Columbia bought info leading to FARC hit

Houston Chronicle:

A well-connected guerrilla who passed information to the Colombian military for a reward allowed a commando unit to track down and kill a senior rebel commander in Ecuador, a top adviser to President Alvaro Uribe said Thursday.

"Money moves things," Jose Obdulio Gaviria, the adviser, said in an interview in his office at the national palace in Bogota. "People are showing up to sell information. They ask: 'How much is this guy worth?' "

The operation, he said, showed that the government's program to pay guerrilla informants and demobilized rebels for information is paying big dividends. The government has a kitty of $100 million to pay off guerrillas who desert, inform on ex-comrades or help spring rebel-held hostages.

In the past two years, paid informants have helped the Colombian military kill three other major FARC figures, including a rebel commander and prolific drug trafficker named Tomas Medina Caracas, better known as Negro Acasio.

The cross-border operation that killed Raul Reyes, a senior commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and 24 others prompted Ecuador, Venezuela and Nicaragua — all ruled by leftist leaders — to break diplomatic relations with the Colombian government of Alvaro Uribe, the United States' closest ally in Latin America.

Venezuela and Ecuador said they were mobilizing their militaries. But the Bogota government holds that taking out Reyes was worth the blowback.

Gaviria said the attack last weekend was made possible by a member of Reyes' inner circle who began selling information to Colombian authorities about six months ago.

In the past, the informant provided the location of five FARC camps near the border with Ecuador, but Reyes always managed to slip away.

However, eight days before the successful operation was launched, the informant revealed that Reyes would be spending the night of Feb. 29 at a camp just inside Ecuadorean territory, perhaps waiting for a visiting delegation or a journalist, Gaviria said.

Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos told a slightly different version. He said the initial plan was to attack Reyes on Colombian soil. But the informant signaled that the rebel leader slipped across the border about 30 minutes before the attack was to be launched.

"We never planned to do this operation outside of Colombia," Santos told the Colombian Congress on Tuesday.

Either way, the killing of Reyes, a member of the FARC's ruling seven-man secretariat, was a major victory for Uribe. The FARC has been fighting for 44 years but, until Saturday, the group had never lost a member of the secretariat.

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Gaviria denied reports that an intercepted satellite telephone call between Reyes and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez tipped off authorities to the rebel's wherabouts.

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The psychology behind this disclosure is interesting. Will it make the FARC leaders more paranoid? Will they go on a witch hunt for the snitch? Even putting the satellite phone theory out there and denying it will make them reluctant to communicate. I think if they had the hone intercepts, they would be tempted to release the transcript to stick it to Chavez after his belligerent reaction to taking out the narco terrorist.