Inside: In Apartadó, Colombia, extreme violence is a daily fact of life. And the bloodshed is being sponsored by your tax dollars.
"We're here to attend an international gathering of women against violence," replies Cecilia Zárate - Laun, head of the Madison-based Colombia Support Network. There are eight of us: Zárate -Laun and two other members of her group, four representatives of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and this reporter.
After a few more interrogatives, the man with the gun shrugs and moves aside so the smiling girls in pastel can skip forward, giving us flowers and a kiss on the cheek. During the next few days in Madison's sister city--a community of about 100,000 along the coastal region in northern Colombia--it will become clear just how risky taking a stand against violence can be.
Apartadó is quite possibly the most dangerous place in the hemisphere. That's why the Dane County Board in 1990 chose it to be a sister city--because of its desperate need for international vigilance. But what would most benefit the people of Apartadó would be the application of a U.S. foreign policy based on respect for human rights--and common sense.
During the last decade, the United States has spent around $1 billion in military aid to Colombia to fight the war on drugs. Not only has this failed to stem the tide of drugs entering the United States, it has exacerbated human-rights abuses. As international rights groups have documented, much of this money goes to a military wracked with corruption and even to savage paramilitary death squads.
One of Colombia's best-kept secrets is the rampant violence that claims around 35,000 Colombian lives each year is not rooted in narcotics trafficking. One study reports that drug traffickers are behind less than 2% of the killings. Rather, the violence owes to an array of armed actors-- guerrillas, paramilitaries, self-defense cooperatives, urban gangs, police and the military--and to the willingness of the United States to underwrite their battles.
The myth that violence in Colombia stems from the drug trade is embraced by the country's political leadership, which benefits most of the continued infusion of U.S. aid. Indeed, Colombian officials dub guerrillas "narco guerrillas" to justify using money from the war on drugs to fight political insurgents.
One need look no further than Apartadó to see this reign of violence. In this city which has less than half Madison's population, there have been more than 300 murders so far this year, compared to one in Madison. Two members of the city council from the left-wing Patriotic Union party are dead, as are nine city staffers. Meanwhile, four other council members have, quite sensibly, fled the city.
Nationwide, more than 3,000 Patriotic Union members have been killed. But one needn't be involved in electoral politics to fall victim to the violence. The graveyards are packed with the bodies of teachers, labor leaders, human rights advocates and banana plantation workers. Many thousands of Colombians have become widowed, orphaned or displaced. On Apartadó's expanding outskirts, shanty towns are popping up, filled with people from the countryside who have been terrorized into abandoning land and homes.
Shortly after we check into the hotel, a short woman in jeans, a T- shirt and pearls with an exuberant smile enters our room with arms outstretched. "Welcome to Apartadó," belts out Gloria Cuartas, her friendly greeting belying the fact that shortly before our arrival there'd been a massacre that claimed five lives. But Cuartas, Apartadó's charismatic mayor, quickly turns serious, pleading for international attention to curb the daily violence.
"This community is very scared," says the 36-year-old Cuartas (speaking in Spanish, as do most sources for this story). "And we cannot expect in these circumstances that the local population will act in defense of life because we are permanently being watched by those with arms. We need outside help." IMPUNITY FOR KILLERS Gloria Cuartas has spent two years at the helm of this violence-plagued city preaching a message of peace. A social worker with no party affilations, she was chosen in 1995 by a consortium of political parties to run as a consensus candidate for peace. That's a daunting task in a country where at least 14 mayors have been murdered this year.
In June, the Colombian government declared Apartadó one of several Public Order Zones. Defying the name, violence escalated. Murders here have more than doubled, from an average of 40 per month to 95 this October.
On August 21, Cuartas was discussing nonviolent methods of conflict resolution with kids at an Apartadó elementary school when two men approached the playground outside. The unidentified men grabbed an eight-year-old boy and started hitting him. Before anyone could react, they took hold of the boy's hair and slashed through his throat. Then they tossed the severed head into the classroom at Cuartas and the children. Minutes later, gunfire from guerrillas, paramilitaries, army and police erupted outside.
