Colombia’s Violence: From Bad to Worse

Violence has become so deeply ingrained in Colombia that a national vocabulary has evolved for the many ways in which its people commit mayhem. Those who study the problem even have their own unique job description: violentologists.

Like an unwelcome stranger brought aboard an already overcrowded boat, the violence unleashed by drug trafficking in recent years has brought Colombia close to sinking under the weight of its own bloodshed.

“Drug trafficking brought a quantitative change to Colombia’s violence, in that it provided resources to all the old sources of violence, including self-defense groups, the paramilitary organizations and leftist guerrillas,” said Eduardo Pizarro, a social scientist at the National University of Colombia and one of the foremost violentologists.

‘Verge of Collapse’

“All this shoots up the indices of violence to the point that we believe Colombia is on the verge of the collapse of the state itself,” he said. “The justice system has already collapsed. This climate of absolute impunity favors the instability and feeds the violence itself.”

When gunmen assassinated front-running presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan at a campaign rally Aug. 18, the steady escalation of narcotics-connected violence finally reached the highest echelon of Colombia society.

Suddenly, Colombians appeared to recognize that the drug lords’ viciousness, superimposed on the existing forms of violence, threatened to unravel the nation’s social fabric altogether.

President Virgilio Barco Vargas declared all-out war on the traffickers the night of Galan’s killing, and thousands of citizens joined a street protest in support of his harsh measures. In the weeks since, police have raided traffickers’ hide-outs and estates in a vain search for the kingpins, and the cocaine cartels have countered with bombings and more killing.

Worse Than New York City

The statistics of violence, whatever the motive, are startling. In 1988, Colombia suffered about 18,000 killings, Pizarro said, but just 70 people were convicted and sentenced. Only about 40% of all crimes are reported, and of those, just 3% result in judgment and punishment. The murder rate in Medellin, Colombia’s second-largest city, is nine times that of New York City.

One of the most feared words in the lexicon of Colombian violence is sicario , little used elsewhere in Latin America, which means “paid killer.” Another is magnicidio , or “magnicide,” used to describe the killings of important people and massacres that manage to shock the inured populace.

Colombia’s history in the last half a century has been more violent than that of any other country on the continent. An expression of the tragedy of that history is the fact that an epoch of bitter political warfare that began in the mid-1940s and endured for nearly two decades is known simply as La Violencia. Pitting elements of the dominating Liberal and Conservative parties against each other, La Violencia claimed an estimated 250,000 lives.

Not until a 1958 plebiscite blessed an accord by the warring parties to share power in a National Front for the next 16 years did the bloodshed begin to subside, but by then a tradition was in place for other forms of violence.

Guerrilla Movements Emerge

Guerrilla bands of varying political stripes emerged in the 1960s and early 1970s, some of them forming around cores of rural bandits who had flourished during La Violencia. Guerrilla activity led to a rise in vigilantism--the formation of civilian self-defense forces in the countryside. Some of these evolved into brutal paramilitary bands--even death squads--seeking to neutralize guerrilla influence and settle other scores.

The guerrillas have never seriously threatened constituted government. Combatting them has been a priority of the armed forces, and national authorities for several years have been seeking through negotiations--with occasional success--to persuade them to lay down their arms. An estimated 8,000 to 15,000 of them still operate in this nation of mountains, plains and jungles embracing an area as large as Texas and California combined.

As drug trafficking--first marijuana and then cocaine--took hold in the 1970s and early 1980s, the drug bosses began to clash with the guerrillas, who often operated in the same regions. In some cases, the rebels and traffickers worked out tactical alliances against the state. Increasingly, the government says, the cartels used paramilitary groups as enforcement arms, often against rival traffickers. Foreign mercenaries were discovered this year to be training the paramilitary forces, adding vicious new skills to the caldron of violence.

Rodrigo Losada, the author of a 1988 study on violence, said that in 1979, the leading cause of death in Colombia was cancer, accounting for 10% of all deaths. Homicide then ranked eighth, at 4.82%, but it rose steadily through the 1980s and ranked first by 1987, causing more than 11% of all deaths.

In 1958, the first year of the National Front, the rate of violent killings was 38 per 100,000, Losada said. By the early 1970s, it had fallen to 16.8 per 100,000--still double the U.S. rate of about 8 per 100,000. But as drug violence climbed, the figure began rising in the early 1980s, reaching about 30 per 100,000 by 1984.

Explosion of Killings

“Then it exploded in impressive form, to reach 62.8 per 100,000 last year,” he said, citing official mortality statistics. “The drug traffickers seem principally responsible for the nearly vertical increase in violent deaths. Also, in the measure in which drug addiction has grown, common crime has soared.

“In the last two to three years, 30% of the deaths have been related to drug trafficking, while between 7% and 15% have been guerrilla-related. The rest is common crime,” he added.

