Word: colombian
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...Colombia's Marxist guerrillas is to be on the move. The rebels - the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) - sequester their captives deep inside the country's mountainous jungle terrain, and they regularly lead them on long, arduous marches from one mosquito-infested camp to another to keep the Colombian military from detecting their whereabouts. But on one of those treks today, the FARC finally exposed itself long enough for the army to score one of the most stunning hostage rescues in the history of a country where human abduction is virtually a national pastime...
...Venezuela's maverick President begun to mellow? On June 8, Hugo Chávez urged the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia to end its violent campaign against the Colombian government, six months after calling for the rebels to be taken off the U.S. list of terrorist organizations. Some analysts suggest that the President may be toning down his rhetoric to soften his image in the run-up to Venezuela's state and local elections in November--and possibly to avoid giving ammunition to anti-Chávez Republican candidates in the U.S. this fall...
...Hours later, he was called on to respond to another crisis, when Colombian authorities announced the arrest of a Venezuelan army sergeant ferrying 40,000 cartridges for AK-47 rifles to FARC guerrillas. Venezuela insists the soldier was corrupt and acting on his own. Conservative Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, a key U.S. ally, has for months accused Chavez, a staunch FARC supporter, of funneling aid to the rebels. The charge, he claims, is supported by alleged evidence from laptop computers belonging to a top FARC commander killed in a commando raid last March. Chavez vehemently denies it and insists...
...1960s, revolutionaries like Marulanda found the new Liberal-Conservative establishment as corrupt and oppressive as the old guard; and so he founded the FARC in 1964. That sparked a bloody civil war that has killed more than 40,000 people - including ghastly massacres by right-wing paramilitary armies the Colombian military fostered to help it battle the guerrillas, and which the Uribe government has only recently begun to dismantle. The conflict displaced millions of people...
Through it all, Marulanda attracted thousands of disaffected Colombians with his talent for striking at the military and fleeing into harsh terrain that he knew better than any army commander. "If they drive us off one mountainside," he once wrote, "we counter immediately at two others." Like Castro, he was said to have escaped death repeatedly, and rarely stayed in one location more than a few days. But although Marulanda was originally inspired by the Cuban Revolution, he was never the committed communist Castro became, a fact that always kept relations between the two surprisingly cool. "Marulanda doesn't read...