"They wanted the children to stay away from me, to be afraid of me," says Cuartas. "Instead they protected me." When things calmed down, Cuartas got the children out of the school and was standing alone in the doorway when the shooting resumed. As every nearby door slammed shut, a 12-year-old girl stepped out and gestured to Cuartas: "Come here, mayor, we'll protect you." The girl took Cuartas to her home, covered her with a blanket and hid her under a bed, as Cuartas intoned "Our Fathers." When she came out hours later, her municipal car was riddled with bullets.
"This was done to create panic," asserts Cuartas. "But this experience means my commitment to peace and the community is unconditional. I have no intention of giving up. This is a pact with life, and a pact with life does not preclude death."
No one was arrested for the child's murder, a fact that doesn't surprise anyone here. Privately, blame is cast on the paramilitaries. But, as is normal when discussing violence here, people use an impersonal pronoun to describe the faceless villains. And when asked to identify the "they" committing the crimes, the universal response is a blank look and a shrug. Explains one woman, "To see the murders would make us the next target, so we look right through them."
The U.S. State Department estimates that 97% of crimes in Colombia go unpunished and that the justice system has a backlog of more than one million cases.
"Our budget goes to defense, not justice," explains Colombia's chief prosecutor, Luis Eduardo Montoya, who says his office is severely understaffed. "Until we end these wars, we're going to have continued high levels of impunity."
One thing is certain: The eight-year-old boy wasn't decapitated by drug traffickers. In fact, coca- -the leaf used in making cocaine--can't grow in Apartadó's hot climate. Some cocaine does exit the country through the nearby Gulf of Urabá, but the fighting and violence is political. According to Apartadó residents and international human- rights groups, U.S. weapons and aid sent to fight a war on drugs are being used in these battles.
In Apartadó, unlike most other regions of the country, the various armed actors almost never confront one another. Instead they assassinate civilians they claim are allied with the opposing side, or farmers they want off their land. Ordinary people--not soldiers or insurgents--are the most common victims.
The violence also takes its toll on the living. Maria Claudia Arango, the only psychologist at the regional hospital in Apartadó, is a very busy woman, relying on group sessions because there isn't time for individual therapy. She says doctors are constantly finding physical symptoms--convulsions, eating and sleeping disorders, even heart problems--that are not caused by any physical ailment. The real cause, she says, is the daily violence.
Arango, summoned to talk to the family of the decapitated boy, says her entire career of training didn't prepare her for this task: "What can you possibly say? How could I possibly be qualified to care for the family?" Another case that made an impact on her was a 70-year-old man who apparently used a machete to cut his own neck. "He'd been a farmer all his life and he was forced off his land to the city with the noise, traffic and nothing to do anymore," she says. "His life was his land--so what did he have to live for?" BUILDING STRENGTH But for some people in Apartadó, living with daily violence has emboldened their quest for peace. Our Madison delegation, later joined by other international visitors, met with several women's peace groups. At one meeting, about 50 women were asked if they'd lost an immediate family member to the violence. More than half raised their hands. Later, we are told that one of the women in their group had been kidnapped and was being held and tortured at a farm as we met.
We also visited a "squatters" neighborhood known as La Chinita. There, in a small two-room home with cement floors and a tin roof, a woman named Silvia held up a photo of her teenage son. Slightly shaking, she recalls the night the boy, 16, left to go to a birthday party.
"At 2:00 am, I heard gunfire and ran out into the streets even though others told me not to go there, it was dangerous," Silvia tells her visitors. "All around I saw dead bodies. I found my son laying on the ground, shot in the head. He was the last one shot as they were leaving."
Silvia's son was still alive--an oversight. She took him to the hospital, but there was no surgeon, so he couldn't be saved. In all, 36 people died that night at the hands of a guerrilla group, all because the neighborhood was suspected of supporting a rival guerrilla group.
"I was told by certain people that the one who killed my son was living near here," says Silvia. "I thought about buying a machete and looking for him, but then I reflected and thought that killing another person was not going to bring my son back."
Instead, she attended workshops training her to help people in similar situations. "I've dedicated my life to helping others build strength and encouraging them to forgive," she says. "It doesn't help to continue the violence." During our brief stay in Apartadó, five people were murdered in the street after leaving a bar, at least one unidentified corpse showed up at the city dump, and 95 displaced refugees from another region who had fled to Panama were shipped to Apartadó so Cuartas could deal with them. All this during a few days when international presence ensured a drop in violence.
Cecilia Zárate -Laun got more bad news when she checked up on other projects in Apartadó that past Madison delegations had visited. All the leaders at a cooperative farm that paid decent wages had been taken into the center of the cooperative and executed one morning in front of the other workers. And a flourishing grocery market cooperative that Zárate - Laun had visited was shut down, its produce confiscated; now it's slated to become a new army base.
Running Apartadó, attests Cuartas, is a lonely job. As mayor, she's tried getting help from the Colombian government to little avail.
A few months ago, the city woke up to find most walls covered with paramilitary graffiti. As is always the case in Apartadó--if you erase paramilitary graffiti, it means you are siding with the guerrillas; if you leave it, that's seen as support for the paramilitaries. Any perceived allegiance is reason enough to be killed. To keep city workers from being assassinated, Cuartas spent weeks persuading the national secret service to clean it up.
"When the children go out in our streets, all they see are this graffiti and dead bodies," says Cuartas. It's not a good backdrop to preach a message of peace, but Cuartas is not giving up.
"They want me not to talk about the problems, the displaced, the massacres, the human-rights violations," she says. "They just want me to find money to build aqueducts and take care of other public works. I can't do that. I think my sole duty is to defend life. What we're enduring here is an inability to defend life." 'LIFE IS CHEAP HERE' In the United States, the war on drugs has led to warrantless searches, expanded wire-tapping and extreme sentences. In Colombia, civil liberties aren't the only casualty; human rights have gone by the wayside as weapons flow into the country to stem the drug trade.
U.S. aid to Colombia--now about $25 million a year--is entirely military. U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Myles Frechette, interviewed in Bogotá before our delegation came to Apartadó, says the war on drugs' cost is actually much higher if you add in U.S. money spent on fumigating coca fields, radar, intelligence and surveillance. In all, he reckons, the U.S. has spent $1 billion on the war on drugs in Colombia during last 10 to 15 years.
In the past, admits Frechette, this money has mainly gone to the army, implicated in wholesale violations of human rights. (As he puts it, the Colombian military has a lot of "bad apples.") A recent Human Rights Watch report says 24 army units are fighting leftist guerrillas with U.S. weapons. And the Miami Herald on Nov. 26 reported: "U.S. training and equipment may have helped set up killer networks of paramilitary groups to murder suspected leftists."
But Frechette says current U.S. aid is earmarked for an elite anti- narcotics squad that he trusts is using it properly. And he claims it would be bad policy to tie aid to improving human rights records.
"The U.S. can provide pressure," says Frechette. "But this is a country where there are enormous violations of human rights. Life is cheap here. Any one of you could hire a guy to kill me for $50." (One member of our group pats her pocket as though looking for cash.)
We also met in Bogotá with representatives of 15 non- governmental organizations. The clear consensus was that the war on drugs is directly linked with human rights abuses in Colombia.
"I believe that the war on drugs is a perfect excuse for the United States to intervene in developing countries," opines Reinaldo Villalba Vargas, an attorney and professor at Bogotá's National University. "The war on drugs serves as a support for the counterinsurgency movements, which violate human rights. The war on drugs also minimizes the political natures of the guerrilla movement, making it more difficult to achieve a political solution to the conflict."
