Colombia Says It’s Closing In on Brazilian Drug Lord

Troops deep in the Colombian jungle have located and are closing in on Brazil’s top drug lord, accused of selling arms to leftist rebels in exchange for cocaine, the army said Friday.

Luiz Fernando da Costa, known by his Brazilian nickname Fernandinho Beira Mar, is believed to be on the run in a thick jungle region near Colombia’s border with Venezuela and Brazil.

More than 300 troops fanned out across the area Friday, while air force planes and helicopters circled overhead, in an operation that Colombian army chief Gen. Jorge Enrique Mora said will finally capture the fugitive.

“I have absolute confidence that with troops of the Rapid Deployment Force we will capture Fernandinho,” Mora told reporters from the Barrancominas military base in southern Colombia, where he was coordinating the hunt.

On Thursday, a military jet forced down and destroyed a small propeller plane near Barrancominas. The army on Friday captured one of five passengers who escaped from the plane shortly before it was destroyed.

The passenger told the army that Fernandinho had been aboard the plane and fled into the jungle on foot.

“They are stuck in the middle of the jungle. They don’t have food, they don’t have equipment and lack the basics to help them survive,” Mora said.

Fernandinho, the former kingpin of Rio de Janeiro’s shantytown drug trade, escaped from a Brazilian prison in 1996. Authorities suspect that he has run his business from Colombia for as long as a year, trading guns and ammunition for cocaine.

In February, Colombian troops captured eight Brazilians, including Fernandinho’s girlfriend, who, according to local media reports, carried an agenda detailing the trade of 560 rifles, 2,252 light arms, explosives and ammunition.

The Army accuses Fernandinho of helping arm Colombia’s largest guerrilla force, the 17,000-member Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which controls the region where the Brazilian allegedly operates.

In a recent interview in the Brazilian newspaper Estado de Sao Paulo, FARC commander Ivan Rios said he believed the rebels may have collected “taxes” from Fernandinho’s drug business, but he denied selling him cocaine in exchange for arms.

The guerrilla group has long admitted to imposing such levies on industry and drug barons to finance its nearly 40-year-old war to impose a Communist state.

Mora, who has been searching for Fernandinho since he launched the army’s Operation Black Cat in February, said the drug trafficker’s capture is crucial to proving FARC complicity in the drug trade.

“This is the most important objective in Operation Black Cat, capturing Fernandinho, who is one of the most powerful drug traffickers and most important in Brazil and who is coordinating trafficking with the FARC,” he said.

But Mora warned that he is willing to sacrifice the key witness. If Fernandinho resists arrest, he said, his troops will shoot him down.

“If things do not go the way we had hoped, if we go to capture Fernandinho and he resists, then the troops will have to act,” the army commander said.