This profile of our new ambassador to Colombia appeared in this morning's society section. Turns out she's from Arkansas ... woodenjano. --Mara High Profile: Anne Woods Patterson PHYLLIS D. BRANDON ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE FORT SMITH -- Anne Patterson, a Fort Smith native, is the new ambassador to Colombia. The job won't be just a cup of coffee. While this South American nation is noted for its exports of java and fresh flowers, it's the massive production of cocaine and the ensuing wealth and power of the drug lords that will make this assignment challenging for the State Department career diplomat. In Bogota, the 5-foot-1 mother of two sons will leave her residence to go to the embassy at a different time and by a different route every day -- all the while surrounded by 13 bodyguards, some in unmarked vans in front and behind her van. Accompanying Patterson to Colombia will be a $1.3 billion drug package from the U.S. government to help President Andres Pastrana eradicate illegal drug production. The aid includes military hardware and will provide training aimed at combating the armed groups that protect plantations producing 90 percent of the world's cocaine and a rising share of its heroin. Implementation of the aid was accelerated by a brief visit Aug. 31 of President Clinton, Cabinet members and 11 members of Congress to Cartegena, Colombia. "There has been drug trafficking insurgency in Colombia for years," Patterson says during an interview at her parents' Fort Smith home. "But two things have happened in recent years that have changed the picture -- one is the coca growing has exploded. [Cocaine comes from coca leaves.] When I worked on these issues 10 years ago, most of the production was in Bolivia and Peru and the Colombians were the processors, but now they are fully integrated. "The other issue is the link between the traffickers and the insurgents. That's basically new over the past few years. They get the money and do extortion and protection and such. Our job is to try and reduce this coca production most immediately." "Ten years ago," she adds, "you could go to Bolivia and there would be coca leaves as far as the eye could see. It used to be the Colombians were just on the high end, but they do everything now. What's happened is the coca leaf production has gone up 20 percent in some parts of Colombia in one year. That's just devastating." Her security detail will be essential. "People get killed in Colombia all the time," she says. "It's terrible. People are leaving in huge numbers and journalists get killed and politicians get killed." Why would she pick this troubled place? "Because this is a huge challenge, and I felt that I knew the issues because I had worked on these issues before." Patterson has just completed a three-year assignment as U.S. ambassador to El Salvador. "This was a country that we got very emotionally invested with," she says. "We wanted them to succeed. And they mostly have succeeded. Every time you see the ex-guerillas talking to people that they had attacked and people whose relatives had been kidnapped, that's hard. That's really hard to put that all in the past and try to work together, but they've done a very good job. "The U.S. government has a lot of good programs there like the [U.S. Agency for International Development] that [Helena native] Brady Anderson runs," Patterson says. These programs are inexpensive, she explains, and help many people by providing for food and child and maternal health. "I really wanted Salvador to succeed, and we tried to do everything possible to help them get there. Salvador is going to be a success story." El Salvador was Patterson's first exposure to the media and anonymous faces, which she found hard to get used to. "You have these groups of reporters that follow you to every event. That's not easy, to be a public figure," she says. Patterson's first three-year assignment was in Equador, starting in 1974. A souvenir of her tour includes the painting now hanging in her parents' home and shown in the High Profile cover photo. Returning to the United States, she was assigned to the State Department in Washington as a Canadian trade officer. "I was and still am an economic officer," she says. There she met David Patterson, who was working in a parallel office on European trade issues. They had more than work in common: He was also a native of Fort Smith. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964 and seven years older than she, he had served in the Peace Corps in Colombia in 1966 and been in the foreign service in Iran. He had worked in Iran and Chile. He'd never met Anne until they were stationed in Washington. In 1979, Anne went to work for another Arkansan, Jim Cheek, on the Nicaraguan desk in the State Department in Washington. "That was almost the hardest job I have ever had before or since because it was just immensely time consuming and tough. We'd work from 7 in the morning until 9 or 10 or 11 o'clock at night." "It was really almost 24 hours a day," recalls former Ambassador Cheek. "When she left they tripled the size of the Central American office and replaced her with three people. This was during the last two years of the Carter administration. "The Foreign Service has 3,000 really talented officers. They're all really good, but some don't have a chance to prove it. Anne distinguished herself and stood out from the pack. This required incredible stamina and capacity to take on an enormous workload. And since it was a crisis, [it required] an ability to keep very cool under fire. "This lady has managed being highly successful in the most competitive service of the U.S. government, which is U.S. diplomatic service, and also have a happy, successful marriage and be a successful mother at the same time. That's remarkable." "When I went to Salvador," Cheek says, "Ann was ambassador, and I thought, boy is she good. Then we went to her home to have dinner, and Anne Patterson was the wife and the mother. All in the same day. That's really remarkable. This is very rare." NEW COUNTRY AND NEW CUSTOMS Anne Woods and David Patterson went home to Fort Smith in 1980 to marry, and their son, Edward, was born a year later. They continued to work in their Foreign Service jobs and remained in Washington because "that was the easiest place to find two jobs together," Anne says. After leaving the Nicaraguan desk she worked in intelligence and coordination on Central America. The job was more conducive to family life. "I did that for a couple of years and it was a very interesting job because I learned a lot about how intelligence functions in the U.S. government. That has been useful." In 1983, the couple took classes in Arabic. "It was real hard for me. It was less hard for [David] because he already had Persian," Patterson recalls. The couple was then assigned to Saudi Arabia from 1984 to '88, and since not many people wanted to go there, it was easy to find two jobs together. For the birth of their second son, Andrew, in 