It was an ambitious plan: create a hit record so irresistible that it would bring in legions of new fans. Minions set to work scouting international talent and putting together slickly packaged tunes and lyrics, complete with glamorous publicity shots. The result: Guerrilla Dance, a would-be breakthrough album for Manuel Marulanda, leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a group better known for bombing and kidnapping than topping the charts.
Intercepted e-mails from Colombia’s Marxist rebels recently revealed that its grizzled founder came up with the idea in 2000. After four decades in the jungle waging Latin America’s bloodiest insurgency, Marulanda wanted to broaden the FARC’s appeal and win new recruits.
Senior commanders such as Mono Jojoy, Marcos Calarca and Felipe Rincon chipped in with their own ideas.
“We have to get the guy who makes merengues and we have to offer him a big budget,” Rincon said, referring to merengue, a rival to salsa, which is popular across Latin America.
Colombia’s El Tiempo says the FARC spent almost US$150,000 commissioning musicians from the Dominican Republic and polishing their tracks before uploading them on YouTube last year. The lyrics blend battlefield ideology — “Taca taca taca, the government will fall,” “carry the grenades and the rifles,” “enemy to the left, enemy to the right” — with more traditional merengue injunctions to “move those hips.”
Guerrilla Dance did not storm the charts but attracted attention as a slick contrast to previous rebel offerings of turgid, patchily recorded ballads.
Marulanda died of a heart attack in 2008. His scattered forces are left to ponder the lyric: “With this song we will get to Bogota.”
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of