By the time the riots ended on March 5, medical personnel estimated that 1,000 to 1,500 people had been killed; the government gave an official body count of 287.2 The class wars had begun, and soon all the country’s problems were viewed through the lens of a white (mantuano) elite dominating and withholding financial and other resources from a brown-skinned (mestizo) majority.
Among the soldiers who participated in what was (not entirely inaccurately) perceived as a massacre of the poor to protect the property of the wealthy was a little-known cabal that called itself the MBR-200, the Spanish acronym for the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement 200, named in honor of the two hundredth birthday of its iconic inspiration, Latin American liberator Simón Bolívar, and founded under a tree where the liberator once napped. MBR-200’s leader, Col. Hugo Chávez, was at home sick with the measles, but he realized that the Caracazo would be the trampoline for the revolutionary change he had been wanting, and that he could ride the wave of anger and racially underpinned class warfare all the way to the presidential palace.
Since he was a soldier and not a politician, he planned to do it by force. Three years later, Colonel Chávez, citing the brutal massacres of the Caracazo, attempted a coup, but he was captured and ordered by the Venezuelan government of President Carlos Andrés Pérez to call down his troops on February 4, 1992, on one minute of television airtime. He was then summarily rushed off to prison, turning him into a martyr—one who would in 1998 win the presidency and install the Chavista regime under the banner of the Bolivarian Revolution.
THE WOMEN WITH ELECTORAL POWER
While in Caracas in 2009, I also went to speak to Maria Corina Machado, a presidential candidate to whom I am distantly related, about what was likely the opposition’s worst mistake: abstaining from the 2005 National Assembly elections, claiming they would be “rigged.” Instead of stopping the election, the boycott simply handed the entire National Assembly to the regime’s candidates—to the country’s eternal regret, as they rubber-stamped one power after another for the president and stacked the Supreme Court with their own party.
Prior to talking to Maria Corina, I had spent hours in the offices of Smartmatic, the makers of the disputed voting machines. The company’s communications director, Samira Saba, explained at length that the required fingerprints were for identification purposes only, that the regime would not be able to access records to identify and punish those who had voted against it, and that the firm’s machines could not be hacked. Ms. Saba said the company’s technology was standard and that its machines were used in elections all over the world. Smartmatic even provided biometric technology to the UK, the country with the highest rate of video surveillance on the planet. If it was good enough for the Brits, why not the Venezuelans? she asked.
But suspicion ran deep, and there was little about the regime’s intimidating behavior that would help counter it. Indeed, the government openly announced that those who voted against the regime would lose their government jobs and benefits.
“Do you think that boycott was a mistake?” I asked Maria Corina.
“In retrospect, probably.”
In Colombia, the FARC Marxist insurgency had worked popular anger of the rural poor into a revolutionary cause. Across the border in Venezuela, so had Chávez, but he won a presidential election, where bucking the system was his brand—not unlike Trump’s win in the 2016 US presidential election. All of them rallied supporters by positioning themselves as defenders of the politically and economically forgotten against a corrupt and elitist system. What is remarkable about Venezuela is how, far from fighting corruption, it became one of the most corrupt, violent, and dictatorial countries on earth—and the world’s main transit point for cocaine. Meanwhile, people die of a lack of food and medicine, hundreds of political opponents are imprisoned, and the country is broke, despite sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves. The process of parsing out how this happened led me to understand the links among corruption, organized crime, and terrorism: the crime-terror pipeline.
3
“A Little Fun”
When I returned to Colombia in January 2010, I was the only journalist to accompany an international delegation that was there to study the country’s peacekeeping program, one that would reintegrate paramilitary fighters into society, a process known in security circles as DDR: demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration. Colombia needed it to work. Its conflict with the FARC is the last remaining guerrilla war in the Western Hemisphere. It has killed nearly a quarter of a million people and created five million refugees within Colombia itself—“internally displaced” is the official term. By numbers of refugees, Colombia’s conflict is in third place behind Syria and Sudan.
Violence begets violence in a self-feeding cycle: violence creates poverty, which creates more violence. Massive displacement and land grabs only exacerbated rural poverty (estimated at 43 percent),1 which drove more poor to take up arms, if only for the salary and the uniforms. Violence nearly collapsed the country.
Around the turn of the millennium, the US Defense Intelligence Agency wrote a report in which it stated that it was concerned that the FARC would overthrow the Colombian government and turn the country into a “narco-state.” Since that report, the US has poured more than US$10 billion into a counternarcotics program, known as “Plan Colombia,” to help prop up the Colombian government. There was also a less-well-chronicled counterinsurgency program called Plan Patriota, which came later: getting into counterinsurgency was a less popular proposition for US lawmakers, who were keen on avoiding another Vietnam quagmire.
So when I was invited to meet former fighters and victims in 2010, Colombia was a security legend in the Western Hemisphere. I was honored and readily accepted. My friends, however, thought I was crazy.
This was the plan: to demonstrate the effectiveness of their demobilization efforts, the Colombians would move sixty high-level military and political leaders from twenty countries and the United Nations and transport them daily across combat zones that the Colombian military had only recently retaken from either the guerrilla insurgents or the right-wing paramilitaries. The insurgents and FARC terrorists were still very much around and would have spies reporting on our identities and movements. These groups were in protracted negotiations with the government.
