Word: colombia
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With each company pointing the finger at the other, however, it's increasingly difficult to get straight answers. Last week Ford admitted it had heard of tread-separation incidents with locally made Firestone Wilderness tires in Venezuela, as well as in Colombia and Ecuador, as far back as the fall of 1998, a year and a half before the company started replacing them on some 30,000 vehicles in the region. It blamed Firestone's misleading diagnosis of the problem for the delay in finding the defect. Firestone says it simply mislabeled some tires as having an extra, protective nylon...
...talked for an hour in the Oval Office and arrived at a tentative conclusion before Clinton headed for the links. He had further discussions Wednesday on Air Force One with Berger and chief of staff JOHN PODESTA as they returned from a one-day visit to Colombia, and the final decision was made Thursday...
...President Clinton last week visited the troubled country to showcase the $1.3 billion in mostly military U.S. aid being sent ostensibly to help Colombia's security forces fight the war on drugs. But nothing is that simple in a country that has been in the grip of an almost 40-year civil war in which all of the major protagonists - the left-wing guerrillas of the FARC and ELN groups; the right-wing paramilitary groups; and the government's own army (which will be the prime beneficiary of the aid) - have been linked both with ugly human rights abuses...
...Colombia produces 80 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States, the largest proportion of it in territory under the direct control of the FARC. Taxing the traffickers in exchange for protection earns the Marxist army some $700 million a year, making it easily the wealthiest peasant guerrilla movement in history, one that is better equipped than the army it is fighting. That has prompted the U.S. to blur the distinction between counterinsurgency and the war on drugs in order to strengthen the government's forces - which many observers in the region and in the U.S. believe...
...Capitol Hill believe that without the aid, the Colombian state is in danger of collapse, which in the end would be good news only for the narco-traffickers and the Marxist tycoons who protect them. On the other hand, regional leaders have pointed out that even if "Plan Colombia" succeeds in lowering production of narcotics in that country, that would simply displace the problem across the border into Brazil, Venezuela or Peru. As long as there's a bullish market for drugs in the U.S. and grinding poverty in Latin America, there's little chance of eliminating the cocaine industry...