Colombia: Crossing a Dangerous Threshold.

• Author: Jenkins, Brian Michael

ALTHOUGH THE United States has been involved deeply in Colombia's internal affairs for some time, we stand now on the threshold of a momentous change in the nature of that involvement. This has provoked intense, if not always edifying, debate. Perhaps it is inevitable in this case, as in all public discussions, that complex issues are reduced to a single, simple question: Should the United States provide Colombia with sixty helicopters, including thirty sophisticated Black Hawks, to enable its army to attack remote cocaine refineries and, perhaps, persuade its guerrillas to negotiate? But in focusing on aircraft, there is a danger that Colombia's complex political landscape will be reduced to mere background scenery.

"La Violencia"

COLOMBIANS refer to one of the bloodier periods of their bloody twentieth century as La Violencia--the Violence--as if the violence were not a consequence of Colombia's political conflicts or culture, but rather a malevolent, independent actor. Violence in Colombia sometimes does seem to be a Goya-etched monster whose appetite for corpses cannot be sated or suppressed. Neither repeated efforts to negotiate settlements among the warring parties nor mere weariness of the bloodshed can end it. Colombia's scholars probe its pathology. National commissions are appointed to examine it. Creative and complicated political contraptions are devised to contain it. But there is no simple or single explanation for it and, so far, no redemption from it.

Colombia confronts a host of Marxist guerrillas, private armies, criminal gangs and hired guns. The current guerrilla wars have killed an estimated 35,000 people. In the last few years, the paramilitaries have accounted for a growing share of this violence. These are private militias, initially organized as self-defense units and financed by landowners, that have worked with Colombia's army to destroy the guerrillas and their supporters. The paramilitaries appear, however, to be evolving into more autonomous actors, financing themselves through drug trafficking, cooperating with government security forces where convenient, but pursuing their own economic and political goals.

The bulk of the violence is not related to politics or to drugs. Sicarios, young hoodlums who can be hired to murder for a few pesos, along with ordinary people steeped in Colombia's violent culture, do most of the killing. They have made Colombia one of the most violent countries in the world. In addition to those killed in the guerrilla wars, approximately 30,000 people are murdered each year, giving Colombia an annual homicide rate of nearly 100 per 100,000. To get an idea of its national impact, applying Colombia's murder rate to the U.S. population would make a quarter million murders a year--year after year. Almost every Colombian has been personally touched by the violence. Since fewer than 15 percent of deaths can be attributed to the guerrilla fighting, ending those wars and reining in the paramilitaries would still leave Colombia a very violent place, even if all the factions and fronts put down their guns.

To the murders and the guerrilla war killings add the kidnappings, which in Colombia have reached industrial scale. In 1982, 19 kidnappings were reported in the country. Today the number reported each year runs into the thousands, and some estimate the unreported total to be much higher still. The fortunate ones are ransomed. The remainder are killed, or at least never reappear. Ransoms provide a major source of revenue for the guerrillas. Everybody with money who does not pay for protection is a target, and nearly every family of means has at least one member who has been held hostage. Drug-financed private death squads called "Death to Kidnappers" were created in reaction to the guerrillas, but they expanded their operations to target leftwing supporters and other persons regarded as troublesome by the traffickers-turned-conservative landlords. Criminal gangs also engage in kidnappings, as on occasion the drug traffickers themselves have done. When he was running for mayor of Bogota, Colombia's current pre sident, Andres Pastrana, himself was kidnapped and held for a week by the "Extraditables", a name adopted by drug lords facing extradition.

Amazingly, until recently this degree of violence has not prevented political, social and economic progress in Colombia. Colombia's democratic institutions remain intact; its new constitution decentralizes power and brings more people into the political process than ever before. Its literacy rate is one of the highest in Latin America, while its forty universities are full. An impressive number of women are enrolled in higher education and serve in public office. Colombian businessmen are entrepreneurial and competitive. Colombia has the fourth-largest economy in Latin America and is the only country in the region never to have defaulted on its debt. There almost seem to be two Colombias: a sophisticated South American Milan attached to a brutal South American Congo.

Lately, however, the violence has begun to undermine the progressive Colombia. It has discouraged investment and impeded the country's economic development. Two million people have been displaced, while 800,000 have fled. Government resources have been drained. The 1997 Asian economic crisis dried up money and knocked Colombia into its worst recession since the 1930s. This is the wider background against which the civil war must be viewed.

The Guerrilla Forces

ARRAYED AGAINST the Colombian armed forces in the struggle in which the United States seems about to involve itself are the 17,000 Marxist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the 5,000 fighters of the National Liberation Army (ELN). The FARC has been fighting for nearly forty years, but its origins reach back to the veterans of the armed movements of the 1950s and to the political warfare of the 1940s. Manuel Marulanda, the leader of the FARC, began his career as a gunman for the Liberal Party after his mother had been shot by Conservative Party gunmen. He was only 15. The year was 1941.

The guerrillas mainly survive in the remote areas of the...