Source:   Dallas Morning News
Contact:    Sun, 28 Dec 1997
http://www.dallasnews.com
discussion forum: http://forums.dallasnews.com/dallas
Author:  Tod Robberson / The Dallas Morning News

COLOMBIAN DRUG ENFORCER BALANCES DREAMS, MILITARY

BOGOTA, Colombia  Something seems deeply out of kilter in the office of
Colombia's top warrior and drug enforcer, armed forces commander Gen.
Manuel Jose Bonett.

Inside his elegant, woodpaneled office are all of the trappings of a man
who has devoted his life to combat, as evidenced by the unusually large,
decorative brass cannon that covers all but the edges of the coffee table
where he sat with White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey a few weeks ago.

But then there's that distinctly unmilitary music blaring over his office
boombox  a collection of American folk singer Joan Baez's greatest hits.
There's that nostalgic, faraway look in the general's eyes as he sits
behind the cannon and talks about his 30year quest to locate a copy of Ms.
Baez's popular peacenik song, Kum Ba Ya.

And there's the calendar of 1960s psychedelic guitarist Jimi Hendrix that
Gen. Bonett, 59, keeps at his desktop computer.

The top commander of the Colombian soldiers and police who occupy the front
lines in the war on drugs admits with a toothy, jagged smile that he is a
lost child of the '60s, a hippie wannabe, a firm believer that Colombians
should make love, not war.

Instead of growing his hair long and wearing tiedyed Tshirts, Gen. Bonett
spent the '60s as a young artillery officer rising through the ranks of
Colombia's military, lobbing shells at Marxist insurgents while watching
the rise of Flower Power from afar.

Today, he is the man in charge of mapping the complicated war strategy that
would simultaneously quell a rampage by rightwing paramilitary death
squads, turn back an offensive by the nation's 15,000 leftist guerrillas
and stem the multibilliondollar flood of heroin and cocaine rushing
northward from Colombia's shores.

Keeping the lid on the world's cocaineexporting capital and the Western
Hemisphere's hottest civil conflict is tough duty for a man who says he
would much rather talk about rock 'n' roll than guns and fighting.

He claims to be the world's biggest fan of the late Mr. Hendrix, and last
year gave an hourlong, impromptu discourse on Mr. Hendrix's life during a
live radio broadcast marking the anniversary of the musician's 1970 death
from a drug overdose.

"He's more than just a soldier. He's a poet. He's a man of the lost
generation," said radio talkshow host Julio Sanchez, who has hosted Gen.
Bonett on his evening broadcast to discuss music, literature and the arts.
"He's fascinated with the hippies. . . . He knows everything there is to
know about Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Joan Baez."

One of his most coveted possessions, Gen. Bonett said in a 2 1/2hour
interview, is a videotape his children gave him last year of Mr. Hendrix
twanging out a national anthem medley with his teeth on an electric guitar
at Woodstock in 1969.

Yes, he acknowledged, there is a certain contradiction in his heroworship
of a man who popularized a generation's use of hallucinogenic drugs with
his hit song, Purple Haze, which is about tripping on LSD. But it is Mr.
Hendrix's craftsmanship and talent, not his lyrics, that draw Gen. Bonett's
admiration. He pointedly did not criticize Mr. Hendrix's use of drugs but
rather sought to explain it.

"Jimi Hendrix is my alltime favorite," the general said. "Jimi Hendrix
lived by and for drugs because he didn't have a father [figure] . . .
because he never really had a home or a childhood. So what could we have
expected from him?"

The gregarious general acknowledged feelings of awkwardness, discontent and
loneliness occupying the commander's position, which he assumed in August
after President Ernesto Samper fired Gen. Bonett's outspoken predecessor,
Gen. Harold Bedoya.

"You feel lonely in this job, because you don't have any superior military
person to consult. You're always on top looking down," he said.

Others say the general's ambivalence stems from a lack of commitment from
the Samper administration to overcome a combined rebel offensive by the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and its smaller counterpart, the
National Liberation Army.

Gen. Alvaro Valencia Tovar, who teaches at the national war college,
suggested that Gen. Bonett risks going down in history as the man who lost
Latin America's longestrunning civil conflict unless Mr. Samper's
government does something to shore the military up, financially as well as
logistically.

"If the government doesn't take that decision, this war cannot be won," he
warned. "The war is lost in advance."

The armed forces are performing so poorly against the guerrillas,
paramilitary militias and drug traffickers that the Clinton administration
is voicing public concerns. It is trying to rush $50 million in emergency
military aid to halt a widely feared rout by the guerrillas, who draw
millions of dollars in financial support from drug traffickers.

During his October visit here, drug czar McCaffrey expressed fears that
Colombia's democracy was under threat because of the military's inability
to stop a rebel offensive, and he estimated that government forces had
already ceded control over 40 percent of the nation's territory. Gen.
Bonett counters that just because territory is not occupied by the armed
forces does not necessarily mean it is controlled by rebel forces.

The general also is under fire for failing to quell a counteroffensive by
rightwing paramilitary militias, who have staged more than 760 political
killings this year and forced the displacement of 41,000 people, according
to figures compiled by two Colombian human rights groups.

Gen. Bonett vowed to crack down on the paramilitary fighters and declared
them, at least for now, his No. 1 military target  despite the fact that
some of his subordinates have provided backdoor assistance to those same
militiamen.

Gen. Bonett warned that any member of the military caught cooperating with
paramilitary groups "will go straight to jail  that is a promise."

There have been other tests of his stamina and resolve since he assumed the
top military post. Some of his subordinates reportedly were skeptical of
his appointment and felt that Gen. Bedoya, now a presidential candidate,
was unjustly fired for failing to support Mr. Samper. Mr. Samper is banned
from entering the United States because his 1994 presidential campaign
accepted more than $6 million from Colombian drug cartel leaders.

"There was some measure of resentment when Gen. Bedoya was demoted. He is
still very wellliked in the military," Gen. Tovar explained. "But the
discipline of the Colombian army is quite strong, in spite of that
lingering resentment."

Gen. Bonett insists his subordinates are fully behind him and have never
voiced reservations about his appointment.

He rose dramatically in national esteem after surviving an assassination
attempt last August, when guerrillas exploded a roadside bomb as his
limousine passed through the Caribbean coastal city of Santa Marta.

The armorplated car transporting the general was charred and pockmarked
with shrapnel, and two blownout tires forced it to limp along the road for
45 minutes before reaching safety at an army base. One person in another
vehicle was killed, but Gen. Bonett survived unscathed, managing even to
joke about it afterward with reporters.

Still, the bombing underscored the military's seeming inability to keep the
guerrillas at bay  even when it comes to protecting its top commander.

Through it all, Gen. Bonett has maintained his sense of humor. In late
October, he suggested during a live radio interview that the guerrilla war
could be concluded by the end of the year if only the rebels' lovers would
deny them sex.

"I think that by December they'll be tamed and they'll propose peace out of
desperation," he said, drawing his idea from the play Lysistrata by Greek
satirist Aristophanes. In the play, Greek women agree collectively to deny
sex to their mates to make them stop fighting the Peloponnesian war.

The suggestion caused an uproar, with feminists expressing particular
outrage at the notion that their only role in Colombia's civil conflict is
to serve as providers of sex. Others criticized the general for appearing
to make light of a deadly serious subject.

The general complained that the suggestion generated more press attention
than the bomb attack on his limousine. Undaunted by the critics, he said he
stands by his words.

"What was my message? First, read the classics," he said. "Second, Colombia
needs to do the impossible and think the impossible to achieve peace."