Word: colombia
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...biggest challenge is making them emotionally whole again," says Philippe Houdard, founder of the Miami-based Developing Minds Foundation, "to get them from being killing machines to normal human beings." The rehabilitation program, started in 2003 and supported by Developing Minds and Colombia's Family Welfare Institute, offers housing, recreation, counseling, schooling and vocational training to former child soldiers. The 31 boys here are among the nearly 3,000 minors who have given up guerrilla life under a 2003 government amnesty program. The guerrilla groups, formed out of the leftist peasant militias of the 1960s, continue to fight Colombia...
...says that when he was 12 years old, paramilitary soldiers murdered his mother and brother. (His name and those of other former guerrillas have been changed to protect their identity.) "I felt a lot of anger, like revenge," he remembers. He signed up with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country's biggest guerrilla group, and within a few years was ordering deadly attacks of his own--including the kidnapping and murder of 13 politicians. "I killed a lot of people, but here I am," he says. Now 17, Humberto is studying confectionery and will soon enter...
...pictures of Colombia's drug culture...
...Rourke, the city-council member, puts it. Talk of legalizing marijuana is growing; the U.N. Commission on Narcotic Drugs in March heard prominent drug researchers argue that cannabis should be sold legally and taxed like tobacco. Ernesto Zedillo and César Gaviria, former Presidents of Mexico and Colombia, respectively, have said the same. And Mexico's Congress is again debating decriminalization of marijuana use, after backing off the issue a few years ago under intense pressure from the Bush Administration...
...efforts in other areas of the economy led to significant successes that have likely mitigated the current recession. Besides the Central American Free Trade Agreement, he more than quadrupled the number of trade agreements between the U.S. and other countries and would have implemented others with nations like Colombia had congressional Democrats let him. Expansions of free trade offer a potential first step to economic recovery: After all, in the beginning throes of the crisis in 2007, it was double-digit annualized export growth that kept GDP growing despite lagging consumption and investment...