On 27 June, an alleged leader of the Colombian FARC guerrilla group was detained in Ecuador, where he had gone to seek medical attention, official sources in both countries announced.
On 27 June, an alleged leader of the Colombian FARC guerrilla group was detained in Ecuador, where he had gone to seek medical attention, official sources in both countries announced.
The man believed to be the second-ranking leader of the FARC’s Front 48 was arrested by the Ecuadorean police in a commercial center in southern Quito, together with a Colombian woman.
“This individual … traded in arms, ammunition, explosives, and military uniforms,” an Ecuadorean police agent added.
The commander of the Colombian military, Adm. Edgar Cely, identified the man as Fabio Ramírez (alias ‘Danilo’), for whom Bogotá was offering a reward of 195,000 dollars.
“We’re verifying his identity to know whether it’s the same person,” indicated the head of the Anti-Organized Crime Strike Unit (Ulco) of the Ecuadorean police, Col. David Proaño.
“I want to extend congratulations and very significant thanks to the Ecuadorean army and police,” Cely declared for his part, at a press conference in Bogotá.
According to the Colombian commander, “this man belongs to Front 48, which is known to have been responsible for the murder of eight of our police officers, four wounded, and two more disappeared, in (the border town of) San Miguel in September 2010.”
He added that Ramírez “was the right-hand man of Milton de Jesús Toncel (alias ‘Joaquín Gómez’),” commander of the Southern Bloc and a member of the Secretariat of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC, a Marxist group).
He likewise affirmed that ‘Danilo’, thirty-eight years old, had been active in the FARC for eighteen years.
The military commander said that the detainee could arrive in Colombia that night and maintained that his arrest was made possible thanks to military intelligence and information supplied by human sources.
Gen. Juan Carlos Salazar, commander of the Army in southern Colombia, told reporters that the work had been “coordinated with the Ecuadorean Army.”
“We had been following him over the last few months. Unfortunately, he disappeared on us, and we succeeded in locating him again in our brother country of Ecuador,” he indicated.