Irish Times

Saturday, May 6, 2000

Dogs of war are loose in Colombia

Ana Carrigan


"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 upper and 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 campesinos 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 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.