Colombian trafficker, guerrilla held in Venezuela

Daniel Barrera Barrera - El Loco or Crazy Barrera - apparently Colombia's most sought-after gangster, was arrested on 18 September while speaking in a phone booth in the city of San Cristóbal, south-western Venezuela, the broadcaster Univisión reported. Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos revealed the arrest, the result of a joint operation between the security and intelligence forces of Colombia, the United States, Venezuela and Great Britain. His suspected crimes included large-scale drug trafficking and collaboration with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), also thought to be involved in trafficking. He was believed to have sent "tonnes" of cocaine to the United States since he began working in the 1980s and was considered the last of Colombia's great traffickers. Santos said Barrera "has been harming Colombia and the world for more than 20 years, devoting himself to all manner of crimes and perverse alliances with paramilitaries and the FARC." The operation was reportedly coordinated from Washington DC by Colombia's police chief José Roberto León Riaño. On 19 September Venezuelan and Colombian agents arrested a suspected member of the FARC sought for his role in a failed bomb attack in Bogotá, EFE and media reported. Luis Freddy Rojas Rincón was injured in a shootout as Venezuelan police sought to arrest him in a hotel in Jesús María Semprún in the western department of Zulia. Rojas reportedly fled to Venezuela after failing in August 2012 to blow up a police building in Bogotá with a car bomb.