OUR NEW WAR IN COLOMBIA

The Clinton administration is proposing an escalation in United States
foreign aid to Colombia so large that it will predictably alter the course
of domestic politics and internal violence in that country. Colombia is
already the third-largest recipient of US foreign aid, after Israel and
Egypt, having received $289 million in 1999. As the current aid bill now
stands before Congress, the government of President Andrés Pastrana would
receive $1.574 billion in direct economic assistance during the next three
years. About one fifth of the funds ($274 million) would be spent on
assistance in economic development and general improvements in the
country's legal and human rights situation. The rest of the money would
arrive in Colombia in the form of military training funds and equipment.

This military help is being presented as indispensable to the fight against
the cultivation of coca leaf in southern Colombia and the consequent export
of cocaine to the United States. Most of the parties involved—the State
Department officials who will shepherd the aid package through Congress,
the gung-ho young men in the US embassy in Bogotá who will get to supervise
all the hardware, the Colombian army brass who are waiting for the
assistance with the fervor of a cargo cult—claim, officially at least, that
the funds are not intended for use in the war the Colombian state has been
fighting for forty years against the world's most entrenched guerrillas.
The question is how such use is to be avoided.

Colombia, which has a population of just under 40 million, is a country
approximately the size of Central Europe. It is divided roughly into five
regions: the lush Caribbean and Pacific coasts; the two-pronged Andean
range, traversed by the Magdalena River Valley; the eastern grasslands; and
the jungle lowlands that extend south to the Amazon River, where Colombia
borders Brazil. Bogotá (population 6.4 million) and most of the prosperous
cities, including Medellín, are perched in the mountains. Here the
population is mostly white and mestizo. In the rich coastal plains and in
the Magdalena River Valley, many people are black and mulatto.

Fewer than two million people live in the grasslands and the jungle, but
between them these adjoining areas account for more than half the national
territory—that is to say, an area roughly the size of France. There are
almost no roads—dirt or otherwise—in this part of the country, and it is in
fact such uncharted territory that maps from the national geographic
institute still show the legend "insufficient relief data" printed over
large areas. Most of these two regions' inhabitants are recent arrivals:
land-hungry peasants who carved out clearings for themselves over the last
half-century or so. It is here, in the outermost regions of the
departamentos of Putumayo, Caquetá, Meta, Guaviare, and Vichada, that the
coca-growing boom has taken place in the last decade.

The US military funds, if approved, will be used for drug interdiction
operations and for a special antinarcotics brigade, and also for Blackhawk
helicopters, speedboats, and planes in which to transport the battalion's
soldiers to the coca fields hidden in the jungle. Here troops will provide
protection for police department fumigation teams, whose job it is to spray
nontoxic herbicide on the illegal crops. Why should two thousand or so
highly trained and equipped soldiers be needed? Because in these parts of
the country, the coca farmers are protected by an army of guerrillas, as
many as 20,000 in total, who have been waging war on the Colombian state
with increasing success. It is here, in the midst of this guerrilla
territory, that the Colombian military has built headquarters for the new
brigade, one battalion of which was trained last year with the help of US
military advisers. It is here that, against all the odds, the violent
convergence of guerrillas and US aid, US-trained troops, and US advisers
is, according to the Clinton administration, not supposed to happen.

In August of 1986 I traveled with a Colombian writer and a local television
team to the headquarters of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de
Colombia, or FARC, the largest, oldest, and richest guerrilla group in
Colombia. At the time it was only one of at least a dozen militant armed
organizations. After some twenty years of fighting, a truce with the FARC
had been declared by the government of Belisario Betancur, and our trip was
one result. In response to the truce, the FARC had created a legal
political party, the Unión Patriótica, and at its makeshift office in
Bogotá a few small groups of journalists were able to negotiate expeditions
to Casa Verde, the guerrilla headquarters in the departamento of Meta. I
knew very little about the guerrillas or about Colombia at the time. It was
surprising to discover, for example, that our destination was barely sixty
miles from the capital as the crow flies. It was even more astonishing to
learn that for years the army had been unable to dislodge the FARC from
that nearby stronghold.

