Word: bogota
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...seemingly more concerned with spoils than social justice - and increasingly despised among even Colombians who once saw the group as a corrective to their country's admittedly epic inequalities. The U.S. and later the European Union designated the FARC as a terrorist organization. When the U.S. finally came to Bogota's aid in 2000 with the multi-billion-dollar Plan Colombia, a counter-insurgency mission disguised as a drug-interdiction project, Colombia's once laughable military began knocking the FARC to the mat. As a result, conservative President Alvaro Uribe is enjoying approval ratings as high as the Colombian sierras...
...Governor Bill Richardson, a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations who has extensive experience negotiating the release of U.S. prisoners around the world. They convinced Richardson to fly south over the weekend and explore the possibilities of exchanging Stansell, Howes and Gonsalves for captured rebels. After conferring in Bogota with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and then in Caracas with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez - a FARC sympathizer who has helped broker freedom for other guerrilla captives - Richardson urged patience. "While I believe this initial trip was successful," he told reporters, "the process of freeing the hostages won't happen quickly...
Today, Stansell, 43, a former Marine, Howes, 54, a former State Department counternarcotics pilot, and Gonsalves, 35, a former Air Force intelligence officer, live in slightly better conditions, says Pinchao. Still, a video that police seized last fall from FARC operatives in the capital, Bogota, shows the men looking weak and depressed. They have now been in captivity for five years - one of the longest hostage episodes in U.S. history. Yet few Americans know about it. President George W. Bush has mentioned the hostages publicly only once, when he visited Colombia last year. "It's amazing and discouraging to think...
...FARC a terrorist group and can't negotiate with it. But U.S. sources say they're hearing signals the FARC might accept significantly reduced sentences for Sonia and Trinidad, which the two could win during their appeals. Says Alfredo Rangel, director of the Security and Democracy Foundation in Bogota: "If a U.S. appellate judge cuts Trinidad's sentence to, say, below 20 years, it puts the ball in the FARC's court." Another possibility: the pair's transfer to, and lighter sentences in, prisons in France as part of the possible Betancourt exchange. "We aren't discounting [either] scenario," says...
...prime example of how lawlessness tormented the lives of law-abiding Brazilians. Today, though, Sao Paulo is a changed place. The annual murder tally for Sao Paulo state has plummeted from 12,800 in 1999 to 4,800 last year, a turnaround comparable to that of New York and Bogota, two cities famous for their successful policing programs...