Word: colombian
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...active-duty soldiers, the narcowars have come to serve as a retirement plan for ex-U.S. military folks looking for somewhere to put their skills to work. Military Professional Resources Inc., of Alexandria, Va., recently wrapped up a yearlong, $6 million mission to help organize and improve the Colombian military. That has made some professional U.S. soldiers itchy. "The employment of private corporations to provide military assistance, specifically the training of other nations' armies to fight wars, should not be an instrument of U.S. foreign policy," an Army colonel wrote in 1998. "The military profession should remain a monopoly...
...Colombian strategy is to try to squeeze off the drug money as a way to strangle the FARC and the ELN. Under the $7.5 billion Plan Colombia--including $1.3 billion from Washington--the U.S. has been giving Bogota choppers, training and advice on eradication. Some of the money will arm three highly mobile, 1,000-member counternarcotics battalions able to apply pressure to many parts of the country at once. Growers who are tempted to move out from under spraying missions in the Putumayo region, for instance, will find there's nowhere...
What worries U.S. planners most is how the FARC will react. To begin with, say U.S. and Colombian officials, the rebels will probably try to diversify their sources of revenue: which means more kidnappings and crime. But U.S. planners also think the FARC will try to hit back. Eradication flights already come under gunfire from FARC units trying to protect crops from spraying. And the FARC might yet expand their counterattacks by trying to go after Americans directly, hoping that enough body bags will scare the U.S. out of the region. One question you will constantly hear debated in Bogota...
Will it work? U.S. and Colombian officials insist that they are on the verge of turning the corner in the war. But they have been saying that for years, even as coca production has boomed. The most pessimistic view of the expanded plan is that it will simply militarize an even larger chunk of the hemisphere, creating war zones all along Colombia's borders. Even the legacy of the Amazon River shoot-down will simply be an adjustment of procedures. No one seriously suggests letting the traffickers have the skies back...
What drives Aristide these days, however, is a fierce desire to sell himself abroad as a modernizer. Haiti certainly needs it. The country suffers 80% unemployment, and Colombian drug traffickers have begun using the island as a transit lounge. So, inside Tabarre, his heavily guarded Port-au-Prince residence, he is showing a new persona: nouveau Jean-Bertrand, a genial statesman-cum-Chamber of Commerce President. "Life is a daily dialectical movement for me," says the ex-priest in a rare interview with TIME. "I pay attention to the global economy now, and I have to be realistic. Haiti needs...