Word: castaño
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Dates: during 2006-2006
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...Casta?o's men led us past the kitchen, where the farmer and his family were commandeered to cook for the surprise guests. They looked scared; even in Colombia it isn't every day that a death squad shows up for dinner. Casta?o was upstairs in a spare room with a desk and a few chairs. The mystery woman was just leaving the room. She was smiling, slyly grateful. Casta?o shook our hands, forcefully. He was short, a foot smaller than his bodyguards, but they obeyed him as if he were a minor god as he snapped out orders...
...reptilian brilliance to his madness. A line from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness kept running through my head. "Exterminate the brutes." He was Mr. Kurtz gone insane in the jungle. He was anxious to start the interview. His scouts had run down a band of leftist guerrillas, and Casta?o wanted to go and personally exterminate them. He had a blood debt to avenge...
...There was a complication: Casta?o wanted to do the interview right then, and we didn't. It was a big deal getting to Casta?o, and TIME's then World editor, Joshua Ramo, was flying down from New York to join us. His flight had been delayed. No matter, says Casta?o: "There's a pasture on the other side of the hill, he can land there in a small plane." We called Ramo in Cartagena. Ramo was an expert pilot, a stunt flier and he enthusiastically agreed to meet us in a cow pasture at 7 a.m. We spent the night...
...there was no aircraft, no TIME editor, in sight. Nor at 9 a.m. or 10 a.m. Casta?o couldn't wait any longer. The ambush on the leftist rebels hadn't gone exactly as planned, and he was in a hurry to evacuate his men. He would see us later that afternoon, at another secret camp. Emblyn and I hiked to a nearby village that had a public telephone. Eventually, we got the cell number of Ramo's Colombian pilot. It turns out that while in flight over the Caribbean, the single-prop had conked out. Ramo and the pilot together...
...Casta?o's men found us in the village and ordered us back to the speedboat. We were dropped at a shining white beach. Casta?o was waiting for us under a giant tree, his armed guards fanned out across the fields in a wide circle. He explained that in the night raid against the leftist ELN (National Liberation Army) rebels, his men had suffered casualties. He thought Colombia needed a strongman, the iron rule of law. His country had been at war against the Marxists for over 40 years, and someone had to finish them off, without being squeamish. In other...