Saturday, May 6, 2000
Dogs of war are
loose in Colombia
While guerrillas and government representatives talk peace, Colombia is
being destroyed by savage warfare and a US "aid" package may tip the
scales into chaos. Ana Carrigan reports from Bogotá
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon
the world; The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of
innocence is drowned . . "
The words of W.B. Yeats might seem like an odd introduction to a report
from this distant Latin-American city high in the Andes mountains but his
prophetic vision of the descent of the 20th century into darkness has
haunted me ever since I arrived here a month ago, and I can find no better
way to convey the mood of despair which has seeped into this isolated,
deeply troubled city.
Bogotá has always been a dangerous, lawless place. But since I was last
here four months ago, the powerful FARC guerrillas, those same people with
whose leaders the government of Andrés Pastrana has been holding peace
talks, have been closing in on the city and the residents are feeling
besieged. A new and insidious fearfulness, mingled with resignation,
pervades the atmosphere. Sightings of FARC roadblocks within 10 minutes of
the city outskirts are not unusual.
Ever since the guerrillas initiated random mass kidnappings on the roads,
people no longer dare take a spin out of town at the weekend. Family
Sunday lunch in the country house or roadside café is a thing of the past.
The country houses on the beautiful savannah stretching north from the
city are empty.
Between 800 and 900 people a week are leaving for the US. They are the
lucky ones: doctors, architects and engineers who already had valid visas.
Those who apply for a visa at the US embassy now must wait for a year to
get an appointment.
Until recently, for most of the upperand middle-class residents, the
people who essentially run the country, the insurgency war was something
they watched on their televisions at night. It was a virtual, sittingroom
war occurring in some other country, some far-off tropical jungle on the
other side of the Andes.
As long as the carnage affected only cam- pesinos and villagers, it did
not connect to their lives. Year after year, the war remained invisible
and the root causes were ignored.
Today it is the peace process which is seen to exist in the virtual world,
insulated from a violent, deeply confusing reality.
What goes on in the conversations and the lunches between the FARC
commanders and the VIPs the government brings to meet them in a model
village in the jungle which has been spruced up and painted in bright
fashion colours bears no relation to the mayhem in the rest of Colombia.
When, in the early 1990s, the FARC built a powerful peasant army on the
proceeds of the drug crops grown by peasants it controls, and this
guerrilla army started to overrun army bases, taking soldiers and police
hostages, the shocking scenes on the nightly news triggered the
realisation that the Colombian army might not quite cut the mustard.
But that worry remained someone else's problem. No middle-class son or
daughter enlisted to fight in this messy, undeclared war among peasants.
Now the guerrillas' new strategy has changed things radically. The
intimidating presence of the barbarian at the gate has brought the rural
war to the city, and the intensification by the guerrillas of their
indiscriminate kidnapping and extortion campaigns has projected the
civilians on to the brutal front lines of a war in which terrorism,
directed at the civilian population, has become the chief strategic
weapon.
Like many modern cities, Bogotá is really two cities - a well-off northern
enclave and a southern slum. Between the two, downtown Bogotá is a
no-man's land. Decayed, overcrowded, chaotic. On a clear, moonlit night,
from the slopes of the northern mountains where the people with money live
in pleasant, fortress-like apartment blocks, protected by private
security, you can see clear across this city of eight million people to
where a myriad naked light-bulbs shimmer in the teeming slums.
Of course, the guerrillas have always been in that city, organising,
recruiting, controlling crime, dispensing "revolutionary justice," making
alliances and building a clandestine urban militia. Today, the shadowy
presence of that militia is what frightens people in the north the most.
If the stories about the maid who was discovered bringing suitcases of
weapons into the apartment, or about the ransomed kidnap victim who came
face to face at the supermarket checkout with her "guard" are true, then
the FARC has infiltrated into the most exclusive neighbourhoods.
