Urgent Action: Protest CBS Reporting on Colombia

Mr. Dan Rather
60 Minutes II
524 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019

Dear Mr. Rather:

I write to you on behalf of the Colombia Support Network, CSN, of which I am president, concerning your report of September 21, 1999 on Colombia. We at CSN were particularly disappointed in your report. We have developed over the past decade sister community relationships with Colombian communities that are beset by violence. We organize delegations and work closely with several non-governmental organizations in Colombia who have to deal with the violence in that country on a daily basis. From our first-hand perspective, your report was deficient in several respects.

The war in Colombia began over thirty years ago, and it is due not to drug trafficking, but rather to a terribly unequal distribution of the economice resources of that country. The drug war has in the past several years become an overlay upon an existing civil war. There would be war in Colombia even if there were no drug trade involving that country.

Your program stressed the role of the United States in tracking down and killing Pablo Escobar, Colombia's most notorious drug lord. You suggested early in your broadcast that Pablo Escobar's killing "was widely reported" in 1993, "but details of how he was killed have never been revealed." That statement is false with respect to most of the details. The Colombian news magazine Semana published an account of how Pablo Escobar was located by the Colombian forces who killed him, and why he was located, and published photographs of Pablo Escobar's body on the roof of the building where he was shot. The published account in Semana recounted personal interviews with members of the Colombian unit that was responsible for Escobar's killing. Much of the information you recounted was available mere days after the killing of Escobar.

Your interview suggests that former U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Morris Busby has been engaged in some sort of useful exercise in developing the forces that he has with Major Macklin. Yet in an interview with a CSN delegation of which I was a member back in 1996, at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, then-Ambassador Busby indidcated that he felt the solution to the Colombian problem was better equipment and training for the Colombian Army. He seems still to have that position, even though the United States since the time that Ambassador Busby made that statement has provided hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment and training to Colombian Police and the Armed Forces, with an essentially negative result, since those forces have been quite unsuccessful in their war against the FARC and ELN guerrillas. In fact, as Colombian NGO's have been telling us for a long time, the emphasis on a militarist solution in Colombia has simply caused more death and destruction. What Colombia needs is a fundamental restructuring of the economic resources of that society, and a much more democratic attitude toward their country by those in power in Colombia. As you could have reported, but did not, President Belisario Betancur in the mid 1980's opened the political system to those who had been engaged in a guerrilla struggle against the State who wished to enter the political process. Thousands of Colombians responded to President Betancur's suggestion by getting involved in the political process, not only those who had taken up arms against the Colombian State, but many others who found that the existing political parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals, did not represent their interests and were engaged principally in protecting the privileges of a small socioeconomic elite. What was the result of the entry of these new people into the political process? The Patriotic Union Movement which they formed as a new political party won a large nubmer of local elections, all the way from municipal council members and mayor to departmental assembly members and Congressmen. The response of those who have traditionally held power in Colombia, and particularly military leaders in collaboration with paramilitary chiefs such as Fidel and Carlos Castano, was to kill the Patriotic Union Party members, some 4,000 of them.

That is the real story of what has happened in Colombia and these are events and truths which your report did not even deal with. The question in Colombia is how can a government which promised to protect the new elements' entry into the political process and then totally failed to do so expect to achieve peace through negotiations with those who have opposed this government? To suggest that giving more arms to the Colombian military, or training the Colombian military better, may lead to a solution without addressing the fundamental issues in Colombian society, which I have just mentioned, fails to deal adequately with the situation in Colombia. Your report is an example of lazy journalism. It is particularly unbecoming to you as one who reported from Vietnam on a responsible and inquisitive basis for you to present the type of report that you did on Colombia on September 21, 1999.

As far as Vietnam is concerned, you should have looked seriously into the matter of U.S. involvement in training and equipping the Colombian Army because there is a parallel with Vietnam. You might have done as we did in a CSN delegation to Colombia last year and gone to an army base to view the troops training there and talk to lower-level officers as well as army leadership. If you had done that, an honest report would require recognition of the fact that most Colombian Army soldiers are very young and very inexperienced and many of their commanders are incompetent. And thus is true after more than 30 years of fighting the guerrillas. What will happen when the U.S. "advisors" (to repeat a term used in Vietnam) and war material fail to have the result you so simplisticly accepted from General Rosso Serrano? Will the U.S., believing its prestige and honor to be on the line, as it was in Vietnam, increase its involvement in Colombia's war? If so, we may see in Colombia something very similar to what the U.S. experience in Vietnam. To fail to mention this possibility to a U.S. audience was irresponsible journalism on your part.

And how remarkable it is that CBS news that has covered the refugees and paramilitaries in Kosovo and the paramilitary violence in East Timor would almost totally overlook Colombia's 2 million internal refugees and displaced persons and the paramilitary violence that takes thousands of lives and forces hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes each year! How you could avoid seeing and reporting on these realities is hard to fathom.

Your report appears to be the result of the type of tour as arranged for Republican leaders in Congress that General Jose Rosso Serrano, the head of Colombia's Police, has long engaged in doing. Those reports obfuscate rather than clarify the reality in Colombia. They may be sufficient for the likes of Representative Dan Burton and Benjamin Gilman in the U.S. Congress and for Drug Czar General Barry McCaffrey. They certainly should not be sufficient for you as a responsible journalist.

We at CSN challenge you to go again to Colombia to see the truth of the situation there. We are prepared to put you in contact with the people in the communities that we work with who will show you what the truth is and will provide you with the information you need to get a more complete view of what is happening in Colombia. Among those persons are dedicated humanitarians who have studied abroad, including very talented persons who have degrees from universities like the Sorbonne, Harvard, and the London School of Economics, and who have dedicated their lives to trying to achieve peace in Colombia. Your weak reporting on national television in the United States does a disservice to the efforts of these people who have dedicated their lives to promoting peace with justice in Colombia.

We challenge you to learn the truth about Colombia. We stand ready to assist you in the endeavor.

Sincerely,

Jack Laun
President
Colombia Support Network
P.O. Box 1505
Madison, WI 53701

(608) 257-8753
fax (608) 255-6621
csn@igc.org
http://www.igc.org/csn