Pubdate: Mon, 04 Jun 2001
Source: Maclean's Magazine (Canada)
Copyright: 2001 Maclean Hunter Publishing Ltd.
Contact:  http://www.macleans.ca/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/253
Pubdate: June 04, 2001
Author: Sally Armstrong

OUR MAN IN BOGOTA

Ambassador Guillermo Rishchynski is trying a different approach to 
Colombia's drug problem

Strolling across the tiny bridge leading to beds of bloodred geraniums, 
Guillermo Rishchynski is a picture of diplomatic decorum.

The cuffs of his midnight-blue dress pants break over his black loafers at 
just the right angle; a white shirt open at the neck adds a relaxed touch 
to his brown sports coat. But as Canada's ambassador to Colombia sits down 
at a glass patio table in the garden behind his home in Bogota, he grows 
tense. Checking his watch, he taps his fingers fitfully on the glass. 
Rishchynski has good reason to be nervous: more than 25,000 people are 
murdered each year in Colombia. And Jeannette, his wife of 20 years, and 
their daughter Giselle, 18, who are returning home from a nearby resort, 
are running late.

They are travelling in an armour-plated limousine, but Rishchynski, who has 
one of the most dangerous postings in the foreign service, knows violence 
can strike suddenly in the South American country. Again he checks his 
watch -- for the fifth time in only a few minutes. Finally, his cellphone 
rings (to the tune of the William Tell overture) and as a familiar voice 
says a hello, a smile of relief spreads across his tanned face. "There's 
Jeannette," he says.

Rishchynski, a bearded, affable 47-year-old career diplomat, has a 
front-row seat on a war that will not end -- Colombia's cocaine-fuelled 
orgy of violence.

The fighting, which some experts believe is about to escalate even more, 
began in the 1940s when Marxist guerrillas, now led by FARC, the 
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, launched their fight to 
redistribute land from wealthy property owners to peasants. Now, it has 
become primarily a war about cold, hard cash:  the $2 billion in revenues 
produced from cocaine every year in Colombia.

Canada plans to spend about $80 million in the region helping displaced 
people, promoting human rights and trying to convince peasants to switch 
from coca, the plant from which cocaine is made, to other crops. 
Rishchynski believes only conciliatory initiatives like Canada's will bring 
an end to Colombia's long cycle of violence, putting him at odds with the 
U.S.  government, which is taking a far tougher approach.

In a bid to put the traffickers out of business, last year the United 
States and Colombia launched Plan Colombia, a $2-billion program to arm and 
train the country's military for an all-out war against the 
narcotraficantes, which operate from hideouts deep in the Colombian jungle. 
But many experts believe the U.S. intervention will only serve to 
accelerate Colombia's smouldering civil war and put an end to peace talks 
that began in October, 1999. "It will heat up the level of violence," says 
Judith Teichman, a University of Toronto political science professor and 
expert on the region. "The producers will simply put more resources into 
corruption, violence and private armies."

Drug money has corrupted every corner of Colombian society.

In addition to their terrorist activities, FARC's fighters and other 
guerrilla groups are now paid handsomely to protect the country's drug 
lords and the peasants' crops.

The cartels also bribe government officials and finance their own murderous 
militias. "Narco-trafficking," says Rishchynski, "has seeped into the 
society to such a point, it's difficult to know who's legitimate and who is 
not."

Rishchynski's Latin American roots run deep. He was born in Toronto, his 
father of Polish-Ukrainian descent and his mother Panamanian. Shortly after 
his birth, the family moved to Panama City, where he was raised and 
schooled in Spanish. He returned to Canada when he was 17, and graduated 
from McGill University in 1975 with a degree in political science. He later 
joined Interimco, a Canadian company selling agricultural equipment abroad.

Peddling tractors across Latin America for six years was, says Rishchynski, 
"the best MBA I never got."

