Word: sumapaz
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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Lords of Upheaval. Called Viotá and Sumapaz, the two Red enclaves of backlands Bolshevism in Colombia have been in existence for years, making trouble for democracy in Latin America long before anyone heard of Fidel Castro. The rugged, roadless terrain offers little hindrance to guerrilla movements, while effectively blunting any military reprisal or concerted government program of building and social reform that might dilute Communist influence on the peasantry...
...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...
More powerful still is wily, slit-eyed Juan de la Cruz Varela, 57, who bosses a 3,300 sq.mi. state-within-a-state, polices Sumapaz with a 150-man cavalry. Anyone, even high central government officials, who wishes to cross Sumapaz must get Varela's safe-conduct pass. Varela calls himself agrarian reformer and has even got himself elected to Colombia's Congress on the votes of poverty-ridden peasants (3,741 Colombians died of starvation and malnutrition in 1958; 1,300,000 are landless today). But Varela's real job is keeping Communism's flag...
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