Word: farcing
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Colombia's Military Revival: A decade ago, the Miami-Dade County police force could have defeated the Colombian military. Back then, in fact, the Marxist guerrillas of the FARC had the upper hand in Colombia's four-decade-old civil war. But since Uribe took office in 2002, the armed forces have grown and modernized impressively enough to land body blows against the FARC, as demonstrated by Reyes' stunning demise. Chavez may have spent $4 billion over the past decade to buy everything from AK-47 rifles to Russian Sukhoi fighter planes, but the Venezuelan armed forces haven't seen...
...Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez does. On Sunday, in a piece of vintage Chavez theater, he ordered thousands of troops and tanks to the border with Colombia after that country's military had ventured a mile into Ecuador on Saturday to kill Raul Reyes, a top commander of Colombia's FARC guerrillas. The left-wing Chavez called conservative Colombian President Alvaro Uribe a "criminal" and a "lapdog of the U.S. empire," warning ominously that "this could be the start of a war in South America...
...that time, the FARC seemed to have the upper hand against Colombia's historically feckless state and its even more dysfunctional military. Back then, Washington "was seriously considering whether the FARC might win," U.S. Ambassador to Colombia William Brownfield told TIME recently. But the Clinton and Bush II Administrations, still constrained by bitter memories of America's involvement in the Vietnam and Central American conflicts of a generation ago, couldn't stick their hands too directly into Colombia's four-decade-old civil war. What they could do, however, was cloak counter-insurgency as drug interdiction. It's a strategy...
...while the cultivation of coca, cocaine's raw material, is up again, the FARC is down - from close to 20,000 fighters in the 1990s to about half that today. A big reason is that the military in recent years has killed or arrested command figures like the bearded and glib Reyes, 59, who was one of the less mysterious FARC comandantes because of his role as media flack. His real name was Luis Edgar Devia Silva - and his satellite phone apparently gave away his location in remote southwestern Colombia, near or across the Ecuadoran border. Bogota has also begun...
...FARC, perhaps the last leftist guerrilla army in a hemisphere where they were once iconic, used to have international legitimacy and sympathy in its fight against Colombia's epic inequality; but that was before it became widely branded as a "narco-guerrilla" group. Perhaps panicked by its dark fortunes of late, the FARC has been trying in recent months to reverse its mafioso image by releasing some of its higher-profile hostages - but not the three U.S. defense contractors it abducted in 2003 after their plane crashed in southern Colombia. Those men - Keith Stansell, Thomas Howes and Marc Gonsalves - completed...