BOGOTA – FARC guerrillas set fire to a bus and three other vehicles on a highway near Colombia’s northeastern border with Venezuela, but no one was injured, police said Tuesday.

The attack occurred in Petrolia, a village in a rural area outside the border town of Tibu, Norte de Santander province police chief Col. Richard Portilla said.

About 10 members of the 33rd Front of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, staged the attack, Portilla said in a press conference in Cucuta, the provincial capital.

The guerrillas stopped traffic on the highway and set fire to a bus, a taxi and two private cars, the police chief said, adding that he planned to travel to the scene of the attack.

The rebels painted slogans on several other vehicles and used them to block the road.

The highway remains closed, Portilla said, adding that army troops were searching for the rebels who carried out the “unfortunate terrorist incident.”

The FARC, Colombia’s oldest and largest leftist guerrilla group, was founded in 1964, has an estimated 8,000 to 17,000 fighters and operates across a large swath of this Andean nation.

President Alvaro Uribe’s administration has made fighting the FARC 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.

The origin of Colombia’s civil strife dates back to 1948, when the assassination of popular politician Jorge Eliecer Gaitan sparked a 10-year-long civil war known as “La Violencia.”

About six years after that conflict ended with a power-sharing pact between Colombia’s two main parties, a government offensive against peasant self-defense groups led Marulanda, who was pursued by death squads during La Violencia, to form the FARC.

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