Soldiers have seized more than 2.1 tonnes of cocaine at a laboratory belonging to the FARC guerrilla group in Narino, a Colombian province on the southern border with Ecuador, the army says.
The illegal drug lab was discovered in Tellez Alto, a village outside the city of Funes, the army brigade based in Pasto, the capital of Narino, says.
The complex included several wooden structures and sprawled over about half a hectare.
"There was a camp at the same site to house between 20 and 28 terrorists," the army said on Monday.
The lab was operated by the 48th Front of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the army said.
The FARC, Colombia's oldest and largest leftist guerrilla group, was founded in 1964, has an estimated 8000 fighters and operates across a large swath of this Andean nation.
The Colombian government has made fighting the FARC a top priority and has obtained billions in US aid for counterinsurgency operations.
The FARC has suffered a series of setbacks in recent years at the hands of the Colombian security forces.
Alfonso Cano, the FARC's top leader, was killed on November 4 in a military and police operation that the government hailed as the biggest blow to the FARC in its nearly 50-year history.
Cano, a 63-year-old intellectual who had entered the ranks of the FARC 30 years ago, was killed in a remote area of the southwestern province of Cauca a few hours after fleeing a bombardment.
The FARC also suffered a series of blows in 2008, with the biggest coming in July that year, when the Colombian army rescued a group of high-profile, rebel-held captives: former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, US military contractors Thomas Howes, Keith Stansell and Marc Gonsalves, and 11 other Colombian police officers and soldiers.
The FARC is on both the US and EU lists of terrorist groups. Drug trafficking, extortion and kidnapping-for-ransom are its main means of financing its operations.
