Word: ruiz
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...Watchful Military. The only real power base in Colombia today is the military, and it still seems solidly behind the President. Valencia's war minister, able, astute Major General Alberto Ruiz Novoa, 47, who commanded the Colombian contingent during the Korean War, insists that the armed forces will adhere to their traditional role as "defenders of civilian rule...
...then hurried back to the hills, where he ran his grisly toll to 592 murders before he himself was killed last year. Not until President Guillermo Leon Valencia was elected in 1962 did the bandit war take a turn for the better. The man responsible: Major General Alberto Ruiz Novoa, Valencia's battle-tough war minister and commander of the Colombian detachment that fought in Korea. Says Ruiz: "We learned from Cyprus, Algeria and other such experiences that you cannot defeat a guerrilla by regular warfare. You have to take away the support of the population...
Carrot & Stick. The basis of Ruiz' campaign is "military civil action," a program for making friends among the campesinos. Army troops show backward peasants how to build schools, highways, health centers, wells and sewers. Government agencies contribute drugs and crop seeds. Alianza funds provide many items, from mobile dispensaries to bulldozers. Army officers help out in classrooms. On Sundays, military bands tootle in village squares. And throughout the country, thousands of posters ask campesinos to help the military track down bandits...
...with civic action, Ruiz has mounted a military offensive built around 100 mobile, twelve-man "killer" teams from the "Laceros," or Lancers, the army's crack fighting force. In some villages, the military investigates every citizen, questions unarmed strangers, shoots on sight any armed newcomers. Many of Ruiz' patrols are disguised as civilians, inviting bandit attack; army undercover men infiltrate bandit gangs, lead them into ambush. Colombian pilots, who have learned air envelopment tactics in the U.S., are equipped with scores of choppers...
...city. But many slip through the cordon. When tragedy strikes, as it did for the 32 hapless victims who drowned off eastern Hong Kong, the trade falls off for a few days. Then the human cargos begin moving once more across the Pearl River estuary. Says Father Luis Ruiz of Macao's Roman Catholic Casa Ricci, which has sheltered more than 35,000 refugees from Red China in past years, "Nothing will stop this smuggling. Nothing can prevent these people from going...