Word: farce
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...nasty fight. In the past decade, the civil war in Colombia has claimed more than 35,000 lives, often in brutal massacres. The war involves four parties: the government, a Marxist movement known as the FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), a Cuban-inspired movement known as the ELN (National Liberation Army) and an increasing number of paramilitary right-wingers taking the antiguerrilla fight into their own hands. The only groups that don't often fight each other are the FARC and the ELN. But both the FARC rebels and the paramilitaries derive huge revenues by "taxing" coca production...
...Colombian strategy is to try to squeeze off the drug money as a way to strangle the FARC and the ELN. Under the $7.5 billion Plan Colombia--including $1.3 billion from Washington--the U.S. has been giving Bogota choppers, training and advice on eradication. Some of the money will arm three highly mobile, 1,000-member counternarcotics battalions able to apply pressure to many parts of the country at once. Growers who are tempted to move out from under spraying missions in the Putumayo region, for instance, will find there's nowhere...
What worries U.S. planners most is how the FARC will react. To begin with, say U.S. and Colombian officials, the rebels will probably try to diversify their sources of revenue: which means more kidnappings and crime. But U.S. planners also think the FARC will try to hit back. Eradication flights already come under gunfire from FARC units trying to protect crops from spraying. And the FARC might yet expand their counterattacks by trying to go after Americans directly, hoping that enough body bags will scare the U.S. out of the region. One question you will constantly hear debated in Bogota...
...Pastrana campaigned for office three years ago on the promise of bringing peace to the war-weary country, and immediately set about pursuing unprecedented negotiations with the FARC. To that end he effectively ceded some 40 percent of the country to the rebels by ordering the military to stay out of a 16,200-square-mile "safe haven." But while there's been little progress toward a negotiated settlement, the "safe haven" has become a base for the guerrillas to mount new attacks elsewhere in the country, and to keep kidnap victims and other prisoners. That has the military pressing...
...Opposition parties pressing for a military solution to the country's 40-year civil war are gaining in popularity, and many military officers remain inclined to cooperate with the efforts of right-wing paramilitaries to take the war to the FARC and ELN, in a manner that shows little regard for the human rights concerns that supposedly govern U.S. aid shipments to the government forces...