I understood why, though, as soon as we began our trip: we drove through
the night from Bogotá over impossibly bumpy and steep roads to the town of
Sumapaz, which sits on the slope of the Andes that opens southward into the
jungle. From that point some members of our group were provided with
splaybacked mounts, while those of us deemed hardiest by our guide—a
guerrilla who happened to be a renegade priest—were invited to walk. At
more than 10,000 feet above sea level, we trudged across the páramo of
Sumapaz, a breathtaking expanse of icy swamp that seems to sit on the top
of the world. Once, when a persistent freezing rain cleared, we were able
to see the tips of snow-capped volcanoes more than one hundred miles away,
and a double rainbow in a canyon at our feet. Around us we saw bizarre
frailejones, which look like stubby, furry palms, and orchids and tree
ferns, wild ducks and occasional herds of sheep. At night taciturn
shepherds shared their tiny, freezing homesteads with us, and we lay
wide-eyed in our sleeping bags through the night, praying for dawn to
arrive so that we could recover a little warmth by moving through the icy
drizzle. The páramo was inhabited, but there were no roads, no schools, no
electricity, no sign at all that the state knew or cared about these citizens.

By the third day mounts had been found for everyone, and the poor beasts
struggled down canyons and across foaming rivers with us, then up again,
then down, down, down into lush cloud forest. In a clearing we came upon a
small community of polite, efficient youths in uniform, including many
young women. Their barracks were well constructed. There was a campaign
hospital and a spotless butcher shop, and what I recall as a rudimentary
schoolhouse. A stream had been dammed and channeled to provide water for
the common kitchen and the laundry area, and these gray waters were used,
in turn, for latrines that can fairly be described as delightful, for they
were raised on stilts above the running water, and were cozy and
immaculate. I was taken upstream to another cabin perched above the
riverflow, where I was left alone with a cauldron of hot water to bathe and
change into clean clothes. And then at last my colleagues and I were taken
into the presence of the leaders of the FARC, Jacobo Arenas and Manuel
Marulanda.

The legendary Marulanda—more commonly known as "Tirofijo," or
Sureshot—founded the FARC and remains to this day its military leader. Now
seventy-two, he has the distinction of being the world's oldest living
guerrilla. Jacobo Arenas, who died in 1990, was the co-founder and chief
ideologue of the FARC, having joined forces in his early, Communist youth
with the landless rebels and converted them to Marxism. At the time of our
visit he was sixty-two years old.

One of the mysteries of the FARC's success, I decided after our first
meeting, was how it had grown and endured despite the total absence of
charismatic leaders. Jacobo Arenas was visually impenetrable, permanently
wrapped as he was in a military cap, dark glasses (his eyesight was weak),
and a thick woolen scarf that seemed to have lived with him for as long as
the war had lasted. He was friendly (he offered immediately to play a game
of Scrabble with us) and starved for conversation, but his own was hardly
scintillating, even though he proudly described himself as an intellectual.
Mostly, it seemed to us, he was obsessed with plots against him and his
forces—bizarre plots involving CIA offers and infiltrators, government
booty for his head, all-seeing antennae directed from great heights against
Casa Verde, gifts of Chinese urns wired for sound. Given the realities of
the cold war and the CIA, his tales may well have been true, but the
narrative was so fervid that a colleague and I could not shake off the
impression of having been submerged in someone's delirium.

Marulanda was a different sort of character. He lived in his own little
compound a short walk from central headquarters, surrounded by an elite
guard. Although we knew that he was in charge of military training and
combat operations, he acted as if his main concerns were the chickens and
the vegetable patch in his front yard. Stocky, almost irritatingly modest
and of few words, he carried on one shoulder the white fringed towel worn
by the rural people, the campesinos. Sometimes he used it to cover his head
against the sun. Sometimes he took it off to swat a fly or two. He gave us
a rather sketchier version of a discourse we had already had from Arenas
(who pointed out a little too often that although Marulanda might be a
campesino, he liked to read books).

In Colombia, Marulanda instructed us, the proletariat and the campesinos
were allies in the struggle against imperialism and the unjust and
oligarchic national state. The FARC fought for justice and equality.
Although initially campesinos like Marulanda himself might have joined the
fight only in order to defend their land, they were increasingly
concientizados, and were now fully involved in the long, arduous struggle
for socialism. When I tried to draw him out on his battle exploits the
conversation languished. "What about this scar?" I asked, pointing to a
dent above one eyebrow. "I got that when my mother asked me to grind some
cocoa beans and a screw in the cocoa mill flew off," he replied. Our group
of visitors ended up spending much more time in Arenas's snug little cabin,
where Arenas was happy to chat about old times and national
politics—although it strikes me now that for someone with such frail access
to communication and political information, he was remarkably uncurious
about whatever news we might have had to offer.

