Bogotá

A Typical Day: 26 Massacred, 10 Missing

The tectonic class divide in Colombian society emerges in this mountainous Andean capital of 6 million as a near-perfect geographic split. The southern half of the city melts into the legendary Ciudad Bolivar, a sprawling and violent Casbah-like ghetto whose inhabitants boast that it's too dangerous even for the army to enter. Northern Bogotá, meanwhile, flaunts designer boutiques from Hugo Boss to Mont Blanc, along with Colombia's equivalent of Wall Street. At its edge, it neatly melds into foothill neighborhoods festooned with elegant high-rise condos whose rooftops are often shrouded in a gossamer mountain fog. On any Sunday, take a stroll down Avenida Chile toward the discos, casinos and outdoor cafes of the northern Zona Rosa and there is a cop, or even a soldier, on every corner--not to menace, but to protect the social elite bunkered into this rarefied enclave. For while the war that rips through the countryside is barely heard here in the capital, its byproducts, especially pandemic kidnappings, haunt the daily routines of the better-off. It might be a short-term abduction triggered by stepping into a "taxi" whose driver, at gunpoint, forces his fare to sign a sheaf of blank checks or surrender his ATM card and code. Or it could be the real deal--one that demands the family patrimony as ransom. So, to enter just about any public building, or even a private apartment house, in Bogotá is to go through the same security routines as at the jumpiest of international airports: sign in with armed private security guards, trade a photo ID for a visitor's badge and, often, pass through a metal detector.

Which is precisely the ritual that precedes a visit with David Buitrago, legal director of Pais Libre, a nonprofit that fights kidnapping. "Hardly anyone feels safe here anymore," he says as he pulls out a sheet with the latest tallies. "In ten years we have gone from 100 kidnappings a year to 3,706 during the year 2000." That's not only a 16 percent increase over the previous year but also about 50 percent of all the kidnappings in the world. All the "armed actors" do it. Usually for money. Last year 75 percent of abductions were carried out by guerrillas, mostly by the largest of the insurgent groups, the FARC and the ELN; 10 percent were committed by the right-wing paramilitaries. "While the paramilitaries kidnap fewer, their victims most frequently just disappear," Buitrago says dryly. And he worries that Plan Colombia will make matters worse. "If the plan really cuts into the drug trade from which all the armed actors profit," he says, "it might force them to increase kidnappings to make up the difference." And it's not just the rich who feel threatened. A recent poll showed that a mind-boggling 43 percent of Colombians fear they could be kidnapped. "Let's face it," says Buitrago, "Everyone wants to leave Colombia."

Consider three news articles on the front page of the Bogotá papers on January 19, the day I meet with Buitrago. One piece reports that a right-wing paramilitary group entered the northern town of Chengue two days before, rounded up the villagers and beat twenty-six of them to death with stones and machetes. As sixty homes were set on fire, the attackers fled with ten other live victims. The article goes on to say that this is the latest in more than 150 "massacres" by the paras in the past eighteen months, which have cost more than 1,500 lives. The leader of these death squads, Carlos Castano, says the news report, is wanted on twenty-two different warrants but has not been arrested. Another article reports that Bill Clinton's State Department, with only hours left before the Bush transition, employed a loophole in the US aid package and "voluntarily" decided to "skip" having to certify that the Colombian government has complied with US human rights demands attached to Plan Colombia legislation--specifically, suppression of the paramilitary death squads. The third news article reports that Gen. Peter Pace of the Pentagon's Southern Command has arrived in Bogotá to say that eighteen Super Hueys have been put into the hands of the Colombian military. The deadlier Black Hawks, says General Pace, will arrive by July.

Clinton's wink at the human rights certification on the same day as the Chengue massacre should provoke no special outrage. The bloodshed here is continuous. More than 35,000 Colombians have died in political violence over the past decade. "What we have in Colombia isn't a civil war," says Ombudsman Cifuentes. "What we have is a war of the armed actors against civil society."

La Violencia

President Pastrana was elected in 1998 on a peace platform, vowing to end a half-century of violence and war. He spoke boldly of a sort of Colombian Marshall Plan that would seek foreign assistance to fight corruption, give some depth to Latin America's oldest formal democracy, reform the justice system, negotiate a settlement with the leftist guerrillas and, yes, fight the drug trade. He asked for $3.5 billion in foreign support which he would match with $4 billion in Colombian government funding.

Pastrana's election so stirred the hopes of a war-weary nation that soon after his election, millions of Colombians came into the streets rallying for peace. At first blush, the aristocratic, fine-featured President seems an unlikely choice to play such a historic role. His father, Misael Pastrana, was a lackluster president in the early 1970s. And Pastrana's Conservative Party is hardly the voice of the common people. But, then again, Colombia defies nearly all Latin American stereotypes. It has produced no significant stretch of military rule nor any sustained populist or nationalist movement of the sort common elsewhere on the continent. The political left, meanwhile, has been historically weak.

For most of this century, the Colombian political stage has been so monopolized by two major parties, the equally ill-named Conservatives and Liberals, that from the mid-1950s into the 1970s they even governed together with no real opposition. "Strangely, we have a deep democratic institutionality that coexists with the most barbaric violence, and the state has a foot in both," says analyst Carlos de Roux.

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