Flashing V's and waving the yellow flags of their Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement, the guerrillas trailed a miles-long parade of supporters, including villagers returning to the south for the first time in two decades.
And in Nepal, following two long weeks covering the terrible earthquake in April last year, I interviewed Mira Rai, a 25-year-old former guerrilla turned successful international trail runner who runs to lift her family out of poverty, to send a message to all other women in her conservative country and simply for the love of the sport.
So imagine the surprise when Juan Manuel Santos, a former defense minister and the architect of some of Mr. Uribe's crushing blows against leftist guerrillas, found himself trailing in recent national polls to a quirky, unpredictable mathematician who murmurs in French about arcane philosophical concepts and wears a chinstrap beard with the air of a latter-day Thoreau.
Mr. Siekmeier's installation harks back to the Revolutionary War, for this creek was part of a trail used by guerrilla soldiers fighting the British.
The Central Intelligence Agency set to work installing a pro-American government in Laos and building guerrilla forces to attack the trail; the North Vietnamese, in turn, infiltrated Laos and backed the local Communists, the Pathet Lao.
Indeed, the arriving strangers told the Sikhs they were on the trail of three guerrillas.
In the Broad Front's primary campaign, his former economy minister and chosen candidate, Danilo Astori, trails José Mujica, a former guerrilla leader who criticises the government as too moderate.
Over that period 15 civilians, including three children, and 45 soldiers have been injured by scores of home-made landmines laid along some three miles (5.5 kilometres) of the trail by the leftist guerrillas of the FARC.
A photograph showed Dr. Albright in casual white pants and T-shirt and a blue baseball cap striding alongside the former guerrilla leader dressed in his fatigues, trailed by a posse of Palestinian bodyguards.
For the majority of refugees who were not Hutu guerrillas, the long flight through the jungle was a trail of tears.
