Colombia officials say rebels put bounty on police, soldiers

CNN February 9, 1999 Colombia officials say rebels put bounty on police, soldiers

                 BOGOTA (Reuters) -- A Marxist guerrilla group is offering its fighters and
                  ordinary citizens a bounty of about $320 for every policeman or soldier they
                  kill in an oil-rich region of northeast Colombia, authorities said on Monday.

                  Gen. Luis Barbosa, head of the army's 18th Brigade, said the Revolutionary
                  Armed Forces (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) published
                  the offer in pamphlets distributed in Arauca province.

The military, including the police, maintains a heavy presence in Arauca to
protect oil fields operated by U.S.

multinational Occidental Petroleum Corp and state-run oil company
Ecopetrol.

                  Both the FARC and the ELN, Latin America's oldest and largest rebel
                  groups, routinely target energy infrastructure in protest at what they see as
                  the excessive involvement of foreign companies in Colombia's oil industry.

                  The bounty on the lives of security force members is thought to be the first
                  since the late drug capo Pablo Escobar paid aspiring gunmen $3,000 for
                  every dead policeman in the northwest city of Medellin.

                  The offer led to the death of more than 400 policemen in the drug mob's
                  powerbase of Medellin between 1998 and 1992 -- the height of Escobar's
                  war against the state.

                  Contract killers are easy to find in this Andean nation that boasts one of the
                  highest murder rates in the hemisphere, and they can be hired for as little as
                  $30.