19-Aug-1999 Thursday
BOGOTA, Colombia -- The current weapon of choice for Colombia's guerrillas
is cheap, abundant, easily transportable -- and terrifyingly effective.
It is a homemade cannon.
Dozens of times in the past year, guerrillas have surrounded towns and
blasted the cannons at military or police outposts.
Simple in design, the cannons are fashioned from cylinders containing
cooking gas. Every village and town in Colombia dispenses the cylinders
since natural gas is commonly used for cooking.
Guerrillas hack off the tops of large cylinders, place a charge inside,
then nestle a smaller cylinder packed with explosives and metal fragments
in the larger tube.
The smaller cylinder is fired like a cannon ball at targets within 100
yards or so. Accuracy is extremely limited, but when a small building is
hit, the impact and explosion can do great damage.
"It is a weapon of terror," said retired U.S. Marine Maj. Gil Macklin, a
former adviser to the police and army and frequent visitor to Colombia.
In a tactic that began about a year ago, guerrillas of the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia amass a group of 400 or 500 combatants to
overwhelm a municipal police outpost or small army contingent in a rural
village or town. The outposts generally house no more than 15 to 30 police
officers or soldiers, armed with small automatic weapons.
To soften up and terrify the security forces, the rebels cordon off the
settlement and begin firing cannons toward the outpost.
Stray rounds often flatten buildings and homes in the block surrounding the
outpost, falling through roofs and killing civilians.
The cannons have become the Molotov cocktails of the rebels --
devastatingly effective, flagrantly cruel to innocent bystanders and nearly
impossible to halt given the pervasiveness of cooking gas cylinders.
"They are not playing fair," said National Police Chief Rosso Jose Serrano.
"They fire these cylinders indiscriminately, letting them fall where they
may."
That is what happened recently in a devastating rebel attack on Narino, a
small town in Antioquia state in northwest Colombia, which left 17 people
dead. Rebels destroyed a police station and leveled two blocks of the
downtown with scores of cannon blasts.
The cannon blasts killed three children, Serrano said.
The army commander, Gen. Jorge Enrique Mora, said rebels sometimes pack the
cannon charges with sulfuric acid.
"We had some soldiers in a battle in Cauca, a month or so ago, whose bodies
were burned by sulfuric acid," Mora said. "They lost all the skin on their
faces. They are putting this sulfuric acid in the cylinders, so that acid
will spray anyone around when the charge explodes.
"They violate all kinds of human rights with these, every aspect of
international humanitarian law."
In a statement in mid-April, the army blamed rebels for the theft of nearly
all of 10,975 cooking gas cylinders stolen in the previous year.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a large insurgency that wields
growing military power but has limited public support, voices little
concern about terrifying -- and killing -- civilians living near police
outposts hit by its attacks.
"This was just horrible for our town," said Alvaro Diosa, 53, a paint shop
owner in Puerto Lleras, a jungle town overrun by the guerrillas July 10 and
11. "I hope to never live through anything like it again."
"We calculate that they lobbed more than 100 cylinders filled with
explosives," said a man who identified himself only as Carlos.
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