Wounded Country

The Lieutenant spoke little English, but in his struggle to make himself understood to those American journalists in his charge, there were flashes of what might be described as poetry. This morning, while leading a dozen of us through the wreckage of the week's fifth explosion, he stopped abruptly and pointed to a large depression in the plaza directly in front of the security-police headquarters. "The wound," he announced uncertainly, and marched ahead. A moment later, we were pressed against a makeshift barricade, gazing into the remains of a street where narcotraficantes had detonated 1100 pounds of dynamite at the peak of the morning rush.

And suddenly, the lieutenant's error--he had meant to translate the word crater--proved an uncomfortable metaphor. From our vantage point, ground zero was, indeed, a wound, vast and tragic, in the heart of downtown Bogota. It bled, or at least appeared to; 30 feet below, the crevices in which the bodies of victims had been found were bright with crimson. On the triage grounds, a few yards from the epicenter, lay an abundance of medical waste: (continued on page 80)Wounded Country(continued from page 76) bandages, plasma containers, blood-soaked rags, some still recognizable as clothing. From behind a hastily installed retaining wall spilled the twisted viscera of civilization--wires, pipes, beams.

The sight was so extraordinary that for ten minutes, we forgot our professional obligations and just stared--into the crater, at the ruptured skyline, at one another. Except for the low hum of a bulldozer in the distance, there was no sound; the blast had put an end to all commercial activity within a five-block radius. Each minute, the devastation become more and more surreal, the conflict that had produced it increasingly absurd.

Then deadline consciousness struck and the reverie ended. The sound and video technicians primed their equipment and surrounded the lieutenant, who obliged them by reciting, with official gravity, the latest statistics. Sixty-two dead. One thousand injured. Property damage exceeding $25,000,000. At a network correspondent's prompting ("And has there been significant progress in your investigation?"), he added a few hopeful remarks about apprehending those responsible and ending the "scourge of cocaine abuse," a pedantry that elicited smiles all around. He concluded the session by thanking us for the chance to let America "share our anguish."

That last remark was somewhat misleading. In spite of the destruction surrounding them, Bogotanos displayed remarkably little emotion of any kind. Of the hundreds left homeless and unemployed by the blast, only the very young and the very old cried. Everyone else sifted impassively through the rubble or negotiated with claims adjusters and government representatives. "I have five thousand things to do before I can even think about praying," said one merchant whose paper-goods business had been reduced to ash.

The sense of tragedy was further diminished by the pranks of overworked repair crews, who spat beer at one another in their pits. And by the endless procession of tourists, gawkers and, yes, journalists, armed with cameras and notebooks. And by the schoolboys playing war games on the blasted landscape.

Colombians are not so much insensitive to the tragedy as accustomed to it. There are 16,000 murders and countless bombings, arsons, kidnapings and assaults in a typical year. In North Bogota, an enclave of the ruling class, virtually everyone I met had witnessed a shooting or a stabbing at close range, or else had stumbled upon a murder scene shortly after it had become one. Similarly, Medellin's barrio dwellers regularly awake to find their streets littered with corpses, five to ten each morning. "There was a time when a shooting would scare the hell out of me," said Gilberto, a 54-year-old Medellin furniture maker. "Not now. I've seen too many. We all have. They're more a nuisance than something to be afraid of."

Gilberto alternately blamed the violence on a surplus of handguns and on Latino youth. Each by itself he considered dangerous; the combination, lethal. "Sangre caliente. Hot blood. Two kids will start talking, one of them will provoke the other, and a minute later, they'll start shooting." To prove his point, he escorted me to the local gun store, which swarmed with tough young permit applicants. "Our future victims" was how Gilberto described them.

Sangre caliente, however, accounts for only a fraction of Colombian violence. The bulk of the fatalities are the work of the 150 or so death squads, citizen armies and leftist guerrilla brigades that advance their commercial or political interests by killing their competitors.

