| | |  Americas & Beyond 
Devastating Blow for FARC Rebels
 Constanza Vieira - Inter Press Service
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September 24, 2010
| | In this June 28, 2001 file photo, Jorge Briceno, military commander of the Colombian rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC, smiles at a rebel camp in La Macarena, Colombia. (AP/Ricardo Mazalan) | |
Bogota - The death of guerrilla commander Luis Suárez, aka Jorge Briceño or "Mono Jojoy", is a "devastating blow" for Colombia's FARC insurgents, military affairs analyst Ariel Ávila told IPS.
Briceño, who was killed in a bombing raid on his camp Wednesday by government forces, was a member of the Secretariat of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), which were founded in 1964. His death was announced Thursday.
He commanded the Eastern Bloc in southeastern Colombia, which covered nearly 40 percent of the territory of this South American country of 1.1 million square kilometers.
The raid by government forces, which involved 700 to 800 troops and heavy bombing, began Sunday and continued through Thursday.
In the attack on Briceño's camp, U.S.-made smart bombs were dropped from Super Tucano war planes purchased from Brazil.
The missiles were apparently guided by a chip that had been smuggled into the rebel leader's camp in an intricate intelligence operation that may have involved informers or infiltration of the guerrilla forces.
The bombing raid took place in a valley between the towns of La Macarena, La Uribe and Vista Hermosa, in the Sierra de La Macarena National Park in central Colombia, one of the birthplaces of the FARC.
Sources on the ground described the bombing as "brutal" and "devastating," and said "they burnt everything." Some 50 bombs were reportedly dropped.
"Even if you combine the deaths of (Manuel) Marulanda, Raúl Reyes and Iván Ríos - all three together weren't as heavy a blow as this," said Ávila, the head of the Armed Conflict Observatory of the Corporación Nuevo Arco Iris, a Bogota think tank, referring to a series of losses of FARC leaders in March 2008.
That month, FARC founder and top leader Marulanda died of a heart attack at age 78; the group's international negotiator Reyes was killed in a bombing raid similar to this week's, across the border in Ecuador; and Ríos was betrayed and killed by his own men.
Briceño's death is "a devastating blow," Ávila repeated, "in first place because he was well-loved within the FARC: he was the legendary leader who replaced Manuel Marulanda" in the esteem of the campesinos who make up the troops of the left-wing rebel group.
Marulanda was succeeded by Alfonso Cano, an anthropologist at the National University in Bogota who, according to Ávila, "is seen as a city man" by the rank-and-file.
Briceño was born in 1953 in Boavita, a town in the northeastern province of Boyacá, the scene of heavy violence unleashed by the conservative government in the war that began in 1946. And he grew up in the FARC; his mother was a guerrilla and was purportedly the cook for Marulanda's second-in-command, Jacobo Arenas, who died in 1990.
He reportedly never formally attended school, but learned to read and write in the guerrilla movement, where he studied the history of Colombia and Marxist texts.
Known as an intelligent, keen conversationalist, with practical medical skills that he applied to himself, he stayed up-to-date on what was going on in the world while keeping a close grasp on the details surrounding the insurgent forces under his command.
"He became a military and cultural myth in the FARC," Ávila said, referring to the man who at one point commanded some 9,000 fighters, when the Eastern Bloc was at its strongest in 1998-1999.
After being hit by Plan Colombia and Plan Patriot - lengthy U.S.-financed military operations - as well as Plan Consolidation, a civic-military campaign that also has the support of several European countries, the Eastern Bloc may now be made up of some 4,000 guerrillas distributed in 32 different theatres of war, Ávila said.
While the government and some analysts say Briceño's death makes peace talks more likely because it weakens the rebel group, Ávila said the FARC does not work like that.
"We have to wait, maybe three or four months," the analyst said. "This will bring about, in the near future, some demobilisations, and there might be some splits, maybe some falling apart." But, he warned: "The FARC will recover."
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