WRITER RETURNS TO COLOMBIA, WHERE DRUG WAR IS EVERYWHERE, NOWHERE

My Colombian War A Journey Through the Country I Left Behind By
Silvana Paternostro, HENRY HOLT; 325 PAGES; $26

In 2000, the United States put in place Plan Colombia, its third
largest military aid package after those given to Israel and Egypt.
Colombia at that time had the highest rates worldwide for kidnapping,
murder and other crimes. Left-wing rebels and right-wing paramilitary
organizations were equally brutal, killing civilians with chain saws
and arranging body parts in grotesque bouquets for surviving family
members. Drugs and politics but mainly social inequalities were behind
the violence. Today, human rights violations are still rampant, but
the bloodshed has lessened significantly since the 2002 election of a
hard-liner president.

"The only reality Colombia has known since its inception is war,"
Silvana Paternostro writes in her new book, "My Colombian War," an
ultimately frustrating mix of memoir and reportage. Paternostro sees
no peace in sight and believes that Colombians have their heads in the
sand. Between 1999 and 2003, the Colombian-born journalist set out to
"read Colombians the Riot Act," to tell them that they all have "blood
on their hands." And to find out how, or if, she now fits into the
country of her birth.

A self-professed gringa, living "the liberal elite New York American
life," Paternostro returned to her hometown, the coastal city of
Barranquilla, in 2002, ostensibly to write a magazine story about her
family's farm, which is in dangerous rebel and paramilitary territory.
But mainly she is there because she is "haunted by Colombia."
Twenty-five years before her story opens, Paternostro left Colombia
for college in Michigan, where she hung a poster of Che Guevara on her
dorm wall, dreaming of joining the revolution. Until then, she had
spent a privileged childhood attending an American school in
Barranquilla, hanging out at El Country Club, oblivious to living
under a curfew. She even professes never to have noticed that her town
had a river, the Magdalena, which flows over 930 miles of her country.

This out-of-focus Colombia still suits her. When she returns,
Paternostro confesses her "secret for tolerating" Colombian life: "I
go around without my contact lenses." Though the book contains solid
reporting, comments such as these may make readers nervous.
Paternostro doesn't vote in Colombian elections ("It is how I manifest
feeling abandoned"), and on the book's final page deems her country "a
failed state that scares me to the point of blindness." Readers may
sympathize with her but will miss the open-eyed reporting style
Paternostro has demonstrated in the past writing about places a bit
farther from home, such as Cuba.

"My Colombian War" opens with Paternostro's declaration she will
return to her homeland to speak to the rebels and the paras and learn
what's really going on. But this is a tease. As a light-skinned
Colombian with a last name carrying high social status, she would have
been bait - like the French poodles trotting around Barranquilla on
golden leashes - for the rebels. Apart from a brief, dangerous trip to
her family's farm, she spends most of her time in her grandmother's
apartment in Barranquilla and at home with her parents in Bogota. Even
within this limited sphere, however, interesting characters do
surface, including her uncle, the overseer of the family farm who
struggles to modernize and put the past behind him, and Billy, a young
U.S. Marine who confides in Paternostro about busting Colombian drug
operations for the U.S. Embassy.

Despite the challenges of seeing what's closest to her, Paternostro
turns the process of her war with Colombia inside out. She reveals how
returning to her homeland affects her and describes her journalistic
musings and anxieties in detail, elucidating her anger with her
compatriots. Colombians, she believes, are obsessed with Carnival and
beauty queens ("The amount of cleavage in Colombia's journalism makes
me want to scream," she writes), not the war they face daily.

But her family takes in several televised news reports on decidedly
less-than-voluptuous subjects. Is her family an exception? When her
grandmother's chauffeur decides to hang out in the shade with his
friends instead of joining her inside Barranquilla's Romantic Museum,
she wonders if his lack of interest is "related to why there is chaos"
in Colombia. She never considers that an ordinary fruit vendor,
lottery-ticket seller and the driver may have something to discuss in
the shade other than the latest cleavage.

Paternostro is acutely aware of the awkwardness of her "mission to
bring war upon Colombians." War, she sometimes sees clearly, is
already upon Colombia. "I wish I could be less uptight, less
critical," she writes. Working to ease the paralyzing fears of
Colombia's media, to make its people safer in their beds, to increase
reading rates - these goals seem to be what Paternostro strives for.
But guilt over leaving, childhood terrors and the usual baggage
associated with home and family blur the purpose of her personal war.
When Paternostro describes a Colombian publishing a subversive
magazine, who is, in his way, "fighting for Colombia," it comes as a
relief to meet finally someone offering hope.