Colombian guerrillas blow up cell tower

Bogota, Agency
FARC guerrillas blew up a cell-phone tower in the southwestern Colombian province of Cauca over the weekend, leaving nearly 500,000 people without service, a high-level police officer said.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, rebels attacked the tower Sunday in Pitayo, a Paez Indian area outside the city of Silvia, located about 500 kilometers (310 miles) southwest of Bogota.

The attack was staged about an hour by foot outside downtown Silvia, the National Police commander in Cauca, Gen. Gustavo Adolfo Ricaurte, said.

The cell phone users affected by the attack live in about a dozen cities in Cauca.

Over the weekend, the FARC said it would not comply with a request from President Juan Manuel Santos's administration to lay down its arms and demobilize.

"To those today in the government, who, drunk with triumphalism, call on us to surrender, we respond with the same words that commander Jorge Briceño directed at (former armed forces chief) retired Gen. (Freddy) Padilla de Leon in January 2010 in response to a similar request," the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, said.

"You do not know us very well Mr. Padilla de Leon: in all sincerity, without hatred or resentment, and with the respect that every revolutionary has for his adversaries, I respond: No, thank you very much, general," the FARC said.

The FARC's high command released the statement via the Web site of the Anncol news agency, which regularly posts documents, interviews and statements from the guerrilla group.

The FARC's military chief, Jorge Briceño Suarez, known as "Mono Jojoy," was killed last month in a joint army, air force and police operation.

Several guerrillas who made up the security ring of the military chief - Colombia's most-wanted man along with the FARC's top leader, Alfonso Cano - were also killed in the airstrike.

The Santos administration has said it would not negotiate with the FARC until the guerrilla group laid down its arms and ceased operations.

Even prior to Mono Jojoy's death, the FARC, which has seen its numbers fall by more than half in recent years to roughly 8,000 fighters, had suffered a series of setbacks.

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.

The FARC, which has fought a succession of Colombian governments for decades, is on both the U.S. and EU lists of foreign terrorist organizations.

Drug trafficking, extortion and kidnapping-for-ransom are the FARC's main means of financing its operations.