Word: vacuums
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Naxalites, a Maoist insurgency that has grown from the margins four decades ago to become, in the words of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, "the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country." It is a tale of ideology and mafia-like thuggery, a conflict born in a vacuum of government inaction, and fueled by official mismanagement and corruption. And it is the story of the millions caught in between...
...There's no denying the insurgency has prospered in areas of official neglect. In a paper he presented to Parliament two years ago, Home Minister Shivraj Patil said that "Naxalites operate in [a] vacuum created by [an] absence of administrative and political institutions." The Naxalites, Patil said, "take advantage of the disenchantment prevalent among the exploited segments of the population" to "offer an alternative system of governance which promises emancipation ... through the barrel...
...coup, tens of thousands of leftists were imprisoned and often tortured. Newspapers and magazines were banned, politics was forbidden in schools and universities and free speech stifled by draconian laws, some of which are still on the books. With intellectualism effectively quashed, the end result was a cultural vacuum. Recovering has not been easy...
...FARC's overwhelming strength sprang from sources as mafioso as they were military. After the demise of Colombian drug cartel bosses like Pedro Escobar, the FARC stepped into the vacuum and earned hundreds of millions of dollars each year protecting traffickers as well as the growers of coca, cocaine's raw material. The guerrillas earned just as much via ransom kidnapping - they're estimated to hold more than 700 Colombian army, police and civilian hostages today, including three U.S. defense contractors whom the FARC abducted...
...McConnaughey, chief of staff for Wyoming Senator Michael Enzi. I remembered from my training that with Republicans, I was supposed to stress crime prevention. McConnaughey said Wyoming didn't have a big gang problem. I told him it was possible that L.A. gangs could get wind of that market vacuum and send kids to carjack around Jackson Hole from 3 to 6. "You should stick to magazine work," he told...