Word: castaño
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...thunderheads on the horizon opened like a curtain, and a speedboat came rocketing towards us. Casta?o had sent the boat. Thoughtfully, he'd also provided rain slickers for us. We bounded across the choppy water, into the seam of black clouds. The journey lasted an hour, with lightning spearing around us. Finally, we sighted land. I don't know if it was Panama or Colombia; it was all jungle. But the launch pulled up at a dock and a farmhouse materialized in the mist. I could make out the silhouettes of towering mercenaries who looked like they had been outfitted...
...Casta?o was a swift, violent man, built like a scrappy welterweight fighter, and you'd be a fool to take him straight on. I met him once, in 2000, and it was the strangest assignment I've ever done. Not dangerous, as I had expected, but strange...
...goons had left a message for me at my hotel, through an intermediary. When the commander of a death squad says he wants to see you, and he knows the number of your hotel room, it's an offer you can't refuse. Casta?o boasted of killing a few journalists; he said he didn't like their style...
...Casta?o's reign of terror originally began as act of vengeance. His dairyman father was kidnapped in 1981 by Marxist rebels and held for a $7,000 ransom. The sum was paid, but the rebels killed him anyway. After that, Casta?o swore revenge and eventually raised a 30,000- man army of mercenaries funded by big landowners and cocaine traffickers. Then he and his brothers strong-armed their way into the drug trade, exporting a total of about 17 tons of coke and heroin to the U.S. and Europe...
...along a muddy track that ran through sugarcane fields and dead-ended on a beach. It was pouring, and lightning stabbed out of thunderclouds. The silent woman, the bodyguard, the photographer and I took shelter in an empty beach shack. I tried to figure out who the woman was. Casta?o's mistress? The girlfriend of a jailed drug lord who needed Casta?o's help? I never found out. Just then, a procession of musicians and dancers appeared out of the rain, as if from the pages of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. On closer examination the women dancers were...