In 1978, on one of his trips to Tegucigalpa, Honduras, he met Jeannette, 
whom Rishchynski describes as "a marvellous young Honduran woman, who 
learned to do Canadian cold." They married in 1981. Four days before their 
first child was born on June 20, 1982, Rishchynski joined the foreign service.

Now, eight postings later, including Brazil, Jordan, Australia, Jakarta and 
Chicago, he is handling one of Canada's most complicated diplomatic 
assignments.  The mission, he says, "is exciting, exhilarating and 
terrifying all at once."

Life in Bogota, the kidnap capital of the world, is fragile.

For protection, Rishchynski has three personal bodyguards to go with his 
bulletproof car; everywhere he goes he is accompanied by armed outriders on 
motorcycles. When Jeannette took up speed walking for exercise, her 
bodyguard started turning up for work wearing track shoes with his 
three-piece suit. Their son Anthony, 17, who will return to Canada later 
this year to start university, has also had to accept the guards' presence, 
even though they tend to cramp a teenager's style.

Tragedy is never far away. The job includes meeting with people at the 
embassy one day and finding out the next they are among the dead or 
disappeared. "The day-to-day situation can be withering," he notes. "So 
much of the violence is against innocent people -- the defenceless." The 
terror seems even more appalling when cast against the country's 
spectacular backdrop. "It's breathtaking, with mountains and rainforests 
and every ecosystem in the hemisphere," Rishchynski says.

Kidnapping, which generates nearly $500 million a year in criminal revenue, 
has become so commonplace that well-heeled Colombians carry a special kit 
in the trunk of their cars. It can contain toiletries, personal 
medications, books to read while waiting an average 10 months in captivity 
and comfortable walking shoes for the long trek into the jungle hideouts.

There is also a dedicated help line: for kidnapping, dial 165, for 
everything else, call 112.

Usually targets, who often pay $1 million to be released, are scouted for 
about a month before being scooped.

But a new style of kidnapping known as Miraculous Fishing is becoming 
notorious.

The thugs, usually FARC guerrillas, barricade the road, indiscriminately 
stopping cars. They then punch the numbers on their victims' identification 
cards into their laptop computers.

Reams of information immediately pop up, including the wealth of the 
"fish," and those worth keeping are held.

The U.S. government believes it can put an end to the violence by crushing 
the cocaine cartels.

But Canada's approach is profoundly different -- helping, among other 
things, to wean Colombian peasants off growing coca by financing the 
production of alternative crops.

To visit the campesinos -- peasants -- Rishchynski, accompanied by his 
bodyguards, often makes the dangerous trek deep into the countryside. Once, 
he has even travelled by donkey on a narrow road too steep for cars.

As well, in a bid to prevent atrocities against civilians, Canada is 
training Colombian soldiers to be more aware of basic human rights. 
Maclean's accompanied the ambassador on a 23-hour junket to Bucaramanga, a 
city in a mountain valley 225 km north of Bogota, where he delivered the 
second half of a $30,000 donation to fund human rights education courses 
for the military at Universidad Autonoma de Bucaramanga. (On arrival, he 
urged his foreign guests to try a taste of fried ants, a delicacy now in 
season in Bucaramanga.) "This is the key that opens other doors," said 
Rishchynski, before dinner with the military commander in charge of the 
region. "You are not going to agree to socioeconomic change in the absence 
of trust.

It starts with people."

Cafe Madrid also awaits the ambassador. It is a desperate place on the 
outskirts of Bucaramanga where more than 3,000 displaced people are crammed 
into a makeshift camp. "They are caught like the ham in the sandwich," he 
explains as he tours the camp. "FARC shows up in their village on Monday 
and says, 'Feed our troops or we'll kill you.' Then another guerrilla group 
shows up on Tuesday and says, 'You collaborated with them so we'll kill all 
of you.' "

Relaxed amid the squalor, the ambassador talks to both adults and children. 
"Do you have a health centre, a school for the kids, a community council?

