Word: farce
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...this anxiety came sooner. Jaramillo’s family left Colombia when she was 12 years old. As an employee of a national telephone company, her father worked to cut off the communications of imprisoned officers of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. He began receiving phone threats from the rebel group. They heard of people they knew getting kidnapped. The family fled to the U.S. to apply for political asylum, a process that was drawn out over eight years...
...hostages looked on in disgust. The agents were joking with the rebels and two of them wore Che Guevara T-shirts. They seemed like FARC-loving lefties...
...plane carrying three U.S. military contractors crash-landed in rebel territory in southern Colombia. The survivors - Marc Gonsalves, Keith Stansell and Thomas Howes - were taken hostage by fierce Marxist guerrillas the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, better known by the Spanish acronym FARC. It would take five years, and the help of billions of dollars in U.S. aid, before commandos of the Colombian Army were able to launch a daring, Mission: Impossible-style sting operation in a bid to save the hostages. Colombian planners of the July 2008 operation were probably keen to avoid the fate of the earliest rescue attempt...
There was no question that the money was the evil lucre of rebel drug deals, extortion rackets, and ransom payments made by the desperate relatives of hostages. By some estimates, such scams earned the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - the country's largest guerrilla army known as the FARC - $500 million annually. But knowing that these riches were tainted didn't stop Suárez. "I was so happy. I'd never seen so much money," he said. "It was like the Virgin had appeared before...
...troops that the cash was a serendipitous payoff for years of dangerous duty protecting the homeland. And if that wasn't enough, it was Easter week, the holiest time of year in Colombia. Many soldiers viewed the treasure as nothing less than a gift from God. (See pictures of FARC in the jungle...