BOGOTA – At least two people were killed and 15 others wounded when suspected members of Colombia’s FARC guerrilla group detonated a bomb in the southern city of San Vicente del Caguan, municipal officials told Efe.

The blast occurred around 4:00 p.m. Tuesday in the downtown section of the city, which was the site of failed peace talks between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and the government between 1999 and 2002, San Vicente del Caguan Mayor Hernan Cortes Villalba said.

“A powerful bomb exploded in the center of San Vicente del Caguan. We have a report of 15 people wounded, five of them seriously, and two people dead,” the mayor said.

The guerrillas may have used a grenade in the attack, killing two children, police chief Gen. Orlando Paez said by telephone.

The wounded were taken to hospitals in the southern cities of Neiva and Florencia, the general said.

Initial indications are that the attack was carried out by FARC fighters who operate in San Vicente del Caguan, Paez said.

The FARC, Colombia’s oldest and largest leftist guerrilla group, was founded in 1964 and today operates across a large swath of this Andean nation.

President Alvaro Uribe’s administration has made fighting the FARC, which has an estimated 8,000 to 17,000 fighters, a top priority and has obtained billions in U.S. aid for counterinsurgency operations.

The FARC, whose leader is Alfonso Cano, suffered a series of blows last year.

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.

A succession of governments have battled Colombia’s leftist insurgent groups since the mid-1960s.

In 1999, then-President Andres Pastrana allowed the creation of a Switzerland-sized “neutral” zone in the jungles of southern Colombia for peace talks with the FARC.

After several years of fitful and ultimately fruitless negotiations, Pastrana ordered the armed forces to retake the region in early 2002. But while the arrangement lasted, the FARC enjoyed free rein within the zone.

The FARC is on both the U.S. and EU lists of terrorist groups. Drug trafficking, extortion and kidnapping-for-ransom are the FARC’s main means of financing its operations. EFE