THE COLOMBIAN NIGHTMARE

Narco-trafficking Has Brought Colombia Escalating Terror And Violence. It
Brought Francisco Santos The Agonies Of Kidnapping And Exile.

Hundreds of thousands of families displaced. Tens of thousands of citizens
kidnapped. Thousands of businessmen and their families fleeing the country
because of the danger. Dozens of intellectuals assassinated or threatened.
Dozens of human-rights activists dead and disappeared. Hundreds of
journalists exiled, kidnapped and murdered.

The internal armed conflict that Colombia is living through today destroys
the country and its future. Citizens from all social classes feel in their
own flesh the pain of war.

I have not been spared from this grim panorama. Twice in the past decade I
have been a victim of the violence unleashed by a war and the drug
trafficking that finances it. In 1990, Pablo Escobar, the capo of the
Medellin cartel, kidnapped me for eight months. And only four months ago,
on March 10, I had to flee into exile when organized criminals who work
with the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (or FARC, its Spanish
acronym) in the business of kidnapping tried to assassinate me on the
outskirts of Bogota, the capital of my country.

In 1980, Colombia had only 50 kidnappings. Murders numbered fewer than
5,000 per year. Paramilitary forcesdid not exist. And membership in the six
guerrilla groups that were active then totaled less than 10,000 men. So
what happened in Colombia? Why in only 20 years has the violence in general
and in the guerrilla struggle in particular reached today's levels? How
does one explain that in only one generation the murder toll has climbed to
23,000 a year and abductions to more than 3,000 a year? There is only one
answer: drugs.

In the mid-1970s, when the Colombian government militarized the fight
against marijuana with the support of the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter
administrations, drug traffickers found a product more profitable and
easier to transport and distribute--coca.

Since then the drug cartels in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia have funneled
their human, financial and military resources into the cultivation,
processing, transport and distribution of that narcotic. At the outset, the
coca was cultivated and processed in Peru and Bolivia, while in Colombia it
was refined as cocaine and transported to centers of consumption.

However, the successful campaign to prevent and substitute the cultivation
of coca crops in Peru and Bolivia led to the vertical integration of this
"industry" in Colombia. Today my country is the epicenter of this immense,
multinational, illegal business whose consumer markets lie in the United
States and Europe.

Obviously the transfer of such a flux of capital brought with it the ills
that plague Colombia: endemic violence, a well-funded guerrilla force with
a mighty capacity to destabilize, and vast social and political corruption.
Further complicating the crisis, the political and economic elites have
been incapable of finding realistic solutions to these national problems.

My life as a journalist has been interwoven with this national reality. On
September 19, 1990, the now-deceased drug trafficker Pablo Escobar abducted
several journalists--me for eight months--and murdered my chauffeur. During
this period, Escobar used coercion through narco-terrorism, corruption and
abductions to get the Constituent Assembly to establish articles in the new
constitution that prohibited the extradition of Colombians.

For 234 days I was chained to a bed in a dark room. Every night and every
morning, when I lay down or went to sleep, I thought those would be the
last hours of my life. Every second of survival was a second that I had
snatched away from death. I learned first-hand about the Darwinian ability
of human beings to adapt to the most difficult circumstances.

But the pain of being kidnapped, like a wound in the heart that never
heals, doesn't only hurt the person who was kidnapped. The family of the
victim suffers even more. The uncertainty of loved ones over the fate of
the person suddenly stolen from them is worse than the kidnapping itself.
The hours seem like days. The days are an eternity.

For family members, to eat a good breakfast or to enjoy a sunny day
generates an immense feeling of guilt. The soul dies, little by little,
with each second that passes. My father aged 20 years during my eight
months of captivity.

In this crime, even the criminals themselves suffer. They too are
kidnapped, because they have a mission to accomplish. In my case, primarily
four men took daily shifts of six hours each taking care of me. "This is
like a funeral without death," one of them told me, in a most accurate
description of an abduction.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, related
in his book "Notice of a Kidnapping" how Escobar demonstrated his capacity
to intimidate Colombian society while the state proved unable to protect
its citizens. After Escobar's death, his organized bands of paid assassins
and kidnappers planted, like a cancer, the seeds of assassination and
abduction that made Colombia one of the most violent countries in the world.

But a lot of the drug dollars did not remain solely in the hands of
narco-traffickers. The guerrilla armies profited from the business as well.
Their military strength and their consolidation as an inexpungible army in
the jungles of southern Colombia are tightly tied to the drug crops that
are cultivated there. The more than $200 million generated each year from
the protection of coca crops, landing fields and laboratories has allowed
the FARC to grow, consolidate and become a national power with which the
Colombian establishment is now negotiating a peace treaty.

