Colext/Macondo Cantina virtual de los COLombianos en el EXTerior -------------------------------------------------- Para complementar la información del San Antonio Express News http://www.mysanantonio.com/expressnews/colombia/ les envío este artículo de Dan Gardner (Chicago Sun Times). Opinen, por favor... PANG============ CHICAGO SUN-TIMES Sunday, 14 January 2001 Colombia collapsing under drug war fiasco ----------------------------------------- By Dan Gardner BOGOTA - They are dark memories now, but in the 1980s and early 1990s, Colombia's drug lords loomed large in North American nightmares. Pablo Escobar, the ruthless chief of the Medellin cartel, was the most infamous of all, the personification of the cocaine plague. In 1989, pressed by Colombian authorities, Escobar declared "total and absolute war," then launched an unprecedented campaign of terror. The Colombian government responded with its own brutal force. For the first time, the War on Drugs became a literal war. Ultimately, with much bloodshed and sacrifice, Colombia defeated Escobar. Then the other great Colombian trafficking ring, the Cali cartel, was taken down. These were the War on Drugs' greatest victories. Yet today, just a few years after these triumphs, Colombia is suffering political turmoil, economic free-fall, epidemic violence and massive corruption, all while producing and shipping more drugs than Escobar could have imagined in his greediest dreams. Victory over the cartels did not stop the illegal trafficking of drugs. Nor did it stop the corruption and violence drug trafficking breeds. It only made these plagues worse. For Colombians, this recent, bitter history foreshadows the future. With the backing of the United States (President Clinton traveled to Colombia recently to formally deliver a massive aid package), Colombia is preparing a new anti-drug assault. The details have changed but not the essential approach: Once again, the illegal drug trade will be fought with police, soldiers and helicopters. Once again, the War on Drugs will become a literal war. Lawyer Monica de Greiff shakes her head with disgust when she talks of this looming war. She is in private practice in Bogota now, but her memories of the last war are vivid. In 1989, de Greiff was vice minister of justice in Colombia. Escobar had ordered the murder of a leading presidential candidate, prompting Colombia's president, Virgilio Barco, to announce a crackdown on traffickers and the extradition of the worst of them to the United States. The drug lords were enraged. Barco made de Greiff his minister of justice. The next day, Escobar launched a terror campaign to stop the extraditions. Life for de Greiff became "like hell," she says. The death threats started immediately. There were blunt phone calls and notes. Funeral arrangements arrived expressing condolences for her passing. A headless doll was delivered to her inside a tiny coffin inscribed with the name of her 3-year-old son. Meanwhile, Escobar launched a wave of maniacal assaults: A bus packed with 1,100 pounds of dynamite exploded in front of the headquarters of the Colombian federal police, killing 80 people and injuring 700; the editor of a muckraking newspaper was murdered; a truck bomb later destroyed the newspaper's offices; judges and police officers, with rich bounties on their heads, were murdered by the score; car bombs maimed shoppers and street merchants; a bomb aboard a commercial airliner knocked the plane from the sky, killing 107 people. For de Greiff, life was a state of siege. Soldiers blocked off the street in front of her house. Her little boy went to school surrounded by guards and machineguns. She traveled in a bombproof car, though with Escobar's well-known desire to kill her, it was rarely possible to go anywhere. "People were so scared that if I went shopping or to a restaurant, they would get up and leave," she says. The government answered Escobar, attack for attack. There were massive seizures of drug cartel property. In sweeping investigations, as many as 10,000 people were detained for questioning. State security forces took emergency legislation as a license for ferocity, committing summary executions of suspects and murders wholly unrelated to the war with Escobar. In 1989, 5,700 people died in politically related murders, 70 percent of these committed by the army or police. Amid this chaos, Monica de Greiff lasted nine months. One day, an anonymous caller described to her precisely where her son went to school, how he got there, what time he arrived and when he left. She resigned and fled to Miami with her family. Escobar and his henchmen never were extradited. But over the next several years, the Colombian government dismantled the Medellin cartel. In 1993, Escobar was shot dead. One of the key men responsible for taking down Escobar was de Greiff's father, Gustavo. As Colombia's prosecutor general, he was a frontline commander in the War on Drugs. And thanks to his role in the sensational manhunt, he also was a hero in the United States. While Escobar was still on the run, American television journalist Sam Donaldson interviewed Gustavo de Greiff in Colombia. If Escobar is imprisoned or killed, Donaldson asked, what effect will it have on the drug trade in Colombia? Gustavo de Greiff startled the American with his answer: "Mr. Donaldson, nothing will happen. There is so much appetite in your country for drugs, the killing of Escobar will not be a solution." Gustavo de Greiff was beginning to doubt that the illegal drug trade could be crippled by going after drug lords. As long as the demand existed, there would be huge profits to be had, and people prepared to risk prison or death to get them. The carnage and destruction in Colombia, he suspected, were pointless. As it turned out, de Greiff was not quite right in saying that nothing would happen to the drug trade. Illegal drug exports did change after the death of Escobar: They rose. Escobar's rivals, the Cali cartel, had been instrumental in the destruction of the Medellin cartel, supplying the government with intelligence and taking out Medellin gunmen with their own assassins. Once the competition was in jail or dead, the Cali drug lords cashed in. Cocaine shipments to the United States outpaced demand. The price of cocaine in the United States actually fell in the