Word: colombia
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...world leaders rattle a saber as flamboyantly as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez does. On Sunday, in a piece of vintage Chavez theater, he ordered thousands of troops and tanks to the border with Colombia after that country's military had ventured a mile into Ecuador on Saturday to kill Raul Reyes, a top commander of Colombia's FARC guerrillas. The left-wing Chavez called conservative Colombian President Alvaro Uribe a "criminal" and a "lapdog of the U.S. empire," warning ominously that "this could be the start of a war in South America...
...killed or arrested command figures like the bearded and glib Reyes, 59, who was one of the less mysterious FARC comandantes because of his role as media flack. His real name was Luis Edgar Devia Silva - and his satellite phone apparently gave away his location in remote southwestern Colombia, near or across the Ecuadoran border. Bogota has also begun extraditing FARC leaders to the U.S., and two of them were recently convicted and handed lengthy federal prison sentences. It's not even certain if the FARC's 77-year-old leader, Manuel Marulanda (known as Tirofijo, or Sureshot) is still...
...FARC, perhaps the last leftist guerrilla army in a hemisphere where they were once iconic, used to have international legitimacy and sympathy in its fight against Colombia's epic inequality; but that was before it became widely branded as a "narco-guerrilla" group. Perhaps panicked by its dark fortunes of late, the FARC has been trying in recent months to reverse its mafioso image by releasing some of its higher-profile hostages - but not the three U.S. defense contractors it abducted in 2003 after their plane crashed in southern Colombia. Those men - Keith Stansell, Thomas Howes and Marc Gonsalves - completed...
...Reyes' death, of course, won't end the Colombian conflict. And it won't remedy the dark social ills, especially the misery of millions of neglected rural Colombians, which started the civil war in the first place. Concern about that aspect of Colombia's tragedy, in fact, has prompted the U.S. Congress to slash President Bush's 2008 military aid request for Colombia by 30% - not least of all because even Colombia's modernized military is still reportedly prone to ugly human rights abuses - and to raise social and economic...
...drug interdiction, maybe Plan Colombia's billions are better spent on counter-insurgency after all, since the voracious U.S. and European appetite for snorting coke - widely regarded as the real cause of the drug crisis - shows little if any sign of abating. As Michael Reid notes in his insightful new book on Latin America, Forgotten Continent, "Plan Colombia [has] proved to be far more effective as a counter-insurgency plan than as an anti-drug plan, though it [has] been sold to the American public as the latter." The U.S. had put a $5 million bounty on Reye's head...