In fairness to Arenas, he was concerned that his entire organization, from
the leadership down, was so limited in its contacts with the world. He
himself had not set foot in Bogotá for twenty years, he pointed out, and
most of his troops had never done so. He knew the world was changing. And
though he insisted that the truce and the fitful peace conversations the
Betancur government had initiated did not deceive him, that the FARC
expected only war and would never lay down its arms, perhaps he saw the
creation of the Unión Patriótica—the legal party that would soon be
contending in national elections—as a way of opening the FARC to the part
of the country that was not rural.

Certainly, if the legal party had been allowed to survive, the FARC might
at least have become aware of the enormous disconnect between the words
with which it described Colombia and the way nonguerrilla Colombians
perceived themselves. But a campaign of terror against the Unión
Patriótica, and against the left in general, was unleashed simultaneously
with Betancur's offer of peace. In 1988, when Colombians were first allowed
to elect their own mayors, the Unión Patriótica participated, and won
eighteen mayoralties out of about a thousand. Thirteen of these mayors were
subsequently assassinated, often after having been forced to resign. No one
has ever been charged with these murders, but it is widely assumed that
members of the military, which has historically operated more or less
independently of the chief executive, and sometimes at loggerheads with it,
played a role.

In 1991, on the same day that a national convention charged with drafting a
new constitution held its first session, the FARC headquarters where we had
visited with Arenas and Marulanda was at long last bombed and overrun by
the army—a worthy military goal whose timing was evidently political. For
all practical purposes, the Unión Patriótica was now dead, peace talks had
been definitely suspended, and the FARC was on an all-out war footing
again. By 1992, 3,500 UP militants and leaders of the legal party,
including two presidential candidates, had been assassinated (although only
a handful of those murders have ever been brought to trial). The guerrillas
had lost nearly all of their urban, better-educated, politically-minded
leaders, and Arenas's paranoia had been brought to the seething point
shortly before he died.

We left the FARC headquarters after only three days, rather stunned by the
hardship we had been allowed to experience, which was only the palest
reflection of the lifelong hardship endured by campesinos who may have
decided that life with the guerrillas at least afforded some possibility—of
revenge, of hope for the future, of camaraderie. And we were stunned too by
the accounts of the bugged Chinese vases and the cheerful discipline among
the young men and women in the camp, as well as by the utter lack of
political imagination we had found in Arenas and Marulanda, and the paradox
of their great capacity to endure.

A conversation with Arenas stayed with me. I had wondered aloud what more
the FARC troops could do, other than sit in their various camps—there were
twenty-seven permanent military units, or frentes, at the time—staging
occasional ambushes and worrying about the CIA. They had been doing this
for the better part of twenty years, after all. When would the revolution
finally get underway? "When the subjective and objective conditions ripen,"
Arenas answered imperturbably. But was this not, I persisted, rather like
standing on a street corner in Bogotá on a Friday night, during rush hour
and in the middle of the pouring rain, waiting for a taxi to come by? What
if a taxi never came? What if conditions never ripened, what then? Arenas
merely looked at me wryly.

The conversation has stayed with me because at this moment the FARC has
sixty frentes of well-trained, well-armed, and well-equipped young men and
women operating throughout the country, engaging the Colombian military in
combat, overrunning army bases and police stations, taking prisoners,
inflicting casualties, bringing down helicopters, controlling and holding
territory, and holding the country hostage. Most guerrilla movements speak
of their infinite patience and act precipitously, but Jacobo Arenas's FARC
proved itself willing to bide its time. Watching recent television news
reports in Bogotá, with their nightly quota of roadblocks, power pylon
blowups, pitched battles a few dozen miles from the city, and civilian
casualties, it could seem as if the taxi had arrived at last.

The motor that jump-started the guerrillas into a new phase also energized
the official Colombian economy in those same years; this was, of course,
cocaine. How and why cocaine became the illegal intoxicant of choice in the
United States is a chronicle that remains to be told. But the first
American who suggested to a Colombian cocaine hustler that he could find
buyers for his product if the hustler could find a way to get it stateside
ignited a fire that has consumed tens of thousands of Colombian lives. A
small marijuana boom in the Sixties preceded the cocaine explosion. (No one
has described it better than Laura Restrepo in her thrilling novel Leopard
in the Sun.1 ) Then the fashion in intoxicants switched to cocaine, which
is manufactured from the tealike coca leaf. Masticated or brewed, coca has
been consumed for centuries in the Andes as a cure for colic, altitude
sickness, and hangovers, and as a palliative for hunger. Traditionally, it
has been grown by Indian communities who hold it sacred, and its sale—by
the bushel in open-air markets or in boxed tea bags in city stores—is legal
in Bolivia and Peru. (Coca-Cola company representatives still visit the
Bolivian markets once a year to buy the key ingredient in their secret
formula.)

