By Vivian Sequera
Wednesday, December 23, 2009; A10

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA -- The governor of a southern state was found dead Tuesday, his throat slit, less than 24 hours after being abducted by leftist rebels in the first kidnapping of a major Colombian politician since 2002.

The body of Gov. Luis Francisco Cuéllar of Caqueta state was found not far from Florencia, the state capital, where the 69-year-old was kidnapped late Monday, security official Edilberto Ramón Endo said.

President Álvaro Uribe said in a television address that it was not clear when exactly the governor was slain as 2,000 soldiers and police officers spread into the jungle highlands outside Florencia looking for the kidnappers.

Uribe said military officials told him that "because security forces were in pursuit, the terrorists, in order to avoid gunfire, proceeded to cut the throat of the governor."

The governor was abducted by eight to 10 men in military uniforms who arrived at his home in a pickup, killed a police guard and blasted open the front door with explosives, according to Gen. Orlando Páez, operations chief for the national police. Cuéllar was driven into the mountains that border Florencia, Páez said.

Uribe, whose rancher father was killed by leftist rebels in a botched 1983 kidnapping, had ordered security forces to rescue Cuéllar, also a cattle rancher.

"We cannot continue to submit to the whims of the terrorists, of the terrorists who bathe this country in blood," Uribe told reporters earlier in the day.

Defense Minister Gabriel Silva blamed the kidnapping on the Teofilo Forero unit of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

Caqueta has long been a FARC stronghold and is among those Colombian states with the highest military presence.

It was in Caqueta that the FARC abducted French-Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt in 2002.

After Uribe was elected that year to his first term, kidnappings that had been common in Colombia's countryside diminished sharply.

The conservative president launched a full frontal assault on the FARC, nearly doubling the size of Colombia's military and benefiting from $700 million in annual U.S. military aid.

Nevertheless, Silva said in a newspaper interview last weekend that FARC is "neither vanquished nor in its death throes" -- though it has been reduced by desertions and killings to about 8,000 fighters, half its size in 2002.

-- Associated Press