Word: colombian
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...truth be told, the tradition of the fatigue-clad Latin American guerrilla, striking and vanishing through mountainous jungle terrain with a raised fist and a Marxist slogan, died years before Pedro Antonio Marin - known by his nom de guerre, Manuel Marulanda - passed away two months ago in a remote Colombian forest. But Marulanda's death by heart attack, confirmed over the weekend by the rebels he commanded for 44 years, makes it official: the Che Guevara era, like that of the hemisphere's military dictatorships, is over. And so, for all intents and purposes, is Marulanda's once feared...
...Marulanda, who was believed to be between 78 and 80 years old, was the most powerful and resilient guerrilla leader the world had never heard of. In contrast to the flamboyant lives of rebel colleagues like former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, Marulanda's was as thickly veiled as the Colombian jungle he occupied for half a century. But he built what was, at its apex a decade ago, one of the world's largest and fiercest insurrection forces. At the turn of the century, the Marxist-inspired FARC numbered some 20,000 fighters and controlled so much territory that...
...FARC's overwhelming strength sprang from sources as mafioso as they were military. After the demise of Colombian drug cartel bosses like Pedro Escobar, the FARC stepped into the vacuum and earned hundreds of millions of dollars each year protecting traffickers as well as the growers of coca, cocaine's raw material. The guerrillas earned just as much via ransom kidnapping - they're estimated to hold more than 700 Colombian army, police and civilian hostages today, including three U.S. defense contractors whom the FARC abducted...
Those lucrative sidelines eventually became a large part of the FARC's undoing, leaving it corrupt and complacent - seemingly more concerned with spoils than social justice - and increasingly despised among even Colombians who once saw the group as a corrective to their country's admittedly epic inequalities. The U.S. and later the European Union designated the FARC as a terrorist organization. When the U.S. finally came to Bogota's aid in 2000 with the multi-billion-dollar Plan Colombia, a counter-insurgency mission disguised as a drug-interdiction project, Colombia's once laughable military began knocking the FARC...
...guerrillas aren't down for the count yet; but their membership, according to U.S. intelligence, has been halved to about 10,000 in recent years, and FARC's command structure is dwindling. Weeks before Marulanda died on March 26, his No. 2, Raul Reyes, was killed in a controversial Colombian army raid on a FARC camp over the border in Ecuador; and this month another top comandante, Eldaneyis Mosquera, alias Katrina, surrendered to Colombian authorities and called on her comrades to do the same. Over the weekend, Uribe claimed that other FARC honchos have offered to lay down their arms...