We would make tempting targets for them, especially the FARC, who did not yet have a deal but was being bombed into near-extinction. If the FARC wanted to strengthen its negotiating hand, seizing a busload, planeload, or hotel full of sixty foreigners from twenty countries and the UN would do the trick. If its fighters kidnapped us (or killed us), they would have the attention not only of the Colombian government, but of the twenty other governments and the UN as well. These other countries and the UN, in turn, would bring their diplomatic weight to bear on Colombia. Security was tight, to say the least—just how tight, I would only find out while already in Colombia. I was a writer, without any military or security training.
The reintegration of former fighters into civilian society is a complicated three-step process, and all countries that want to end a civil war go through it. The first step is demobilization: get the fighters to quit the fighting groups, insurgent or paramilitary as the case may be. For this, you usually need the very big stick of killing them in large numbers: they need to be persuaded that they will not win militarily, will die, and are losing popular support for their cause, so they are better off reaching a peace deal. The demobilization occurs when a peace deal is reached that sets the terms for what happens to the fighters if they demobilize (quit the groups), outlining the rules by which they must abide to receive government benefits.
In 2010, the Colombian government had reached a peace deal only with the paramilitaries, the United Colombian Self-Defense forces (AUC), based on a deal struck in 2005, the Justice and Peace Law, which was amended in 2006 to emphasize societal reintegration. The government had not reached a peace deal with any of the insurgencies, of which the FARC was
the most powerful.
The second step is disarmament: the fighters have to turn in their weapons to the government or UN peacekeepers, depending on the deal. The third step is reintegration: the former fighters must become productive members of society. This is the most complicated part. Many fighters joined when they were children, and fighting is the only skill they have. So the government has to send them back to school, give them job training, help them find jobs, get them psychologists to deal with their trauma and anger, and teach them to be good spouses, parents, and citizens. Colombia even gave the former paramilitaries life insurance policies. The populace is not always very happy about the reintegration packages—with former drug traffickers, kidnappers, extortionists, and terrorists getting better education and welfare than law-abiding citizens ever got.
“Colombia’s is the Rolls-Royce of programs. That’s why we’re all here,” said a keen American as we joined the rest of the participants boarding a bus from our hotel to Bogotá’s El Dorado Airport for our first risky transfer. It was also the first time all the delegates got to meet each other: we had arrived in Bogotá from our disparate points of origin the night before. The weeklong trip would be my immersion in the aftermath of political violence funded by the illicit trade in narcotics and other smuggled goods. I was about to see the real price of cocaine and other forms of illicit trade, inscribed on the bodies of children with missing limbs and millions of refugees.
From Bogotá we flew 150 miles west to the town of Armenia, the capital of Quindío Department, in the Andes region. Armenia is a medium-sized city located between Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali, the three biggest cities in Colombia; it is in the heart of the Colombian coffee-growing axis. In the elevations where coffee grows, so grow coca and poppy plants, for cocaine and heroin.
The area surrounding towns like Armenia can be extremely dangerous due to the presence of terrorists and criminals, including armed gangs, resulting in kidnappings, killings, and explosions. The reintegration occurs in such disputed territories, so we were there to see how the government was moving former fighters into the coffee-picking business, away from the drug trafficking and killing business. Though we didn’t see any trouble, seven years later, in 2017, the US State Department was still posting travel warnings for the area.2
Despite the government’s best efforts, there was no doubt we were moving around amid a significant threat. In Armenia, our buses were joined by police escorts: two police officers on each of about three motorcycles were all we could see from the windows. When we arrived at our country hotel, I saw the full security detail: on either side of the imposing gates were about twenty grim and earnest soldiers, clutching what I mistook for M-16s. Their eyes followed us steadily, and when someone tried to photograph them, they turned their backs to the camera. Wherever we moved, police, Special Forces, sharpshooters, and helicopters hovered over us constantly, a steady reminder of what peace-building without a comprehensive peace accord means.
On our hour-long open-backed-jeep journey to La Linda, a hilltop village that had long been in the crossfire, Alejandro Eder, leader of the reintegration effort and therefore our de facto tour guide through the reintegration projects scattered across the country, told me that the area had been encircled and cleared by soldiers for three days prior to our arrival. In addition to the armed convoy, the Black Hawk helicopters, and the soldiers dotting the landscape, “there are many others you cannot see,” he said in a tone he intended to be reassuring.
Almost twenty relatives of Alejandro Eder had been kidnapped over the years. His family is well known, very wealthy, and, as sugar producers, big landowners, or latifundistas, ideal targets for the Marxist guerrillas arguing for agrarian reform and against an oligarchic system. Fearing for his safety in Colombia, his family sent him to the US to get a first-rate education. To hear him speak English, you would take him for American. But his love of country got the better of him: he gave up a lucrative banking job in New York to return home and help build a more peaceful and prosperous Colombia.
Though Colombia wants to emerge from the right-versus-left fighting that has shredded the country continuously since 1948, it has enacted only piecemeal laws to enable demobilization.