Colombia, which has a much smaller indigenous population than Bolivia or
Peru, used to cultivate less coca, and for many years it grew what was
considered an inferior product—meaning that the Colombian leaf produced a
less potent alkaloid. But Colombia had a lackadaisical government,
uncharted riverways, and a tradition of smuggling that dated back to
colonial days. A small but flourishing illegal trade in marijuana,
emeralds, and pre-Hispanic artifacts had kept smuggling techniques up to
date, and by the early Eighties non-Indian hustlers, many of them from the
prosperous industrial city of Medellín, had consolidated their hold on the
manufacture of cocaine from coca leaf, and on the export of refined cocaine
to the United States. Among other things, these middlemen had figured out
how to smuggle acetone and ether from the United States—precursor
chemicals, as they are called, without which cocaine alkaloid cannot be
extracted from the leaf.

By the end of the decade the illegal manufacture and export of cocaine had
turned into a bonanza. Cocaine accounted for around 5 percent of the
Colombian national product, according to calculations by Salomón
Kalmanowitz, an economist who is currently on the board of the Banco de la
República (the local equivalent of the Federal Reserve). "In arming the
population, creating strong criminal incentives—crime pays really
well!—fomenting corruption, financing both sides of the war, and destroying
personal security," Kalmanowitz says, the boom had highly distorting and
destructive effects on the national economy. But the fact is that Colombia
had found what most developing countries lack, a cheap crop that can
produce the levels of employment, return on investment, and national growth
that only industrial goods normally provide. Construction soared, the
service sector exploded, antiques dealers thrived, airline companies
expanded their routes, artists made a more than decent living, and,
beginning in 1992, many campesinos also felt less gnawed by hunger.

This last effect was a direct consequence of the "War on Drugs" decreed by
President George Bush. In the late 1980s, the State Department and the Drug
Enforcement Administration coordinated a successful anti-drug campaign with
the governments of Bolivia and Peru: vast coca plantings were sprayed out
of existence in both countries' Andean foothills; under US guidance,
Bolivian and Peruvian army planes began shooting down unauthorized aircraft
entering their air space. But demand for cocaine had grown, not eased, in
the United States and around the world. Seeking safer territory for the
unceasingly profitable trade, Colombian drug exporters began to sponsor
coca plantings in their own uncharted jungles, and they financed a
successful search for a variety of coca plant that would produce high
levels of alkaloid in hot, lowland conditions. Seeking a better livelihood,
peasants from all over the country flocked to the jungle departamentos of
Meta, Putumayo, and Caquetá. And the FARC guerrillas were with them.

In a small town in Caquetá last January, I talked with a spokesman for the
FARC, who explained the guerrillas' approach to the illegal drug trade this
way: "For us, a campesino who plants coca is no different from one who
plants cocoa," he said. "They both live off the land. We say that coca
cultivation is no good, and we've established norms: they must plant two
hectares of food crops for every hectare of coca. But what we can't do is
deny the campesinos the right to grow this crop, because from the
government on down, everybody in Colombia lives off coca."

What the guerrillas really can't do, apparently, is deny themselves the
right to improve their own situation. Running even a small guerrilla army
is expensive, after all, especially if all weapons and supplies must be
acquired illegally and smuggled in. It did not take long for the FARC to
notice that campesinos could use protection from the city types who paid
them to grow coca, not to mention from government antidrug patrols.

During the same period that the Colombian traffickers were consolidating
their supremacy in the world drug market, the guerrillas worked out a
policy. "We don't look after coca fields, we don't grow coca and we don't
transport it," the official spokesman claimed. "But we do charge taxes,
just as we do on everything else. Truckers [who drive through FARC
territory] have to pay taxes. Shopkeepers [who operate in FARC territory]
have to pay taxes. And the growers do too." The guerrillas, who see
themselves as the legitimately established authority in areas they control
militarily, levy taxes on both the sale and transport of coca (and recently
also of opium paste from poppy fields in the highlands). In exchange, the
campesinos expect them to guarantee that they all get paid, and paid
equally, and that the money they receive is in some proportion to the
product's market value. Estimates of the income derived by the FARC from
this arrangement vary between $200 and $600 million a year.

The transaction the FARC spokesman described—taxes in exchange for a
protective armed presence—includes in his telling only two parties; growers
and guerrillas. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that a large and
belligerent antigovernment organization can prove extremely useful to the
drug lords as well. At the very least, there is a situation on the ground
of peaceful coexistence between the guerrillas and the people who control
the drug trade. Perhaps the guerrillas are telling the truth when they say
there is no explicit agreement, and that the two sides never even come into
contact. Another possibility is that the guerrillas don't merely look the
other way when the little bimotor planes land on improvised strips in the
jungle to pick up their cargo, or when motorboats bring in chemical
engineers to tinker with extraction procedures in clandestine laboratories.
Perhaps they unload some automatic rifles for themselves and the odd
antiaircraft gun as well.

