2 battles in Colombian Andes kill up to 100

BOGOTA (Reuters) -- Clashes between Marxist rebels and Colombia's main right-wing paramilitary force have killed up to 100 people this week in two remote areas of the country's jagged Andes mountains, authorities said on Friday.

The fighting, confirmed by paramilitary warlord Carlos Castano and among the bloodiest yet this year, included a battle for control of a region in northern Bolivar Province long known as a stronghold of the Cuban-inspired National Liberation Army (ELN).

"The idea is to force them out of the only sanctuary they have left," Castano told local television.

He was referring to what military sources have described as intense combat since Wednesday around the San Lucas mountain range, where commanders of the ELN, Colombia's second-largest guerrilla army, are thought to have their main base camp.

Col. Jaime Martinez, a regional National Police chief, told reporters that as many as 60 guerrillas and 15 members of Castano's outlawed United Self-Defense Forces (AUC), an umbrella organization of ultra-right militias, were thought to have been killed in the fighting.

But he said the death toll was unofficial and based only on accounts from peasants fleeing the area.

Castano, who spoke in a brief phone interview with RCN television, did not comment on the number of dead in the San Lucas fighting. But he rejected rebel assertions that the paramilitary offensive there was backed by government security forces, long accused of tacitly supporting paramilitaries in their "dirty war" against leftists and suspected rebel sympathizers.

The offensive came as several ELN commanders, two of whom were released on parole from a maximum security prison on Friday, prepared to meet Colombian business, civic and labor leaders in Geneva on Monday to prepare the way for full-fledged peace talks with the government.

No firm date has been set for formal negotiations, which would come more than 1-1/2 years after the government launched talks with the larger Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

But communist-ruled Cuba has agreed to act as a "facilitator" and possible mediator in the talks once they get under way, together with the governments of France, Spain, Norway and Switzerland.

Colombia's internal conflict, which has intensified in recent years as rebels built up their own sources of financing -- including widespread kidnapping and links to the drug trade -- has killed more than 35,000 people since 1990.

The other battle this week also began on Wednesday, according to local government officials, when the FARC raided one of Castano's strongholds in a rugged mountain area of northwest Antioquia Province, killing at least 28 paramilitary gunmen.

The death toll was the highest reported this year involving gunmen from the AUC, which human rights groups blame for most of the peasant massacres and other atrocities committed in Colombia's protracted civil conflict.

"The information we have is that there are about 30 dead, including two civilians," said Jaime Montoya, mayor of the municipality of Ituango, where the fighting occurred.

Castano disputed the toll in his comments to RCN, however, saying no more than 15 of his men had died, along with six guerrillas and five civilians.

Montoya told Reuters his own information was based on accounts from two personal envoys dispatched to the area where the combat took place, in the mountain hamlet of Santa Rita.

Although the fighting began on Wednesday, heavy cloud cover hampered efforts by the police or military to fly into the area, and no troops had arrived as of Friday afternoon.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Presidency of the Republic of Colombia
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)
National Liberation Army (ELN) -- Colombia

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