Word: drugging
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Still, the FARC has few of its own victories to show these days. The secret to its survival from here on out, according to many FARC-watchers, is not military muscle but drug money. Life in the Cordillera Occidental, where TIME recently spent three days with the 18th Front, revolves around cattle ranching and coca cultivation. The FARC collects what it calls "revolutionary" taxes from coca farmers and drug traffickers, both of whom pay a $90-per-kg duty on every sale and purchase of unrefined cocaine in that area. Similar tariffs nationwide - and ransoms earned from kidnapping - are said...
...highway between Medellín and Colombia's Caribbean coast winds through one of South America's major drug-producing regions. The road is controlled by army and police checkpoints, but to enter the Cordillera Occidental mountains that hover above it, you need the permission of the FARC (The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), the fierce Marxist guerrillas who control the cultivation of the area's coca crop, the raw material of cocaine. That rare permiso allowed TIME to take an eight-hour mule ride through the mountains, rivers, jungles and dozens of coca plantations to the encampment of German...
...Drug interdiction was the professed purpose of the $5 billion U.S. Plan Colombia, launched in 2000, but its focus shifted instead to a counterinsurgency campaign to eliminate the FARC. "Most of the money that was supposedly for the war on drugs has been used for war against the guerrillas," Comandante Alberto notes. Plan Colombia, which has afforded Colombia's military U.S. hardware like Black Hawk and Huey helicopters, making it difficult for the rebels to concentrate in large units, has been successful in hobbling the FARC. But coca cultivation in Colombia rose in 2007, according to a new U.N. report...
FARC commanders dismiss the "narco-guerrilla" portrayal as government propaganda and insist they're still a viable rebel movement whose survival doesn't depend on drug income. For his part, Alberto points to his unit's spartan housing conditions - mountain and jungle shacks often without electricity or running water - as proof that they're not exactly living as sumptuously as famous cocaine kingpins like Pablo Escobar...
...have spent more than a year outside the area must secure the FARC's permission before they can enter. The 18th Front remains the only authority for miles around, executing thieves, suspected informants and anyone who tries to evade the coca taxes. And despite the area's narco-economy, drug consumption of any kind is strictly forbidden - to such a draconian extent that a few days before TIME arrived, guerrillas executed two drug addicts in the nearby town of Puerto Valdivia...