Word: evening
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...fact, in a typical corporate election, most shareholders trust the incumbent management to cast votes for them by proxy. In general, shareholders don't even know they have voted, since even the decision to let someone else decide is made on their behalf by mutual-fund and pension-fund managers. Obviously, huge blocks of votes are easier to count than individual ballots. Only the government would think to insist that every voter cast his or her own individual ballot, thereby making the process of counting them so needlessly onerous and prone to error...
...like the days of Che Guevara, where you sat around a campfire in the jungle playing the guitar," says Carlos Castano, laughing. He is probably the most feared--and elusive--man in Colombia. "Even in the jungle, I have the Internet and mobile phones. Why, the other night I watched a Kevin Costner movie, Message in a Bottle, on satellite TV." Since 1996 Castano has seized control of hundreds of small private armies recruited by Colombia's druglords, industrialists and owners of the big cattle ranches and emerald mines. These vigilantes were little better than death squads. Castano consolidated these...
...twisted way his war makes sense. "The art of the guerrillas is to hide themselves among the civilians. That may give them immunity against the army and police but not against us," Castano says chillingly. After all, say some Colombians, nothing else seems to have worked, not even the government's two years of peace talks with the FARC...
Castano is a backer of Plan Colombia--in which the U.S. is funding a $1.3 billion drug-eradication program--even though most of the AUC's funds come from shaking down drug traffickers. "I prefer taking cash from the narcos than from honest people," says Castano, who explains that his group, like the rebels, collects a "tax" on coca paste and on the drug's transportation in AUC-controlled areas. Castano has given orders not to shoot at the government crop-spraying aircraft when they swoop over coca fields in his areas...
...them by dawn," he says confidently. Given his popularity among Colombians, will Castano one day run for political office? Disgusted, he shakes his head. "With my past? With the things I've done? Never. It's a sign of how bad the situation is in Colombia that people would even think of me like that." He adds, "No, I'm just a temporary antidote." Given his methods, the question is whether the antidote is as bad as the poison...