In the past year, the government of President es Pastrana has been
buffeted by one crisis after another and the authority and credibility of
his presidency have been dangerously eroded. Now in the 20th month of his
four-year term, many seasoned political analysts are worried about the
stability of his besieged presidency.
The fratricidal, territorial war between the FARC and the right-wing death
squads, known as "paramilitaries", continues to rage. Every day, the
paramilitaries continue to turn the Colombian countryside into a human
slaughterhouse.
Paramilitary massacres, last year and this, have occurred on average once
a day. In the phrase of Gabriel García Marquez, all of the massacres in
Colombia have been "foretold". Despairing appeals for protection in the
days leading up to the torture and the butchery have been ignored by army
and police commanders stationed in the immediate vicinity.
Two weeks ago, Mr Anders Kompass, the highly respected Swedish diplomat
who directs the Colombian office of UN Human Rights Commissioner Mrs Mary
Robinson, laid the responsibility for what he called "the magnitude and
complexity of the paramilitary phenomenon" directly at the door of the
Colombian government. He claimed it had failed to develop any active
policy to combat them.
Asked by the press what recommendations he could make to tackle the
horrific human rights crisis in Colombia, he went right to the point: "To
the government: combat the paramilitaries. To the FARC: stop kidnapping
and release all those in their power."
There is little chance that either message will be acted upon. The
government is too weak to take on the paramilitaries. The FARC's use of
indiscriminate kidnapping and extortion is intimately connected to its
long-term ambitions, which it has never denied, to take power by force if
the negotiations fail. Besides, today the FARC has yet another reason to
step up its fund-raising.
Next week, the US senate is expected to clear a $1.6 billion package of
military aid for "counter-narcotics" operations in FARC-controlled
territory. Washington's obsession with fumigating drug crops in faraway
places will draw the US another fateful step closer to the vortex of the
war and into direct conflict with 40,000 coca farmers.
Even before the senate votes, the FARC has taken action. In the Putumayo
coca fields where US-trained and equipped counter-narcotics battalions
will support the Colombian police teams when they fly in to fumigate, the
FARC is arming and training the coca farmers to resist.
All the elements of a major tragedy are in place here. The US action
provides the militarists in the FARC with precisely the excuse they need
to withdraw from the negotiations at minimum political cost. The war will
spread to new areas, with new actors, at the precise moment when changing
conditions in the coca fields offer a unique opportunity to get rid of the
coca peacefully, with the active collaboration of the farmers.
In Putumayo, and other areas also, the Colombian farmers who grow the coca
are looking for a way out. They are tired of the war, violence and death
which their crops bring. But they are trapped, by the FARC and by the
paramilitaries. Both depend on the coca to finance their war.
What the farmers desperately need is government protection: soldiers
capable of providing a shield between them and the FARC and the
paramilitaries. And then they need a guaranteed subsidy from the
government for their produce: a commitment to fly in and purchase at
market rate whatever they produce.
Theirs is not a mega-dollar plan. The structural development of the
Putumayo, the roads, schools, clinics and markets which they need, can
come later. But they face an emergency situation. They are in great danger
from all the violent players in the area.
There is very little time left before the US scenario closes the escape
hatch and the way out from drugs and fumigation and war will be lost.
For the past 16 months, President es Pastrana has stubbornly sought to
keep open the door to a rational settlement of the political violence
which is tearing his country apart. On the surface, the talks have often
appeared to be on the point of breaking new ground. The promise has never
held.
This may be the crunch moment, when only the international community can
help. The FARC wants belligerency status. It also wants a big meeting in
the coca fields with all the governments to explain how they would
eliminate coca.
Perhaps this is the time to exchange international recognition in return
for signing on to international humanitarian law and abandoning
kidnapping. There may not be another chance to put some brake on the
savagery of this war.
Ana Carrigan is the author of The Palace of Justice, a study of conflict
in Colombia in the 1980s.
Warm regards
George Pennefather
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