ONE of the Colombia's most renowned rebel fighters, and the guerrillas' senior female commander, has surrendered in yet another victory for the United States-backed war policy of president Alvaro Uribe.
"We have been after this woman for a long time," said Juan Manuel Santos, the defence minister, "but she always gave us the slip."
Half-starved and wounded, Nelly Avila Moreno, who was better known by her guerrilla alias, "Karina", surrendered to
the secret police, the DAS, ending one of the legends of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc). Accompanying her was her bodyguard and lover known only by his alias of Michin.
"To become a Farc leader you have to be utterly ruthless and vicious, even more so if you are a woman," said an army intelligence source. "Karina was both."
A glance at Karina shows why she was known as a female "Rambo" in the Farc and a role model for the women that make up more than 30 per cent of the supposedly Marxist guerrilla army. She has lost the sight of one eye and has scars on her face from combat. She also has lost a breast and has bullet wounds along an arm.
Yet she gave far worse than she got. She was wanted for a battery of charges, among them murder, extortion and kidnapping.
She has been linked to a series of massacres in the banana-growing region of Uraba, near the Caribbean Coast, close to where she was born. Many businessmen and ranchers suffered extortion, kidnapping and murder at her hands.
Yet by negotiating her surrender under the government amnesty legislation known as the Peace and Justice Law, she can be sentenced only to a maximum of eight years in prison.
She came to public attention during the peace process between the Farc and the former president, Andres Pastrana, who granted the rebels a 16,000sq mile safe haven in the south of the country as a venue for peace talks.
During a ceremony in the safe haven, attended by thousands of rebels, Karina addressed the rows of uniformed and heavily armed guerrillas – the proof that women in the Farc had acquired the fame of being even more vicious fighters than their male counterparts.
She became a priority target for the authorities in June 2002 after the town of Arboleda-Pensilvania in the province of Caldas was attacked by a rebel column. They killed 13 policemen along with four civilians, including one woman burned alive for being married to a policeman. It was then that Oxford-educated president Uribe called upon his security forces to capture or kill Karina and put a £400,000 bounty on her head.
The guerrilla commander, with more than 20 years in rebel ranks, was known to be equally without pity on her own troops. Intelligence sources believe that she personally executed a dozen Farc members accused of being informers or breaking the revolutionary rule book.
Karina, 45, commanded the Farc's 47th Front which, at the height of its power, had 350 members operating in and around the northern province of Antioquia, the capital of which, Medellin, is where she now sits in a police cell, awaiting her fate.
Parts of her criminal empire sit astride drugs and arms smuggling routes, ensuring that she was never short of money to carry out operations.
However over the last eight months, the US-trained and equipped army has launched a series of offensives against the Farc in Antioquia and the surrounding provinces, putting the guerrillas on the defensive and forcing them to abandon camps and move on to a permanently mobile footing. This meant that guerrillas were tired, often hungry and in frequent combat with the military, leading to mass desertions, which gave the army more information to concentrate their operations.
Karina came under greater pressure in March, after her boss, Ivan Rios, a member of the Farc's ruling seven-man body, the Secretariat, was murdered by one of his bodyguards.
The bodyguard, alias "Rojas", cut off Rios's hand as proof of his act and turned himself in to the authorities, where he promptly claimed and later received, a reward for more than £500,000.
The Farc has had a year of setbacks. On 1 March, a raid by the Colombian police and armed forces killed the Farc's second-in-command, Luis Edgar Devia Silva, also known as Raul Reyes.
He was the most senior Farc leader killed by the Colombian government in nearly 40 years of war. He was also the first member of the Farc's leadership council to be killed in combat.
ANALYSIS FARC – the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – has been weakened by Alvaro Uribe's US-backed security campaign. But the rebels, seen as terrorists by US and EU officials, are still fighting with help from cocaine trafficking.
Farc was established in the 1960s as the military wing of the Colombian Communist Party. It originated as a purely guerrilla movement, but became involved with the drugs trade during the 1980s, which caused its official separation from the Communist Party.
According to the Colombian government, Farc has 6,000-8,000 members, down from 16,000 in 2001. Other estimates suggest up to 18,000 guerrillas, with Farc claiming in a 2007 interview that they have not been weakened.
Farc is currently active in about 15-20 per cent of Colombia's territory, most strongly in south-eastern jungles and in the plains at the base of the Andes mountains.
Recent reports from Unicef have highlighted the group's use of child soldiers.
A recent report from Human Rights Watch stated that female Farc members "had roughly the same duties and possibilities of promotion as males. Yet girls in the guerrilla forces still face gender-related pressures.
"Although rape and overt sexual harassment are not tolerated, many male commanders use their power to form sexual liaisons with under-age girls.
"Girls as young as 12 are required to use contraception, and must have abortions if they get pregnant."
The full article contains 1008 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
