Word: farmers
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Castano's crusade against the rebels began as a white-hot act of revenge: in 1979 a FARC gang kidnapped his father, a dairy farmer in Cordoba province. The members demanded $50,000, and when the Castano family could raise only $20,000, they executed him. "We knew these guerrillas. We'd let them sleep in our house. We sympathized with their social ideals," Castano recalls. Later, his kid sister was killed in a botched kidnapping by the FARC. Eight more of his siblings were later killed, either by drug hit men or rebels, he says...
...satellite TV came to the Warana sugarcane-growing region of Maharashtra state, some 250 miles southeast of Bombay, and the ground started moving under the farming village of Pokhale. "Even one-year-olds started shaking their hips like those MTV girls," says farmer Shantappa Ghewari. More than a year later, another magical box was installed in the village, and Pokhale became one of 70 villages in the region to take part in the "Wired Village Warana," a $600,000 information-technology project initiated by the federal government. All the villages in the area have computer kiosks that are linked...
...Coca doesn't help the peasant farmer to improve his life. The coca provides profits for narco-traffickers, and the guerrilla, and the AUC. The farmer earns more with coca than other crops, but at the same time, everything costs him much, much more in coca-producing zones. Plus there's prostitution, alcohol - and there's no social fabric, no education, no health care...
...strange for me to say as an anti-subversive, but narcotics is a worse problem than the guerrilla. When guerrillas fought for social ideals we all liked them, but when they got involved with narco- traffickers, they lost their bearings, their popularity. They hit the middle class, the small farmer, the truckers, and that's when we rose up. The middle class needs us to defend them...
...network also helps reduce a major anxiety plaguing local farmers. Once a sugarcane crop is ready to harvest, each day's delay reduces its sugar content and the money the farmer can get from a cooperative for his crop. The Pokhale cooperative owns only one harvester, which is usually monopolized by bigger, more influential farmers. But now the harvesting dates for every village and farm are available on the network, and farmers can complain to the cooperative chief if the harvester fails to arrive at the appointed hour. Ghewari, 63, who grows cane in a five-acre field, was quick...