wfn.org | Many Colombians Seem to Be Prospering on the Wages of Sin and Death

[PCUSA NEWS <pcusa.news@ecunet.org>]

20-December-1999 
99429 
 
    Many Colombians Seem to Be Prospering 
    on the Generous Wages of Sin and Death 
 
    by John Filiatreau 
 
BOGOTA, Colombia - When one is stopped at a red light in Bogota, smiling 
strangers, most of them children, approach one's car windows with 
bargain-priced items for sale: pencils, playing cards and cigarettes, light 
bulbs, toilet paper and lipsticks. 
 
    This peripatetic "Stop-N-Shop" is the most visible part of an 
unofficial ("black-market") economy that may represent as much as half of 
all the money made and spent in Colombia, a resource-rich nation whose 
annual gross domestic product is $172 billion. 
 
    Not included in that figure, of course, is about $5 billion a year from 
the cocaine trade, of which almost none trickles down to the street people 
in the capital. At a red light in downtown Bogota, there also is a good 
chance that one will be able to see at least one nervous-looking uniformed 
warrior with an automatic rifle slung over a shoulder. 
 
    This may be a comfort. The U.S. State Department points out that one 
has a greater chance of being kidnaped in Colombia than in any other 
country in the world - and adds, "Since it is U.S. policy not to pay ransom 
or make other concessions to terrorists, the U.S. government's ability to 
assist kidnaped U.S. citizens is limited." 
 
    Since 1980, officials have recorded 112 kidnappings of U.S. citizens in 
Colombia and its border areas. Fourteen victims have been murdered, and one 
died from malnutrition in captivity; the whereabouts of dozens of others is 
not known. 
 
    Moreover, the country's murder rate - 77.5 killings per 100,000 
inhabitants per year - is more than eight times that of the United States. 
Although some deaths are related to the drug business and the continuing 
civil war, three-quarters are committed by common criminals. 
 
    Nonetheless, every year another 200,000 people pull up stakes in the 
countryside and move into Colombia's big cities - especially Bogota, which 
now is home to more than six million people. Already the country's 
population is 75 percent urban. Rural people keep moving to the cities 
because the civil wars - at least eight of them in the 19th century, all 
topped by the 1948 outbreak known as La Violencia, in which nearly 300,000 
people died - are fought largely in the outback. 
 
    The latest spate fighting has never quite made it to Bogota, although 
just a few months ago it was nipping at the southern suburbs. The cities 
are simply safer, give or take a political bombing or two. In the cities, 
young men and women are much less likely to be made to choose between 
joining an army of killers and being killed on the spot; an easy decision 
with hard consequences. 
 
    In the first nine months of 1999, about 1,400 people lost their lives 
in the war. The government blames most of the killings on the guerrillas. 
The guerrillas blame most of them on private militias allied with the 
Colombian military. 
 
    The omnipresent people with rifles are not police officers. Most are 
mercenaries belonging to the countless private armies that guard hotels, 
offices, apartment buildings and places of business in the capital. Others 
are Colombian soldiers on sentry duty around government facilities. One 
almost never sees the municipal police in Bogota. "You don't see them," a 
Colombian businessman said matter-of-factly. "They see you." 
 
    In Bogota, the war is like the police - unseen but omnipresent. 
 
    A delegation from the National Council of Churches of Christ in the 
United States (NCC) recently toured Colombia to learn whether it could do 
anything to advance the cause of peace in a nation that has known very 
little peace in the past two centuries. Not surprisingly, it found a 
culture that has grown used to, and inured to - perhaps even comfortable 
with - the fighting and killing and the money it generates. 
 
    Colombia's above-board economy is limping along, with inflation and 
unemployment both above 20 percent. The country is said to be suffering 
through its worst recession in 70 years. 
 
    Meanwhile the cocaine economy is booming, paying lavish dividends to 
everybody with a stake in it - including the military, the private 
right-wing "paramilitaries" that are allied with and sometimes commanded by 
the military, and the left-wing guerrilla armies that have opposed the 
government for 35 years. All these groups extract a "tax" from 
"narco-traffickers" in exchange for protection, safe passage and logistical 
support. In a country where jobs are scarce, impoverished campisanos can 
always make a subsistence living by growing coca for sale to the drug 
merchants. And any able-bodied man or woman of the appropriate age can sign 
on with one of the illegal paramilitary "self-defense" forces at a 
respectable wage of $200 a month. 
 
    The paramilitaries and the two largest guerrilla groups, the 
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Army of National 
Liberation (ELN), are believed to gross about $600 million a year from the 
drug trade. The U.S. embassy in Bogota says the guerrillas make almost as 
much by kidnapping people and holding them for ransom. In the first nine 
months of 1999, more than 2,000 people, mostly corporate and government 
types, have been snatched and held for redemption. 
 
