Word: lopezes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Lopez is a Hall of Fame golfer and four-time LPGA Player of the Year
...least for a few days, Colombians could celebrate amid the homecomings. After a Brazilian army helicopter carrying Red Cross officials plucked Lopez from the jungle and delivered him to Cali's international airport, his two sons, aged 18 and 20, nearly knocked him to the ground as they embrace him on the tarmac. The haggard but smiling former lawmaker later suggested that the guerrillas, not Uribe nor the army, have become their own worst enemies...
Colombia's Marxist guerrillas probably rue the day they kidnapped state legislator Sigifredo Lopez and his colleagues. Disguised as police agents, the rebels stormed a government building in the southern city of Cali in 2002, announced a bomb threat and then herded a dozen lawmakers, including Lopez, aboard a bus and drove them into the mountains. But the operation ended up in one of the ghastliest blunders of Colombia's four-decade-long civil war. In June 2007, guerrilla guards mistakenly thought they were under attack by the army and, in a panic, executed 11 of the hostages. Lopez alone...
...Lopez, 45, was finally freed on Thursday, almost seven years after his abduction. All told, the guerrillas, the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), got nothing out of the Cali operation - and they finally seem to have come to the conclusion that their decade-long orgy of political hostage-taking has gotten them nowhere. (See pictures of FARC guerrillas in their jungle stronghold...
...Lopez was the last of the remaining high-profile political prisoners to be liberated, and the FARC by most accounts has sworn off taking any others. That doesn't necessarily mean the rebels will stop nabbing military and police prisoners, as well as non-political civilian hostages, of which they still have hundreds in their clutches. But war-weary Colombians are cautiously hoping that their long national kidnapping nightmare is in its final throes. "In the best case," the Colombian newsmagazine Semana wrote this week, "the liberations could be the first step toward negotiations to bring...