Peruvian police have arrested a top commander of the Maoist Shining Path guerrilla group in an operation in which two alleged rebel fighters were killed, local media reported on Wednesday.

Edgar Mejia, also known as “Comrade Izula,” was detained at noon, Marlon Savitzky, a police chief in the Huallaga region was quoted as saying by Peru 21 in its website.

Savitzky said the rebel leader is suspected of leading guerrilla groups in two gun battles with police in the past few years in which 11 police officers and a representative of the attorney’s office were killed.

In Peru’s main coca growing regions, the Alto Huallaga, the Ene and Apurimac River Valleys, police and soldiers often clash with cocaine smugglers with links to the Shining Path group that waged a war against the state in the 1980s and 1990s.

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Ecuador was under a state of siege Friday, the streets quiet with the military in charge of public order, after soldiers rescued President Rafael Correa from a hospital where he’d been surrounded by police who roughed him up and tear-gassed him earlier.

Correa and his ministers called Thursday’s revolt — in which insurgents also paralyzed the nation with airport shutdowns and highway blockades — an attempt to overthrow him and not just a simple insurrection by angry security force members over a new law that would cut benefits for public servants.

The region’s presidents quickly showed their support for Correa, rushing to a meeting in Buenos Aires early Friday and condemning what many called a coup attempt and kidnapping of Correa. The U.S. also warned those who threaten Ecuador’s democracy that the leftist Correa has Washington’s full support.

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One of the FARC’s top commanders, “Mono Jojoy,” was killed by Colombian state forces. According to Caracol Radio, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos confirmed the guerrilla leader’s death from New York City.

According to several Colombian media sources, the head of the FARC’s Eastern Bloc and member of its Secretariat was killed in an air strike in a region called La Macarena in the central Colombian Meta department, 200 miles south of Bogota.

In the attack, some 20 other guerrillas were reportedly also killed.

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Twenty-two Colombian guerrillas were killed Sunday in an airstrike, the country’s defense minister said.

The Colombian air force bombing was part of an operation against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, in southern Colombia, Defense Minister Rodrigo Rivera said. The operation was ongoing and more bodies could be found, he said.

Rebels in the area had killed eight police officers in an attack earlier this month.

Sunday’s bombing campaign was one of the strongest blows against the FARC in recent memory.

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Left-wing guerrillas have increased their attacks against police installations in cocaine-producing areas of southern Colombia, killing eight officers on Friday and bringing this month’s death toll to 55.

President Juan Manuel Santos took office last month, promising to keep up pressure on the drug-running insurgents.

But his government has gotten off to a difficult start in the provinces of Narino and Putumayo, where the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has gone on the offensive.

The provinces bordering Ecuador are key to the cocaine smuggling operations that fund Colombia’s decades-old
insurgency.

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http://af.reuters.co … dAFN1025921520100910