    With an income that almost certainly exceeds $200 million a year, the 
rebels are independent and self-supporting. They can fight on indefinitely, 
with or without popular support, with or without financial aid from outside 
Colombia. There was a time when FARC was believed to be receiving money 
from the like-minded Castro government in Cuba. Now, said Gen. Fernando 
Tapias, the commander in chief of Colombia's armed forces, "The FARC may be 
sending financial aid to Cuba." Earlier this year, FARC reportedly paid 
cash on the barrel-head for a shipment of 10,000 AK-47 automatic rifles. It 
turns out that the last of the hard-line, ultra-orthodox Marxist 
revolutionary armies in the Western Hemisphere is surprisingly adept at 
amassing capital. Sometimes the guerrillas are better-armed and -equipped 
than the military. 
 
    But the anti-drug side is about to raise the stakes - by investing 
billions of dollars more in yet another "shadow" economy, the war-on-drugs 
juggernaut. 
 
    In July, Gen. Tapias and Colombian Minister of Defense Luis Ramirez 
asked Washington  for $500 million in counter-narcotics and 
counter-insurgency aid. The following day, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the head 
of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, proposed a $1 
billion U.S. contribution in "emergency drug supplemental assistance" to be 
used in the anti-drug war in South America, including $570 million for 
Colombia, already the third-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid. 
 
    In September, Colombian President Andres Pastrana visited New York and 
Washington to promote his "Plan Colombia," a $7.5 billion program to curb 
drug trafficking, end the civil conflict and revive the nation's economy 
that includes $4 billion in police and military aid. Pastrana said he would 
be asking for $3.5 billion from "donor countries," principally the United 
States. 
 
    About a month ago, Colombia staged a training exercise to show off its 
new Rapid Deployment Force (RDF), the first fruit of Tapias' and Pastrana's 
plan to upgrade the military. Colombia also has a new anti-narcotics 
battalion and a special brigade to patrol the nation's rivers. The RDF 
includes troops from three mobile counter-insurgency brigades, a Special 
Forces group trained in the United States and an artillery unit, all 
supported by aircraft, including 15 U.S.-made Blackhawk helicopters. 
 
    U.S. and Colombian officials have said they intend to "eradicate" the 
"narco-traffickers" by spraying toxic herbicides on coca plants, 
intercepting shipments of cocaine bound for the United States and other 
world markets, and extraditing alleged drug wholesalers to the United 
States for trial. Once the flow of drug money is cut off, they figure, the 
guerrilla groups, having no real popular support, will wither away. With 
the right kind of support from the United States, Tapias has claimed, he 
could finish off the guerrillas in three years, maybe less. 
 
    In its quest for peace, the Colombian government agreed in 1998 to pull 
its forces out of a so-called "neutral zone" of five municipalities 
generally south of the capital. The idea was to create a place of serenity 
where peace talks could be held. This area is now entirely in FARC's 
control. Peace talks are on-again-off-again. 
 
    The U.S. ambassador in Bogota, Curtis Kamman, says the guerrillas 
control "an area the size of Switzerland" that amounts to "only about 4 
percent of Colombia." FARC claims that, in the districts under its control, 
it does a better job of keeping the peace, feeding the hungry and 
maintaining the roads and the rest of the infrastructure than the 
government ever did. 
 
    Lately ELN, the next-largest rebel group, whose membership includes 
many artists, academics and other "intellectuals," has been lobbying for a 
DMZ of its own, as a signal of the government's "respect." Pastrana, who 
inherited the "neutral zone" concession to FARC from his predecessor, is 
understandably reluctant to deliver any more of his country to the 
insurgents. But he was elected on a peace platform, and if current talks 
are to make progress, he will need the continued involvement and support of 
the ELN, by far the more tractable of the top guerrilla groups. So far the 
government has met with ELN in neighboring Venezuela. 
 
    Often it seems as if the military and political combatants in 
Colombia's civil strife don't really want peace, because war pays better, 
in money and status alike. But it is evident that the Colombian public does 
want peace. 
 
    In October 1997, about 10 million Colombians - a quarter of the 
population - went to the polls in a non-binding election to express their 
desire for an end to the fighting. 
 
    In October 1999, about 12 million took to the streets to protest the 
continuing violence and to demand a cease-fire. Pastrana is said to have 
won last year's election largely because he managed to identify his 
candidacy with the people's dream of peace. In fact, he may owe his 
election to a single photograph published in the region's newspapers: a 
shot of Pastrana in the company of FARC's military commander, Manuel 
Marulanda Velez, also known as "Tirofijo" ("sure shot"). 
 
    "That picture," said Kamman, the U.S. diplomat, "was worth about 
500,000 votes." 
 
    FARC, with about 15,000 men and women under arms, is Latin America's 
largest surviving rebel army from the 1960s. Marulanda is described as "the 
world's oldest living commander of a revolutionary army." A FARC 
headquarters in San Vicente, decorated with posters of Che Guevara and 
Nikolai Lenin, looks like a typical U.S. university dormitory room in the 
mid-'60s. 
 
    ELN has a fighting force of about 5,000. The Colombian military has 
about 125,000 people in uniform, but only 40,000 to 50,000 who can be 
deployed in combat. 
 
    Both sides in the fighting admit that neither has a realistic hope of 
achieving a military victory anytime soon. 
 
    For all their talking about peace, both sides seem fairly happy with 
the status quo. 

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