World

Bogota –  Three police officers were killed and three others wounded in an ambush staged over the weekend by Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, guerrillas outside Miranda, a town in Cauca province, officials said.

The officers were attacked while traveling Sunday on the highway that links Miranda to Florida, a town in neighboring Valle del Cauca province in southwestern Colombia.

The ambush triggered a series of clashes between the security forces and the rebels, a police source in Popayan told Efe, adding that the attack was staged by the FARC's 6th Front.

The attack came less than two days after the security forces killed 15 rebels and wounded another from the same unit in the mountains around the town of Tacueyo.

The counterinsurgency operation was carried out by the air force, navy and army based on intelligence gathered by the National Police, President Juan Manuel Santos said Saturday.

The Colombian government has made fighting the FARC a top priority and has obtained billions in U.S. aid for counterinsurgency operations.

FARC military chief Jorge Briceño, known as "Mono Jojoy," was killed in a military operation on Sept. 22 in a jungle area near La Macarena.

Several guerrillas who made up the security ring of the military chief - Colombia's most-wanted man along with the FARC's top leader, Alfonso Cano - were also killed in the airstrike.

Even prior to Mono Jojoy's death, the FARC, which has seen its numbers fall by more than half in recent years to roughly 8,000 fighters, had suffered a series of setbacks.

On July 2, 2008, 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.

The guerrilla group is believed to still be holding some 700 hostages.

FARC founder Manuel Marulanda, who was known as "Sureshot," died on March 26, 2008.

Three weeks earlier, Colombian forces staged a cross-border raid into Ecuador, killing FARC second-in-command Raul Reyes and setting off a regional diplomatic crisis.

Ivan Rios, a high-level FARC commander, was killed that same month 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.

The FARC, which has fought a succession of Colombian governments for decades, is on both the U.S. and EU lists of foreign terrorist organizations.

Drug trafficking, extortion and kidnapping-for-ransom are the FARC's main means of financing its operations.