Word: farce
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...When I was 14 years old, my father was kidnapped. The FARC [the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia] asked for $50,000, which was unattainable for a family like us. We had some land, so we raised $20,000 and they said the other 50 percent was missing, so they killed him. My case isn't that unusual. It's happened to hundreds of honest Colombians. There are a lot of people kidnapped by the guerrillas...
...crisis began when the president tried to fire the controversial Montesinos, who had been implicated in smuggling weapons to the leftist FARC guerrillas in neighboring Colombia. Washington, of course, is planning to spend more than $1 billion in helping Colombia fight the FARC as part of its anti-drug efforts, so it was obviously very irritated that Peru, which has been a key ally in the war on drugs, appears to have been a conduit for weapons to the guerrillas. Fujimori moved to ditch Montesinos when a videotape was leaked to a local TV station showing the intelligence chief bribing...
...tossing $1.3 billion at Colombia, employs almost solely military tactics. By attacking the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a guerilla group with Marxist underpinnings dwelling in central Colombia since the 1960s, the U.S. somehow believes that inexperienced Colombian troops can battle with the guerillas on the coca fields until they destroy a means of production...
...being sent ostensibly to help Colombia's security forces fight the war on drugs. But nothing is that simple in a country that has been in the grip of an almost 40-year civil war in which all of the major protagonists - the left-wing guerrillas of the FARC and ELN groups; the right-wing paramilitary groups; and the government's own army (which will be the prime beneficiary of the aid) - have been linked both with ugly human rights abuses and with narco-trafficking. Peace talks between the government and the guerrillas, which began after the government recognized guerrilla...
...Colombia produces 80 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States, the largest proportion of it in territory under the direct control of the FARC. Taxing the traffickers in exchange for protection earns the Marxist army some $700 million a year, making it easily the wealthiest peasant guerrilla movement in history, one that is better equipped than the army it is fighting. That has prompted the U.S. to blur the distinction between counterinsurgency and the war on drugs in order to strengthen the government's forces - which many observers in the region and in the U.S. believe...