Word: cordillera
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Still, the FARC has few of its own victories to show these days. The secret to its survival from here on out, according to many FARC-watchers, is not military muscle but drug money. Life in the Cordillera Occidental, where TIME recently spent three days with the 18th Front, revolves around cattle ranching and coca cultivation. The FARC collects what it calls "revolutionary" taxes from coca farmers and drug traffickers, both of whom pay a $90-per-kg duty on every sale and purchase of unrefined cocaine in that area. Similar tariffs nationwide - and ransoms earned from kidnapping - are said...
...highway between Medellín and Colombia's Caribbean coast winds through one of South America's major drug-producing regions. The road is controlled by army and police checkpoints, but to enter the Cordillera Occidental mountains that hover above it, you need the permission of the FARC (The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), the fierce Marxist guerrillas who control the cultivation of the area's coca crop, the raw material of cocaine. That rare permiso allowed TIME to take an eight-hour mule ride through the mountains, rivers, jungles and dozens of coca plantations to the encampment of German...
...strongholds like the Cordillera Occidental, FARC commanders and soldiers remain defiant. And while it might sound delusional to many, they insist the guerrillas have more life than the government claims. "They've been saying [we're defeated] since the 1960s," says Comandante Alberto, who joined the FARC when he was 15 and has spent more than two decades in these mountains. "If they couldn't defeat us when we were a few dozen farmers, without uniforms and hardly any weapons, how can they beat us now when there are [still] thousands of us all over Colombia? This is a propaganda...
...year-old insurgency. But it still has thousands of armed fighters, a war chest of hundreds of millions of dollars and a triple-canopy rain forest to hide in. Despite the heavy blows it's taken in recent years, the rebels continue to dominate regions like the Cordillera Occidental, where teachers, farm laborers, health workers and even locals who have spent more than a year outside the area must secure the FARC's permission before they can enter. The 18th Front remains the only authority for miles around, executing thieves, suspected informants and anyone who tries to evade the coca...
...initial stages of the encounter were never in dispute. Bryant, in Colorado to undergo a knee operation at a clinic in Vail, checks into the Lodge & Spa at Cordillera in nearby Edwards on June 30, 2003. The front-desk clerk, a 19-year-old woman, shows him around the place and later visits him in his room, anticipating a brush with fame. They kiss by mutual agreement. Then they have sex: forced, she says; consensual, he says. He is arrested on July 4 and two weeks later charged with felony sexual assault...