Between August 1989 and February 1990, Colombia's major cities endured more than 400 bombings, nearly 300 in Bogota alone. The intensity of the attacks varied enormously. From August through October, the narcos showed surprising restraint in their selection of targets. In Bogotá, bombs were typically detonated in the very early morning and in places of symbolic value--schools, newspaper offices, political headquarters--that were likely to be deserted. Property damage was substantial, essential services were interrupted, but casualties were few.

"There was more confusion than terror," recalled María Jimena Duzán, a journalist for the crusading daily El Espectador. "After the first month, we decided that the narcos were more interested in breaking our spirit than in annihilating us."

The traffickers stepped up their campaign in November. There were more bombings with bigger bombs and several hundred fatalities but still no appreciable panic. A judge of the Public Order Court who oversees many of the major drugrelated indictments suggested that by bombing so frequently, the traffickers may have inadvertently anesthetized the public: "Every night, there were bombs. And every morning, there were casualty reports. It was painful, but there finally comes a point when it becomes part of the background noise."

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American drug warriors inevitably compare Bogotanos to Londoners of the Nazi blitz. And although the comparison is not entirely valid (few Englishmen made their living selling Nazi paraphernalia), there are some Bogotanos who have confronted the offensive with Churchillian defiance and a measure of ingenuity. Parties spring up in the aftermath of minor explosions, the revelers high on what a local poet called "the scent of recent danger." Craftsmen and architects have cashed in on the reconstruction boom. Telephone and electrical services were improved for 50,000 customers when aging substations were destroyed and replaced with modern equipment. Teachers, too, have taken advantage of their students' fascination with munitions by lecturing on chemistry and physics.

But these are exceptions. At the peak of the bombings, the city that guidebooks once described as "the Athens of Latin America" or "a swinging, sophisticated metropolis of almost 6,000,000 people" more often resembled a ghost town, and its people, apparitions who drifted from one metal detector to another. Restaurants, theaters, cantinas and hotel lobbies were all but deserted, their attendance a function of the week's casualties. During the day, workers and shoppers rushed through the downtown streets, afraid of being caught in cross fire or pelted with shrapnel.

Faced with these daunting conditions, about 50,000 people have already deserted Bogotá. Following a U.S. State Department travel advisory last October, 10,000 Americans and several thousand Europeans permanently assigned to Colombia were recalled by their employers. Many Colombian government officials quietly relocated their families to provincial retreats--or to the U.S.

There's an old saying that Colombia attracts only mercenaries, missionaries and misfits; it has perhaps never been more correct. The reduction in Bogotá's population has been partially offset by the stationing of 20,000 troops in and around the city. For the most part, they are very young, undereducated and inexperienced. They stand on the street corners in tight packs of three or four, fingers on the triggers of their automatics, and inspire in passers-by only slightly more confidence than the narcos.

There are other newcomers: American lawmakers on fact-finding junkets at the (continued on page 147)Wounded Country(continued from page 80) best hotels and restaurants, and American journalists, known to the locals as "gringo scavengers." But they contribute nothing to the quality of life. "Colombia has become the freak show of the world," lamented Jorge Ortiz, director of Colombia's New York tourist office.

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Deprived of their usual diversions, Colombians spend a lot of their free time apportioning blame for the current crisis. And whether they're doling it out in derelict cantinas or in ministry anterooms, two names head their demonology: the narcotraficantes, for obvious reasons, and Los Estados Unidos, for reasons less obvious but more compelling.

"Cocaine has become America's villain," explained UN ambassador Enrique Peñalosa. "That's understandable. And it's been established that Colombia is the primary source of cocaine, the source of the villainy. But Americans have started to think of Colombia itself--and Colombians--as the villain. And that's unfair."

Colombians tend to view themselves differently. "Colombians are not corrupting Americans," declared former president Julio César Turbay Ayala. "You are corrupting us. If you abandon illegal drugs, the traffic will disappear."

Just how strong anti-American Sentiment runs depends on which part of town you're in. In the slums, the so-called barrios of misery, the walls scream Muerte Al Yanqui. One American journalist sent into this precinct to absorb local color returned drenched in spit. The merchant classes are more reserved in their invective but have more to gripe about. It is they who've felt America's economic wrath.

