Word: guerrillas
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...comrades went upstairs to begin the siege. Counterposed with images of Spitzer's happy wedding are images of the squalor of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, as al Gashey recounts his family's expulsion from Israel in 1948, and their subsequent despair. It's only when he joins a guerrilla organization that he develops some sense of Palestinian identity and pride, and when after months of intense training he hears of the intended target, he expresses his joy at being given an opportunity to "confront the Israelis...
...FARC-ettes," as the women fighters are nicknamed, fascinated me. Before covering Latin America, I'd reported on the Tamil Tiger guerrillas in Sri Lanka. The Tiger women were spooky: They wore cyanide pills around their necks to be consumed in the event of capture, and dozens of them trained as suicide bombers. The FARC-ettes were, well, more Latina. Even when in their fatigues, they wore earrings and pink scrunchees to keep their hair in place, and listened to music on tiny radios. While sex had been forbidden among the Tigers, the FARC's more relaxed view is evidenced...
...they're not exactly open to criticism, either. Last January, FARC guerrillas waited until an anti-Marxist priest finished saying mass in the Putumayo district, then walked up to the pulpit and shot him dead in front of his congregation. Local justice is meted out by guerrilla "people's courts" whose judges seldom have a high school diploma. And while the FARC may earn most of its revenue from taxing the cocaine trade, any guerrilla caught sampling the product is executed by his comrades...
...mostly military U.S. aid 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...
...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...