Word: castano
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...conversation with him was like an encounter with Mr. Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. This man who is responsible for so much of Colombia's barbarity possesses a glittering, dangerous lucidity. After seeing Castano on TV last August, wearing a casual white sweater instead of his usual combat gear and talking with great charm and simple logic, many Colombians began to think that in a twisted way his war makes sense. "The art of the guerrillas is to hide themselves among the civilians. That may give them immunity against the army and police but not against us," Castano...
...Castano near the Panama border? Because, he explained, his men had been tracking FARC guerrillas moving out of secret bases deep inside the Panamanian jungle. Last Saturday night a contingent of 300 FARC rebels attacked a Colombian army outpost in the Darien rain forest. Mortars screeched through the mist, and the dark jungle engulfing the army camp was suddenly lit by hundreds of blazing rebel guns. The Colombian army sergeant in charge and his 60 men faced annihilation. In the confusion and crashing grenade explosions, it took the FARC attackers a while to realize that they were suddenly being shot...
Rebels accuse the AUC of being a sinister arm of the Colombian military, but Castano denies any formal link. However, he does admit to having furtive contacts with the lower echelons of the army and police. But he says these ties are forged by having a common enemy, the guerrillas. "Once the superior officers come into battle, we clear off because they shoot at us," he says. So far this year, the army says it has killed more than 70 of Castano's milita and captured more than...
...Castano's crusade against the rebels began as a white-hot act of revenge: in 1979 a FARC gang kidnapped his father, a dairy farmer in Cordoba province. The members demanded $50,000, and when the Castano family could raise only $20,000, they executed him. "We knew these guerrillas. We'd let them sleep in our house. We sympathized with their social ideals," Castano recalls. Later, his kid sister was killed in a botched kidnapping by the FARC. Eight more of his siblings were later killed, either by drug hit men or rebels, he says...
...Castano is a backer of Plan Colombia--in which the U.S. is funding a $1.3 billion drug-eradication program--even though most of the AUC's funds come from shaking down drug traffickers. "I prefer taking cash from the narcos than from honest people," says Castano, who explains that his group, like the rebels, collects a "tax" on coca paste and on the drug's transportation in AUC-controlled areas. Castano has given orders not to shoot at the government crop-spraying aircraft when they swoop over coca fields in his areas...