Word: colombianizing
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...piece of vintage Chavez theater, he ordered thousands of troops and tanks to the border with Colombia after that country's military had ventured a mile into Ecuador on Saturday to kill Raul Reyes, a top commander of Colombia's FARC guerrillas. The left-wing Chavez called conservative Colombian President Alvaro Uribe a "criminal" and a "lapdog of the U.S. empire," warning ominously that "this could be the start of a war in South America...
...hand ever perpetrated by Washington. Since its launch in 2000, the more than $5 billion crusade was meant to help violence-torn Colombia eradicate drug cultivation and trafficking - an effort that is largely regarded a failure. Instead, the billions have not-so-subtly been employed to help the Colombian military beat back the fierce Marxist guerrilla army known as the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, or FARC, and the success of that mission was underscored Saturday by the stunning news from Bogota that the army, using Plan Colombia-funded communications technology, had found and killed the FARC's No. 2 leader...
...ignoring its original purpose. But the Bush Administration would argue that by beheading the FARC, Plan Colombia is actually fulfilling its anti-drug mandate - because at least half of the between $500 million and $1 billion the FARC is believed to earn each year is derived from protecting Colombian cocaine trafficking. The other half is made via ransom kidnapping - the FARC currently holds more than 700 hostages in its jungle redoubts, including three Americans - which is the other reason the U.S. State Department placed the rebels on its list of international terrorist groups a decade ago (as does the European...
...abducted in 2003 after their plane crashed in southern Colombia. Those men - Keith Stansell, Thomas Howes and Marc Gonsalves - completed five years in FARC captivity last month. Martin Sombra, the FARC veteran who admits to having been one of the jungle jailkeepers of the three Americans, was captured by Colombian authorities last week. But his arrest is unlikely to help get the Americans released by the FARC, which is demanding the release of its members held in the U.S. as a precondition...
...Reyes' death, of course, won't end the Colombian conflict. And it won't remedy the dark social ills, especially the misery of millions of neglected rural Colombians, which started the civil war in the first place. Concern about that aspect of Colombia's tragedy, in fact, has prompted the U.S. Congress to slash President Bush's 2008 military aid request for Colombia by 30% - not least of all because even Colombia's modernized military is still reportedly prone to ugly human rights abuses - and to raise social and economic...