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||| FARC. Specialized explosives units cordoned off the place while detonating the charges

Army blows up house bomb

||| Soldiers from the 28th Brigade found the explosives during a premise search. ||| The FARC, whose leader is Alfonso Cano, has suffered a series of setbacks this year.
||| The rebel organization is on both the U.S. and EU lists of terrorist groups.

EFE News Service
 

BOGOTA – Army explosives experts detonated a "house bomb" in a rural area near the southern city of San José del Guaviare that was prepared by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, guerrilla group, military spokesmen said.
Soldiers from the 28th Brigade found the house packed with explosives at a place called La Granja.
The explosives had been set up in such a way that they "would detonate the moment deactivation was attempted," the army said.
"Specialized army explosives units cordoned off the place and detonated the charges in a controlled way without producing any dead or injured," the army said.
The FARC, Colombia's oldest and largest leftist guerrilla group, was founded in 1964, has an estimated 8,000 to 17,000 fighters and operates across a large swath of this Andean nation.
President Alvaro Uribe's administration has made fighting the FARC a top priority and has obtained billions in U.S. aid for counterinsurgency operations.
The FARC, whose leader is Alfonso Cano, has suffered a series of blows this year.
On July 2, the Colombian army rescued former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, U.S. military contractors Thomas Howes, Keith Stansell and Marc Gonsalves, and 11 other Colombian police officers and soldiers.
The FARC had been trying to trade the 15 captives, along with 25 other "exchangeables," for hundreds of jailed guerrillas.
The rebels' most valuable bargaining chip was Betancourt, a dual Colombian-French citizen the FARC seized in February 2002 whose plight became a cause celebre in Europe. FARC founder Manuel Marulanda, who was known as "Sureshot," died on March 26.
On March 1, Colombian forces staged a cross-border raid into Ecuador, killing FARC second-in-command Raúl Reyes and setting off a regional diplomatic crisis.
Iván Rios, a high-level FARC commander, was killed March 7 by one of his own men, who cut off the guerrilla leader's hand and presented it to army troops, along with identification documents, as proof that the rebel chief was dead.
A succession of governments has battled Colombia's leftist insurgent groups since the mid-1960s.
In 1999, then-President Andres Pastrana allowed the creation of a Switzerland-sized "neutral" zone in the jungles of southern Colombia for peace talks with the FARC.
After several years of fitful and ultimately fruitless negotiations, Pastrana ordered the armed forces to retake the region in early 2002. But while the arrangement lasted, the FARC enjoyed free rein within the zone.
The FARC is on both the U.S. and EU lists of terrorist groups. Drug trafficking, extortion and kidnapping-for-ransom are the FARC's main means of financing its operations. |||

||| COLOMBIA. Over 100,000 trucks idled

Truckers’ strike is affecting exports

EFE News Service
 

BOGOTA – The truckers’ strike has been affecting freight transport in Colombia for the past six days, during which time more than 100,000 trucks have been idle, impacted coffee exports on Monday.
On the weekend, growers were unable to ship to international markets more than 100,000 sacks of unground coffee beans.
Fernándo Gómez Chica, a director for the National Coffee Exporters Association, said that the truckers strike had begun to make it impossible for growers to fulfill their international commitments.
Gómez Chica told reporters that it is necessary to export some 50,000 sacks to comply with last week's sales quota. Since Sunday, the Agricultural Producers Society of Colombia has been warning of a drop in food shipments to markets in the country's major cities.
On Saturday, the president of the Colombian Truckers Association, Nemesio Castillo, said that the work stoppage would be intensified starting on Monday.
Colombian truckers have been refusing to transport goods since Wednesday. |||

||| HONDURAs. Landowners try to run them off

At least 9 dead over land dispute

The Associated Press
 

TEGUCIGALPA – The Honduran government on Monday sent federal police to investigate the killings of at least nine people in a long-standing land dispute along the country's northern coast.
But residents with guns and machetes kept the 50 officers from entering the area.
Armed men firing their guns stormed into a farming cooperative in Silin on Sunday. The cooperative's members chased the men into a home and set fire to it, burning at least six people to death.
Three bodies were also found hacked to death along a nearby road.
"We still don't know if the dead are the original attackers or residents of the burned home because the police can't get control of the area," he said. "We are trying to avoid more bloodshed."
Leftist lawmaker Rafael Alegría, also a farming leader from the region, said the original attackers apparently were sent by neighboring landowners, who have skirmished with peasants in the past.
Landowners who want to buy the property have tried to run them off the land. |||

Oil strike averted in Brazil

EFE News Service
 

RIO DE JANEIRO - The vast majority of Petrobras workers have accepted a proposal that would increase their share of the Brazilian state-owned oil giant's soaring profits and refused to back the national strike set to begin at midnight Monday.
"The proposal was accepted today at meetings by workers at Petrobras's platforms in the Campos marine basin, who were the last ones to speak out," union spokesman Vitor Meneses told EFE.
The Campos basin, located in the Atlantic off Rio de Janeiro state, is Petrobras's main production area and accounts for some 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude, or nearly 80 percent of the firm's domestic output of 1.87 million bpd. "We can't say that everybody already cancelled the strike due to the fact that workers on land at the bases in northern Rio de Janeiro state still have to meet, but practically all the Petrobras employees accepted the proposal and gave up the strike," Meneses said.
The unions in other areas have already approved the recommendation of the FUP labor federation, which includes all the Petrobras unions, that the company's proposal should be accepted and the strike called off.
Petrobras agreed to raise from 13 percent to 15 percent the amount of profits shared with workers, as well as to improve the distribution of profits, which before went mainly to managers and high-level executives.
FUP officials told Efe that Petrobras also agreed to recognize as work time the half day it takes workers at offshore platforms to travel to the rigs, with the change effective retroactive to 2005.
Employees at the offshore platforms usually work 15 days and rest 21 days on land, but – until now – have not been paid for travel time. Petrobras partially accepted employees' demands after the five-day strike in June by Campos basin workers. The strike did not affect production because Petrobras implemented a contingency plan that allowed it to maintain the platforms' operations at minimal levels.