The leader of a Colombian rebel group that rejected a 2016 peace deal and is involved in the cocaine trade has been arrested in drug violence-torn Ecuador, police said Monday.
Carlos Arturo Landazuri Cortes was one of Colombia’s most-wanted criminals and is accused of taking part in the kidnapping and murder of a group of Ecuadoran journalists in 2018.
He took over as leader of the Oliver Sinisterra Front, a splinter group of the now-defunct FARC guerillas, after his predecessor was killed by Colombian soldiers that same year.
Ecuador’s police chief Cesar Augusto Zapata announced the arrest on X, describing Cortes as a “high-value target” who was seized after months of investigations and intelligence work.
The Colombian prosecutor’s office lists the Oliver Sinisterra Front as key among “transnational organizations dedicated to cocaine trafficking” to the United States and Europe from the southwest of the country.
This part of Colombia borders Ecuador — a once peaceful nation whose ports have become a key exit point for cocaine, attracting powerful drug cartels and plunging it into violence.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) signed a peace deal with the government and disarmed in 2016, however fighters who did not ink the pact splintered into a variety of dissident groups.
Colombia’s leftist President Gustavo Petro has sought to put an end to six decades of conflict between the country’s security forces, guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and drug gangs.
Since he took office in 2022, he has launched peace talks with the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the most powerful FARC dissident group, the EMC.
No contacts have been announced between the government and the Oliver Sinisterra Front.
The group has been accused of the abduction and murder of a three-man Ecuadoran press team on the border with Colombia in March 2018.
Landazuri, nicknamed “El Gringo,” was also wanted for a bomb attack that same year that left 28 police officers injured in northwestern Ecuador.
