Colombia’s former vice-president, Francisco Santos, “can go to hell,” the FARC said Wednesday in response to billboards comparing rebel commander “Ivan Marquez” to late drug lord Pablo Escobar.
In a press release published on one of the guerrilla organization’s weblogs, “Ivan Marquez,” the FARC’s chief negotiator currently in Havana for peace talks with the government, called the former VP the “repulsive clown of Colombia’s politics” and said Santos “can go to hell.”
Marquez’s fury had been aroused by a billboard campaign sponsored by the former vice-president on which was asked who had killed more Colombian policemen, Marquez or Escobar.
MORE: Billboards comparing FARC to Pablo Escobar stir anger
As part of his response, Marquez published his own “billboard” on the weblog calling to “guess who asked the paramilitaries to create death squads in Bogota” referring to a criminal investigation into the alleged involvement of Santos in the creation of paramilitary death squads in Colombia’s capital.
MORE: Colombia’s former VP met with AUC on several occasions: Recordings
The ex-vice-president proved hardly impressed by Marquez and told a local radio station the FARC “can say what they want.”
Santos, a second cousin of current President Juan Manuel Santos, was Alvaro Uribe’s VP between 2002 and 2010 and one of hundreds of Uribe allies and family members in legal trouble over their alleged or proven ties with the paramilitary group that was determined a terrorist organization by the U.S. until its official demobilization in 2006.
The recording confirms testimonies made by Mancuso who told Colombian prosecutors that Santos had met with paramilitaries about the formation of a “Capital Bloc” in Bogota.
Colombia’s Prosecutor General’s Office is officially investigating the former vice president for his alleged ties to the AUC.