Colombian Rebel Turncoat
Claims Betrayal
By LIBARDO CARDONA
Bogota - He dealt a major blow from within to Colombia's
leftist rebels, killing a member of the FARC's ruling junta with a
shot to the head and toting the man's severed hand out of the jungle
as proof.
Nearly a year later, the guerrilla turncoat known as "Rojas" says
the government has double-crossed him.
He's stewing in jail while prosecutors investigate him for
terrorism, theft, and murder, and he may never see a penny of his
$320,000 reward, which was frozen to offer eventual indemnity to
victims of four kidnappings attributed to him.
"With this kind of treatment for a deserter, what guerrilla is going
to turn himself in?" Rojas told The Associated Press in a prison
interview this week.
The rebel known as Pedro Pablo Montoya has been a headache for
Colombian officials who offered hefty rewards to anyone who helps
capture a senior guerrilla commander. The government didn't specify
whether killers could get the award.
And Rojas, among their most famous deserters, is unrepentant. He is
refusing to confess any crimes he may have committed during his 16
years in a rebel army that finances its operations with kidnapping
and drug trafficking.
Prosecutor Mariano Ospina told the AP that Rojas is eligible for a
reduced sentence of no more than eight years in prison under a 2005
law designed to encourage members of Colombia's far-right militias
to demobilize.
But only if he confesses.
Rojas says he should never have spent a day in jail, because he
surrendered believing he would get amnesty. "I didn't just kill a
rank-and-file rebel," he notes.
He refused to tell the AP any details about his killing of Rios, or
any other crime he allegedly committed.
Rojas spent 16 of his 33 years in the Western Hemisphere's last
standing rebel army, his final months in the security detail of Ivan
Rios, one of seven members of the FARC's Secretariat.
Late one night in March 2008, he killed Rios and the comandante's
girlfriend in their sleep with close-range shots to the head. He cut
off Rios' right hand as proof and carried it packed in ice as he
surrendered to the army.
Colombia's government triumphantly presented Rojas at a news
conference as evidence that the FARC was imploding.
Officials were clearly uncomfortable, however, about endorsing
murder, and President Alvaro Uribe said "a government of laws can't
encourage massacres."
The effort by Colombia's U.S.-backed armed forces' to decapitate the
FARC was clearly aided by the program offering a total of $100
million in rewards. Less than a week before Rios' death, Colombia's
military killed another Secretariat member, Raul Reyes, in a
cross-border raid into Ecuador. The leaders' deaths contributed to
more than 3,000 desertions last year, according to the Defense
Ministry.
Rojas' reward money was banked in his name but frozen by
prosecutors, who "say it's for reparations to my victims," the
steely eyed guerrilla complained during the interview in La Picota
prison, where he wore a bulletproof vest and was flanked by six
guards.
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