Colext/Macondo
Cantina virtual de los COLombianos en el EXTerior
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Express-News: Nation & World
Immigrants here fear homeland
By Dick J. Reavis
Express-News Staff Writer
The chief political problem facing Colombians is fear, San Antonio's
Colombian immigrants say.
Members of Amigos de Colombia, a San Antonio association of about 400
immigrant families, students and visitors, expressed concerns about their
country at a meeting Wednesday night at the home of St. Mary's University
Professor Alejandro Vélez.
Two of the some two dozen Amigos who attended the informal session said they
have Colombian relatives who have been kidnapped
"The husband of a niece of mine has been kidnapped twice. Now he is making
monthly payments to his kidnappers," one of the immigrants said.
"One of my relatives has been told, by the company that employs him, not to
answer the telephone at home," psychologist Marta Pelaez said. "That is
because, before a kidnapping, the criminals often telephone to make sure
that their victims are at home."
Colombian relatives of Pelaez now are screening calls through an answering
machine. If they don't recognize a friendly voice on the other end of the
line, they don't pick up the phone, she said.
The Colombians described conditions in their country in response to a San
Antonio Express-News series this week about Colombia's long civil war, the
insecurity of daily life and the stepped-up U.S. intervention through Plan
Colombia.
The United States is spending $1.3 billion in mostly military aid through
the plan to train and equip Colombian counter-narcotics forces to fumigate
coca fields.
The fields, the source of about 70 percent of the world's cocaine base,
often are protected by rebel groups, leading some analysts to predict the
operation will draw the United States into a shooting war. The Pentagon has
ordered the U.S. advisers to stay clear of combat.
Because of dangers that confront their relatives in Colombia, several
immigrants who spoke this week asked not to be named or photographed.
Physicians who have come to San Antonio over the past 35 years accounted for
nearly half of those who attended the meeting.
Several members of the Amigos group have considered but discarded ideas of
returning home for retirement because they believe their homeland has become
unsafe.
The San Antonio Colombians are divided in their opinions about prospects of
peace in Colombia and about the usefulness of Plan Colombia, which soon will
send helicopters to coca-growing regions. The plan aims to destroy about
half of the country's cocaine production.
"Two or three generations will have to pass before there will be peace in
Colombia," physician Jorge Vélez said.
To think that Plan Colombia can resolve the Colombian crisis is "utopian,"
declared Dr. Pedro Angarita, pointing to the country's long history of
violent rebellions.
Another San Antonio immigrant doctor from Colombia argued that, if Plan
Colombia succeeds in reducing the country's drug crop - from which both
paramilitary and guerrilla groups derive income - peace could come as early
as five years.
Because of Plan Colombia, "the guerrilla groups are now realizing that the
government is going to come down on them hard, and they've started to make
concessions," said Dr. Julio Acevedo, 69.
With time, Plan Colombia and other measures to control drug traffic and
political violence can succeed, Professor Vélez argued, because, "As
imperfect as they may be, both the United States and Colombia are
democracies, and democracies are always weak when confronted with
totalitarian groups, but only initially."
"There were more killings than there were beneficial effects when the United
States prohibited alcohol," Nancy Iragorri argued. "I think that the drug
traffic should be legalized."
The group expressed a consensus that sharp economic inequalities underlie
the drug traffic and civil unrest in Colombia, and aggravate both problems.
Oscar Munoz, 30, a fellow in cardiology at the University of Texas medical
branch here, said he will stay in the United States if the opportunity
presents itself, in part because Colombian inequalities make life difficult
at home.
"The problem with Colombia is that the poor live badly, and the rich do,
too," he said. "The poor live badly because they are poor, and the rich live
badly because, in Colombia, a rich man cannot own a fine car or a handsome
house because that will attract kidnappers."
A problem shared by all members of the group, they agreed, is that their
homeland is acquiring a notoriety that, they believe, does not fully reflect
the country of their childhoods.
"All that people seem to know about Colombia is drugs, drugs, drugs and war,
war, war," housewife María Luisa Benavides lamented.
Citing advances in medical science made in Colombia, she said: "There are
many good things about Colombia that remain unknown."
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