By FRANK BAJAK
Associated Press Writer

The U.S. government says it will seek the extradition of two leftist rebel "cocaine brokers" arrested in Colombia on charges of conspiring to export a ton of the drug through Venezuela.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration identified the two, which it said were arrested in Colombia on Thursday, as Jose Joaquin Montes and Maria Lilian Castellanos.

It said both were attached to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia's 10th Front in Arauca state, which borders Venezuela.

Colombian and U.S. officials have long said the rebel forces, known as the FARC, use Venezuelan territory for refuge, to treat its wounded, to regroup and rearm - and to export cocaine.

In September, Washington accused three security officials in the inner circle of leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of aiding the FARC by supplying it with arms and drug-trafficking assistance.

Chavez denies abetting the rebels but Colombia says documents found in a laptop belonging to a top FARC leader slain in March 2008 indicate he was preparing to give them an open-ended loan of several hundred million dollars.

The DEA did not offer details of the capture of Montes and Castellanos but Colombia's Defense Ministry said Castellanos was seized in a residence in the city of Arauca.

It said she is 51 and had run international drug trafficking operations for the rebels' powerful Eastern bloc and two other fronts.

Latin America's oldest and largest rebel army, the FARC has been fighting to overthrow successive Colombian governments for 45 years and funds itself chiefly through the cocaine trade.

Castellanos and Montes are named in an indictment unsealed Thursday in U.S. District court in Manhattan that says that beginning in April 2006 they "met with DEA undercover agents, posing as representatives of the Mexican Juarez Cartel, to plan a shipment of one ton of cocaine from airstrips in Venezuela," the DEA said in a statement posted to its Web site on Friday.

It did not say whether it had evidence that that two delivered any drugs.

The FARC, listed as a "foreign terrorist organization" by the U.S. government, has suffered a series of crippling blows in the past few years, capped by the July 2 rescue of three U.S. military contractors and the French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt in an elaborate ruse by military agents posing as humanitarian workers.

The Defense Ministry says it is down to about 9,000 fighters, about half its strength of a decade ago.