Word: farce
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...FARC-ettes," as the women fighters are nicknamed, fascinated me. Before covering Latin America, I'd reported on the Tamil Tiger guerrillas in Sri Lanka. The Tiger women were spooky: They wore cyanide pills around their necks to be consumed in the event of capture, and dozens of them trained as suicide bombers. The FARC-ettes were, well, more Latina. Even when in their fatigues, they wore earrings and pink scrunchees to keep their hair in place, and listened to music on tiny radios. While sex had been forbidden among the Tigers, the FARC's more relaxed view is evidenced...
...What about jealousy? One comely Farc-ette wanted to switch partners, and waited until the evening culture hour (after a Marxist study session), when she broke the news to her old boyfriend in a song. "He went a little crazy," one witness recounted...
...Having been at war for 36 years and flush with cash from taxing the narcos, the FARC maintains a sophisticated fighting force of more than 15,000 guerrillas. They control some 40 percent of the country, and are engaged in turf wars with a smaller rival leftist group, the ELN, as well as with right-wing paramilitaries accused by human rights organizations of committing some of the worst massacres of the long-running civil war. Ideology aside, they all are battling for control over the coca fields and the power to tax the drug trade and everything else in their...
...didn't get to meet FARC's leader, the canny 72-year-old peasant Manuel "Sureshot" Marulanda. While his minions entertain the media, government negotiators, leftist groupies from the U.S. and Europe and such occasional visitors as the president of the New York Stock Exchange, Marulanda prefers to lay low in the jungle, guarded by female guerrillas...
...after a few hours at the FARC headquarters, I was beginning to feel the same way myself, so I went back to San Vincente and its funfair. As night descended on Farclandia, I passed the evening watching the looks of disbelief on the faces of the cowboy drunks as they lurched out of the brothels to be nearly flattened by a giant grinning worm careening through the muddy streets...