Bogota – FARC guerrillas on Sunday left thousands of residents of about 15 northeastern Colombian towns without electricity after dynamiting four power pylons, regional authorities reported.
The attacks, attributed to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, took place just eight hours after technicians reestablished on Saturday the region’s power supply, which had been interrupted for three days by a similar strike on the electric supply infrastructure.
The Norte de Santander province’s electricity firm Centrales Electricas, or Cens, announced in Cucuta, the provincial capital, that the leftist guerrillas had downed four pylons that were part of two transmission lines.
Two of the towers were part of the transmission line between the towns of El Zulia and Tibu, near the Venezuelan border, which on Thursday morning had been disrupted when rebels blew up another pylon.
Cens manager Alberto Rangel told a journalist with Bogota’s Caracol Radio that the new attacks affected some 75,000 customers in the Catatumbo and Ocaña areas in Norte de Santander, as well as a similar number in the southern portion of neighboring Cesar province. EFE