Whoever paid for the guns, there were enough for a force that has tripled,
at least, since the bonanza in the jungle. The FARC's sixty military
frentes are spread out through every region in the country, including the
outskirts of Bogotá. In one or several of these, the guerrillas are holding
the five hundred soldiers and police officers they have taken captive since
they began overrunning army bases and police stations in 1996. The word in
the countryside is that one eats better in the guerrilla army than at home,
and there is general agreement that the FARC controls or has strong
influence in about a third of the one thousand or so municipal districts
into which Colombia is divided—meaning that, at the very least, the
organization has a say in who gets elected mayor in these districts and how
municipal funds are spent.

The tacit agreement between drug traffickers and guerrillas in the southern
half of the country is surprising only because in the northern part of
Colombia the two sides are busy killing each other. Or at least it is fair
to say that the various right-wing armed associations who fight the
guerrillas—paramilitares, or autodefensas—depend on drug money for their
machine guns and uniforms just as the FARC does.

The paramilitares first sprang up, like soldiers grown from dragons' teeth,
in regions where the guerrillas made the mistake of kidnapping the wrong
people. In the days before the FARC started taxing cocaine, they survived
in large part off income derived from abducting, or threatening to abduct,
ranchers and businessmen. Kidnapping as an illegal economic activity has a
long history in Colombia. Many drug traffickers, for example, got their
startup capital through kidnapping and continued to use it as an additional
source of income and power. (The best account of a kidnap victim's
terrorized life in captivity is to be found in Gabriel García Márquez's
News of a Kidnapping, about the victims of the trafficker Pablo Escobar.2 )

It is the armed left, however, that has turned kidnapping into one of
Colombia's widespread horrors. Colombia experts estimate that the FARC
still derives as much as half its income from kidnappings. Another
guerrilla group, the Ejército Nacional de Liberación, which kidnapped both
a planeload of passengers and all the worshippers in a church in Cali last
year, subsists almost entirely off extortion. In recent years the
guerrillas have increased their efficiency in two ways. They "buy" kidnap
victims from ordinary criminal organizations that do not have safe hiding
places, as the guerrillas do in the wilderness, and they set up roadblocks
on major highways, at which drivers' licenses are checked against a
computer listing of all the bank accounts in the country.

At the beginning of the Eighties, however, the guerrillas started
kidnapping the relatives of drug traffickers, a drastic miscalculation. In
response, the drug traffickers created and financed a group, called Muerte
a los Secuestradores, or Death to the Kidnappers, which appears to have
worked closely with the military to hit back at the guerrillas by murdering
anyone suspected of associating or sympathizing with them. In 1981, in the
mining town of Segovia, the FARC kidnapped the father of a small-time drug
and emerald dealer called Fidel Castaño, a crime which would turn out to
have fateful consequences.

According to the accounts of Fidel and his younger brother Carlos, the
guerrillas—former friends of the family—demanded a ransom far beyond the
Castaño family's ability to pay. The brothers offered what they could and
were rejected. Fidel, in what Carlos would later describe as "a mistake,"
then wrote the kidnappers, stating that if the family came up with more
funds "it would be exclusively to fight against you." According to a
subsequent account by Fidel, his father, who had been held tied to a tree
by a long rope for many days, slammed his head against the tree trunk until
he dropped to the ground and there "was left to die" by the guerrillas,
presumably of a heart attack. According to published accounts by Carlos,
the father was killed by the guerrillas after the Castaños failed to come
up with the ransom money.

The details matter a great deal to many people these days—not the least the
FARC—because, according to a survivor Iinterviewed in 1989, in 1983 a group
of men under orders from Fidel Castaño moved like a scythe through the
riverside villages near Segovia where Castaño believed his father had been
held, pulling babies out of their mothers' arms and shooting them, nailing
a child to a plank, impaling a man on a bamboo pole, hacking a woman to
pieces with a machete. By the time Castaño's men were finished there were
twenty-two dead. It was the first time after the brutal civil war known as
La Violencia—from 1945 to 1965—that a massacre of such size had taken place
in Colombia.