"We give you everything," lamented Tulio Veranes, a Cartagena exporter. "We send you our best coffee and we drink garbage ... our best fruit. What do we get in return? Shit on!"

Veranes has reason to be bitter. In the past year, he has lost several thousand dollars' worth of cut flowers to "the malice of the U.S. Customs Service." "Agents take their time about making an inspection. Flowers are perishable. One shipment was impounded for four days. By the time they got around to inspecting it, it was rotten."

Other exporters have suffered similar losses; one trade group estimates that $1,000,000 worth of cargo has been lost to delayed inspections. Travelers, too, have suffered at the hands of U.S. Customs. Colombians were frequently subjected to humiliating searches at American docks and airports--which the ministry of state formally protested as unreasonable, bordering on harassment.

Of course, U.S. Customs does have some cause for suspicion. Often, cocaine seized from passengers at American airports is smuggled in by Colombian mules; they exhibit remarkable ingenuity. Officials at Miami's airport stopped a Colombian couple who purported to be the parents of a suspiciously quiet baby. Upon inspection, Customs determined that the child was, in fact, a cocainestuffed corpse. And medical workers responding to the Avianca crash on Long Island last winter reported that two survivors were carrying cocaine pellets in their digestive tracts, to be expelled and sold in New York City.

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With the Colombian people largely demoralized, their cities destroyed and their industry jeopardized, it's not surprising that a majority of their congressional representatives have begun pushing for an end to the drug war. Usually, the proponents of a "dignified resolution" advocate a quick and dirty compromise with the cocaine traffickers.

The stumbling block is Virgilio Barco Vargas, an elderly, spectacled academician who is Colombia's president. His position on compromise is simple: "There are no safe havens form narco terror. Now there must be no safe haven for the narco terrorists."

Barco is tenacious enough to get his policies implemented, but his rhetoric and inflexibility invariably draw ridicule, not least because he advises a nation that has already sacrificed almost everything to sacrifice more.

He was recruited to the drug war late in life. Twenty years ago, as mayor of Bogotá, his biggest drug-related concerns were keeping the Mafia from executing its victims within city limits and keeping the locals off cocaine. In 1985, he campaigned for the presidency on an antipoverty platform, only to find, upon winning, that his government was all but paralyzed.

The poverty crusade was set aside and a war on drugs launched in its place. In December 1986, four months after taking office, Barco revived an extradition treaty with the U.S. and froze the assets of known traffickers. He also empowered the secret police to conduct a series of strikes on cocaine conversion laboratories, one of which netted celebrated kingpin Carlos Lender. The reprisals that followed Lehder's extradition--anticipated by his confederates' battle cry "Better a grave in Colombia than a jail in the U.S.!"--were exceptionally severe. The list of the dead came to resemble the Colombian social register: newspaper publishers, judges, attorney generals and presidential candidates.

But in spite of the enormous toll, or perhaps because of it, Barco pressed on. Alternately encouraged and pressured by the U.S. (a White House drug-policy advisor confessed, "We sticked him more than we carroted him"), he maintained his offensive for two years in the face of mounting domestic opposition. And still the supply of cocaine on American streets continued to increase.

"We recognized early on that we lacked the resources to make a dent in cocaine production," said a high-ranking Colombian official. "But we also thought that if we held out long enough and got enough support, we might be able at least to stop the terrorism. From October 1989 on, then, all our resources have been concentrated on a campaign to end the narco terror. Beyond that, we had no expectations."

With their own resources taxed to the limit, Colombia's leaders have had to depend increasingly upon the charity of the United States. In recent years, U.S. financial aid to all Latin-American antinarcotics initiatives has averaged $60,000,000 a year. Split among Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, that aid has been described as laughable. The plight of the Colombians, however, moved President Bush late last August to increase U.S. assistance to "whatever is necessary"--a figure of speech the Office of Management and Budget has interpreted as $423,000,000. It was a welcome increase but still inadequate. The New York Times estimated that it would cost one billion dollars to relieve Peru alone of its economic dependency on coca.

