Gabriel Marcella
Published: 2001-04-27
Total Pages: 36
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Colombia is the most difficult challenge facing the United States in the hemisphere. Washington's prestigious Inter-American Dialogue affirmed in late 2000: " No country in Latin America outside of Mexico will command greater U.S. policy attention than Colombia." It has long been besieged by internal conflict. But the appetite for cocaine and heroin in the United States (where 3.5 million people are addicted to cocaine and up to 12 million use illegal drugs), Europe, Canada, Asia, and Latin America feeds a veritable killing machine that annually takes the lives of over 3,000 (over 40,000 in the last 10 years). Nearly 2,500 kidnappings took place in Colombia in 2000, securing once again that country's first rank in that dreadful business. Violence has displaced over 1.5 million people caught in the crossfire of shooting, threats, and counter-threats, from the insurgents and paramilitary vigilantes. Its destructiveness intensifies poverty. The insecurity makes normal life practically impossible for Colombians of all classes. Colombia's problems also raise deep concerns in Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Panama, and Brazil about spillover violence, corruption, ecological damage, and criminal activity. There is fear of the "balloon effect," the threat that coca cultivation could move across borders (and back into Peru and Bolivia) should Colombia dramatically reduce cultivation. Moreover, the violence and uncertainty about the future contribute to the steepest economic decline in two generations, with 20 percent unemployment for the year 2000. Insecurity and contagious pessimism about the future drive thousands of Colombians to seek opportunity and personal and family security abroad, especially in the United States. A leading intellectual expresses the current grim national mood in Colombia: ". . . no idea, no ideology, no leader, no force, no institution of national scale that might try to convince us, provokes admiration or moves the collective enthusiasm . . . A Congress out of touch with reality . . . An opposition of beggars and actors . . . A criminal insurgency without ideas. A murderous right . . . frightened intellectuals . . . Businessmen on the defensive and a "civil society" which no longer exists."The institutional capacity of the state to deal with the problems of governance and public security is manifestly weak. Colombia's collective troubles are a powerful combination of the lack of authority, legitimacy, and governance. The leading scholar on the violence, Eduardo Pizarro of the National University of Colombia and research professor at the University of Notre Dame, refers in Spanish to the partial collapse of the state and the ominous emergence of the solution from the right as derechización, which implies increasing popular support for the illegal right-wing paramilitaries in a society looking for alternatives. This is a common historical pattern in societies riven by deep conflict. As the political center weakens and public security declines, a society will naturally look for security from the right.