-Caveat Lector-
> Published Friday, July 9, 1999, in the Miami Herald
>
>
>
> In Colombia, everyday `awful things' stranger than fiction
>
> By JUAN O. TAMAYO
> Herald Staff Writer
>
> BOGOTA, Colombia -- 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.''
>
> e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
> <Picture><Picture>
>
> <Picture: Shop The Herald, Online! -- Click Here!>
>
> Contact Us
> Copyright 1999 Miami Herald
Above from Miami Herald
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Thursday, July 8, 1999 Published at 12:27 GMT 13:27 UK
> World: Americas
>
> Doomsday cultists vanish
>
>
> Up to 60 members of a Colombian doomsday cult have gone missing
> in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada in Northern Colombia.
>
>
> <Picture: [ image: ]>They were due for an alleged rendezvous
> with a spaceship, and nothing has been heard of them since the
> weekend, despite a continuing police search.
>
> The members of the Stella Maris Gnostic church were hoping to be
> carried off by extraterrestrial beings before what they believe
> will be the imminent end of the world at the turn of the
> Millennium.
>
> Police checked the sect's half-finished temple in the Caribbean
> city of Cartagena, but found no clue as to where the cult has
> gone or what their intentions were.
>
> Mariela Tovar, whose 23-year-old daughter Patricia is among the
> disappeared, said the group's failure to return prompted worried
> relatives to contact the police.
>
> The head of the sect apparently assured followers that the Sierra
> Nevada - a sacred territory to indigenous Indians - was where
> they could contact a spaceship.
>
>
> <Picture><Picture>The BBC's Jeremy McDermott reports on the
> beliefs of the cultAccording to their interpretation of the
> Bible, the sect believes that extraterrestrials will take 140,000
> people from the earth before the end of the world - a sort of
> second Noah's Ark.
>
> The authorities have not discounted any theory about the
> disappearances and are exploring the possibilities of a mass
> suicide, mass kidnapping or a lift from a passing UFO.
Above from the BBC
A<>E<>R
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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