But if the guerrillas and the narco-traffickers have a strategic alliance
in the south, in the north of the country--on the Caribbean coast and in
Antioquia--they fight a war to the death. Underlying this conflict:
kidnapping and the value of the land.

Sixty percent of the 3,000 annual abductions are carried out by two Marxist
guerrilla groups--the National Liberation Army (ELN, its Spanish acronym)
and the FARC--in many cases in alliance with common criminals who kidnap
people and then sell them to the guerrillas. One-third of the kidnap
victims are farmers and cattle ranchers. Due to the state's inability to
protect them--a recurring fact of Colombian life for the last two
decades--many of these vulnerable people abandoned their lands, which the
drug traffickers then bought up at very low prices. In fact, drug
traffickers own about 30 percent of Colombia's most fertile land.

Such investment was amassed by the drug traffickers by means of blood and
fire. Meanwhile, the logic of war--the enemy of my enemy is my
friend--encouraged an alliance between large landowners threatened by
guerrilla kidnappings and soldiers from the far right. This gave birth to a
paramilitary army that has grown exponentially to more than 6,000 men in
only 10 years.

Drug trafficking serves as the heart of the war in Colombia. It pumps money
into the left and the right. And it nourishes itself from the fears of a
Colombian society so intimidated by kidnappings that it desperately
searches for an end to the conflict. For that reason, the paramilitaries
find a political echo and a complicit acceptance from diverse sectors of
society, who see in this new military player a possible way out of the
national crisis.

After my kidnapping by Escobar, I founded a non-profit organization that
helps kidnap victims: Pais Libre, or Free Country. My struggle against this
war crime led to my second encounter with death. Four months ago, I had to
leave the country after a band of kidnappers working with the FARC planned
an attempt on my life. I fled after four assassins came looking for me at a
restaurant I had left minutes earlier.

Today, I live in Spain, waiting for a better time when I can return to
practice my journalistic and activist endeavors, to defend human rights
through word and action.

In the meantime, one can only hope that peace negotiations in Colombia take
place, despite an increasingly violent climate. Escobar's lesson in the use
of terror to bring a society to its knees for political gain was rapidly
learned by the insurgent and paramilitary organizations.

FARC leaders now impose positions of strength at the negotiation table
through acts of war. They publicly demand that citizens pay a war tax; the
penalty for not paying is abduction. They destroy villages with
indiscriminate attacks that exact an enormous toll from the civilian populace.

Similarly, the paramilitaries seek to create a legitimate political space
for themselves at the negotiation table through acts of violence. They
massacre and displace peasants to expand their territorial control. And
they oppose the government pulling its military out of a zone in northern
Colombia (as it did in the south) in order to help along its negotiations
with the ELN.

Drug traffickers, in turn, are not going to remain silent in a peace
process that undoubtedly will harm their business. They have wasted no time
in sabotaging the negotiations through assaults against the guerrillas and
proponents of the peace process.

Of one thing there is no doubt: Even if the U.S. military aid leads to the
best--and quite frankly, the unlikely--outcome of eradicating Colombia's
illegal crops, narco-trafficking is not going to end.

Multinational drug trafficking, with its billions of dollars in profits,
already behaves like an enterprise seeking greater earnings and better
business conditions.

Heroin is already exported by the Colombian cartels, and if new conditions
make it difficult to cultivate and process cocaine in Colombia, the cartels
will move the industry back to Peru or Bolivia in no time. Or they could
take advantage of the fragility of the Ecuadorian state, or of the vastness
of the Brazilian and Venezuelan jungles, to continue satisfying the growing
and profitable markets of the First World.

Narco-trafficking destroyed Colombia. There is no debate about that. It
killed moral and ethical values and imposed a mafiosaculture of easy money.
It was the great catalyst of street violence against the common citizen and
it fed the internal armed conflict. It brought Colombia to its deepest
crisis in the 20th Century, a crisis that nonetheless produced a positive
effect by compelling elites to use the peace process to rethink their
political and economic model of exclusion.

On a personal level, the nightmare changed my life radically when it
kidnapped me 10 years ago, and even today it pursues me in my exile.

My only wish--and I have no doubt whatsoever this will happen--is that a
small hope of reconciliation emerges, so that I can return, running, to the
country that has given me everything, where I hope to die as an old man.