Word: pastrana
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Colombia?s biggest drug bust in four years is good news for President Andres Pastrana - and for President Clinton?s efforts to persuade Congress to part with $1.5 billion in aid to Pastrana?s government. Colombian authorities on Wednesday arrested 30 people on drug trafficking charges, including leaders of a cartel that claims to export 30 tons of cocaine a month into the U.S. "This looks like a very important bust," says TIME correspondent Elaine Shannon. "They?ve arrested some of the key figures in the international drug trade - the Miami DA called it a who?s who of kingpins...
...Thursday marked what may be Colombia's best chance to avert a hellish future. At the southern town of San Vicente del Caguan, inside the jungle realm of the biggest and fiercest Marxist guerrilla group--the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC)--the rebels and the government of President Andres Pastrana Arango began the country's third attempt at peace in 17 years. But the fiesta of tropical bands, stuffed pig and beer, attended by luminaries like Colombia's Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, couldn't rise above the jolting absence of the FARC's mysterious 68-year-old chief, Manuel...
...FARC said Marulanda feared an assassination attempt, but many Colombians fear that the guerrillas aren't really serious about peace. Sureshot's snub makes the U.S. nervous as well. If Pastrana's efforts fail to hold Colombia together--if the FARC solidifies its sovereignty over coca-land--the U.S. war on drugs in Colombia could unravel. Washington spends more than $100 million annually to help Colombia's national police destroy coca crops but to little avail--largely because the FARC earns 40% of its estimated $1 billion annual income from a tax it levies on coca farmers to protect their...
...Pastrana, 44, a Conservative who took office last summer, is doing what he can to keep the country intact. By any standard, his trip into the heart of FARC territory last week was courageous. "I did not become President of Colombia to preside over its dissolution," he recently told TIME...
...tapes surfaced June 15, four days before the election, when an unidentified man handed them to Pastrana during a campaign stop in Cali. Exactly who recorded the telephone conversations remains unclear. Pastrana presented them to Gaviria on June 17. The President in turn gave them to Prosecutor-General Gustavo de Greiff, the controversial director of Colombia's antinarcotics effort, to check their authenticity. After his election loss, Pastrana made them public. "Let's bring them out in the open and get to the bottom of it," he said at a news conference. That exercise required some explanation from Pastrana, whose...