The massacre was the beginning of an assassination campaign that since then
has left many thousand civilians dead in villages suspected of harboring
guerrillas. Before his own death a few years ago, Fidel Castaño organized
his hit men into a group called Autodefensas Campesinas de Córdoba y Urabá,
or ACCU. His successor was his younger brother, Carlos, who turned the
organization into a tightly disciplined combat group, and formed an
alliance with similar organizations throughout the country, calling it the
Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia. In a recent television interview, Carlos
Castaño claimed that his organization now has 11,200 troops. This figure is
twice the usual estimate, but it is easy to believe the Autodefensa leaders
when they say that they wish their numbers were growing a little more
slowly, because, although there are more guerrillas and guerrilla
sympathizers to exterminate with every passing day, controlling so many
volunteers is tricky.

I had the opportunity recently to talk at length with a woman whom I will
call Rosa, who is closely connected with the high command of the
antiguerrilla ACCU. She was arrested not long ago, and she agreed that I
could visit her at the detention center. (The office of the current
Colombian prosecutor general, Alfonso Gómez Méndez, has aggressively
pursued investigations of paramilitary crimes, and there are now six
hundred people in jail, accused of collaborating in Autodefensa massacres.)
I find it troubling to describe Rosa or even refer to the circumstances of
our meeting; people get killed all the time in prisons in Colombia, and she
has a great many enemies. It seems reasonable to say, however, that she is
now middle-aged, that she seemed vulnerable even as I tried to think of
some reason why Ishould feel pity for her, and that although her life has
always been "driven by the winds of violence," as she put it, her
activities have been political, rather than military in the strict sense of
the word.

Her family was well off by the standards of the provincial backwater she
was brought up in, but her father, a devout Catholic, had strong sympathy
for the labor movement. One of her first memories is of learning the songs
of the Fifth Regiment of the Spanish Republican Army from activist priests
who taught at her school. They told her about Dolores Ibarruri, "La
Pasionaria," the Basque miner's daughter who during the Civil War exhorted
the Republican troops to fight for liberty and face down death. Rosa was
barely a teenager when she took to singing the Civil War hymns herself, to
cheer on workers during strikes. At university, swept up in the radical
fervor of the times, Rosa and her friends were soon helping campesino
organizations coordinate invasions of privately owned ranches, set up
roadblocks, stockpile whatever weapons they could find for the coming
revolution.

Although the FARC already existed, it was seen by many as old hat and
insufficiently idealistic, and new guerrilla groups, and what used to be
called "pre-party formations," multiplied. The Ejército de Liberación
Nacional, or ELN, as well as the Quintín Lame, an armed Indian rights
group, the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores, the M-19, all came
into being. By the late Seventies Rosa was closely identified with another
of the groups to emerge from the university crucible, the Ejército Popular
de Liberación, or EPL. The group was strong in the area of Córdoba, where
in those days the population was fairly clearly divided between poor
campesinos and the people with money who owned cattle ranches and farms
where bananas and oil palms were grown.

How Rosa's destiny took her from the EPL to the heart of paramilitary power
is, in her telling, a long, breathtaking, and not always reliable story,
but she is only one of many defectors from the fanatic left to join the
ranks of the murderous right. The autodefensas claim that fully one third
of their troops are former guerrillas, and even if one disputes the
figures, there is no doubting the general trend. Rosa's life, however, is
unusual even in Colombia, where reality always seems to flow out of
someone's dream, or nightmare.

The first thing that bothered Rosa about her leftist associates was what
one might describe as their impact on the political ecology of the
departamento of Córdoba. At the height of the revolutionary ferment, there
were six different guerrilla organizations prowling around the hills in
Rosa's region, each one demanding that the campesinos pay "taxes" to
finance their coming liberation. "If a campesino had five cows, he had to
give up one," Rosa says. "The guerrillas were eating up all the money from
the NGOs [non-governmental organizations]. They were hijacking mules. They
were emptying out the community stores."

None of these organizations, however, was capable of defending the
campesinos when the ranchers—including many drug traffickers turned
aspiring landed gentry—began organizing assassination squads to deal with
guerrilla collaborators. "Those people were terrible masacradores," Rosa
says. "The rank and file were ranch guards, ranchers, drug traffickers, and
everything you've heard about the [murders committed with] chainsaws, axes,
and machetes is true." Although the guerrillas could not defeat the
paramilitary squads, they did rather well when it came to turning on each
other. One guerrilla group, the ELN, tried to dispute the EPL's local
hegemony, Rosa recalls. "The ELN wanted to rule," she says. "And they
killed whoever didn't obey."

