Word: colombia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Bogotá Freedom for FARC Hostages Former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt was rescued in a Colombian military-intelligence operation July 2, ending her six years as a hostage of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The most famous of FARC's estimated 750 captives, Betancourt, who holds French citizenship, was liberated along with 14 others, including three U.S. military contractors...
...highway between Medellín and Colombia's Caribbean coast winds through one of South America's major drug-producing regions. The road is controlled by army and police checkpoints, but to enter the Cordillera Occidental mountains that hover above it, you need the permission of the FARC (The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), the fierce Marxist guerrillas who control the cultivation of the area's coca crop, the raw material of cocaine. That rare permiso allowed TIME to take an eight-hour mule ride through the mountains, rivers, jungles and dozens of coca plantations to the encampment of German...
...recently one of the most powerful rebel forces the hemisphere had ever seen, has had its membership slashed from as many as 20,000 a decade ago to about 10,000 today. The guerrillas are far from vanquished, but they are the target of the biggest military offensive in Colombia's history, and they've lost several key commanders. The FARC is being pushed into remote mountains and jungle redoubts, and it hasn't captured a town since 2004. Fighters are deserting the FARC at a rate of 300 a month, according to the government, leading many analysts to believe...
...FARC when he was 15 and has spent more than two decades in these mountains. "If they couldn't defeat us when we were a few dozen farmers, without uniforms and hardly any weapons, how can they beat us now when there are [still] thousands of us all over Colombia? This is a propaganda war. A couple of weeks ago the army came in here - we ambushed them and they ran away. You'd never read about that in the press. They only show you army victories...
Drug interdiction was the professed purpose of the $5 billion U.S. Plan Colombia, launched in 2000, but its focus shifted instead to a counterinsurgency campaign to eliminate the FARC. "Most of the money that was supposedly for the war on drugs has been used for war against the guerrillas," Comandante Alberto notes. Plan Colombia, which has afforded Colombia's military U.S. hardware like Black Hawk and Huey helicopters, making it difficult for the rebels to concentrate in large units, has been successful in hobbling the FARC. But coca cultivation in Colombia rose in 2007, according to a new U.N. report...