Word: peasant
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...Coca doesn't help the peasant farmer to improve his life. The coca provides profits for narco-traffickers, and the guerrilla, and the AUC. The farmer earns more with coca than other crops, but at the same time, everything costs him much, much more in coca-producing zones. Plus there's prostitution, alcohol - and there's no social fabric, no education, no health care...
...rain forest is not good agricultural land, to put it mildly: the very nature of the ecosystem is to recycle organic matter without enriching the underlying soil. Once cleared, the acidic dirt of the forest floor is exhausted after a few harvests. That in turn causes peasant farmers to keep moving and sell their barren holdings to cattle ranchers looking to buy cleared land on the cheap. So the devastation continues to creep forward. All over the Amazon, I saw vast areas of degraded land where before there was a virtually unbroken expanse of trees. In all, the Amazon contains...
...convincing an argument when every single one of their seven asses hit the blue mats at some point over the course of the competition. Without Bela and his Romanian discipline, the American cause is hopeless. My blockmate disagrees: "They're normal, healthy chicks, unlike the Russian and Romanian peasant girls. Those gymnasts don't go to school and they just practice all day to escape their misery. I'd choose freedom over a gold medal any day." Whatever. I certainly wouldn't. Gymnastics is all about contortion, stunted growth, hopeless oppression and tears shed for the sake of the cameras...
...didn't get to meet FARC's leader, the canny 72-year-old peasant Manuel "Sureshot" Marulanda. While his minions entertain the media, government negotiators, leftist groupies from the U.S. and Europe and such occasional visitors as the president of the New York Stock Exchange, Marulanda prefers to lay low in the jungle, guarded by female guerrillas...
...Colombia produces 80 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States, the largest proportion of it in territory under the direct control of the FARC. Taxing the traffickers in exchange for protection earns the Marxist army some $700 million a year, making it easily the wealthiest peasant guerrilla movement in history, one that is better equipped than the army it is fighting. That has prompted the U.S. to blur the distinction between counterinsurgency and the war on drugs in order to strengthen the government's forces - which many observers in the region and in the U.S. believe...