The figures dispel the notion that economic disparities lie behind the violence, as in other Third World countries. Colombia has retained one of the healthier economies on the continent. The figures show a steady decline, for example, in child deaths from intestinal diseases, from third to seventh place as a cause of death, showing that health services have improved steadily.

The historically inefficient justice system has virtually succumbed in this decade to intimidation and bribery by drug traffickers, legal analysts agree. At least 50 judges have been slain, along with an attorney general and a justice minister, among others.

The breakdown in justice is itself a further cause of violence, Losada noted, because people increasingly have resorted to taking their own revenge. Thus, labor disputes, personal problems and business squabbles often end up “militarized,” with hired death squads or sicarios providing their own justice.

The Center for Research and Popular Education, a Jesuit research institute that compiles statistics on violence, reported that 6,579 violent deaths in 1988 were or may have been politically motivated. The killers are efficient. The statistics show that 10 times as many people are killed as are wounded in political violence. The ratio is much nearer 1 to 1 in military vs. guerrilla fighting.

More Massacres

A report in April by Americas Watch, a U.S.-based human rights group, noted an alarming increase in mass killings in Colombia. Attackers killed four or more people at least 82 times in 1988, with peasants the main victims, costing more than 600 lives. One of the bloodiest massacres was at Uraba, in northern Colombia, where 20 people were slain by a death squad in March, 1988. A judicial inquiry blamed the massacre on a paramilitary squad alleged to be financed by drug bosses Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha and Pablo Escobar.

Another of the euphemisms of Colombian violence is the “social cleanup,” in which armed bands kill prostitutes, drug addicts and other undesirables, sometimes in batches. The drug traffickers, conservative businessmen by nature, are often believed to be behind such mass cleanups and, in the process, aim to eliminate competitors and left-wing activists who seek to form rival power bases.

The Patriotic Union, a political party formed in 1985 by left-wing groups that had previously been sympathetic to armed guerrilla activity, has been a principal target of the numerous death squads.

Party spokesman Julio Santana said that 860 party members have been killed in the last four years, including two senators, two congressmen and 30 local regional council members.

“The (drug) Mafia has no ability to confront the guerrilla armies directly, so instead it attacks unarmed civilians in a terror campaign,” he said. The army has permitted or actively encouraged that campaign, he asserted. “An army captain earns about $300 a month. Rodriguez Gacha can pay him $2,000 a month. The Mafia in Colombia can buy anybody.

“Part of the Mafia focuses on its drug business, and the other part carries out the ‘dirty war’ ” against the left,” Santana said. “We (the Patriotic Union) pay the price.

“Drug-trafficking violence is destroying the entire moral ethic of the country,” Santana said. “A peasant who used to be willing to work for 20 years now wants everything now. There is an inversion of values. A person now will kill for 5,000 pesos (about $12).”

Hopes Raised

As the government has concentrated its efforts in the last five weeks toward fighting and winning the drug war, and as official talks seeking to pacify the guerrillas go forward, some hopes have been raised of possible broader advances against violence.

Violentologist Pizarro said “the guerrilla groups recognize that if they agree to a truce, the government can redefine its enemy and redirect its attention to narco-terrorism. This narco-terrorism has been much more effective against the guerrillas than the state--the ‘dirty war’ has been privatized, carried out by the drug traffickers. The guerrillas understand that they can weaken their worst enemy if they help the government destroy narco-terrorism.”

Pizarro said the escalating scale of drug violence against the state heightens the urgency of the government’s counterattack.

“If the government doesn’t manage in the next few weeks to deal some blows against the traffickers, it will be difficult to keep up the campaign,” he said. “The traffickers are attacking all aspects of society, to weaken the will to fight and to force negotiations. We are in a time game.”

Much of Colombia’s violence has been confined to rural areas, and urban terror such as bombings has been relatively rare, he said. “The political class never felt touched before, and the traffickers finance political campaigns, so few have spoken out against them. But now, the narcos have escalated the terror. . . . After Galan, there is only Barco himself.”

Pizarro and others distinguished between the Cali cartel, described as more businesslike and better integrated into the political system, and the Medellin cartel of Rodriguez Gacha and Escobar, which has been far more prone to violence.

The Medellin cartel bosses have bought about 2.5 million acres of farmland, installing private armies that liquidate peasants and guerrillas who oppose them.

Rebuilding Colonial System

“They are undoing all the agrarian reforms of recent years, rebuilding the old colonial latifundio system,” Pizarro said. “This has fueled a wave of migration to the cities, which also causes major disruptions.”

In the introduction to journalist Enrique Santos Calderon’s recent book, “Crossfire,” former President Belisario Betancur described Colombia’s violence as “at once a lion, she-goat, cobra, snake or dragon that refuses to merge into a single body.”

Santos, editor of the respected Bogota newspaper El Tiempo, noted that more people were murdered in Medellin alone in 1987 than in all of Western Europe. Colombia, he said, “remains confronted with an old but primordial challenge: to banish violence (in) a nation that is consuming itself.”