Commentary June 16, 2001
Sliding into Civil War Colombia Nigel Harris
I have been in Cali. Where, you might ask, is Cali? It is a beautiful city of something over two million people, nestling at the foot of the Andes in south-western Colombia, about a 100 km from the Pacific and the port of Buenaventura. Long years ago, Rakesh Mohan did a study of the city for the World Bank. It has a lovely Spanish colonial centre, a great night life of clubs and dancehalls, with the music of a black Pacific population (as opposed to a Caribbean music). A great statue of Christ, on the crest of one of the mountains, looms protectively over the city. He is needed. Cali, famous for its narcotics cartel until it was smashed, has one of the highest homicide rates in Latin America - over 40 per cent of those murdered are young men, and much of the violence is within families. It has a rate of unemployment of over 20 per cent. It has a vast squatter settlement, growing poverty and inequality. Who says the world is getting better? Cali - like Colombia - is just climbing out from its worst economic crisis since the 1930s. It is doing so as the country is falling apart with warring armies threatening to turn the country into the Balkans. But the Calenos are a calm civilised and courteous people. And the restaurants are full, the streets packed with vehicles. The main topic of conversation is the disastrous result of the football match between Cali and Rosario (of Argentina) in the America Cup. Sometimes it seems that the city is like someone who does not know that they are HIV positive. But then again, shoulders shrug, what can be done? So routine, so unhorrifying, has horrifying violence become, it has slipped out of the headlines of the daily press. El Tiempo records the daily slaughter in side stories. Twenty-four bodies, some beheaded, have floated down the river Sinu, peasants kidnapped six days earlier and murdered by the guerrilla group, FARC ('the army of the people') for, they say, growing the narcotic coca (base for cocaine) for the right wing paramilitary forces, the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC). In Palmira, near Cali, the financial controller of the municipality is shot dead in the street. Five children under the age of 12 are among eight peasants murdered by the AUC; 35 armed men attacked two peasant cottages in the early morning with grenades and rifles; the victims were asleep - 'Why the children?' a survivor asks helplessly. Car bombs go off in four cities, and four others are deactivated. Who set them? Who knows? It could be any of 25 or more organisations. Officials say soothingly that these are only 'isolated incidents' - can they be serious? Isolated from whom? And all this daily fare covers only what is recorded; there is another parallel informal economy of violence that does not reach the newspapers. Some countries collapse into civil war. There are events, turning points that show major structural conflicts. But Colombia moves as slowly as a glacier, sliding gently into civil war, the tempo of conflict rising almost imperceptibly, day by day. For much of the time, it is shrouded by the foreground events - the occupation of the highway to Buenaventura by two companies of truck drivers, battling for control of a trucking park (for a time, dying patients could not reach the hospital because of the barricades). The teachers are on strike in response to a 'decentralisation' of the educational budget - the capital is shifting the burden onto the local authorities. And then there are the great stories of the love life of footballers or film stars, the little thefts and embarrassments that constitute the daily gossip of the press. Meanwhile the war grows, step by step, closer. * * * The Mayor of Cali blames globalisation and the multinationals for the social disintegration of the city. But this dodges responsibility. It underestimates the special role of Colombians. Officially, there were 1,777 deaths in combat last year, but the Colombian Commission of Jurists puts the figure at 6,067 (an increase of 50 per cent on a year earlier) - 49 per cent inflicted by the AUC, 11 per cent by the guerrillas, the rest by the national army. Amnesty International gives a different set - 4,000 murders by the AUC, 1,500 kidnappings (including 200 children), 300 'disappeared', and 3,00,000 forced to flee their homes. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) is said to be responsible for 3,000 kidnappings (ransom money is an important money-earner). All, it is said, are guilty of atrocities, of mutilations as a routine practice, let alone simple murder. The peasants in the unpoliced countryside suffer most from marauding bands under one flag or another, but there are also target killings in the cities - officials, politicians, journalists and judges. Last year, eight journalists were murdered. This week, the AUC warned five journalists in Cali that they were under sentence. Perhaps they will flee to join the one or two million Colombians who now live in exile abroad; the intelligentsia leaks like life blood out of the wounded nation. * * * The multiple wars of Colombia float on narcotic revenues. Most of the profits from selling cocaine (and now also heroin) go to the sellers in North America and Europe, but enough is repatriated - possibly US $ 2.5 to 5.0 billion (equal to 2.4 per cent of the Colombian national output) - to keep the armies going without much recourse to creating a popular and taxable base. The FARC was formed in the mid-1960s as the militia of a disaffected wing of the Communist Party. It lost most of the Communists, and fashioned itself out of peasants and