Word: colombia
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...Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela have avoided war, but now two other Andean nations are gearing up for battle. This time the foe is the United Nations, and the cause is the right to chew coca, the raw material of cocaine. It may not sound as important as the diplomatic row that shook the region earlier this month. But the dispute is momentous for millions of people in Bolivia and Peru - where the coca leaf is sacred to indigenous culture and a tonic of modern life - and for anti-drug officials in the U.S. and other countries who are desperate...
...problem is, it's also considered the building block of broken lives in the rest of the world, where cocaine consumption and addiction remain rampant in developed regions like North America and Europe. The U.S. has spent more than $5 billion this decade aiding Colombia's largely failed efforts to eradicate coca cultivation. Meanwhile, Washington and the U.N. have tried to get Bolivia and Peru to reduce their coca crops to the bare minimum for traditional consumption. Peru and Bolivia are the region's second and third largest coca producers, behind Colombia, with about more than 75,000 hectares...
...Death and Man of War for a reason.' THOMAS PASQUARELLO, regional director of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, on the capture of notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout, who had previously worked with U.S. contractors in Iraq but ran afoul of the law when he allegedly smuggled guns to Colombia's leftist rebels and other outlawed groups...
THOMAS PASQUARELLO, regional director of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, on the capture of notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout, who had previously worked with U.S. contractors in Iraq but ran afoul of the law when he allegedly smuggled guns to Colombia's leftist rebels and other outlawed groups...
...working for the DEA emailed an associate of Bout in November to arrange for an arms shipment FARC. Using the code words "farming equipment" in the emails, Bout's intermediary allegedly planned for 100 Russian-made Ingla surface-to-air missiles to be air-dropped into FARC territory inside Colombia. After meetings in Curacao, Copenhagen and Bucharest, the DEA, through confidential sources, arranged for Bout to travel to Bangkok, Thailand to finalize the deal on March 6. That's when the Royal Thai police, working with the DEA, arrested him on charges of providing material support of a foreign terrorist...