years after Escobar's death. The Cali cartel became flush with money and power. Colombia's first victory in the War on Drugs had produced only more drugs, more corruption and more power for organized crime. Just how bad things had become was confirmed in the 1994 Colombian presidential election, when evidence surfaced that the campaign of the winner, Ernesto Samper, had been financed in part by the Cali cartel. Where Escobar had tried to destroy the state, the Cali cartel threatened to buy it. The United States responded by decertifying the Samper government-issuing a formal reprimand for not doing enough to fight drug trafficking. The Americans threatened economic sanctions and an end to financial aid. Colombia's economy had only just been opened to international trade and investment, and with 40 percent of the country's exports going to the United States, economic sanctions would have been devastating. The Samper government, desperate to improve relations with the United States, attacked the Cali cartel with a vengeance. By 1996, all of the Cali drug lords were either in prison or dead. Still, the Clinton administration refused to give its blessing to the Colombian government, and Samper left office under a cloud of allegations of corruption. With the destruction of the Cali cartel, the War on Drugs had won its second triumph. But the cost was terrible. Between 1985 and 1995, 3,400 Colombians died and another 5,000 were wounded in the fight with the drug lords, including civilians caught in the crossfire. Meanwhile, an even more fundamental change was taking place, helped along by the fight with the old cartels. Until the 1990s, Colombia grew very little coca, the plant from which cocaine is derived. Instead, Colombian cartels obtained coca base-unrefined cocaine-from Peru and Bolivia. They then processed it into cocaine and shipped it to the United States, Canada and Europe. Beginning in 1992, the planting of coca expanded rapidly in Colombia. In 1995, it took off. Over the next five years, the amount of coca grown in Colombia doubled. The U.S. government estimates that coca now covers about 50,000 acres of the country, making Colombia the single largest source of coca in the world. Combined with the coca brought into the country to be processed, Colombia now exports three-quarters of the world's cocaine. Even more dramatic was the shift to opium poppy, the plant from which heroin is derived. Before the 1990s, opium poppy was little-known in Colombia. Now it covers about 3,000 acres, enough to supply two-thirds of the American heroin market. Why did drug production suddenly soar in Colombia? In large part, coca shifted over the border when government crackdowns in Peru and Bolivia (helped by a fungus that attacked Peruvian coca) pushed production down in those countries. Opium poppy arrived after Colombian traffickers cut deals with southeast Asian gangs, who traditionally dominated heroin production and smuggling, in order to get involved in the American heroin market. More crucial, though, was the chaos in the Colombian countryside. Leftist guerrillas who held effective control over huge swaths of Colombia, especially in the south, encouraged the traffickers to develop coca and opium poppy on their lands. In exchange for protection from the government, the rebels taxed the drug producers. The traffickers got a steady supply of drugs, and the rebels got a lucrative source of financing for their war. The current civil war in Colombia has been going on for 35 years. Why had this not occurred before? Many experts feel the guerrillas owed their new strength to the American government's decision to isolate Samper. Ethan Nadelmann, a former Princeton professor, is now head of the Lindesmith Center, a drug policy reform group in New York City, and a leading critic of the War on Drugs. In Colombia, he says, the United States was stupid. "We had a guy there, President Samper, who was taking money from some traffickers, but this was the same guy who had done more to take out traffickers than any other president had. We were so hung up on the corruption end of it that we went after him with all we had and punished the country to get rid of him. "In two or three years of punishing Samper, we weakened the central state, we weakened the civilian government." With Colombia's government isolated and forced to focus its meager resources on the fight against the drug cartels, the rebels rapidly expanded their territorial control. Then drug producers were invited into rebel-controlled lands, creating a bonanza for the guerrillas that financed new weapons. With the central state weakened, the paramilitaries rose to become political powers unto themselves, with independent financing and strong control in many regions. Again, the illegal trade in drugs was their springboard. The economy, meanwhile, has crumbled. After decades of economic expansion, Colombia is now in its worst economic recession since the 1930s. Here, too, the fingerprints of the illegal drug trade can be found. Corruption, the standard tool of illegal drug trafficking, erodes the quality of governance, which in turn hampers development efforts. And the huge profits of narco-trafficking create serious structural distortions to the economy over time. All this leaves Colombia as it is today, seven years after Escobar was shot dead. The murder rate is 10 times that in the United States-on average, one person is killed every 20 minutes. Monica de Greiff, too, despairs. She feels Colombia today is worse off than it was when Escobar and the drug lords terrorized the nation. These should be happy days for de Greiff. Earlier this year, she finally gave up her last bodyguard. "I can walk in the streets alone; I can go and shop alone." But the dark mood in the streets and shops is draining. At her law office, de Greiff gets three or four calls a day from people trying to go to live in the United States. "This isn't how it was supposed to be after fighting and winning the greatest victories the War on Drugs has ever known." Copyright 2001 Chicago Sun-Times _____________________ -------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] with UNSUBSCRIBE COLEXT as the BODY of the message. Un archivo de colext puede encontrarse en: http://www.mail-archive.com/colext@talklist.com/ cortesia de Anibal Monsalve Salazar