One day the campesinos decided they'd had enough of multiple taxes and the
conflicting, deadly demands on their political loyalties. The first one to
rebel was a fisherman who turned on an ELN patrol that had approached him
for money. In Rosa's description, the fisherman hacked a young man and a
young woman guerrilla to death. "Campesinos don't know how to kill," Rosa
observes dryly, having dwelt on the scene in some detail. "And when someone
kills who doesn't know how to do it, he kills monstrously."

As for her own apostasy from the revolutionary cause, Rosa says it took
place sometime after she was kidnapped in 1991 by one of the leaders of the
antiguerrilla squads, the paramilitares. She had already decided by then
that her commitment was to the campesinos and not the guerrillas, she says.
Then came the kidnapping. She was abducted, she told me, after
participating in a land invasion of a ranch owned by a well-known
paramilitar. Her captors took her to a camp where "a fat man" was put in
charge of torturing her to get information about the guerrillas. He broke
off her teeth with pliers. (She paused in her narrative to show me that all
her upper teeth had caps.) She was tied down while the fat man jumped on
her stomach. She was forced to stand, bleeding, through the rest of the
night, wondering when her execution would take place. At dawn, she was told
to start walking. The bullet in the back she was expecting never came
("maybe because I never gave them the information they wanted, and they got
tired of torturing me"). She kept walking and eventually found her way to
her parents' house.

The lesson she appears to have drawn from this episode is not what one
would expect. "After that time," Rosa explains, she and her kidnapper
respected each other. "Me on this side, you on that one, we both agreed."

"It's funny how life is," she said, in conclusion to her narrative.
"Because the guy who ordered the fat man to torture me and I are now pretty
good friends." Presumably this is because a few months after her abduction
she crossed over to her enemy's side.

By then, Rosa says, a majority of the guerrilla group she was involved
with, the EPL, had decided that a revolutionary war could not successfully
be fought in Colombia, and had turned their weapons in, changing their
organization's name, but not its initials, to Esperanza, Paz y Libertad
(Hope, Peace and Liberty). Peace was not forthcoming, however, because the
FARC guerrillas soon appeared with their own guns and tried to establish
control in the void they perceived had been created by the despised
pacifists. The FARC began executing former EPLguerrillas. The survivors and
their campesino supporters felt they had no option except to join forces
with the right-wing paramilitary leaders who had tortured Rosa and murdered
many of her comrades.

In the village of El Salado last February, in the departamento of Bolivar,
where Rosa's friend Carlos Castaño operates, members of a paramilitary
squad sang and danced in the church square while they tortured the
villagers and slit their throats one by one. According to the local army
commander, the deaths were the result of an armed confrontation between
guerrillas and paramilitaries, but the prosecutor general's office, which
is often at odds with the army on matters such as this, stated in no
uncertain terms that the victims were civilians. Forty-four men and women,
suspected by Castaño's people of guerrilla sympathies, were killed during
the autodefensas' four-day rampage.

The latest Human Rights Watch report on Colombia presents in numbing detail
dreadful accounts of dozens of similar mass murders, primarily involving
Carlos Castaño's paramilitary troops. But from the point of view of those
who have to approve the US military assistance package, the most
frightening aspect of the autodefensas may be their long, gleeful, and
passionate association with the military. For years, detailed evidence has
accumulated implicating senior army commanders, mid-level officers, and
troops of connivance with, or even the planning and execution of,
paramilitary massacres. "Together, evidence collected so far by Human
Rights Watch links half of Colombia's eighteen brigade-level army units to
paramilitary activity," the report states.

Very few military men have been demoted, much less brought to trial, for
their role in mass murders, and perhaps this is also because, as public
revulsion with the army's suspected role has grown, its participation has
become more discreet. But perhaps it is because the executive and judicial
branches of government remain incapable of controlling the rogue military
establishment. In any event, intelligence-sharing, the Human Rights Watch
report states, remains the most pervasive and common method of
collaboration between the Colombian military and the autodefensas. (The
report also describes another form of cooperation, known as legalización,
which is rooted in the Colombian army's tradition of demanding a high
number of enemy casualties from officers ambitious for promotion. According
to the report, paramilitaries will bring civilian corpses to army barracks
and exchange them for weapons. The officers dress the corpses in camouflage
and boots and claim that they were guerrillas killed in battle.)

A number of Colombian observers of the various wars in their country have
pointed out that the aid package for Colombia now before the US Congress
is, at the very least, badly skewed. Most of the aid is supposed to be
spent on the military; and it is supposed to be spent in the southern part
of the country, where the guerrillas, and not the paramilitaries, will be
the target. State Department officials who are lobbying for approval of the
aid package have not ignored the paramilitary threat: they point to new
human rights training programs for officers and troops as signs of
progress, and occasionally they reproach the government of President Andrés
Pastrana for its "passivity" in the face of the paramilitary attacks. But
when the reproaches are combined with the proposed gift of stupendous
amounts of hardware for the army, they tend to lose force.

