Word: varela
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...approach of four automobiles. Recognizing three of his own regimental officers, he waved the cars inside the gate. But the cars also carried a score of workers from Lisbon's suburb of Almada, and such sworn foes of the Salazar regime as ex-Army Captain João Varela Gomes and Manuel Serra, former head of the Catholic youth movement...
...insurgents easily rounded up sleeping officers in the regimental headquarters-so easily that they grew careless. Varela Gomes burst into the room of the acting commandant, a major, and ordered him to put up his hands. Instead, the major whipped out a submachine gun, dropped Varela Gomes with five bullets in the stomach, and escaped to give the alarm...
...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: "For a great Communist Party...
...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...