Violence Rises in Colombia's Arauca State

www.timesdaily.com By ANDREW SELSKY Associated Press Writer January 27. 2003 6:07PM

A Colombian police officer stands guard over a bridge on the Arauca River that leads from Colombia to Venezuela, Saturday, Jan. 18, 2003. President Alvaro Uribe has made Arauca state a priority, but months into his crackdown, it remains a lawless frontier. The governor, a retired army colonel, recently resigned because of death threats. And while government forces are concentrated in the towns and U.S. special forces have arrived to train Colombian troops, rebels and paramilitaries still carry out attacks in the grassy savannas at will. (AP Photo/Zoe Selsky)

Colombia's interior minister insisted Monday that the government was still in control of Arauca state, a region where one rebel group killed six soldiers and a civilian with a car bomb over the weekend and another kidnapped two foreign journalists.

Colombian Defense Minister Martha Lucia Ramirez and the commander of the armed forces, Gen. Jorge Enrique Mora, visited Arauca on Monday to investigate the volatile situation.

The car bomb, which exploded near a military patrol in the village of Pueblo Nuevo on Sunday, was believed set off by the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the army said.

The civilian who died was the driver, the army said. The blast, about 200 miles northeast of the capital, also wounded eight soldiers and another civilian, the army said.

Authorities have accused rebels of twice using hostages as unwitting suicide bombers, luring them into cars without telling them the vehicles were packed with explosives, and then detonating the bombs by remote control when the car neared a military target.

Arauca - a state about twice the size of New Jersey in northeastern Colombia, along the Venezuelan border - is rich in oil resources, and FARC and other rebel groups have repeatedly attacked a pipeline running through the state. An illegal right-wing militia is battling the rebels for control of the oil plains in the state, which has about 350,000 residents.

Some 70 U.S. Army special forces trainers are to begin training a Colombian army brigade in counterinsurgency tactics in Arauca this week so they can protect the oil pipeline, owned jointly by Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum and the Colombian oil monopoly Ecopetrol.

Interior Minister Fernando Londono said Monday the government was still in control of Arauca, despite the violence.

"This doesn't mean that the government, the armed forces and the police have lost control of Arauca, which is a very difficult zone to manage," Londono told RCN radio Monday.

The army announced it killed three rebels Sunday near the Arauca town of Saravena. No further details were immediately available. There was also no word on the fate of kidnapped American photographer Scott Dalton, 34, and British reporter Ruth Morris, 35.

Their rebel captors - the National Liberation Army - have said nothing about the freelance journalists since announcing Thursday over a clandestine rebel radio station that they had "detained" the two, who were on assignment for the Los Angeles Times, on Jan. 21.

There was concern the recent bombings and clashes between government security forces and rebels put the hostages' lives at risk, but there have been no calls for the army to mount a rescue attempt.

Arauca's oil pipeline resumed pumping Sunday night after being shut down for four days due to a rebel bombing, an Ecopetrol spokesman told Dow Jones Newswires on Monday.

The dynamite attack last Wednesday was the first of the year on the pipeline, which was bombed 40 times in 2002 and 170 times in 2001.

Some 3,500 people die each year across Colombia in the decades-long war. The army announced Monday that rebels had killed eight people over the weekend in various parts of the country, including two who had been kidnapped.