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BOGOTA – The second-in-command of the FARC guerrilla group’s elite Teofilo Forero column was killed in fighting with police over the weekend in Colombia, President Alvaro Uribe said.
Hermes Triana and two other men were killed Sunday during an operation that also left two police officers wounded, Uribe said in a press conference in the capital.
Triana “participated in terrorist acts that shook Colombians,” Uribe said, noting that the guerrilla was involved in the 2003 attack on Bogota’s El Nogal social club that left 36 people dead and about 200 others wounded, as well as the 2006 kidnapping and murder of Liliana Gaviria, the sister of former President Cesar Gaviria.
Colombian police also considered Triana a suspect in the failed 2003 attack on Uribe at the airport in Neiva.
Triana died “in an operation that had been planned for several days,” Uribe said.
Officers searched for the guerrillas in an area on the border between Caqueta and Huila provinces in southwestern Colombia, National Police chief Gen. Oscar Naranjo said.
An informer provided a tip on Triana’s whereabouts, Naranjo said during the press conference held at the air force base in Bogota.
The informer will receive a reward of 1.9 billion pesos (about $987,346), Naranjo said.
Triana belonged to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, for about 15 years, serving in the Teofilo Forero column for about 11 years.
The FARC unit has been accused of carrying out the kidnappings of several politicians who the guerrilla group intended to swap for jailed rebels.
Over the weekend, five soldiers were killed and two others wounded by FARC guerrillas in the jungle around Calamar, a town in southern Colombia, the army said Sunday.
The soldiers were ambushed Saturday afternoon while providing security for peasants hired to manually eradicate coca fields in La Paz, a village east of Calamar, which is in Guaviare province.
The soldiers, who belonged to the army’s 4th Division, were protecting the peasants from the FARC’s 1st Front, military spokesmen at the unit’s headquarters in the central city of Villavicencio said.
A FARC guerrilla who allegedly carried out more than two dozen bombings across Colombia was arrested early Saturday in Bogota, police said.
Edilberto Cruz Rubio was detained in Bosa, a district in the southern section of the capital, Dijin judicial police agency chief Col. Luis Gilberto Ramirez said.
The FARC, Colombia’s oldest and largest leftist guerrilla group, was founded in 1964, has an estimated 8,000 to 17,000 fighters and operates across a large swath of this Andean nation.
President Alvaro Uribe’s administration has made fighting the FARC a top priority and has obtained billions in U.S. aid for counterinsurgency operations.
The FARC, whose leader is Alfonso Cano, suffered a series of blows last year.
On July 2, 2008, the Colombian army rescued former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, U.S. military contractors Thomas Howes, Keith Stansell and Marc Gonsalves, and 11 other Colombian police officers and soldiers.
The FARC had been trying to 
trade the 15 captives, along with 25 other “exchangeables,” for hundreds of jailed guerrillas.
The rebels’ most valuable bargaining chip was Betancourt, a dual Colombian-French citizen the FARC seized in February 2002 whose plight became a cause celebre in Europe.
The guerrilla group is believed to still be holding some 700 hostages.
FARC founder Manuel Marulanda, who was known as “Sureshot,” died on March 26, 2008.
Three weeks earlier, Colombian forces staged a cross-border raid into Ecuador, killing FARC second-in-command Raul Reyes and setting off a regional diplomatic crisis.
Ivan Rios, a high-level FARC commander, was killed that same month by one of his own men, who cut off the guerrilla leader’s hand and presented it to army troops, along with identification documents, as proof that the rebel chief was dead.
A succession of governments have battled Colombia’s leftist insurgent groups since the mid-1960s.
The origin of Colombia’s civil strife dates back to 1948, when the assassination of popular politician Jorge Eliecer Gaitan sparked a 10-year-long civil war known as “La Violencia.”
About six years after that conflict ended with a power-sharing pact between Colombia’s two main parties, a government offensive against peasant self-defense groups led Marulanda, who was pursued by death squads during La Violencia, to form the FARC.
In 1999, then-President Andres Pastrana allowed the creation of a Switzerland-sized “neutral” zone in the jungles of southern Colombia for peace talks with the FARC.
After several years of fitful and ultimately fruitless negotiations, Pastrana ordered the armed forces to retake the region in early 2002. But while the arrangement lasted, the FARC enjoyed free rein within the zone.
The FARC is on both the U.S. and EU lists of terrorist groups. Drug trafficking, extortion and kidnapping-for-ransom are the FARC’s main means of financing its operations. EFE