Pubdate: Sun, 17 Mar 2002
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Page: A09
Copyright: 2002 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author:  Scott Wilson, Washington Post Foreign Service

IN COLOMBIA'S WAR, EVEN CAUSE AT ISSUE

Diverging Views An Obstacle To Peace.

Ignacio Choachi, a construction worker old enough to remember the day in 
1948 when Bogota was burned in a spasm of political violence that has yet 
to end, attended Mass at the fading colonial Santa Barbara Church this 
morning in search of answers.

Why had gunmen killed the archbishop of Cali on Saturday night? Why has 
Choachi's country known constant killing -- from peasants to political 
leaders -- in his 65 years? How would it end?

"It's sad that we have gotten so used to these kinds of crimes. Nothing 
really surprises me anymore," said Choachi, who had just heard the 
archbishop of Bogota call on Colombians to "stop this river of blood." "I 
suppose it is because there are no jobs and too many poor people that can't 
make a living."

About 10 miles north of the church, where the city gives way to high plains 
and grazing cattle, a 37-year-old banker watched the finals of the Jet-Set 
Cup polo tournament. Onlookers in Gucci loafers sipped free Chivas Regal as 
the players concluded a week of fashion shows and society events here in 
the well-guarded capital.

But the game was poorly attended, and while the chatter ranged over the 
usual topics of movies, parties and trips to Miami, it also dwelt darkly on 
the not-so-usual subject of the murder of Archbishop Isaias Duarte Cancino.

"There is one reason we are in the position we are -- drug money," the 
banker said. "Our social problems are no different than those in Argentina 
or Brazil, except for the drug money. If it disappeared, so would the 
incentive for these armed groups to fight."

Sharing the same fractured frame, these starkly different scenes illustrate 
the diverging ways Colombians understand their ageless war, now worsening 
in the wake of a collapsed peace process. Stubbornly held interpretations 
of the conflict, shaped by class, geography and the unequal way Colombia's 
violence is felt by its people, are perhaps the single largest obstacle to 
the country's search for a solution to a conflict that claimed 3,500 lives 
last year.

By turns, Colombians understand their war as a fight over the drug profits 
enriching various armed groups. Or a political crusade to correct the 
prevailing economic imbalance in a land of plenty. Or the result of lost 
morals. Or as simple terrorism flourishing because of the broad impunity 
enjoyed by those who commit the worst crimes. Each viewpoint has its own 
solution, be it more military force or investment in the welfare of an 
impoverished rural population. As a result, agreeing on the war's roots 
remains an essential, if elusive, first step toward solving it.

The variety of armed groups and the relentless momentum of a conflict that 
officially began as a 1960s-era struggle for social justice has generated 
deep apathy among Colombians of all classes. Except perhaps the 35,000 or 
so soldiers of the three irregular armies fighting it.

Today, one rising and one fading Marxist guerrilla group battle the 
government and a growing paramilitary force that fights by its side. Among 
this cast of characters, only the Colombian military is not defined as a 
terrorist organization by the Bush administration, which now hopes to 
loosen restrictions on $1.3 billion in counter-narcotics aid so that the 
package's mostly military component can be used directly against the 
guerrillas.

"Let's all work for a better society until those who act this way know they 
can't continue killing, kidnapping and torturing a whole society as if they 
were savage beasts," Cardinal Pedro Rubiano, the archbishop of Bogota, said 
in his sermon today.

After years of disagreement, however, a new consensus about what the war is 
about may be coalescing around the presidential candidacy of Alvaro Uribe 
Velez, a former governor of war-ravaged Antioquia province who understands 
the war primarily as a terrorist campaign carried out by a guerrilla group 
that benefits from a weak Colombian state. Opinion polls suggest that 
support for his tougher line against the guerrillas spans geographic and 
class lines.

Uribe's view is also shared by Colombia's top generals and the leader of an 
irregular army that emerged in response to the guerrilla insurgency.

"The worst thing that happened to Colombia is the guerrillas' corruption by 
drug money," said Carlos Castano, head of the United Self-Defense Forces of 
Colombia, a 15,000-member paramilitary group that itself profits enormously 
from the drug trade and from donations by Colombia's ranchers and other 
private business interests. "For years, the guerrillas seemed like they 
might be the solution to our problems . . . until they allied themselves 
with the drug traffickers."

But the current public clamor for a military solution has yet to yield a 
consensus on how to wage that war since President Andres Pastrana's peace 
efforts with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC as the 
largest guerrilla group is known, collapsed last month.

Last week, Colombia's finance minister, Juan Manuel Santos, proposed that 
Colombians donate a day's pay to the country's meager military budget. 
Among the wealthy, the idea was welcomed. Low-wage workers and union 
leaders said they would donate a day's pay, but only to needy hospitals and 
schools.

The disagreement also applies to operations of the military, where 
mandatory service is easily avoided with money. Those who have not finished 
high school find themselves in the counter-guerrilla patrols, while the 
college-bound serve behind a desk.

Usually, though, families that are able to scrape together $1,000 to buy a 
son's way out of "mandatory" service do so -- leaving only the very poor 
and those with a social conscience to do the fighting. Gen. Fernando 
Tapias, head of the armed forces, wants that loophole closed to distribute 
the burden of the war more equitably and to extend the length of mandatory 
service to two years from 18 months.

Rodrigo Lozano, a 30-year-old corporate lawyer from a well-to-do Bogota 
family, did not buy his way out of military service. Sipping a Chivas while 
watching polo, Lozano said he still believes that his mostly office-bound 
assignment was unfair to the less-educated inductees who landed in combat 
units.

"War in Colombia has become a way of life for so many people -- there is a 
lack of education, a lack of opportunity and a lack of morals," Lozano said.

If given $1 billion to spend on solving the war, Lozano said, he would 
invest it in the education system. But ultimately, he said, the economic 
motivations driving the war will make it hard to stop.

"The war allows for narco-trafficking, sales of weapons and the huge 
commissions that result," he said. "In any country, war benefits somebody. 
The military has an interest and so do the elite, who profit from the 
economy around the war. And, of course, so do the guerrillas."

Colombians were forced again today to consider what they had become in 
light of Duarte's murder.

The archbishop had been a sharp critic of the guerrillas, and his murder 
underlines how few institutions are exempted from Colombia's war. 
Universities, unions, the media -- all have become fair game for political 
assassinations. Now so has the church in this deeply Catholic country; last 
week, the head of the Colombia bishops' conference, Alberto Giraldo, called 
his country "morally sick."

"There is no respect even for those who make God visible to others," said 
Marina Guzman, a 37-year-old dressmaker from Bogota who attended Mass this 
morning. "This violence is being passed from parents to children, and the 
young are getting used to taking the easiest way -- like killing people for 
money."
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