Catch-22

(continued)

by Kristen Lombardi

PAPER WEIGHT: Colombian activists have collected more than 10,000 signatures supporting HR 2741, the Andean Adjustment Act of 1999.

Violent death has been a fixture of the Colombian political landscape for the past 40 years, as a civil war fought by factions of bad guys -- there have been no good guys -- has engulfed the country. Today's conflict stems from a guerrilla insurgency that arose in the 1960s. As legend has it, a group of poor farmers appealed to the government for assistance. Instead of receiving help, they were butchered. Survivors stole into the Andes and then re-emerged as homegrown mutineers. They called themselves the FARC -- the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Yet what began as a fight for democracy has turned corrupt and fearsome. Through extortion, kidnapping, and drug dealing, the FARC has grown into the oldest, largest, and most powerful guerrilla organization in Colombia today. (The other guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army, or ELN, entered the fray in the 1980s with Cuban backing.)

Guerrilla warfare was further stoked during the 1980s, when the Cali and Medellín drug cartels took hold. The drug lords are a vicious breed, murdering anyone who stumbles into the wrong place at the wrong time. Rich landowners organized a self-defense movement -- one that evolved into the ruthless paramilitary death squads that commit 80 percent of the human-rights abuses today.

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The government, likewise, has long wrestled with corruption, neglect, and gross human-rights violations. Like its predecessors, the current administration, led by President Andres Pastrana, has not stopped the generals from colluding with the right-wing militias. Human-rights organizations, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have amassed mounds of evidence that the army continues to look the other way when its paramilitary allies massacre civilians. Last August, the army itself was responsible for a deadly, unprovoked assault in Pueblo Rico, where soldiers gunned down six children and injured four more. "The government has no legitimacy," says Matthew Knoester of the Colombia Support Network, a Boston peace group. "It is equally bad."

For the average Colombian, life is dominated by the violence of the war. Civilians are shot at by soldiers; kidnapped for ransom by guerrillas; stabbed, strangled, and slaughtered with impunity by death squads. Colombia, which is the size of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi combined, has a murder rate that's nine times that of the United States. Ten civilians -- mostly campesinos, or rural peasants -- are killed every day because of the political clash. In the past 18 months alone, more than 2500 people have died in 500 massacres by illegal militias. And in the past decade, as many as 40,000 civilians have perished.

That all three military forces represent a threat to civilians is a fact the US government has overlooked since 1988, when former president George Bush funneled $39 million into the country to help wage the domestic drug war. Today, Colombia still supplies as much as 80 percent of the cocaine consumed in the US, and 65 percent of the heroin. "Narcoguerrillas," as a result, have become a huge factor in US drug policy. Because the Colombian army says that it needs help fighting the guerrillas, and that beating back the guerrillas would quell the drug trade, the US has boosted the scope of its aid at a record pace. By 1999, Congress had allocated $300 million in antidrug funding to the Colombian police and army, making Colombia the third-largest recipient of military aid after Israel and Egypt.

This year, President Bill Clinton raised the stakes further by pushing through an unprecedented $1.3 billion package -- a four-fold increase over just 12 months. Invoking "national security," Clinton later waived the human-rights conditions that Congress imposed on his plan -- even though the Colombian government had failed to comply with six of the seven requirements, such as directing the US secretary of state to certify that the Colombian government is vigorously investigating and prosecuting human-rights violations by military personnel. Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), who led the congressional effort behind the conditions, said last June in the Senate that "the protection of human rights should not be a `waivable' foreign-policy objective. It should be enforced with the same vigor as our antidrug goals." But by waiving them, Clinton has enabled the money to flow faster and without restriction.

BECOMING AMERICAN: Colombian activists are learning the values of activism and civic duty.

The controversial aid package is devoted largely to arming the military against the guerrillas. This has set off a wave of criticism among American and Colombian activists alike -- and not simply because the funding has heightened the United States' role in another country's civil war. What especially bothers critics is that the money puts the US in league with a military that maintains long-standing ties to drug-dealing paramilitary thugs. "This isn't about the drug war," Knoester says. "It's about a counterinsurgency campaign against the FARC."

Right now, the war is set to escalate in Putumayo, a main coca-growing region in southern Colombia. US special forces are training Colombian troops, who will spearhead an offensive to drive the FARC out of its stronghold -- and, by default, the 200,000 coca farmers living there. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has already alerted Ecuador, which shares a border with the region, to prepare to take in as many as 40,000 refugees. Even in Boston, the local Colombian community is gearing up for the migration wave. As Soto of Colombia Vivé says, "US policy is creating refugees. Colombians are desperate to go places where they feel safe."

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Kristen Lombardi can be reached at klombardi[a]phx.com.