From Coffee to Cocaine: U.S. Pours Gasoline on Colombia's Flames

Colombia, as newspaper headlines and TV sound bites remind us daily, is in chaos. The government formally cedes control of major parts of the national territory -- one piece is bigger than Switzerland -- to guerrilla groups. Paramilitary armies control other areas and slaughter civilians suspected of collaboration with the guerrillas. Two million people have been displaced from their homes, while nearly a million have fled the country. Entire villages of men, women and children, are hacked to death with machetes.

Yet there has been no outcry for the U.N. Security Council to intervene. No one has been brought before an international tribunal to be charged with crimes against humanity.

I am no longer surprised by anything I read or hear about Colombia. I have been observing the country for more than 50 years, and it all follows its own ghoulish logic. This is a place where one quickly learns to live dangerously.

I first looked down on Bogotá from the window of a DC-3. Before boarding, we had been weighed -- not just our bags but ourselves. The weight-to-power ratio was critical, as we were testing the DC-3's ability to clear the mountain. The pilot had an oxygen mask. The rest of us held our breath.

The year was 1946. Within days of our safe landing, the Colombian Senate, in formal session, declared me an honorary citizen of Colombia, along with several dozen other journalists from North, Central, and South America, who were participating in a meeting of the Inter-American Press Association.

The Colombian Senate could be relied on to do that type of thing. It was a perfect example of how the oligarchy has traditionally run the country. We were wined and dined at country clubs more luxurious than any club I know of in London or New York. The Senate hoped that when we returned home, we would write about Colombia’s modern cities and booming coffee economy, ignoring the steadily expanding slums and the misery in which the coffee workers lived -- and especially the violence.

We wrote little at that time about the violence. There seems to be a pathological condition that causes Colombians to kill each other savagely and for no obvious reason. It had begun sporadically more than a decade earlier -- today it is institutionalized.

Of course it is not irrational, but a gut response to a social system that has for centuries concentrated power, wealth and status in a small ruling class, while leaving the mass of citizens not only in poverty but without recourse against the capricious impositions of the patrón.

A population explosion in the 20th century, without corresponding economic growth, made this system unworkable. Colombia’s population was fewer than 4 million people in 1900. In 1950 it was 11 million, and today, 40 million people live there. The population distribution has changed from 75 percent rural to 75 percent urban.

Unable to divide their tiny family plots any further, many young peasants chose to climb higher in the mountains to join bands of desperadoes. There, they could count on a brief moment of local glory before falling to the bullets of the military. The bandits would occupy a village or an isolated homestead or ambush a bus. Before fleeing with their loot, they would slaughter all inhabitants, mutilating bodies and chopping off heads.

In 1947, the year after the press association meeting, the violence reached Bogotá. Jorge Gaitan, a popular reformer, was assassinated in broad daylight. It was never determined who was behind the killing. Onlookers had seized the gunman and beat him to death. Official inquiries led nowhere.

The assassination unleashed pent-up resentments in Bogotá. An outburst of pillage and burning swept the city for days and spread across the country, giving the Spanish language a new word -- bogotazo. In the ‘50s, the violence claimed an estimated 200,000 victims. It was out of hand.