An aircraft used by the U.S. government to monitor drug trafficking routes crashed Sunday in northern Colombia, killing three Americans and a Panamanian, the U.S. military said Sunday.

"Two Americans survived the crash and were rescued by Colombian military forces and taken to a hospital in Bogota," the U.S. Southern Command said.

The Colombian government resumed peace talks with leftist rebels Thursday in a renewed bid to end nearly half a century of armed conflict.

Negotiations, which began in November, picked up again in the Cuban capital Havana following a two-week break.

Colombia's leftist FARC guerrillas said Wednesday they have been victims of "cyber espionage," and suggested the U.S. National Security Agency may be to blame.

Recent revelations by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden have exposed the NSA's far-reaching electronic surveillance of phone records and Internet traffic.

U.S. rights activist Jesse Jackson on Saturday agreed to a request from Colombian guerrillas to help mediate the release of a U.S. military veteran the rebels captured in June.

In a statement published on the website of the daily El Tiempo, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) asked Jackson to help expedite the release of Kevin Scott Sutay, who was captured in the central-eastern region of Guaviare when he traveled through the area as a tourist.

Since its founding nearly 50 years ago Colombia's leftist rebel army FARC has recruited some 13,000 minors, some as young as eight, a newspaper said Monday.

The rebel group has been in peace talks with the government since last November, and leaders will be charged over recruiting child soldiers even if a peace accord is reached and some kind of amnesty for other offenses is applied, prosecutor Leonardo Cabana told the newspaper El Espectador.

Colombian police searching an after-hours bar triggered a stampede that left six people dead early Sunday, authorities said.

Bogota police chief General Luis Eduardo Martinez said another five were injured in the bar in a popular nightlife district. The dead included five women and a man.

Police in Colombia seized 950 kilograms (2,100 pounds) of cocaine in a drug processing laboratory allegedly run by FARC rebels, officials said Thursday.

The drugs, ready for distribution, were confiscated in the country's southwestern Cauca department after a confrontation with guerrillas who managed to flee the scene.

President Juan Manuel Santos ordered troops on to the streets of Bogota as well as Colombia's highways on Friday, after violent protests in support of striking farmworkers left two dead.

Within hours, leaders of farm workers in a key province near Bogota began calling on their followers to lift roadblocks around the country, saying in a statement they had reached "partial agreements" with the government.

Colombia's constitutional court on Wednesday approved a reform that will enable rebels who lay down their arms after a peace process to take part in political life, it said.

The constitutional amendment, approved by lawmakers in 2012, was given the green light by seven of the court's nine justices, the court said in a statement.

Venezuela said Monday it derailed a plot to kill President Nicolas Maduro, arresting two hitmen it said wanted to assassinate the leftist leader on orders from a Colombian right-wing ex-president.

Interior Minister Miguel Rodriguez said at a briefing that Caracas arrested the alleged hitmen, two Colombians, on August 13.