Colombia nabs rebel wanted on US cocaine charges

BOGOTA, Colombia - Colombian troops and police have captured a drug trafficker wanted by the United States for selling massive amounts of cocaine to buy guns for Marxist guerrillas, the army said in announcing the latest in a string of drug-related rebel arrests.

Farouk Shaikh Reyes, a clandestine member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, was arrested by soldiers and police at Bogota's El Dorado airport as he arrived on a flight from his home in Mexico on Saturday night, an army spokesman said.

Known by the aliases Hermes or "El Mechudo", which means "long haired" in Spanish, Shaikh Reyes was the FARC's main cocaine salesman for US markets, the army said in a news release.

Shaikh Reyes also swapped cocaine for weapons for the FARC and was part of a network supplying $150 million worth of cocaine a month to the United States and Europe, the army said.

"Farouk Shaikh Reyes is considered one of the most important men trafficking cocaine abroad," the army said.

His arrest followed the capture in July of another alleged senior FARC trafficker to the United States, Ferney Torres.

Colombian authorities, backed by close ally the United States, hope that by strangling the FARC's cocaine exports they can choke off its four-decade-old war for socialist revolution.

In March, Colombia extradited FARC rebel Nayibe Rojas, known as "Sonia", to the United States. Authorities believe her capture in a jungle town in early 2004 was one of the biggest blows to the FARC in years.

Although the FARC denies drug trafficking, it admits "taxing" drug producers and US and Colombian authorities say they have ample evidence the rebels also ship cocaine themselves.

The growth of Colombia's cocaine industry over the past few decades provided a financial bonanza for the FARC, according to law enforcement authorities. That has allowed it to expand to become what security forces now believe is a 17,000-strong armed and uniformed army.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe looks likely to win reelection next May thanks to his tough military policies against the FARC, which have been backed by hundreds of millions of US aid a year.

But, despite enormous law enforcement expenditure and well-publicized arrests and confiscations by Colombian and US authorities, new traffickers always spring up to supply users' demand for cocaine and there is little evidence that the flow of the drug into the United States has slowed.

Thousands of people are killed in Colombia's conflict each year, even though the FARC has nominal support outside the countryside in an increasingly urban nation.

- REUTERS