Pubdate: Sun, 16 Jul 2000
Source: Chicago Tribune (IL)
Copyright: 2000 Chicago Tribune Company
Contact:  435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611-4066
Website: http://www.chicagotribune.com/
Forum: http://www.chicagotribune.com/interact/boards/
Author: Francisco Santos
Note: Francisco Santos is an editor of El Tiempo, the leading newspaper of 
Bogota, Colombia, and a former kidnap victim.

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.
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart