Word: colombia
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...COLOMBIA Get Out and Stay Out In response to a government cease-fire offer, Colombia's largest rebel group demanded the withdrawal of U.S. military advisers and an end to Plan Colombia, President Andrés Pastrana's effort to fight drug trafficking, a key source of rebel income. The call from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) came two days after Washington announced an expansion of its military-aid package. FARC accused the U.S. of a "humiliating violation of our national sovereignty...
...COLOMBIA Mediation Helps Rebel leaders agreed to restart peace talks after President Andrés Pastrana called their bluff by threatening to retake their safe haven. But even as the President set another deadline for a cease-fire timetable, observers of the three-year peace process were hopeful of maintaining the momentum. The difference, they said, was the presence of international negotiators, including a U.N. envoy and diplomats from 10 countries. Renewed bombing attacks by FARC guerrillas in areas south of the capital left others less convinced...
...troops and blowing up so many electricity pylons that some provinces are rationing electricity. Sabotage could hit Bogota itself, where the FARC has its urban "militia" in the slums at the capital's southern end. In Washington, the Colombian ambassador is lobbying for the U.S. to drop the Plan Colombia restriction that limits U.S. aid strictly to the drug-war campaign. The Colombians want U.S. training for a new mobile battalion that would protect the country's infrastructure...
...armed actors," as Colombians call them, have used the three-year peace process to build up their arsenals and their fighting strength. And the drug business, the economic engine of conflict, is prospering. So far, the big victory of Plan Colombia is - according to official stats - to have stopped an increase in coca plant cultivation...
...being prodded by a U.N. diplomat and a group of 10 European and Latin American ambassadors. Lame duck President Andres Pastrana bet his presidency and career on peace and he may be the first Colombian president to turn over a peace process in motion. But this is Colombia. By the logic of a place where civil conflict has been nearly constant since independence, peace in motion means warriors on the march...