Colombian mayor escapes bomb, 10 wounded
Source: Reuters
(Adds comment, background, updates wounded) By Patrick Markey BOGOTA, March 1 (Reuters) - A Colombian mayor who was threatened by guerrillas escaped an assassination attempt on Thursday when a rebel car bomb exploded and wounded 10 people near a radio station where she was speaking, authorities said. Cielo Gonzalez, mayor of Neiva, was broadcasting a program in the southern city when her bodyguards noticed a suspicious car parked outside and ordered it removed. The car exploded on a timer device as it was being towed away, police said. Local television showed a bus in flames near the wrecked car and wounded motorcycle drivers lying amid debris in Neiva, about 190 miles (300 km) south of the capital Bogota. Urban bombings are less common since President Alvaro Uribe began a U.S.-backed campaign to combat the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or FARC and the cocaine trade that fuels Latin America's oldest guerrilla war. "Everything in the investigation points to an assassination attempt on the mayor of Neiva," Police Col. Miguel Angel Bojaca said, blaming the FARC for the attack. The civil defense agency said 10 people were wounded. Gonzalez has received threats from leftist guerrillas fighting the four-decade-old conflict. A grenade was fired at her house in 2003 and a bodyguard was killed during an assassination attempt on her father. "This is the risk people involved in politics have to take, especially those in office in places with security problems like Neiva," she told reporters. Violence has ebbed in Colombia since Uribe came to office in 2002 helped by millions of dollars in U.S. aid to drive back the FARC and disarm more than 31,000 right-wing paramilitaries who once fought the rebels in a dirty war. But the FARC remains a potent force in rural parts of the country. Last year around 600 soldiers and police were killed in combat with the rebels and other armed groups and thousands of people are forced from their homes each year by combat. The Huila region, where Neiva is located, is a corridor for drug traffic from neighboring provinces that have been the focus of U.S.-funded operations. The area is a base for the FARC's Teofilo Forero command, one of its more experienced fronts, experts said. "This demands a revision from the high command," said Pablo Casas, an analyst at the Security and Democracy think tank in Bogota. "This is a strategic area that is a buffer zone between drug country and the more productive areas."
| AlertNet news is provided by |  |
