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Chaos in Colombia: why drugs rule and violence reigns

The following is the first installment in a three-part series describing American involvement in Colombia.

By Mandy Sheffield

The Colombian people have been at war almost continuously for hundreds of years. While the elite battle for power and money, most people just want peace.

“Violence stalks Colombia like a biblical plague,” Marc Bowden said in his book, Killing Pablo, which is about the search for and assassination of the world’s most notorious drug lord, Pablo Escobar.

The United States gives more aid per year to Colombia than any other Latin American country, traditionally to fight the war on drugs. However, that policy has also come to include fighting Marxism and terrorism, and perhaps expanding the American Empire. Unfortunately, by trying to eradicate drug trafficking in the country, the United States is also eliminating an export that helps feed countless Colombians.

Over the years, both the American and the Colombian governments have tried to ameliorate the situation in Colombia, but these attempts are never successful as one group or another sabotages the prospect of peace. Disorder there breeds prosperity for many, and peace would mean empty pockets. If the U.S. hopes to resolve any problems involving drugs and terrorism in Colombia, Colombia’s problems must be solved first. However, extreme measures, which would include extreme U.S. commitment, would be necessary for a lasting peace.

Background

The Colombian history relevant here begins when the Europeans tried to conquer and exploit the natives, who refused to submit. But the white man proved a worthy opponent, wielding his weapon of Christianity. Religion was the only medium through which the Spaniards could hope to communicate with and control the “savages.” But instead of keeping the peace, religion fed into the superstitions and passions within the native culture. During the 19th century, eight civil wars took place over the separation of church and state. The Liberals wanted priests to have a hand in the government and the Conservatives vehemently disagreed.

April 8, 1948, was Colombia’s day that will live in infamy. Shortly before that, the leftist movement in Latin America was gaining widespread power and support. The socialist followers looked to Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, the head of the Liberal Party and a likely candidate for president in 1950. He won the hearts of most Colombians by promising an end to the seemingly endless civil war, which pitted the powerful against each other and ravaged the rest of the country. On that infamous day, he was gunned down and killed in the street. All hope for peace was gone.

Violent riots broke out in cities throughout the country, and the army was sent out to stop them. This fighting, called El Bogazato, “was eventually quieted, but it lived on throughout untamed Colombia for years, metamorphosing into a nightmarish period of bloodletting so empty of meaning it is called simply La Violencia,” Marc Bowden wrote in Killing Pablo.

La Violencia lasted until 1953, and when it was over more than 145,000 people were dead. The violence was almost unfathomable, but it demonstrated that the intense pain, passion and fear that had been building up in Colombians since the Spanish conquest would not easily be quelled.

“Terror became an art, a form of psychological warfare with a quasi-religious aesthetic,” wrote Bowden. “In Colombia it wasn't enough to hurt or even kill your enemy; there was ritual to be observed...Male victims had their genitals stuffed in their mouths... One gang left its mark by slicing the neck of a victim and then pulling his tongue down his throat and out through the slice, leaving a grotesque ‘necktie’...”

In an effort to end La Violencia, Conservatives and Liberals formed the National Front in 1958. Under the agreement, every four years the two parties would alternate presidents and all political positions would be distributed equally between to the two parties. While the Front lasted, violence between the Conservatives and Liberals ended, but social and economic problems for the rest of the country became far worse. In 16 years, the number of people living in absolute poverty doubled and in rural areas nearly tripled - to 67.5 percent.

Drugs: Colombia’s solution and North America’s problem

Marijuana was Colombia’s first big cash crop, but the drug lords (narcos) soon switched to cocaine. The demand for it increased dramatically in the ‘70s-especially in the U.S.-- and Colombians were happy to take North American money for it. At least 600 tons of cocaine and heroin are smuggled into the U.S. and Europe every year, and it is estimated that 50 percent of the United States' heroine and over 90 percent of its cocaine comes from Colombia.

At the beginning of the drug boom, narcos and guerrillas worked together. The guerrilla groups developed during La Violencia. Wealthy landowners fled and abandoned their lands, giving peasants the opportunity to claim and farm them -- until the government sent the army to reclaim the territories for the rich landowners. The peasants would not leave without a fight, and their protectors are the infamous guerrilla fighters, the most notorious group being the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

The guerrillas controlled and protected the coca-covered land, and the narcos produced and distributed the cocaine. But when the narcos started accumulating loads of money, they also bought more and more land. By 1989, they owned 60 percent of it. Resentment emerged between the two groups, and they soon became enemies. To fight the poor farmers, the narcos started hiring their own strongmen to fight off FARC and any other threats to their multi-million dollar businesses.

Paramilitary and Self-Defense Groups

The paramilitary groups are the most violent in Colombia. They are the militants who fight the guerrillas for control of land and money, which they get from kidnapping, taxing coca crops and selling drugs themselves. The most notorious is the United Self-Defense Forces, or AUC. Many are connected with the narcos and do their dirty work: shoot invaders, collect debts and kill disloyal insiders. They are right-wing vigilantes and arguably the most violent group in Colombia; they kill the greatest amount of people. They raid towns, capturing or killing anyone involved with the guerrillas, and some groups practice “social cleansing” -- killing any FARC sympathizers, including street children and prostitutes.

According to the official FARC website, FARC sees the paramilitaries as a tool of the U.S., their activities carried out “by policies of the 'National Security Doctrine,’ a ‘low intensity conflict,’ drawn up by the Pentagon for all of Latin America, beginning in the mid-sixties, to deal with the so-called 'communist threat.’” The group also says that the paramilitaries are “financed by the drug trade and by…industrialists, created for the indisputable purpose of exonerating the army of its responsibility in the physical elimination of all those who oppose the establishment.”

Links between paramilitaries and the Colombian military have been known to exist, but it is almost impossible to know to what extent. The military admits to helping create many paramilitary groups, but they do not, and cannot, control them.

Narcos Rule

For most Colombians cocaine is not a problem. For many, it is actually a blessing. The industry is so big that it employs thousands of Colombians and is one of the country's highest grossing exports. Cocaine use is not a problem for Colombians because they can’t afford it. The drug does not hurt its producers; it puts food on their tables.

When the cartel leaders started earning enormous amounts of money in the late ‘70s, they were viewed as heroes in the minds of many Colombians. They were seen as modern day Robin Hoods-- taking from the rich and giving to the poor. The drug lords invested much of their money back into Colombia and even created social programs in their home cities. This began to change once people realized the type of control the narcos wielded.

They control more of society than anyone, including the government. In the 1980s, in order to maintain the right conditions for the narcos to carry out their activities, 12,859 government officials were killed.

With the billions of dollars some narcos were making (Escobar even had his own fleet of private jets), they resorted to heavy bribery to ensure the prosperity of their businesses. They had a hand in everything -- government, police, military, other cartels, the corner grocery store. The government became completely ineffective because nearly all officials found themselves at the mercy of some narco.

In last summer’s issue of the The Washington Quarterly, Phillip McLean wrote in his article titled “Colombia: failed, failing, or just weak?” that “the deterioration of Colombian institutions correlated closely with the growth of the narcotics trade from the late 1970s onward...The country’s legal instruments were weak and not prepared for the organized assault by the drug mafias. Colombians had become too accustomed to resolving matters with private arrangements that favored the well-connected parties and avoided objective adjudication.”

Mandy Sheffield is Buzzsaw’s Latin American specialist. If you have a problem with it, email her in Spanish at asheffi1@ithaca.edu