Word: colombian
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...Cessna's single engine could not have failed over a worse patch of Colombian jungle. On Feb. 13, 2003, four U.S. defense contractors and a Colombian police officer, on a routine surveillance flight looking for rural cocaine laboratories, made an emergency landing in southern Colombia. The area is a stronghold of the fierce Marxist guerrillas known as the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, or FARC. Rebel soldiers swarmed over the shattered plane, shooting and killing its U.S. pilot, Thomas Janis, and the Colombian officer, Luis Cruz. They stripped the remaining Americans -Keith Stansell, Thomas Howes and Marc Gonsalves - of their clothes...
...march into a tropical dungeon. When the Americans' bloody foot sores made it impossible to walk, says John Pinchao, a Colombian police officer who had been held with them until he escaped last spring, their captors gave them boots so small it made their steps only more agonizing. (The rebels finally hacked off the toes of the boots with machetes to lessen the pain.) Pinchao says the men trekked for days until they reached a FARC camp in the Sierra de la Macarena, where they were initially penned together in a slung cage whose low, barbed-wire ceiling prevented them...
...head of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family, Colombian-born Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo was a staunch advocate of the Roman Catholic Church's conservative policies, opposing abortion, stem-cell research, gay marriage and contraception--at one point calling into question the efficacy of condoms in preventing the spread of HIV. Considered a possible candidate for Pope before Benedict XVI succeeded John Paul II in 2005, López Trujillo was deeply wary of leftist liberation theology and its influence on Latin American Catholicism. "I don't believe that in Latin America, Marxism has any possibilities," he said...
Ecuador, meanwhile, says it's determined to stay neutral in the Colombian conflict, treading carefully lest it provoke terrorist attacks by the FARC on civilian targets or sensitive infrastructure like its oil pipelines. It refuses to list the FARC as a terrorist organization, as the U.S. and the European Union do; but it also won't recognize the rebels as legitimate belligerents, as left-wing Venezuelan President Chavez, a Correa ally, urges the region to do. Correa knows that Uribe, a key U.S. ally, is likely to keep his military's border pressure strong while George W. Bush is still...
...Thursday meeting with foreign journalists, Correa reiterated that the lucrative coca trade is attractive among the remote and economically threadbare border communities. "A large part of the population, above all in Amazonia, on [both] the Ecuadorian and Colombian sides support the FARC," he said, "because the Colombian and Ecuadorian [governments] don't reach them, and the ones who provide jobs, in drug cultivation, etcetera, are the FARC...