Vargas warns that if the Colombian Congress next year approves the extradition of drug traffickers to the U.S., guerrillas will soon be shipped out as well. The war on drugs, he says, serves as an excuse for such severe, repressive measures as declaring a "state of emergency" or "state of commotion"--which Colombia has had for 35 of the 44 past years-- during which the president can operate by decree and due process can be set aside. The drug war has also brought about--with considerable U.S. aid- -Colombia's "faceless" justice system.
In this regional court system, the identity of judges, prosecutors and even witnesses are kept from criminal defendants. Testimony from witnesses is sealed, and the accused have no chance to rebut it. The courts, similar to those set up in Italy to try the Mafia, were designed to facilitate the conviction of drug traffickers, who are notorious for doing away with anyone who testifies or rules against them.
But Faustino Alvarez Esquea, an attorney who works with political prisoners, says more guerrillas than drug lords have been tried in these faceless courts: "It's been used as a means to criminalize social protest under the guise of combating drug trafficking." Among those convicted of crimes by these courts are two former mayors of Apartadó; most citizens here strongly believe they are innocent.
Not only are rights being surrendered and violence proliferated, there's no proof the millions spent fighting the drug war in countires like Colombia is effective. Even Ambassador Frechette admits, "Our efforts are like the dough boy. You squeeze once place and it pops up in another." But he supports U.S. anti- drug efforts, saying labs and coca fields are being destroyed and kingpins arrested.
"Narcotics kill a lot of Americans," says Frechette. "You can argue that we should be doing more in the United States to keep youth off drugs, but I do believe our policy is sound. It's just hard to measure progress." THE DISPLACED The lobby of the government building that houses the offices of agrarian reform is packed with people. But they aren't the office workers in suits and heels that scurry by. Filling the lobbies and any vacant office space are 120 peasant refugees, displaced from their land in southern Colombia, they tell us, by a violent land baron who also happens to be the former Colombian Ambassador to Belgium.
Many of the displaced are young children, some of whom have lost both parents to violence. Amid the people are sacks of clothes, a few chairs and some temporary stoves and clothes lines. With nowhere else to go, these peasants have been occupying two government buildings for several months.
One of the farmers, Manuel Narvaez, strains not to show emotion as he quietly describes how his wife and children were taken hostage to force him out of hiding. He managed to get them back, only to have both his brothers killed when they tried to return to the land they'd been forced from.
Refuges from all over Colombia have flooded Bogotá, the capitol of seven million. One woman tells us the noise and traffic make her afraid; she doesn't know what to do. Some end up in prostitution, others fall victim to social cleansing--the murder of homeless, prostitutes, drug addicts and street children by urban death squads, some of which include off-duty police. A Bogotá social worker says it's normal to find 80 corpses on the street and in trash piles after any weekend.
Colombian Interior Minister Horacio Serpa tells our group that for the displacements to end, so must the violence. He faults U.S. foreign policy for ignoring Colombia's most pressing needs: sound economic policy and the development of infrastructure. Under U.S. pressure, says Serpa, Colombia has been forced to spend more on ineffective strategies to fight drug traffickers--and less on fighting poverty.
"The worst problem is that the United States policy doesn't understand our particular situation," says Serpa. "They help us for war, not for peace. The decisions of the U.S. government complicate and harm our own processes, especially with regards to drug trafficking." Serpa calls for economic aid that could be used to fund crop substitution. But Frechette responds that the "totally corrupt" Colombian government can't be trusted not to squander economic aid.
"The killing would continue whether or not they get a penny of U.S. economic aid," argues Frechette. "It's a bum rap. We don't deserve to be blamed for that."
Coca growers disagree. In August, they organized massive marches in southern Colombia protesting the policy of fumigating coca fields--and sometimes killing other legal crops and cattle. They say it will take radical agrarian reform and investment in infrastructure, like roads, to allow them to get a different crop to market.