small farmers (a legacy that means they have almost no political following in the cities - it is an army without a party). It launched its attack on the permanent and petrified deal between the two main political parties, Liberal and Conservatives, to keep the control of the country in the grip of a handful of wealthy families, defended by a permanent state of emergency. It was a little bit like Lebanon before the terrible collapse of civil war. By now the FARC is said to have 18,000 well-armed troops - most recently, they are said to have purchased 10,000 AK-47 automatics from Jordan, courtesy of the brokering role of Peru's notorious Vladimiro Montesinos, ex-president Fujimori's security adviser. Shortly after the creation of FARC, the ELN (National Liberation Army) was created out of followers of Cuba's Fidel Castro. They have possibly 7,000 troops, but, it is said, have been badly savaged by the AUC. Then there is the AUC. This was fashioned out of the vigilante bands set up by the drug barons to protect their supply areas and landing strips, and then by larger farmers to keep the guerrillas at bay. There is strong evidence that the national army supported the AUC as a clandestine means to fight the guerrillas. The AUC claims to recruit both ex-guerrillas and ex-army soldiers, including officers and NCOs, and to do so because it pays them well. By now, guerrillas and AUC control major swathes of territory from which the coca is harvested. Half the coca output of the country comes from Putumayo province in FARC hands. The drug lords pay the AUC protection money. The guerrillas, they say, tax the drug producers and control landing strips and processing laboratories. The president of Colombia, Andres Pastrana, conceded to FARC a non-militarised zone of 42,000 sq km as an earnest of goodwill to encourage negotiations for a ceasefire (the territory was conceded, the ceasefire seems no nearer). Of course, the AUC does not accept these concessions and continues to fight for control in the FARC zone. Now the ELN is negotiating its own territory. Slowly, the official administration is being superseded in a major part of the country - the government controls about half Colombia (but including the cities and the majority of the population). Enter Washington, in hot pursuit of the sources of the narcotics that Americans so love. The latest effort, the Plan Colombia, aims to burn the coca crop in the field, with $ 7.5 billion over three years. It involves training three anti-drug army battalions (of 2,500 men) with Blackhawk helicopters to protect the spraying operations. Inevitably, this is going to involve clashes with guerrillas and AUC. Spraying is said to have worked in Bolivia and Peru, but after the expenditure of a mountain of American treasure, the street price of narcotics in the US has hardly varied. One day Washington will discover there is no option but to legalise the trade in order to control it. The army - 1,40,000 troops, backed by 1,00,000 police (and an even larger army of private security guards) - is ambivalent about the peace talks. Some officers still back the AUC and argue that, given their head, they could end the guerrillas. The government has tried to purge the military of AUC supporters and, with US help, upgrade and expand the army. There have been many more attacks on the AUC by the national army, but the stalemate continues. Meanwhile, the leaders get a national press. Manuel Marulanda, 69-year old leader of the FARC, provides excellent hospitality in his zone to visiting government officials, journalists and foreign ambassadors. Carlos Castano of the AUC, son of a farmer murdered by the FARC, appears in the press in full military gear, debating whether he can now prevent the AUC attacking government forces since collaboration has been ruled out. * * * Colombia is a sad and pitiless case, as sad and savage as Algeria and many more. So many fragments seem to have been left over from the 1960s and from an even longer romantic tradition of warfare against the state. For the Left, the pursuit of violence strangles those impulses of generosity and compassion which originally inspired revolt, creating the hierarchies and power which promote and sustain those with the greatest capacity for merciless violence. Morality is no match for the objective necessities of warfare. Social being really does determine consciousness. The rebels succeed in exposing the ugly face of state violence, but that is no consolation to a land laid waste, to orphans and widows: the common ruin of all. 'Security' and 'Terror' turn out to be twins, mutually interacting to the loss of all - whether on the West Bank of Palestine, the Tamil homelands of Sri Lanka, or Kashmir. In such a mad world, only violence seems real, and its means, the Kalashnikov, the most sacred and precious symbol of our times. The revolutionary and the patriotic soldier become identical, little different from football hooligans. Yet the tears of the widows are equally salt in Sarajevo, in Cali, in Lahore or Amritsar. Meanwhile, Cali is bathed in the warm sunlight, alive with trees and bright flowers. The violence can seem for a moment faraway. But the frustrations of people grow daily. Some feel violence is ended only by a greater violence, by the black implacable and necessarily unjust violence of the state. Only with official terror can the 'social capital' be restored to allow pacific relations, the daily collaboration which constitutes society. God help Colombians if the army decides this is indeed the exit from civil war. A land laid waste, the destruction of a generation.
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