Overseeing the cash outlays in Colombia is an increasingly beleaguered band of American representatives. With the closing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, the embassy in Bogotá has the distinction of being the State Department's most dangerous posting. The foreign-service staff, particularly those members assigned to intelligence or narcotics areas, works under a variety of threats. Lehder declared in 1985 that he'd pay as much as $350,000 for the murder of any DEA agent, the amount to be determined by the victim's rank. Consequently, most senior DEA, CIA, Defense Department and State Department personnel have been placed under 24-hour protection. Life for the DEA country attaché is little more than an early ride to the embassy in an armored van (the route varies daily), 12 to 15 hours of strategizing, consulting and paperwork and a ride back home. On those rare occasions that an agent does venture out, he's accompanied by no fewer than four Uzi-toting guards, often more. Any encounter or site that may be dangerous is avoided.

"The best way, maybe the only way, of getting the drug kingpins is by penetrating their organizations," said DEA agent Mike Vigil, recently transferred from Colombia. "But the moment you're under protection, your cover is blown--your usefulness ends."

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It is a bourgeois (perhaps American) conceit that corruption is a form of evil. To the majority of Colombians, especially to those living in poverty, it's viewed differently. A bribe is considered a means of survival. Salaries are so low that a soldier is tacitly encouraged to find opportunities to supplement his income.

In one raid, narcotics agents discovered a pay scale for informants. Soldiers and policemen receive an average of $150 each month; lieutenants, $500; colonels, $1000; generals, upwards of $5000. New recruits frequently request assignments in frontier towns in hope of securing a position as a lookout to the local coquero (grower). Entire platoons have been spotted guarding cartel warehouses and airstrips and loading cocaine onto planes bound for America.

The Colombian national police force has lately taken some modest steps toward enhancing its integrity. Periodically, the high command orders a purge and "suspected collaborators" are discharged by the thousands; last year, 7000 troops qualified--out of a total force of 82,000. In any case, it could be considered a promotion of sorts: Many of the worst offenders immediately found work as cartel security guards.

For antinarcotics missions that demand a high degree of security, General Miguel Maza Márquez, director of the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS), the Colombian secret police, relies solely upon his private army, a battalion of untouchables. Known officially as the Elite Corps, these 500 men are said to be among the most scrupulously honest in Colombia, and great pains are taken to keep them that way. They are better paid than their regular-army counterparts, and to reduce the risk of boredom--which, the general has observed, leads good men astray as surely as cash--they are rotated frequently and receive meteoric promotions. Most importantly, they do what they were meant to, sometimes with spectacular results. Following the bombing of the DAS headquarters last December, it was the Elite Corps that tracked down and killed José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, the extraditable--so called for his vulnerability to prosecution in the U.S.--responsible for much of the terrorism taking place in Bogotá.

Still, the Elite Corps is not infallible. In mid-January, a blue Mercedes loaded with 500 kilos of explosives was discovered in an upscale residential district. The bomb was defused and the car and explosives were put on display for the international press in a makeshift studio. Under the camera lights, several soldiers muttered that the Mercedes had been rigged by the troops themselves, to boost public confidence in the government's initiative.

"Their techniques probably won't sit well with Americans," an appellate-court judge told me. "They get results however they can: by reconnaissance, by courting informants, by interrogating and threatening prisoners, sometimes by applying pressure. [The judge meant torture but wouldn't use the word.] It's necessary. We have no illusions about human rights or the sanctity of life. We treat them like they've been treating us."

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The Economist described cocaine as the most profitable article of trade in the world. It costs roughly $400 to produce a kilo of cocaine and $2000 to transport and deliver it to the New York dealer, who purchases it for approximately $12,000. That leaves the trafficker a profit of $9600 per kilo. How many kilos are produced each year? The U.S. Government places the figure at 700 tons, or about 635,000 kilos.

