This sweltering market town on Venezuela's southwestern frontier has its own mayor, council and police force. It also has a parallel government of sorts - a group of Communist guerrillas from the neighboring country of Colombia.
Aerial spraying is still the preferred method of coca eradication in Colombia, but the use of manual laborers is expanding. Many take the dangerous job because of good wages; some have more personal reasons.
For months the sometimes headless bodies, cut up by chain-saws, washed up on the banks of the muddy Cauca River.
Inquiry finds the Colombian army killed slum dwellers, then said bodies were those of guerrillas
A Colombian man, believed to be a major narcotics trafficker who threatened the lives of federal law enforcement officials, was secretly flown into the United States on a Customs Service plane and whisked yesterday morning to the federal court in Central Islip, New York, for arraignment.
U.S. and Colombian investigators have dismantled an international cocaine smuggling and money laundering ring that allegedly used part of its profits to finance Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Shiite militia, officials said Tuesday.
A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Luis Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia
For workers in the town of Trujillo, Father Tiberio Fernández helped them fight for their rights. For paramilitary chiefs and government forces, he was a rebel collaborator. In 1990, he was one of 342 victims in what came to be known as the Trujillo Massacre. Now their stories have been put down on a 300-page independent report on the massacre, the first of many intended to tell a fuller story of Colombia's hidden past.
A tiny but debilitating enemy is stalking Colombian soldiers as they hunt for Marxist rebels deep in the jungle: the sand fly, which carries a parasite that causes the flesh-eating disease called leishmaniasis.
Colombia's inspector general's office is investigating a secret meeting at the presidential palace in April between top aides to President Álvaro Uribe and emissaries of a feared paramilitary warlord.
The recent killing of Omaira Arismendi was a reminder that even after 31,000 fighters laid down their arms in a government-sponsored demobilization, much of Colombia is still infested with paramilitary gangs.
A team of forensic anthropologists painstakingly dug up the bodies -- two from the town's decaying mausoleum, others from the moist earth in the cemetery, a couple from a field nearby. The preferred method of death: a single gunshot to the head. One young man had been beheaded, his skull now nowhere to be found.
In a startling development, more than 700 imprisoned rebels have renounced the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and are calling on the guerrilla army to make peace.
Raúl Agudelo was a fearsome commander of Colombia's largest rebel group, carrying out killings, kidnappings and extortions for more than 20 years. It was the only life he really knew. But going back to that life is now the last thing he wants to do.
Guillermo Sáenz, 58, plans attacks and kidnappings as commander of Colombia's largest guerrilla group. His younger brother, Roberto Sáenz, publicly denounces the rebels from his seat on the Bogota City Council.
Colombia's Juan Carlos Lecompte spent six years trying to liberate his hostage wife, Ingrid Betancourt. But when she finally stepped off a plane at the Bogota airport, Betancourt gave Lecompte a stiff hug, then flew to Paris the next day without him.
Patricia Nieto fears that the predicament of husband Sigifredo López and other hostages will be forgotten now that more famous captives have been rescued. While the nation celebrates the recent rescue of 15 captives, families of 700 others taken by the same rebel group are left waiting.
When guerrillas discovered sophisticated sensors hanging from the trees along a jungle river in southern Colombia, hostage Keith Stansell secretly rejoiced. The tracking devices were put there by U.S. Special Forces and, for Stansell, they signaled that the noose was tightening around his rebel captors.
Since Ingrid Betancourt's liberation from jungle captivity in a daring rescue operation early this month, Ingrid-mania has swept the globe.
The daring jungle rescue July 2 of 15 hostages held by Colombian guerrillas might never have happened if not for a controversial decision six years ago in Congress to allow American military aid to Colombia to be used in "unified campaign" against drugs and terrorism.
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