"There are no roads, health clinics or schools," says Gilberto Sanchez, a grower and labor organizer in the Putamayo region of Colombia. "The person buying the coca leaves is willing to come to us. For other crops we need roads to get them to market. Right now the cost of transportation is too high to switch crops."
"The U.S. government has a double standard," adds organizer Pedro Nolasco Presidga, reflecting a theme we hear often this trip. "The U.S. demands cocaine from this country but it forbids production. Yet there isn't an effective policy of forbidding consumption."
Some Colombians suspect a more sinister reason for the U.S. government's intense interest. Colombia is rich in natural resources and it's the only place in the Americas where an alternative canal could be located once the Panama Canal reverts to Panamanian ownership in 1998.
"What we're seeing today is the same imperial tendency the U.S. has shown in the past," says Bertha Lucía Castaño, whose group helps victims of violence with mental-health issues. "It's no coincidence that the paramilitaries are strong in the Pacific Coast region in an area where an alternative canal is a possibility. It could become an international region." WRONG MEDICINE Zárate -Laun, the head of Madison's CSN, wonders what it will take to get U.S. citizens concerned about foreign policy toward Colombia.
"The U.S. government cannot imagine anything more beautiful than the war on drugs," she reflects as our plane leaves Apartadó. "It's an excuse that justifies the continual presence here. Colombia is a country rich in resources--that's the real reason." Indeed, she suspects that Colombia--where an elected government provides a facade of democracy-- is the new model for U.S. relations with Latin America. She hopes the public will pressure the U.S. government into changing its policy, and to reject a current proposal to send another $169 million in arms to Colombia. "The U.S. is using a military approach to a social problem--that way will never find a solution," says Zárate -Laun. "It's like if I had a disease that's treatable with antibiotics, yet the doctor gave me surgery and stronger drugs that didn't kill the disease."
Looking out the airplane window at the Colombian countryside, Zárate -Laun sighs, mindful of the uphill battle she faces advocating for an end to military aid. "Politicians in the U.S. don't want to ask the most important question," she concludes. "Why is the United States the biggest consumer of drugs in the world?"
"Once they killed him I knew I couldn't be silent," she recalls. "I had to start something."
Her first task was to get Apartadó named a sister city. Madison already had several sisters, so this new tie was forged with Dane County. (Levels of violence aside, both regions have strong agricultural bases and value education.) Supvs. Mark Pocan and Tammy Baldwin helped pass a resolution through the County Board and joined some of the first delegations to Apartadó.
"I think a sister-city relationship is extremely important," says Baldwin, who has continued to advocate for Colombia as a state legislator, writing letters on behalf of political prisoners and recently urging the UW Board of Regents to divest from countries like Colombia where human rights violations are rampant. (The Regents will vote on the issue early next year.)
"But another important role is bringing the truth back," says Baldwin. "People risk their lives to tell us the whole story that we don't get from our State Department. For those folks to seek the job I have, it puts their life on the line. I'd say the chances of surviving as a mayor in Colombia are about 50-50."
Madison's Colombia Support Network has become the most active U.S.
group working on Colombian issues. It has a newsletter, web site and
recently helped translate and publish
And now Zárate -Laun has had meetings with Sen. Russ Feingold, whom she describes as sympathetic and well-informed on Colombia, asking for him to call for hearings on aid to Colombia before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he sits on. She's hoping to get someone from Feingold's office on next spring's delegation to Apartadó to witness the situation first- hand.
"Madison has a long track record of caring for communities in
distress," says Zárate -Laun. "People here should be awakened to
the misleading nature of the war on drugs. The fighting should be going on
inside the U.S., where we should be using money for treatment centers."
The Colombia Support Network can be reached at
(608) 257- 8753. Or
visit the group's web site at http://www.igc.apc.org/csn/