No one knows just how large the cocaine trade has become, but the best guess is that annual revenues are somewhere between four and eight billion dollars. Traffickers have savings accounts reaching into the tens of billions. In 1984, Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa offered enough money to repay Colombia's International Monetary Fund debt--15 billion dollars--in exchange for amnesty.

The lion's share of the profits goes toward maintaining the lifestyle to which a trafficker grows accustomed; favorite luxuries include Florida real estate, blue-chip stocks, Thoroughbred livestock and discothèques. But a substantial amount also trickles down into the local economy. The DEA estimates that 25 percent of all cocaine profits are repatriated to Colombia. Anywhere from $600,000,000 to two billion dollars is invested in the province of Antioquia alone in a typical year. In a country where 40 percent of the population lives in abject poverty, that's a much needed source of capital. One Medellín restaurateur described it as manna: "I wouldn't be in business without them--I don't think anyone would."

Roughly 200,000 Colombians work directly in cocaine as growers, pickers, chemists, processors, pilots, accountants, bodyguards and drivers. Another 400,000 people work part-time or offer some kind of support service. So prized is a job with the cartels that the successful completion of a teenager's first assignment, say as a runner or a mule, is celebrated with an enthusiasm usually reserved for weddings or bar mitzvahs.

Among the most obvious beneficiaries are Latin America's peasants. Coqueros and pisadores (coca-paste stompers) earn five to ten times what they could in the legal sector. So desperate are the Latino peasants that they've started to settle what were formerly considered barren regions. It's another example of how America exports the pioneer spirit. Indeed, when you are put on hold during a phone call to the Medellín town hall, the music that plays is Home on the Range.

As a rule, the farther from Bogotá you go, the weaker the state becomes, and the more willingly the natives submit to an alternate authority. Depending on whether you head for the jungles or the river valleys, you end up in territories ruled by leftist guerrillas, typically the extremist Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), or in areas dominated by neofascits Mafiosi. Much of the countryside is run on feudal principles: There is a lord, a kingpin or a revolutionary whose word is law and whose judgement, however despotic, is final; a covey of knights and other armed enforcers; and a class of serfs. But while the guerrillas tend to rule with iron first in iron glove, and do little more than tax and terrorize, the traficantes are agreeably munificent--more so than the state can afford to be. Indeed, one reason the cocaine cartels have flourished is that in addition to the order they've imposed on notoriously anarchic provinces, they consistently dole out heaping portions of bread and circuses. Rodríguez Gacha gave Pacho, his home town and base of operations, electricity, plumbing and a bull ring. In Medellín, Pablo Escobar built modest hillside homes for 3000 slum dwellers, sponsored operations for the destitute and installed electric lights in neighborhood soccer stadiums. Just in case anyone missed those acts of munificence, they were reported in the local newspaper, published by Escobar.

Such civic-mindedness is repaid with a loyalty that borders on fanaticism. Kingpins are usually referred to as "Don," a form of address customarily reserved for dignitaries, industrialists and saints. Every third car in Medellín sports an anti-extradition bumper sticker: Colombian Justice for Colombians. Skycaps, cabdrivers, hotel clerks, bartenders, policemen, soldiers, telephone installers and judicial clerks double as cartel watchdogs and are tied into a vast underground surveillance network worthy of Interpol. Any strangers appearing among them, Americans in particular, are subjected to intensive and occasionally hostile interrogations at the airport, in cantinas and on the street. Shortly after I arrived, a pair of hoods trailed me for two blocks through the prosperous neighborhood of El Poblado--a favorite of the criminal element--before closing in and advising me to get the hell out.

The police captain who took down my complaint was as distressed as I. "There's been a surge in pro-narco sentiment in the last six months," he explained. "People have become very protective of the dons and their families. Word's gone out, too, that all useful information will be generously rewarded, so everyone's on the alert. We've had reports of air-traffic controllers passing along flight-path data and hotel clerks searching guests' rooms."

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While their disciples have grown more and more combative, the traffickers themselves have begun showing their conciliatory side. Four months after vowing "to burn and destroy all the industries, properties and mansions of the oligarchies" (and coming close to doing so), they suspended their attacks and began advocating, through spokesmen and communiqués, more humanitarian ideals.

