Word: colombia
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OLIVER STONE, Hollywood director, who has joined a mission led by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez to retrieve three hostages held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, the nation's largest guerrilla army...
...what Chavez discovered as he rang in 2008 last night is that the grapes of time sour pretty quickly in violence-torn Colombia. The hostage release collapsed as 2007 ticked away. Many had hoped it would not only revive peace talks to end Colombia's bloody, four-decade-old civil war, but also be a precursor to freeing three Americans held by the guerrillas. The debacle has now left Chavez looking humiliated, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe looking churlish and the leftist rebels, the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces - known by their Spanish acronym, the FARC - looking more than ever like...
Worse, it left the Colombian peace process looking as tangled as the jungle where waiting Venezuelan helicopters were supposed to retrieve the hostages. Nearby in Villavicencio, Colombia, south of Bogota, observers from France, Switzerland and six Latin American countries, as well as celebrity onlookers like American film director Oliver Stone, packed their bags and left shaking their heads. As he departed, Stone, who has a penchant for things guerrilla, said, "Shame on Colombia," referring to what was widely seen as meddling by President Uribe that may have helped sink the release operation...
...learned an important lesson about the 20,000-strong rebel army: it couldn't care less about its public relations image because it is powerful and rich enough not to have to care. Maybe it could have been counted on to keep its word a generation ago, when combating Colombia's epic social inequalities was still its primary objective. But today the FARC, which controls a mammoth swath of southern Colombia, is widely considered to be a ruthless mafia that earns as much as $1 billion a year via ransom kidnapping and protecting the country's cocaine trade...
February, in fact, marks the fifth anniversary of the FARC's capture of three U.S. defense contractors - and the sixth for the rebels' best-known captive, liberal Colombian Senator and presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, whose dual Colombia-French citizenship has made her a cause celebre in Europe. Chavez said he still believes the FARC will release Gonzalez and Rojas, who was Betancourt's running mate. But if they don't, 2008 will begin as yet one more year of shame for Colombia...