Tag Archives: FARC

The FARC’s announcement to halt kidnapping: why?

The FARC’s announcement last Sunday that the organization will no longer kidnap civilians was a surprise to most observes and experts of the region. The mainstream media has reported on the event, but has been unsuccessful at explaining why the FARC would do this. In the past 48 hours, online media and blogs have [...]
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Different Means, Same Ends

Oil production in Colombia is a popular topic these days. Domestic production levels are at an all time high, and Colombian state-owned oil behemoth Ecopetrol is considering selling 10 percent of its stake in the firm to the public. Dow Jones reports the deal will likely go down in 2012. Silla Vacia has an excellent [...]
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Business as Ideology

Boz has a very good post about the apparent “lack of ideology” when analysts describe drug trafficking organizations. Occasionally some analyst will say that the drug cartels have no political ideology. However, maybe a better way to look at it is that their ideology is their business…Just because they’re not Marxists or anarchists or [...]
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Scare Tactics in Colombian Presidential Elections

Soft on Terrorism. The well-worn phrase is one that the US public has grown accustomed to. Like nationalism, it is a tactic that political campaigners use in attempts to disparage one candidate while strengthening the other. During the 2008 presidential campaign in the United States, Republican candidate John McCain accused Democratic candidate Barack Obama of being soft [...]
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Venezuelan-Colombian Relations at World Politics Review

Diplomatic relations between Colombia and Venezuela have been at the front lines since a Spanish judge accused Venezuela of assisting FARC rebels on March 1, two years to the day after a raid by Colombian soldiers in Ecuador prompted one of the worst regional diplomatic disputes in recent memory. The accusations are hardly new; in fact, [...]
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Tradtional Advertising, Non-tradtional Brands: Colombia’s Ministry of Defense and The Government of Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli

Colombian Government Spends Money to Talk to FARC Rebels Advertising Age, a leading trade in the advertising industry, published a story on its front page during the week of 16 November about an established ad campaign with a non-traditional target audience: members of the FARC. The campaign, sponsored by the Colombian Ministry of Defense and created pro [...]
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Colombia’s FARC rebels. Headed for defeat or hunkering down?

Withering military pressure by President Álvaro Uribe’s government has forced Colombian’s largest leftist rebel group, the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), to dig itself even deeper into the Colombian countryside. In 2008, more than 3,000 rebels surrendered their weapons and accepted Uribe’s desertion package. The kidnapping rate has taken a nose dive [...]
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The War on Drugs: Eradication of Colombia’s Indigenous People

The deadline for the FARC to return the slain bodies of the 27 Awa indigenous community members killed earlier this month expired at 6:00 PM on February 23, 2009.  The killings, carried out on two separate occasions in the Nariño area of southwestern Colombia, have brought terror to the region and left more than 400 [...]
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The use of the Red Cross in Operation Jaque: Why did it take a leaked video for us to find out?

It was CNN that first reported on July 15 that a military officer had apparently used the Red Cross emblem during Operation Jaque. CNN had seen a tape leaked by a military officer that showed the use of the emblem. Even though CNN chose not to pay for the video and pictures at the [...]
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Colombia as Israel and the Andes as the Middle East?

On March 3, Venezuelan President Chávez called the Colombian government the “Israel of Latin America” stating, “we aren’t going to permit Colombia to become the Israel of these lands.” But this week’s comparisons of the Andes with the Middle East and Colombia with Israel did not stop there. Some of the comments were simply [...]
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