The statements coming out of the Pentagon recently about the intended use
of the aid money ("Everybody who's in the drug business—guerrillas,
autodefensas, or drug traffickers—will be the focus of these operations."3
) raise the strong possibility that this is really an antiguerrilla package
disguised as an antidrug package. In Colombia, at any rate, it is taken as
a given by all sides that the money is intended for anti-insurgency use.
Partly this may be because Colombians, who have spent twenty years paying a
terrible price for the drug bonanza, cannot believe that anyone would be
dumb enough to fight drugs with military assistance. And indeed, if the aid
is really aimed at halting drug production, it has to be said that military
wars waged on cocaine commerce do not have a good record of success. (It is
easy to forget that the Clinton administration was not always so hawkish.
Clinton's first chief of the White House Office of Drug Control Policy, Lee
Brown, stopped using the term "drug war" when he took office. As I wrote
after talking to him in Bogotá in 1993, this was because it seemed to Brown
that it was dangerous to use the word "war" in reference to a native
population—whether Colombians, or black inhabitants of the Bronx.4 )

In the particular case of the war decreed since the days of the Bush
administration on the illegal commerce in cocaine, the balance sheet is
dismal, although the large and thriving drug bureaucracy in the United
States puts out reports every year citing ever-larger impoundments of
cocaine and heroin. The figures are presented as evidence that (a) the war
on drugs is being won, because seizures and arrests are increasing, and (b)
the war on drugs is not being won fast enough, because seizures and arrests
are increasing. Ever-larger budget allocations are necessary, according to
this logic, to bring victory within sight.

At first glance, it is hard not to be impressed with the results of the war
waged on drugs in Bolivia and Peru. In 1995, according to a recent report
by the US State Department, Bolivia had 48,600 hectares of coca under
cultivation. In 1999 there were only 21,800. Even more dramatic are the
figures for Peru, where production peaked at 115,300 hectares in 1995, and
shrank four years later to barely 38,700. But if one takes the total
combined figures for hectares of coca under cultivation in Colombia,
Bolivia, and Peru in 1995, and again in 1999, the picture is somewhat
different. In 1995 the estimated total was 214,800 hectares. In 1999 it was
183,000. In other words, there was no large decline in the total area under
cultivation: coca cultivation expanded in Colombia to take up the slack in
Bolivia and Peru. A cynic might even speculate that the 1999 decrease of
30,000 hectares is partly the result of some enhanced estimating. It would
not be surprising if new, uncounted areas of cultivation have been opened
on the other side of the Amazon, in the vast expanse of jungle that belongs
to Brazil. It is in any case a reasonable wager that once serious drug
interdiction programs get underway in Colombia, cultivation will shift to
Brazil and Venezuela. As long as demand continues, that is.

Whether or not the military aid being proposed by the Clinton
administration can be used successfully to fight drugs, what is true is
that in Colombia a surprising number of people—perhaps a majority of those
who shape public opinion—now see the aid package as the country's last best
hope of ending the long, brutal confrontation with the FARC. They reach
this conclusion at a time when the Pastrana government is engaging in the
most serious and lengthy peace negotiations with the guerrillas in the
history of this conflict. If the supporters of the aid package are right,
US might and money will be useful in defeating the guerrillas in the field
or forcing them to take part in serious and practical peace talks. If the
supporters of US military aid are wrong, the FARC will retreat from their
current armed clashes with government troops to more traditional forms of
guerrilla warfare—ambushes, sabotage operations, urban terrorism, selective
killings—which would enable it to survive indefinitely, and set the
prospects for peace back for years.

[footnotes]

1 Historically accurate, it has been beautifully translated by the highly
promising novice Stephen A. Lytle (Crown, 1999).

2 Marquez's book (Knopf, 1997) was reviewed in these pages by Alastair Reid
(October 9, 1997). Escobar, the most notorious of the Medellin traffickers,
was killed in 1993 at the climax of a national manhunt.

There is general agreement that his death, and the subsequent arrest of the
leaders of a rival cartel in the city of Cali, led to a fragmentation of
the drug trade, with no single leader aspiring since then to the kind of
total control exercised by Escobar.

3 Statement of Louis Caldera, Secretary of the USArmy, in Bogota, reported
in El Tiempo, January 22, 2000. (back)

4 See my The Heart That Bleeds (Knopf, 1994).