Word: marxist
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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...
...military cost for the guerrillas," says Leon Valencia, a Bogota political analyst. The United Nations and every other international organization deem the kidnapping of civilians, even political leaders, as a crime against humanity. The practice seemed to complete the rebels' gradual makeover from peasant warriors fighting for a Marxist utopia to ruthless narco-terrorists. When Betancourt, a French-Colombian citizen and a cause celebre in Europe, was whisked to freedom during last July's commando raid, much of the world lost interest in the FARC. Most analysts said the group, whose membership has been halved from as many...
...community still refuses to confer on it. The strategy is partly the doing of Alfonso Cano, who was named the FARC's maximum leader last March following the death, at the age of 78, of Manuel "Sureshot" Marulanda, the guerrillas' cunning but stubborn founding father. Though a hard-line Marxist, Cano, 60, who grew up in Bogota and attended a university there, "sees the world differently than Marulanda," says Carlos Jaramillo, a former government peace negotiator. "He has to make some changes. He can't let the FARC die and that's his big challenge...
...Hard to imagine that at his zenith, George W. Bush would ever have wanted to quote the Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, but one of Trotsky's famous lines would have fit perfectly into his farewell. "You may not be interested in war," Bush said in essence, "but war is interested...
...worst of the worst": "Among the eight worst-rated countries, one, North Korea, is a one-party Marxist-Leninist regime. Two, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, are Central Asian countries ruled by dictators with roots in the Soviet period. Libya is an Arab country under the sway of a secular dictatorship, while Sudan is under a leadership that has elements both of radical Islamism and of a typical military junta. The remaining worst-rated states are Burma, a tightly-controlled military dicatorship; Equatorial Guinea, a highly repressive regime with one of the worst human rights records in Africa; and Somalia, a failed...