Why had gunmen killed the archbishop of Cali on Saturday night? Why has Choachi's country known constant killing – from peasants to political leaders – in his 65 years? How would it end?

"It's sad that we have gotten so used to these kinds of crimes. Nothing really surprises me anymore," said Choachi, who had just heard the archbishop of Bogota call on Colombians to "stop this river of blood." "I suppose it is because there are no jobs and too many poor people that can't make a living."

About 10 miles north of the church, where the city gives way to high plains and grazing cattle, a 37-year-old banker watched the finals of the Jet-Set Cup polo tournament. Onlookers in Gucci loafers sipped free Chivas Regal as the players concluded a week of fashion shows and society events here in the well-guarded capital.

But the game was poorly attended, and while the chatter ranged over the usual topics of movies, parties and trips to Miami, it also dwelt darkly on the not-so-usual subject of the murder of Archbishop Isaias Duarte Cancino.

"There is one reason we are in the position we are – drug money," the banker said. "Our social problems are no different than those in Argentina or Brazil, except for the drug money. If it disappeared, so would the incentive for these armed groups to fight."

Sharing the same fractured frame, these starkly different scenes illustrate the diverging ways Colombians understand their ageless war, now worsening in the wake of a collapsed peace process. Stubbornly held interpretations of the conflict, shaped by class, geography and the unequal way Colombia's violence is felt by its people, are perhaps the single largest obstacle to the country's search for a solution to a conflict that claimed 3,500 lives last year.

By turns, Colombians understand their war as a fight over the drug profits enriching various armed groups. Or a political crusade to correct the prevailing economic imbalance in a land of plenty. Or the result of lost morals. Or as simple terrorism flourishing because of the broad impunity enjoyed by those who commit the worst crimes. Each viewpoint has its own solution, be it more military force or investment in the welfare of an impoverished rural population. As a result, agreeing on the war's roots remains an essential, if elusive, first step toward solving it.

The variety of armed groups and the relentless momentum of a conflict that officially began as a 1960s-era struggle for social justice has generated deep apathy among Colombians of all classes. Except perhaps the 35,000 or so soldiers of the three irregular armies fighting it.

Today, one rising and one fading Marxist guerrilla group battle the government and a growing paramilitary force that fights by its side. Among this cast of characters, only the Colombian military is not defined as a terrorist organization by the Bush administration, which now hopes to loosen restrictions on $1.3 billion in counter-narcotics aid so that the package's mostly military component can be used directly against the guerrillas.

"Let's all work for a better society until those who act this way know they can't continue killing, kidnapping and torturing a whole society as if they were savage beasts," Cardinal Pedro Rubiano, the archbishop of Bogota, said in his sermon today.

After years of disagreement, however, a new consensus about what the war is about may be coalescing around the presidential candidacy of Alvaro Uribe Velez, a former governor of war-ravaged Antioquia province who understands the war primarily as a terrorist campaign carried out by a guerrilla group that benefits from a weak Colombian state. Opinion polls suggest that support for his tougher line against the guerrillas spans geographic and class lines.

Uribe's view is also shared by Colombia's top generals and the leader of an irregular army that emerged in response to the guerrilla insurgency.

"The worst thing that happened to Colombia is the guerrillas' corruption by drug money," said Carlos Castano, head of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a 15,000-member paramilitary group that itself profits enormously from the drug trade and from donations by Colombia's ranchers and other private business interests. "For years, the guerrillas seemed like they might be the solution to our problems . . . until they allied themselves with the drug traffickers."

But the current public clamor for a military solution has yet to yield a consensus on how to wage that war since President Andres Pastrana's peace efforts with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC as the largest guerrilla group is known, collapsed last month.

Last week, Colombia's finance minister, Juan Manuel Santos, proposed that Colombians donate a day's pay to the country's meager military budget. Among the wealthy, the idea was welcomed. Low-wage workers and union leaders said they would donate a day's pay, but only to needy hospitals and schools.

The disagreement also applies to operations of the military, where mandatory service is easily avoided with money. Those who have not finished high school find themselves in the counter-guerrilla patrols, while the college-bound serve behind a desk.

Usually, though, families that are able to scrape together $1,000 to buy a son's way out of "mandatory" service do so – leaving only the very poor and those with a social conscience to do the fighting. Gen. Fernando Tapias, head of the armed forces, wants that loophole closed to distribute the burden of the war more equitably and to extend the length of mandatory service to two years from 18 months.

Rodrigo Lozano, a 30-year-old corporate lawyer from a well-to-do Bogota family, did not buy his way out of military service. Sipping a Chivas while watching polo, Lozano said he still believes that his mostly office-bound assignment was unfair to the less-educated inductees who landed in combat units.

"War in Colombia has become a way of life for so many people – there is a lack of education, a lack of opportunity and a lack of morals," Lozano said.

If given $1 billion to spend on solving the war, Lozano said, he would invest it in the education system. But ultimately, he said, the economic motivations driving the war will make it hard to stop.

"The war allows for narco-trafficking, sales of weapons and the huge commissions that result," he said. "In any country, war benefits somebody. The military has an interest and so do the elite, who profit from the economy around the war. And, of course, so do the guerrillas."

Colombians were forced again today to consider what they had become in light of Duarte's murder.

The archbishop had been a sharp critic of the guerrillas, and his murder underlines how few institutions are exempted from Colombia's war. Universities, unions, the media – all have become fair game for political assassinations. Now so has the church in this deeply Catholic country; last week, the head of the Colombia bishops' conference, Alberto Giraldo, called his country "morally sick."

"There is no respect even for those who make God visible to others," said Marina Guzman, a 37-year-old dressmaker from Bogota who attended Mass this morning. "This violence is being passed from parents to children, and the young are getting used to taking the easiest way – like killing people for money."

Note: Diverging Views an Obstacle to Peace.

Source: Washington Post (DC)
Author: Scott Wilson, Washington Post Foreign Service
Published: Monday, March 18, 2002; Page A09
Copyright: 2002 The Washington Post Company
Contact: letterstoed@washpost.com
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com

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