MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Colombian forces kill FARC top military commander and capture main camp

Mono Jojoy, also known as the “symbol of terror” for his merciless tactics

The number two leader of the Colombian FARC guerrilla group has been killed in a military raid, President Juan Manuel Santos said Thursday. Victor Julio Suarez Rojas, also known as Jorge Briceño Suarez and by his nom de guerre Mono Jojoy, was the military leader for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
Santos called the rebel leader's death a “historic” event.

“This is the biggest blow the FARC has suffered in its history,” Santos said from New York, where he is participating in meetings of the United Nations General Assembly.

“This is the end of the ‘symbol of terror’ and the message to the rest of the FARC, we are going after them,” Santos said. “We are not going to rest.”
About 20 other guerrillas also were killed in the raid, Santos said.

“This is a day of joy,” Defense Minister Rodrigo Rivera said. “It is a day of jubilation for Colombians”.

The guerrilla leader was killed near the town of Macarena, in the southwestern Colombia state of Meta close to the Ecuadorian border.

The final operation against Suarez started early Wednesday, Rivera said, adding that officials had spent two sleepless nights awaiting the results.

Five Colombian soldiers were wounded in the operation, which included heavy air strikes, Rivera said at a news conference from Bogotá.

Rivera called Suarez the guerrilla group's ”strategic heart“ and said the military had captured ”the mother of all FARC camps.“ The camp, which measured about 300 meters long, had a bunker, tunnels and escape routes, Rivera said.

The guerrilla leader's death was the FARC second major setback in the past few days.

An air strike over the weekend killed a high-ranking rebel commander who was wanted in the United States, police said.

Sixto Antonio Cabaña Guillén was among the more than two dozen guerrillas killed in a Colombian air force bombing operation Sunday, the National Police said Monday.

The U.S. State Department had been offering a reward of up to 2.5 million USD for information leading to his arrest or conviction.

Cabaña, as a top member of the FARC, helped set policies directing and controlling the production and distribution of hundreds of tons of cocaine to the United States and the world, according to a statement on the State Department's website.

At least 27 FARC members were killed in Sunday's operation in southern Colombia, Santos said.

Speaking at Thursday's news conference in Bogotá, Rivera urged FARC leader Guillermo Leon Saenz, known as Alfonso Cano, to surrender.

”We guarantee your life,“ Rivera said. ”We guarantee fair treatment“.
Nevertheless, Rivera vowed the war against the FARC will continue.
”They have robbed us of nearly 50 years as a nation,“ he said. ”We are going to end the narco-terrorist FARC nightmare.”

Suarez, who was believed to be 47, joined the FARC as a teenager and rose through the ranks to become commander of one of the rebels' seven fighting divisions. He became a top commander in the early 1990s, when he was appointed as one of the FARC's seven-member general secretariat.

He eventually became the FARC's military commander in chief.

Although he was considered the No. 2 person in the rebel group, Suarez had much more military experience and time served in the FARC than its leader, Cano, who was appointed to the general secretariat as the result of a deal with the Colombian communist party.

Suarez also was the first FARC commander to order in the late 1980s or early 1990s that the rebels collect a tax from peasant farmers on coca plant cultivation. That, analysts say, marked the start of the FARC wholesale involvement in drug trafficking.