"We accept the triumph of the state," read a January communiqué. "We submit to the existing legal establishment in the hope of obtaining from the government and from society respect for our rights."

"Respect for our rights" has come to serve as a portmanteau for unconditional amnesty, the release of all frozen assets and, above all, an end to extradition. But beggars, even billionaire beggars, can't be choosers, and a cartel mediator with whom I spoke thought harsher terms might be acceptable: "If it comes to it, I think they'd be willing to give up some assets or even stand trial--in Colombia--provided certain teeth are extracted from the laws under which they'd be prosecuted."

It goes without saying that these are signs more of the traffickers' desperation than of their redemption. Since December, the military and national police have driven most of the Medellín kingpins and their colleagues into hiding. Life for Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa brothers, the most flamboyant of the Medellín traffickers, has become little more than a succession of safe houses and midnight runs to frontier towns.

"The longer, we search, the more often the narcos have to expose themselves," said the DEA Special Agent in Charge in Colombia. "That's risky. They wind up in towns where people owe them no loyalty and would rather earn the reward than harbor fugitives." It was a boat hand and a pig farmer who informed on Rodríguez Gacha when he surfaced near Tulo last December. They split almost half a million dollars. "We're relying as much on the poverty of the Colombian peasant," the agent said, "as on their national police to run them down."

Deprived of key military and logistical support, the extraditables have attempted to win over the same folks they'd been terrorizing for two years with demonstrations of their good intentions; and the war on drugs has evolved into a war of publicity. They have released hostages and given up chunks of their empire. On the eve of last February's drug summit in Cartagena, they surrendered a processing complex capable of turning out 20 tons of cocaine monthly--a gesture that led to an outpouring of pronegotiation sentiment from the streets of Bogotá and the legislature.

And, not surprisingly, from the homes of the traffickers themselves. Perhaps the most pathetic appeals come from Fabio Ochoa Restrepo, father to three leaders of the Medellín cartel. Since last August, Ochoa has embarked on a haphazard media campaign aimed at "keeping my sons alive and out of American prisons," inviting reporters to his Las Lomas horse farm on the outskirts of Medellín, where they are subjected to grandiloquent lectures on the importance of family and reminded that in Colombia, gentlemen have traditionally been open to negotiation, no matter what the circumstances.

"Let there be dialog," says the clan's patriarch. "Let there be peace, let there be amnesty. No more drug trafficking. No more war. No more assassinations. Let us not be proud. Let us not be stubborn. Let's sit down together."

The Colombian government has taken some tentative steps toward negotiating with the traffickers. Early this year, President Barco and several cabinet ministers met secretly with associates of Escobar, ostensibly to arrange the release of a kidnaping victim but chiefly, as a senior DEA official put it, "to see if they couldn't find some common ground." A few months later, however, the extraditables threatened to revive their offensive after a senior trafficker was extradited to Arizona.

The possibility of another wave of bombings was enough to give Bogotanos the shakes. Unlike Americans, whose drug policy is deeply rooted in quixotic soil, the guerra de las drogas has made Colombians decidedly pragmatic. Although they appreciate the importance of eradicating the cocaine crop and defeating the traffickers, they also understand the impossibility of doing so. Many pine for the good old days when traffickers ran their business quietly and left the government to manage those few institutions it could.

There are, in fact, indications that so called normalcy may be returning. Independent cocaine traffickers have thrived during the crackdown, largely because they've kept to themselves and avoided violent disputes. A distributor for the Group of Bogotá, one of the more enterprising of the independent cocaine-trafficking groups, claimed that his organization was able to double in size in the past two years for precisely those reasons. "The police are out to stop violence and avenge the politicians," he explained. "They couldn't care less about us."

When I asked him why he was so sure, he replied, "Because we haven't done anything criminal."

"Parties spring up in the aftermath of explosions, the revelers high on 'the scent of recent danger.'"

"One American journalist sent into this precinct to absorb local color returned drenched in spit."