COLOMBIAN President Juan Manuel Santos said Monday the country’s largest rebel group was increasingly selling its cattle to finance itself as income from trafficking cocaine drops.

    Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, has been reeling from more than a decade of a military offensive that has dealt it major blows and cut cocaine output in one of the world’s top producers of the drug.

    “The FARC is designing a complete strategy to counter the problem of lack of financing ... due to the blows to their funding sources, especially drug trafficking. One of the orders was to sell cattle to get more resources,” Santos said.

    The FARC has been trying in recent weeks to sell cattle stolen in other regions of the country, Santos said.

    The rebels have for decades funded their movement through control of coca production and have built up ties with drug gangs in some parts of the country and fought for control over key routes and supplies in others.

    The billions of dollars a year in cocaine money has been one of the main reasons why Colombia’s war has continued for nearly five decades and its political system has been rocked by scandals of collusion between officials and gangs.

    Santos is responsible for some of the harshest blows against the FARC, including killing the group’s leader Alfonso Cano in November.

    Despite being at its weakest in years, the FARC still carry out ambushes.(SD-Agencies)