FARC Rebels Desert as Colombia Army Advances

Until the United States helped overhaul Colombia’s military with more than a half-billion dollars in annual aid, soldiers barely penetrated the jungles in which the FARC moves so deftly. Now it enters an area and stays for a year or two.

Longtime FARC watchers are reluctant to proclaim the rebellion over. The guerrillas have hunkered down in Colombia’s forbidding jungles and mountains, planting more land mines in hopes of outlasting President Alvaro Uribe, who has made defeating the FARC the cornerstone of his administration. His second term ends in 2010 and he is constitutionally barred from running again.

Not long after two top commanders of Latin America’s last major rebel army were killed — one in a raid, the other by a turncoat bodyguard — Diego Canizares decided to call it quits.

The 39-year-old veteran guerrilla made indirect contact with the Colombian army. Then he strapped on his 9mm Taurus pistol and portable radio, slipped 10 anti-personnel mines into a canvas sack and walked off as if going to work.

Instead, he met up with a waiting army patrol — becoming one of more than 1,450 fighters of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, to desert this year, according to the government’s count.

Posted by Dilated_Rebel
Born and raised very humbly in a “small town” in southern California, I was a product of different worlds. Literally, part of my family descends from Mexico the rest from Portugal and Uruguay. This mixture had kept me from supporting any racist psyche found...