Rebels kill 14 in Colombia

Colombian guerrillas killed 14 soldiers in an ambush not far from the capital this weekend, pushing up an already high death toll in December as expectations build for increased military clashes next year.

The attack occurred Saturday near the town of La Julia in Meta province, a prime coca-growing region about 100 miles southeast of here. Shooting broke out as Colombian army units were moving toward the town, which had been previously wrested from guerrilla control, and which they had heard rebels would try to retake.

The attack was the latest setback suffered by the armed forces, which are partially trained and equipped by the United States under Plan Colombia, an aid package worth $700 million a year designed to help Colombia fight drug traffickers and guerrillas.

About 550 soldiers and national police have been killed in action this year.

Many U.S. and Colombian military analysts expect the government of President Alvaro Uribe to step up military operations against the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by their Spanish initials FARC.

Uribe had said that he would first neutralize the country’s right-wing paramilitary groups and then would be free to mount intensified attacks on guerrillas, who have been fighting a civil war here since the mid-1960s. Paramilitary militias were formed by farmers in the 1980s as a defensive measure against the left-wing rebels but later turned to organized crime and drug trafficking.

Now that about 31,000 paramilitary fighters have been demobilized and their leaders jailed, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos recently announced that the government’s next military phase would be called Plan Victory and have as its objective the capture or killing of guerrilla leaders.

Earlier this month, the army seized a top-ranking FARC official named Roberto Olaya Caicedo, head of the “Tulio Varon” rebel brigade that operates in Tolima state.

In a recent interview, Santos said the Colombian armed forces now stood at about 400,000 uniformed troops, about 30% more than when Plan Colombia began in 2000. The armed forces will not expand much beyond that level, he said, with the bulk of future military aid to be spent on intelligence, equipment and helicopters.

Interviewed at the U.S. military’s Southern Command headquarters near Miami this year, U.S. officials said they expected the Colombian military to try to sweep rebels out of southern border states including Putamayo and Narino, which rebels control and use as bases for processing and trafficking coca.

But Adam Isacson, a researcher with the Center for International Policy, a Washington-based think tank and a critic of Plan Colombia, said the La Julia attack showed that the Uribe administration’s “official optimism is misplaced.”

“More than four years into the Uribe government, the guerrillas are still able to mount large attacks at will. Government control of Colombia’s isolated rural zones, which make up the majority of the national territory, remains as weak as ever,” he said.

The rebels already have been on the offensive against the government. In early November, FARC guerrillas killed 17 national police officers, attacking and bombing a police station in Tierradentro in the northern state of Cordoba. Police were caught off guard partly because the FARC had not been seen in the area in recent years.

Then on Dec. 1, 17 soldiers were killed in northeastern Colombia near the Venezuelan border. The FARC is suspected of using the border area as a haven, and for drug trafficking and kidnapping of Venezuelan farmers. The Colombian and Venezuelan governments recently agreed to step up vigilance in the area.

The most recent attacks occurred amid diplomatic tension between Colombia and Ecuador over Uribe’s decision two weeks ago to resume spraying defoliants on coca plantations along the countries’ common border, ending a yearlong suspension. Ecuador complains that the spraying damages crops on its side of the border and poses a health hazard.

Ecuadorean leaders want Uribe to station soldiers in the border region to manually destroy coca plants. Uribe said manual eradication was out of the question because his military forces did not control the area.

chris.kraul@latimes.com