JUBILANT AUTHORITIES in Colombia released photographs on Thursday night of the body of the top military commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, confirming its most important success against the country’s biggest rebel group in recent years.
Colombia’s military said Mono Jojoy had died during an air and ground assault lasting several days on his mountain camp in the remote Macarena region.
The Farc’s field marshal and overall number two in the guerrilla organisation, Jojoy was the military strategist who used the proceeds of cocaine trafficking to turn the peasant movement into Latin America’s biggest and most feared guerrilla army during the 1990s.
Welcoming the news, Colombia’s president Juan Manuel Santos said it was “the severest blow which the Farc has suffered in its history”, describing the dead guerrilla as “the symbol of terror in Colombia”.
The 57-year-old rebel, whose real name was Víctor Julio Suárez Rojas, had a reputation as the most hardline member of the Farc’s ruling seven-man secretariat.
He reportedly joined the 46- year-old movement in 1975. With little formal education, he built his name as a military leader, rising through the ranks to the Farc secretariat, where he shared power with the group’s Marxist intellectuals. He had been indicted in both Colombia and the United States on terrorism and drug-trafficking charges.
His death is the latest in a series of blows the Colombian military has inflicted on the Farc since it went on the offensive earlier this decade in order to reverse gains made by the rebels in the 1990s, when under Jojoy’s military leadership the Farc scored a series of successes against the government, controlling broad sweeps of the countryside and besieging and overrunning several towns.
Jojoy is the most senior rebel commander killed by the military since March 2008, when the group’s main ideologue, Raúl Reyes, died in a bombing raid on his camp inside Ecuador.
Rodrigo Rivera, Colombia’s defence minister, said the killing of Jojoy proved the Farc was “crumbling from within”, saying informers within the dead rebel commander’s “front” had betrayed his camp’s location to the military.
Colombia offers large ransom payments to informants who provide information that leads to the arrest or capture of guerrilla leaders.
Rivera called on Alfonso Cano, the Farc’s overall leader, to surrender. “The message is for them to demobilise, that they give themselves up,” he said. Along with Jojoy, Cano has been the most-sought-after Farc leader since the killing of Reyes in 2008.
Colombia’s intelligence service believes he is hiding out in the remote Andean region of Tolima, protected by an inner circle of 26 bodyguards, and spends much of his time in tunnels to avoid bombing raids by the air force.
The Colombian authorities estimate the movement’s strength has been reduced by half during the last decade to about 8,000 fighters.
In a recent video, Cano acknowledged the recent setbacks but said the Farc was still mounting about 10 attacks a day.