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After half a century of some of the worst political and criminal bloodshed in Latin America, Colombians appear to have grown almost inured to stunning levels of violence, warfare and drug scandals. ___________________ ====================================== MIAMI HERALD Friday, 9 July 1999 In Colombia, everyday `awful things' stranger than fiction ------------------------------------ By Juan O. Tamayo BOGOTA -- One wonders what Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, creator of the magical world of Macondo, would have made of this recent story in the newspaper El Tiempo: Iran's ambassador in Bogota had pledged $2 million to build a slaughterhouse in a remote Colombian town ruled by leftist guerrillas. The beef will be butchered according to Koranic law, and exported to Tehran. Or this one: In a country with a murder rate eight times higher than the United States, the army's 4th Mechanized Group in the northwestern department of Antioquia raffled off a 9mm pistol to raise funds for social activities. Or this: Government officials recently issued two-way radios to two jailed guerrilla chiefs so they could negotiate the recent release of some 80 hostages, including 51 kidnapped by rebels from a church in the midst of Mass. As odd as those stories may appear, none were deemed unusual enough here to appear on the front pages. After half a century of some of the worst political and criminal bloodshed in Latin America, Colombians appear to have grown almost inured to stunning levels of violence, warfare and drug scandals. Thursday, for example, the Colombian army reported intense fighting with guerrillas in a town just 32 miles south of Bogota, but few in the capital showed any sign of knowing or caring. ``Many Colombians consider that this country has always lived in crisis, and that violence is a constant in our history as a nation with which we must coexist,'' wrote El Tiempo columnist Carlos Caballero Argaez. A car bomb with 440 pounds of explosives found and disarmed in Bogota last month got a one-day run on front pages. The radio-controlled bomb appeared to have been aimed at the Bogota chief of police. ``We are so immersed in violence that we are accustomed to it,'' lawyer and kidnap mediator Tomas Moore said. ``Terrible things are commonplace. Awful things are the norm. And every day things get worse.'' Outrageous mayhem In his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez reflected some of Colombia's outrageous mayhem -- the war between Liberal and Conservative party bands in the 1930s and '40s is known as La Violencia, The Violence. ``We have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable,'' he said in his Nobel prize acceptance speech in 1984. But even Garcia Marquez might cock a disbelieving eyebrow at some of the strange things that have occurred in Colombia in more recent times. Some unusual types of assaults and kidnappings have become so common that Colombians have given them nicknames that belie their seriousness. Gunmen who kidnap their victims, usually as they emerge from luxury shops, and drive them around to several ATM machines to drain their accounts are said to be taking their prey on ``the millionaire's walk.'' Roadblocks set up by guerrillas and common criminals along rural roads in hopes of kidnapping a passing driver worthy of a good ransom have become known as pescas milagrosas, roughly translated as fishing for miracles. A jesting survey in the news weekly Semana to establish whether readers fit the profile for kidnapping targets asked: ``Do you go to Mass on Sundays?'' and ``Are you Colombian?'' Government licenses Kidnap negotiators are legally required to obtain government licenses and forbidden from accepting any payment, controls designed to stop shady mediators from acting in cahoots with the abductors to drive up the ransoms. And a U.S. State Department warning to Americans traveling to Colombia noted that local thieves have been walking up to foreigners and blowing little packets of a drug into their faces. The drug, scopolamine, briefly disorients the victims and allows the crooks to escape with their wallets or purses, according to the Nov. 20 Consular Information Sheet. Colombia's narcotics industry has provided its share of peculiar stories. One leader of the National Liberation Army, a guerrilla group heavy on Marxist ideology, was revealed to have been betrayed to police by a lover who suffered an emotional crisis after a dayslong cocaine binge. The rebel, Francisco Galan, one of the radio-toting prisoners who negotiated the hostage releases with his brethren in the mountains, was convicted of subversion, murder and possession of narcotics. The U.S. government last month put Cali's America soccer team on a no-visa list because of its alleged ownership by front men for the Cali Cartel's leaders, brothers Miguel and Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela. On soccer team board And Colombian drug prosecutors today sit on the board of a Bogota soccer team, Millonarios, after seizing the assets of other convicted drug traffickers. When then-President Ernesto Samper flew to a United Nations meeting in 1996, 8.8 pounds of heroin were found hidden in the walls of the presidential plane during a stopover in Miami. Three junior air force officers were convicted. Samper himself faced charges that the Cali drug cartel had donated $6 million to his 1994 campaign. Two top campaign aides confessed and said Samper knew about the donations, but a politically friendly Congress cleared him. Then there's the bloody war against leftist guerrillas, which Colombia's political leaders often appear less than interested in fighting and sometimes seem even reluctant to acknowledge. Armed Forces Chief Gen. Fernando Tapia, in a recent state-of-the war briefing, told reporters that Colombia now has more war dead in a year -- 3,000-4,000 -- than Israel suffered in all its wars with Arab neighbors. But the government spends a mere 3.5 percent of its GNP on national security, less on a proportional basis than Chile, Haiti, Ecuador or the Dominican Republic, which are not at war with anyone. To reserve units And the Defense Ministry announced recently that it will stop sending most draftees with high school diplomas, generally the sons of the middle and upper classes, into active service and instead assign them only to reserve units. Such draftees were already exempt from serving in combat units, usually joining police forces and leaving the fighting to peasant and poor draftees and the small number of volunteers and career soldiers. While military experts say armies usually need a 10-fold manpower superiority to fight an effective guerrilla war, Colombia has only some 30,000 combat troops facing an estimated 17,000-18,000 rebels. Defense Ministry officials said that sparing the high school graduates from active service would allow the armed forces to concentrate more resources on improving front-line units. But with draftees required to serve only 18 months, combat units are winding up with badly educated soldiers who tend to leave the military almost as soon as they are trained. ``You can bet the guerrillas are sending their best boys to the front, not the kitchen,'' lawyer Moore said. ``But the political elite in this country has yet to accept the reality of this war.'' Copyright 1999 Miami Herald |
