BOGOTA, Colombia – Colombia’s main rebel group has suffered its second major setback in just over a year with the killing of its No. 1 commander, the bookish 63-year-old ideologue Alfonso Cano, officials say.
The death of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia chief on Friday hours after his nearby camp was bombed was celebrated by President Juan Manuel Santos as “the hardest blow to this organization in its entire history.”
“I want to send a message to each and every member of this organization: demobilize. Because if you don’t, as we’ve said so many times and as we’ve shown, you will end up in jail or in a tomb,” Santos said in a brief televised address.
“Viva Colombia!” he exclaimed.
The killing is anything but a fatal blow, however, to the nearly half-century-old peasant-based group known by its initials FARC.
Financed mostly by drug trafficking, it is comprised largely of peasants with few other opportunities in a country where land ownership is highly concentrated in the hands of a few.
Cano, 63, was killed in combat in a remote area of the southwestern state of Cauca along with four other rebels an hour before dusk, about 200 yards (meters) from the bunker he apparently fled
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