1987, she returned to Washington and an American hospital. Saudi Arabia was a fascinating experience, Patterson says about the country where women are still veiled. She was chief of the economic section and wore no veil. "I could do pretty much anything I wanted, but you can't imagine how some things could be so different on the face of this earth as inside Saudi Arabia," Patterson says. "Nobody my age could read or write because there wasn't public education for women until 1964." The Saudis didn't care that Patterson wasn't veiled, because "as far as they were concerned I was a heathen. They're immensely religious, of course." On the positive side, she felt they wanted their society to change. By receiving a Western woman in their offices and having their picture taken with her, she believed, they sent a signal that they were interested in change. PICKING UP LANGUAGE While the diplomats were in Geneva, the world was concerned with the buildup to the Persian Gulf War. In Geneva, Edward learned to speak French, "with a great accent. I hope he doesn't lose it," she says. Their younger son, Andrew, speaks Spanish learned in an American school in Salvador. Patterson sees an important reason to know Spanish. "[America] is the fifth largest Hispanic country in the world. I would say that so much that people got tired of it because immigration was our major issue in Salvador. Twenty percent of Salvador's population has moved to the United States. Most of them moved during the war, but they keep coming. "That has all kinds of implications that people don't think of. Ten percent of Los Angeles now is Salvadoran. It's not just Salvador, it's Mexico and Guatemala and every place else in Latin America. Hispanics, as you can see from [the political conventions] are a big issue now." POWER OF ADVERTISING For her high school education Patterson attended Hockaday School in Dallas, a private prep school for girls. "It was fine, a good school and you learn a lot in close quarters with lots of people. I was kind of a jock back then and was on the tennis team, the swim team and I studied a lot." After graduation in 1967, she enrolled in Wellesley (Mass.) College. This period was the cutting edge of the feminist movement, she recalls, and she found Wellesley challenging. "It was certainly the smartest group of people I've ever been associated with in my life." Wellesley is the alma mater of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was two years ahead of Patterson. "She was a campus leader and everyone knew who she was." After getting her bachelor's degree, Patterson attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a year, but lost interest in graduate school. Returning to Fort Smith, she was looking for a job when her mother saw an advertisement that said the foreign service needed women. Her mother, Carol Woods, saw the full-page back-cover ad on a publication of the Daughters of the American Revolution. "I've never in my life seen another ad for that particular thing. I've belonged to the organization for a long time and take the magazine sporadically," Carol Woods said. Patterson took the admission test in Little Rock in 1973 even though during college she had been mostly interested in domestic issues and didn't have a foreign language, "but the Foreign Service doesn't care," she says, "they'll train you in the language." After joining the Foreign Service she took an introductory course for a few months and then was given a list of spots that were open. "One of the places that was offered to me was Equador, and I got that. It was a split assignment between the coast and the highlands -- they were going to move me after a year." THE MOST DIFFICULT OF ALL While the Pattersons are in Bogota, their older son will attend the University of Chicago. The younger son will attend boarding school in Florida, because she was uncertain how safe he would be in Bogota. "For school you have to go and come the same time every day. It's not as if you can vary your route or not show up on time." He will be just one plane flight away from his parents. Anne Patterson visited Bogota in 1995, so she is familiar with the ambassador's residence. "It's an old house," she says. "A beautiful old house we built in 1942. The embassy itself is a brand-new supersecure building we built on the edge of town. It's not near the residence. Unfortunately, there is a commute." While Patterson signed up for Colombia before Congress approved the $1.2 billion in aid, she's anxious for the Colombians to try to make a living another way than raising cocaine. The Americans will help the Colombian police eradicate the coca plants with an aerial spray, using Round-up, and then teach the farmers how to grow other crops, like mangoes or pineapples. Colombians are very industrious, she says. "From some of the growing areas, they'll have six or seven planes just out of a little operation, flying overnight to Miami with loads of carnations. Flowers are a huge export industry for them. "But coca production is impinging on it. It has all kinds of secondary economic effects. Colombia was prosperous until all these problems began to catch up with them. It's a very sophisticated country. It's too bad, and this is our problem, too." Patterson plans to be in Bogota three years because that's the usual length of an assignment, but she also serves "at the pleasure of the president. ... We'll all turn in our resignations for either President Gore or President Bush; and it would be unusual but not unheard of for a career person to leave." CONSTANT SCRUTINY She learned while she was in El Salvador how much influence the U.S. government has and how important the United States is. "So anything we do has an effect." It was hard for her to learn that every time she went to an event or said something or didn't say something, the people felt she was sending a signal of some sort. When they first got to El Salvador she went to "a bunch of military events just because we had a bunch, and people would ask me, 'Is that because you're trying to do something with the military? Or trying to send a signal to Salvadoran military?' I said, 'No, it just happens to be scheduled that way.' You have to be very conscious of what you are doing. You have to be super careful of what you say because people will take signals from that that you often didn't intend." What will the Pattersons do for fun in Colombia? "That's going to be hard," she says, "because it's so hard to get around. And those 13 people with you, they work hard, too, so every time you think, 'Well, maybe I'll go out and do something,' you think, 'Well, these 13 people have to go with me, so that's an imposition.' So you don't go out very much except for official things." Patterson gained useful, valuable knowledge in Washington. "But it's just a very different job working in an embassy. You're the boss. If you have to remind them that you're speaking for the president, you've probably failed." This article was published on Sunday, October 1, 2000
