Abstract

Latin America's Longest War

The article describes the dire situation in Columbia, and the attempts of the United States to address the nation's longstanding problems. In May of 2004, Jan Egeland, the United Nations Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs, called a news conference in New York to declare publicly what he had been warning people about for some time: that the nation of Colombia had become "by far the biggest humanitarian catastrophe of the Western Hemisphere." Chronic and intractable warfare among paramilitaries, the army, cocaine traffickers and leftist guerrillas has so wreaked havoc on the countryside that, Egeland pointed out, 2 million of its 36 million inhabitants had become refugees. Colombia's problems are of long standing and are deeply tied into the country's tortured and violent history. They do not appear to be amenable to quick fixes--especially military ones. But over the past few years, while the world's attention has been transfixed by events in Iraq, the United States has become deeply involved in a military buildup in Colombia and is rapidly becoming more so.