of the end” of the badly battered insurgency.

In an interview published Monday by El Tiempo, Colombia’s national police chief, Gen. Oscar Naranjo, said four FARC turncoats would share more than $2.5 million in reward money for betraying Briceno.

The armed forces chief, Adm. Edgar Cely, told the AP in an interview later Monday that a single FARC informant had provided the GPS coordinates for the concrete bunker where Briceno and his female companion died at 2 a.m. Sept. 22 in a shower of GPS-guided bombs.

Cely dismissed as absurd the reports by several Colombian news organizations that Briceno had been covertly supplied with boots embedded with a GPS transmitter.

Ordonez said in a statement posted on his office’s website that he dismissed Cordoba based on electronic documents found in computers belonging to Raul Reyes, the FARC “foreign minister” killed in a March 2008 raid by the military on a rebel camp across the border in Ecuador.

The documents showed that Cordoba, who was identified with the aliases including “Teodora de Bolivar” and “la Negra,” had “overstepped her government-authorized role” to facilitate hostage releases, Ordonez’s statement said.

It said that behavior included advising the FARC on releasing proof-of-life messages from hostages “with the goal of favoring other governments” — presumably a reference to neighboring Venezuela and Ecuador.

Cordoba also made public declarations “that favored the interests of the subversive group,” the statement said. In public appearances, she has often endorsed the FARC’s stated goals of a Colombia where wealth is more equally distributed.

Cordoba worked closely with Chavez — an action authorized in late 2007 by then-President Alvaro Uribe — to broker unilateral hostage releases that the rebels ended in early 2009.

The FARC, whose fighters come mostly from the ranks of poor, marginalized peasants, has been fighting to topple Colombian governments since 1964. It is classified by the U.S. government as a foreign terrorist organization, but most Latin American nations refuse to so designate it.

Associated Press writers Libardo Cardona and Cesar Garcia contributed to this report.