Where is the water coming from?" He ducks under laundry lines, examines the 
stinking latrines, the leaky roofs made from plastic sheets, and holds 
discussions in dark single-room shacks that house 10 or 12 people each. 
"This is the tragedy of Colombia," he says, emerging from one of the homes. 
"The sense of inadequacy is overwhelming."

At the university, the ambassador delivers a speech about human rights, to 
an auditorium filled with soldiers and students.

Afterwards, while generals and professors wait to talk to him, half a dozen 
people press refugee claims into his hand. One person's father has been 
murdered, another's brother has been kidnapped.

Murder and mayhem seem to have been bred into Colombian culture.  At a 
speech attended by a Canadian ambassador in 1999, Manuel (Sureshot) 
Marulanda, the founder and commander of FARC, defended the actions of his 
guerrillas. But the speech consisted mostly of recollections of how 
chickens had been seized from his family in 1948, and revenge was required. 
"Brothers, cousins, nephews, aunts and uncles get involved, making this a 
very personal conflict, which is why it gets so vengeful," says 
Rishchynski. "Justice is about settling accounts.

There is very little capacity to get beyond that."

If a change ever arrives, it may, ironically, result from the very 
trafficking in cocaine that is now destroying the country.

There is so much money involved that the Marxist guerrillas who were once 
motivated by agrarian reform are growing rich themselves. "Today, 
guerrillas are switching sides [from one rebel group or militia to another] 
for the sake of a few more pesos a month," Rishchynski says. "So the 
argument is more about money and less about ideology."

The American intervention could either successfully crush the cartels, or 
plunge the country into more chaos.

Almost 100 U.S. military advisers operating from a massive base 400 km 
south of Bogota have already trained nearly 3,000 Colombian soldiers.

The so-called anti-narcotics battalions will be the cutting edge of Plan 
Colombia's assault on the drug dealers' operations. Colombian pilots flying 
U.S.-supplied planes have also sprayed 86,000 acres of coca plants with 
herbicide, destroying almost 25 per cent of the country's crop. Teichman 
believes Canada's approach is preferable. "The obvious solution is 
alternative crops," says Teichman. "Obviously people need to make a living 
and they need to make a living growing something other than coca." Plan 
Colombia may just write another chapter of violence into Colombia's already 
bloody history -- ensuring that Canada's ambassador stays close to his 
bodyguards.

GUERRILLAS, DRUGS AND VIOLENCE

The history of Colombia, population 40 million, is as complex as it is 
violent. Prior to the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century, the 
territory was inhabited by the now extinct Chibcha Indians. Since the South 
American country gained independence in 1819, power has alternated between 
conservative and liberal factions.

In 1946, conservatives led by Mariano Ospina Perez won the elections, 
triggering a civil war that lasted from 1946 to 1958 and claimed more than 
200,000 lives.

In the 1960s, two Marxist guerrilla movements thwarted efforts to restore 
order: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, organized by peasants 
and former communist party members, and the National Liberation Army, 
founded by students who had been heavily influenced by Cuban revolutionary 
Che Guevara. To counter the leftists, wealthy landowners, fearing they 
would lose their property, financed the operations of numerous paramilitary 
groups to battle the guerrillas.

In 1998, following the election of President Andres Pastrana, three-way 
peace talks between the two rebel groups and the government began.

But peace prospects have been complicated by the drug trade -- since the 
1970s, when Mexico began cracking down on its marijuana trade, Colombia 
emerged as the world's top supplier.  Drug revenues -- now mainly from 
cocaine -- are used to finance the operations of both guerrilla and private 
armies.

To break the back of the lucrative business, Colombia and the United States 
have launched a massive military campaign to wipe out crops and processing 
labs.  But many analysts believe the anti-drug offensive will only result 
in more fighting, ensuring the violence that has plagued Colombia for so 
long continues to rage on.
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager