Word: merch
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...horseback and on foot, 300 Colombian peasants in ponchos and floppy felt hats trekked through the jungles and coffee fincas to a settlement in the Andean backlands 25 miles outside Bogotá. The men carried leaflets: "Viva the organized masses!" A Red caudillo, Víctor Julio Merchán, delivered a welcoming harangue, and the stubble-bearded troop responded with a clenched-fist salute. From an equally isolated redoubt not far to the east, a second Red band, commanded by Juan de la Cruz Varela, peddled at gunpoint 1 peso coupons bearing Lenin's picture and the appeal...
...bosses, Merchán in Viotá, Varela in Sumapaz, are as much masters of their lands as any feudal lord. They fly a hammer-and-sickle flag, liquidate or banish dissenters, brainwash the populace with dinning P.A. systems, maintain their own efficient militia backed by arsenals that include machine guns and mortars. They even collect their own taxes, currently set at 10% of harvests...
Fortunes & Murder. From his headquarters hamlet of Brasil, pudgy Victor Merchán, 52, wields power in a 5-sq.-mi. area, on the fringes of which anti-Communist coffeemen patrol their land with rifles. Born of coffee-bean pluckers but now enjoying a fortune from his tax rake-off, Merchán studied two years in Moscow, returned to indoctrinate Colombians and, around 1930, incited peasants to overrun most of the area's coffee plantations...