Word: alberto
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fierce Marxist guerrillas who control the cultivation of the area's coca crop, the raw material of cocaine. That rare permiso allowed TIME to take an eight-hour mule ride through the mountains, rivers, jungles and dozens of coca plantations to the encampment of German Silva Hernandez, alias Comandante Alberto, one of the commanders of the FARC's 18th Front. He carries a bullet scar on his stomach and a $36,000 government bounty on his head. But unlike so many FARC members these days - especially in the wake of this week's astonishing army rescue of high-profile FARC...
...FARC's critics would say it's Comandante Alberto who needs better information. The reality is that the FARC, until recently one of the most powerful rebel forces the hemisphere had ever seen, has had its membership slashed from as many as 20,000 a decade ago to about 10,000 today. The guerrillas are far from vanquished, but they are the target of the biggest military offensive in Colombia's history, and they've lost several key commanders. The FARC is being pushed into remote mountains and jungle redoubts, and it hasn't captured a town since 2004. Fighters...
...strongholds like the Cordillera Occidental, FARC commanders and soldiers remain defiant. And while it might sound delusional to many, they insist the guerrillas have more life than the government claims. "They've been saying [we're defeated] since the 1960s," says Comandante Alberto, who joined the FARC when he was 15 and has spent more than two decades in these mountains. "If they couldn't defeat us when we were a few dozen farmers, without uniforms and hardly any weapons, how can they beat us now when there are [still] thousands of us all over Colombia? This is a propaganda...
...interdiction was the professed purpose of the $5 billion U.S. Plan Colombia, launched in 2000, but its focus shifted instead to a counterinsurgency campaign to eliminate the FARC. "Most of the money that was supposedly for the war on drugs has been used for war against the guerrillas," Comandante Alberto notes. Plan Colombia, which has afforded Colombia's military U.S. hardware like Black Hawk and Huey helicopters, making it difficult for the rebels to concentrate in large units, has been successful in hobbling the FARC. But coca cultivation in Colombia rose in 2007, according to a new U.N. report...
FARC commanders dismiss the "narco-guerrilla" portrayal as government propaganda and insist they're still a viable rebel movement whose survival doesn't depend on drug income. For his part, Alberto points to his unit's spartan housing conditions - mountain and jungle shacks often without electricity or running water - as proof that they're not exactly living as sumptuously as famous cocaine kingpins like Pablo Escobar...