26 Colombian Policemen Die in Siege by Leftist Rebels

Leftist guerrillas on Saturday killed 26 police officers guarding an oil field in southern Colombia and set off 11 bombs in the capital, causing one injury but no deaths.

About 300 rebels belonging to the Simon Bolivar Coordinating Front used automatic weapons and grenades to attack 32 police officers guarding the Orito oil field in the jungle near the border with Ecuador, officials reported.

The six surviving officers were wounded in the seven-hour battle, which ended when reinforcements from an army brigade arrived at the oil field about 300 miles south of Bogota. It was not clear whether there were any dead among the rebels, who fled into the jungle, the officials said.

While the morning battle was raging, guerrillas activated 11 small bombs in Bogota, causing extensive damage to several banks and one minor injury, police said.

The Simon Bolivar Coordinating Front is the umbrella organization for Colombia’s two active rebel groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, and the National Liberation Army, or ELN.

Both groups stepped up attacks in March after the latest round of peace talks with the government broke off. Since then hundreds of police officers and army troops have been killed in the fighting.

In addition, about 20 police officers have been gunned down in Medellin recently in attacks blamed on Pablo Escobar, the fugitive drug lord who escaped in July from a resort-like jail overlooking the town of Envigado.

“We have no doubt that these murders have been ordered by the escapees from the Envigado jail and specifically by Mr. Pablo Escobar,” the national police chief, Gen. Miguel Gomez Padilla, said in a television interview late Friday.

Evidence indicates that Escobar, trying to discourage police from searching for him, is paying $2,100 for each officer killed, Gomez Padilla said.

Those slain include four teen-age police trainees. Medellin officials trying to halt the killings ordered all of the city’s remaining 395 cadets to sleep at two training schools beginning Friday night.

The escalating attacks by traffickers and guerrillas have put pressure on the government of President Cesar Gaviria to adopt new measures to curb the violence.

In declarations Saturday, the president of Colombia’s Roman Catholic Church council, Msgr. Pedro Rubiano, urged Gaviria “to exercise authority and put (his) house in order with a strong hand.”

Church leaders, who in the past have acted as mediators in talks between the government and the guerrillas, are no longer willing to play that role, the prelate added.

“The church will participate again only when there is an honest, constructive and objective dialogue, not one like we’ve had up to now, signed and sealed with blood and attacks,” he said.

So far, Gaviria has relied on tough talk to try to deflect criticism from those calling for new measures against FARC and ELN. “Listen to me well: The violent ones of Colombia, that small criminal minority that doesn’t hide its Stalinist fundamentalism . . . cannot defeat us,” the president said in a speech Friday.

But Gaviria saved his strongest words for Escobar and his assassins, saying that the government would battle those “narco-terrorists” who “sow death in the homes of police.”