The Justice and Peace Law has been widely criticized by Human Rights Watch and other NGOs as inadequate punishment for the paramilitaries. But it was specifically designed to give demobilized fighters who have committed crimes against humanity and members of a “recognized armed group at the margins of the law” reduced sentences in exchange for full disclosure and reparations to the affected families. (The demobilized fighters serve five or eight years instead of cumulative sentences that could easily run more than forty.)
It’s Colombia’s version of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and by early 2010 it had uncovered knowledge of 257,089 registered victims, 32,909 specific crimes—of which 14,612 had been confessed to—and 2,182 exhumed graves. In 2009 the government had approved reparations of $100 million, plus $500 million in aid budgeted for the internally displaced, the refugees within Colombia. The demobilization process also greatly increased intelligence about the armed groups, enabling the government to combat them more effectively. Murders have dropped from 30,000 in 2002 (when Alvaro Uribe was elected president) to 16,000 in 2009, and kidnappings from 3,000 to 213 over the same period.
Now, in 2017, the Colombian government is trying to come to a similar deal with the left-wing FARC and ELN terrorist groups. The intelligence it gained in all those Justice and Peace Law deals with the right-wing paramilitaries helped it bomb the left-wing terrorists nearly to oblivion and bring them to the negotiating table today. Such are the Graham Greene–esque contradictions of Colombia: a revolution alongside a state, forgiveness with prosecution, peace-building without peace accords, and a peace process driven by the US-backed military prowess of the government.
A thin, pale, kind of spy plane known as “The Cross” will hover above guerrilla jungle camps and guide in soldiers or Black Hawk helicopters. After the battle comes the psychology: leaflets, banners, and booming messages encouraging the embattled guerrillas to quit. Even Ingrid Betancourt, the French-Colombian politician who spent six and a half years as an FARC hostage, was pressed into service within twenty-four hours of her rescue: “I am Ingrid Betancourt and I am free. Cross the bridge and come join me in freedom. Life is better out here. Give up your weapons now.”
The idea is to chip away at unpaid and unhappy foot soldiers so there won’t be much of an enemy to resist the military onslaught. Colombian authorities say they had three strategic priorities to reduce violence: “Demobilize, capture, kill.” Now paramilitaries and the occasional former FARC fighter pick coffee beans alongside the villagers they once terrorized to produce El Café de la Reconciliación (“Reconciliation Coffee”), which is then packaged, sold, and marketed by Colombia’s powerful Coffee Growers Federation, which owns the Juan Valdéz brand.
“We’re tired of the violence. We just want it to end,” said the weather-worn coffee farmer clinging to the back of our jeep as it headed up the dirt road from the small Risaralda town of Santuario (“Sanctuary”) to a cliff promontory called La Linda (“The Pretty One”). La Linda was a FARC stronghold from 1999 until 2003, when it was taken over by a paramilitary front known as the “Heroes and Martyrs of Guática” of the Central Bolivar Bloc of the AUC, the umbrella organization for the right-wing paramilitaries. The Heroes and Martyrs of Guática then demobilized at La Linda in December 2005 under the Justice and Peace Law. In 2009 the government funded a playing field and a schoolhouse in La Linda in exchange for the community’s accepting the former fighters back into their fold, living and building the school alongside their former torturers.
One woman told me her community in La Linda had taken in a FARC fighter who had killed her son and a paramilitary who had killed her husband. She knew their names; they were her neighbors now. I asked how she felt; she didn’t want to answer with the government representatives wi
thin earshot. I kept asking until I got an answer: not thrilled, but patiently tolerant.
Our self-appointed guide (the jeep clinger) referred to the right-wing paramilitary (the United Colombian Self-Defense, or AUC) as los muchachos (“the boys”), still afraid to call them paramilitaries. When the paramilitaries occupied the town, relatives of the locals were delivered in body bags or hacked to pieces by chainsaws in the town square—starting from the ankles and working up, so the victim lived (and screamed) as long as possible. This was a common (and effective) paramilitary tactic: after witnessing it, villagers fell into line and did not challenge their occupiers.
Our local guide had witnessed the chainsaw executions, yet spoke of the paramilitaries as cleansing the village of the FARC and of their brutally imposed curfews (anyone out at night was killed) as being for the villagers’ protection. Might, apparently, made right. After all, there was no government entity there to protect them, so at least they had order and security under the paramilitaries. It’s a pattern of criminal acceptance I have seen repeated elsewhere since then.
By global standards, Colombia’s peace process is privileged. Because Colombia’s warring revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces have fought alongside an active state infrastructure, the peace and reintegration process is run by the state itself rather than an outside mediator like the United Nations or NATO. It is tougher than it sounds, though. Peace-building in Colombia is a form of territorial conquest: the government uses its slowly developed military might to force the surrender by opposing fighters into the state structure, not some UN-mediated power-sharing agreement as in Northern Ireland or Liberia. The extent of US military assistance and training was evident at the agricultural commune integrating former guerrillas in VallenPaz in Cauca on the southwest coast. The soldiers guarding us had “US” stamped on their vests and radios. Their guns, though, were Israeli.
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