Word: colombian
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...water? Or the wild monkey? Either way, the improvised Amazon chow was playing havoc with Walter Suárez's innards. Suárez was part of a contingent of 147 Colombian soldiers punching through the snarled jungle foliage as part of a massive operation to encircle the guerrillas holding Keith Stansell, Marc Gonsalves, and Tom Howes. But as the troops marched deeper into the wild, they began running out of supplies...
...heart raced. Each plastic- wrapped packet contained a thousand banknotes, or 20 million Colombian pesos - the equivalent of nearly $7,000. His wallet had never held more than petty cash, but now he was stuffing his uniform pockets with thick wads of currency. It wasn't easy because his whole body quaked with the snap realization that he, Walter Suárez, a $44-a-week anonymous soldier condemned to a mission impossible, had just won a kind of ad hoc lottery...
...word of the fantastic riches spread, more and more troops began scouring the jungle floor, hacking at the earth like overcaffeinated grave diggers. The blue barrels bulged with Colombian pesos but they also found yellow containers filled with U.S. currency. How much was there? Months later, a report by the office of Colombia's inspector general estimated that the containers held $14 million in U.S. and Colombian currency. But in the same report, several troops testified that the final haul exceeded $43 million. One government investigator said the figure was much higher - more than $80 million...
...were trapped inside a gold mine with no way to extract the bullion. Their stacks of dollars and pesos added up to nothing because there was nothing to buy: no bars, no brothels, no BMW dealerships. "Imagine having so much money and nothing to eat!" said one of the Colombian GIs, Frankistey Giraldo, whose father named him after Frankenstein. When they looked at themselves, they still saw a bunch of hungry, unwashed peasants in the middle of no-man's land. They were fabulously wealthy. Except they weren...
From Law of the Jungle: The Hunt for Colombian Guerrillas, American Hostages and Buried Treasure. Copyright ? 2010 by John Otis. Published by William Morrow...