BOGOTA — Colombian authorities arrested a former top rebel peace negotiator on a US drug warrant Monday, delivering a major blow to the country’s already teetering attempts to put a half-century of political violence behind it.

Seuxis Hernandez, a blind rebel ideologue best known by his alias Jesus Santrich, was picked up at his residence in Bogota on charges that he conspired with three others to smuggle into the United States several tons of cocaine with a wholesale value of $15 million.

According to an Interpol notice, Santrich met with cocaine buyers at his residence on Nov. 2, 2017, a day after one of his accomplices delivered a 5-kilogram sample of the narcotic to them at a hotel lobby in Bogota. During the meeting and subsequent negotiations, he and his accomplices allegedly discussed plans for a 10-ton drug shipment to the United States, boasting that they had access to cocaine laboratories and US-registered planes to produce and move the drugs inside Colombia.

Under terms of the accord aimed at ending Latin America’s longest-running conflict, rebels who lay down their weapons and confess their war crimes to special peace tribunals are to be spared jail time and extradition. But they are not protected for crimes committed after the December 2016 signing.

ASSOCIATED PRESS