Word: colombia
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Laptop computers packed with evidence allegedly tying Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez to Colombia's Marxist FARC rebels pose a dilemma for the Bush Administration: The fact that the FARC is listed by Washington as a terrorist organization means the laptop data provide cause for the U.S. to add Chavez's government to its list of international sponsors of terrorism, as many conservatives on Capitol Hill are now demanding. But there are also numerous reasons the Administration could resist the temptation to turn up the heat on its most vocal challenger in Latin America...
...when the Colombian army overran a FARC base in neighboring Ecuador, killing guerrilla boss Raul Reyes. Their contents, according to the Colombian government, extensively link Chavez with the rebels, even revealing an alleged Venezuelan plan to loan the FARC $250 million. Chavez denies funding the rebels and accuses Colombia of planting the laptops. But on Thursday, the Paris-based international police agency Interpol reported that its examination of the computers found no evidence that they had been tampered with. Colombia's conservative President Alvaro Uribe and the Bush Administration have issued hearty told-you-so's about Chavez...
...second reason the U.S. may proceed with caution is the regional furor caused by the operation during which the laptops were captured: Colombia's incursion into Ecuador was backed by the U.S., but was branded a violation of international law by the Organization of American States, and prompted a regional diplomatic crisis that left Colombia and the U.S. isolated. As a result, much of the region feels the U.S. lacks the moral authority in this case to label Venezuela a terrorism sponsor. Even the Republican staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in a report issued last month headed...
...Congress debates the best way to fix the problem, Mexico is fast spiraling in the direction of the narco-terror that gripped Colombia in the 1980s and the early 1990s. Mexico's cartels, including the Sinaloa gang's main rival, the Gulf Cartel, have in recent years raised the scale of the bloodletting by introducing such weapons as grenades, AK-47 assault rifles and bazookas, as well as ghastly methods like mass beheadings...
...February, a Sinaloa operative was killed and another injured during a botched attempt to detonate a bomb outside a Mexico City police headquarters - a portent that the mafias may be poised to unleash the kind of frontal guerrilla assault on law enforcement seen in Colombia two decades ago. "Each year, the violence takes on distinct new dimensions," says Victor Clark Alfaro, a security expert at the Binational Human Rights Center in Tijuana. "It's like fighting guerrillas - it often defies understanding...