Word: cocas
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...terminals that function as combination ATMs and online shopping kiosks, offering CDs, concert tickets and hotel reservations. The next step, say industry experts, is to link conventional vending machines with Japan's ubiquitous cellular telephones. In March, Japanese telecommunications giant NTT DoCoMo announced that it is teaming up with Coca-Cola Japan and Itochu Corp. to test a system that will link i-mode, the company's Net phone service, with vending machines, allowing users to pay for drinks by pressing a few buttons on their handsets...
...world, as common here as the Internet entrepreneur seemed to be in the U.S. two years ago. Theirs is a growth business. Everyone seems to be on one side of the game or the other--except those unfortunate enough to be caught in the middle. Charts of coca production and the violence that goes along with it--kidnappings, massacres, executions--look like a NASDAQ chart from 1998. The jungles of Colombia and Peru and Bolivia are dotted with the paraphernalia buttressing a shadowy and bloody war: American radar systems, air bases and special-operations training units...
...part of a significant U.S. presence in the region. On any given day in the past two or three years, it was possible to find U.S. air hardware in the skies over Colombia and Peru. The primary missions: helping local authorities demolish the "air bridge" that links Andean coca crops to laboratories in Colombia by locating and arresting traffickers, dynamiting clandestine runways and trafficker hideouts and assisting in ambitious crop-eradication projects...
...National Liberation Army) and an increasing number of paramilitary right-wingers taking the antiguerrilla fight into their own hands. The only groups that don't often fight each other are the FARC and the ELN. But both the FARC rebels and the paramilitaries derive huge revenues by "taxing" coca production in areas they control. Last year alone, the FARC, the largest group, is estimated to have banked $200 million to $400 million this...
Will it work? U.S. and Colombian officials insist that they are on the verge of turning the corner in the war. But they have been saying that for years, even as coca production has boomed. The most pessimistic view of the expanded plan is that it will simply militarize an even larger chunk of the hemisphere, creating war zones all along Colombia's borders. Even the legacy of the Amazon River shoot-down will simply be an adjustment of procedures. No one seriously suggests letting the traffickers have the skies back...