Colombia’s defense minister Juan Carlos Pinzon claimed Thursday the FARC’s top leaders are living outside the country.
“Since Alfonso Cano died the FARC’s leaders are no longer living in Colombia,” the defense minister said in a press statement, without specifying the whereabouts of the FARC’s seven secretariat members.
Alfonso Cano, the FARC’s former top leader, was killed in November 2011 in Colombia’s southwestern Cauca department.
Pinzon said the FARC leaders were trying to manipulate the country from “comfortable positions” in the exterior. “What they want is to own the country and the affected communities with a shameful terrorism, violating all the humanitarian laws, affecting children and populations, this is what the country is facing, an increasingly deformed group.”
The defense minister said the FARC’s leader, “Timochenko,” was “lying to the country” when he said Wednesday the rebels would leave the Cauca department once the “the military, the police and the [neo]paramilitaries” exit the area.
“Hopefully the [FARC] will someday be able to tell the truth. What [they] have done is permanently lie to the country. There, [in Cauca,] they are pinned down and our precision against this terrorist group and their drug trafficking structures will keep increasing; this is the message to this organization,” Pinzon concluded.