Word: farce
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Lopez, 45, was finally freed on Thursday, almost seven years after his abduction. All told, the guerrillas, the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), got nothing out of the Cali operation - and they finally seem to have come to the conclusion that their decade-long orgy of political hostage-taking has gotten them nowhere. (See pictures of FARC guerrillas in their jungle stronghold...
...FARC, then one of the world's largest and fiercest insurgencies, started targeting Colombian senators, governors and other power brokers, hoping to swap them for imprisoned guerrillas. The rebels also demanded a demilitarized zone to negotiate prisoner exchanges with government envoys. But conservative President Alvaro Uribe, who took office in 2002, refused to play along. With strong U.S. backing, he beefed up Colombia's once dysfunctional military and started delivering body blows to the FARC. Last year was the guerrillas' most disastrous year ever. The rebels lost three of their top seven commanders (two were killed, one died...
Lopez was the last of the remaining high-profile political prisoners to be liberated, and the FARC by most accounts has sworn off taking any others. That doesn't necessarily mean the rebels will stop nabbing military and police prisoners, as well as non-political civilian hostages, of which they still have hundreds in their clutches. But war-weary Colombians are cautiously hoping that their long national kidnapping nightmare is in its final throes. "In the best case," the Colombian newsmagazine Semana wrote this week, "the liberations could be the first step toward negotiations to bring...
...FARC's global image has suffered badly as well. "All of this had very high political [as well as] military cost for the guerrillas," says Leon Valencia, a Bogota political analyst. The United Nations and every other international organization deem the kidnapping of civilians, even political leaders, as a crime against humanity. The practice seemed to complete the rebels' gradual makeover from peasant warriors fighting for a Marxist utopia to ruthless narco-terrorists. When Betancourt, a French-Colombian citizen and a cause celebre in Europe, was whisked to freedom during last July's commando raid, much of the world lost...
...issue grew more complicated on Jan. 26, when the European Union removed the MEK from its list of terrorist organizations, a roster that includes organizations such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The E.U. move, which came after a long lobbying campaign by the MEK's supporters in Europe, sparked an outcry in Tehran. About 300 people were gathered around noon on Wednesday in front of the British Embassy in Tehran to protest the E.U. decision. Some in the crowd threw stones at the embassy, while others held up shoes on sticks...