Second senior Farc rebel killed

[robcon]

Source: BBC

The Colombian government says another senior commander of the Farc rebel group has been killed.

Defence Minister Juan Manuel Santos said Ivan Rios had been killed by his own men. Earlier the army had claimed he had died in combat with its troops.

The reported death comes less than a week after another top commander Farc leader, Raul Reyes, was killed by troops in a raid just inside Ecuador. That killing sparked a diplomatic row, with Ecuador denouncing the incursion.

Ivan Rios - whose real name was Manuel Munoz Ortiz - was the youngest member of the seven-man secretariat of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc.

Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7284222.stm

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Rios was probably located by forensic work on Reyes' computers.

[Tempest]

1. If he was killed by his own men

Then the computers wouldn't have located him.


And then there's this:

Ecuador's Ambassador to the U.S., Luis Gallego said, in an interview this morning on C-Span's American Journal he saw videos of the site which was bombed, and he wanted to know the brand of laptops they had in there which still had that information after having been blown to kingdom come, as they had to have been built to last, and he wanted to get one for himself.

[MaryCeleste]

2. Panasonic Toughbook

Which are very solid machines

[ohio2007]

3. Hard drives are hard to kill actually

data can be found on hard drives that most people think has been erased.

[SquireJons]

6. Really?

Even after they have been blown to bits?

Yeah, that's the ticket... just super glue the platen back together and attach it to your iPod dude!

While it's true that forensic analysis can recover useful data from even parts of the disks, it takes some time and you would never get whole documents that show financial connections between Ecuador and FARC, as has been claimed. This laptop stuff is pure, super strength BS. Forensic analysis takes weeks and they can get bits and pieces, not whole documents if the disks are physically damaged. It's enough to convict someone for having illegal porn, but not enough to say who did what with whom. Or go to war, unless you are a stupid republican who wants to overthrow the democratically elected government of Venezuela. Looks like we are in for another round of US sponsored coupes before the criminals are forced from office.

[AP]

4. As long as we're inventing scenarios: he was killed because someone in his inner circle was bribed

I'd guess, someone just got $1M deposited into a Cayman bank account.

[ohio2007]

5. FARC's aura of invincibility "shattered" ( after 40 years )

The death of Raul Reyes marks the first time a member of Farc's ruling body, the Secretariat, has been killed in combat during four decades of fighting.

snip
What the operation shows is that the intelligence wing of Colombia's security forces has managed to penetrate even the close circles of Secretariat members.

Communication intercepts

The government has set up a network of informants, runs reinsertion packages for deserting rebels and offers handsome rewards for information.

In the past few days, almost $900,000 was paid for the capture of a Farc commander with 35 years of service.

snip

While unprecedented in its scale, this is not the first time a Farc commander has been killed in a military operation, with an infiltrator pinpointing a location and the Colombian air force dropping massive amounts of ordnance on the site.

In a grave blow to Farc finances the head of the 16th Front, Tomas Medina, alias Negro Acacio was killed last September in a similar operation, this time in the province of Vichada, by the Venezuelan border.

He was one of Farc's drug lords, handling the exportation of cocaine, one of the main sources of revenue for the guerrillas.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7273320.stm


money talks.

So, will current events ever lead to a reduction of cocain flowing into the US or is that a "connected dot" not to be considered in the big picture as a fallout in that war down there?