PERSPECTIVE ON ‘THE DRUG WAR’ : A Tortured Land, Glittery and Gold : For a Colombian in the U.S., it’s all a small world of young men dealing in death to escape their own despair.

Now, I realize that the only way to look at Medellin is from a distance. Every time I go home, I descend from the violent clouds onto the green pastures of the northern Andean cordillera surrounding Medellin. When I was a child, I would sit on the veranda of my grandmother’s country house up in those mountains looking at the glow of the city in the night sky and wondering who all those people were who lived among the twinkling lights.

From that distance, Medellin looked like a great Nativity scene, like the Bethlehems that my cousins and I used to create with fresh moss and figurines at Christmas. Now, after these many years, I see that the only resemblance is probably the similarity of Medellin’s turmoil, frailty and terror to that of Judea during its occupation by Imperial Rome. Now I know that most of the people who live in Colombia, whether under the sparkling city lights or rural moonlight, have somehow been touched by one of the bloodiest and most mutilating wars that our country has ever lived through: the war on drugs.

We all have our horror stories. Ours is the story of a country where terror reigns and where fear shrouds our most treasured dreams. On Dec. 2, while I was working in New York, I received a call from my television station in Bogota: “They killed Pablo Escobar.” I remembered all the other long-distance calls that I have received announcing deaths unforetold--my nephew, my brother’s wife’s brother, my cousin’s cousin, the lawyer, the journalist, the minister . . . . Medellin’s violence has been a chain of bloody murders, and that chain is attached to my own neck, to my own soul.

Pablo Escobar was the most notorious of the merchants of death, but not the only one. Many innocent men, women and children have died during the drug war’s indiscriminate bombings; others were deliberately targeted. It is said that he kept a sort of wish list, which contained the names of judges, lawyers, journalists and hundreds of police officers. But Escobar was not the only one who paid to have people killed. Innumerable peasants, labor union members, political leaders and leftist activists have been killed.

These political deaths had nothing to do with the narcotics traffic. These crimes are still unresolved. In Colombia, death and impunity are the law of the land. Escobar’s death is one more in an endless and futile violent spiral, a sort of macabre dance of power, money and hegemony.

Recently, I sat on a rooftop in one of the poor neighborhoods that surround Medellin, facing the mountain from where, many years ago, I used to look down on the anonymous lights. I was waiting to meet a young man who had been trained to kill by the Medellin cartel--and who was, so far, a survivor.

“Pedro” was short, well-groomed, with impeccable tennis shoes and expensive designer jeans. He may have had a gold chain with a crucifix around his neck, not to mention bullet scars engraved someplace on his body. He would have worked hard dealing drugs or killing people to get those imported clothes, symbols of power, of well-being, possibly of a future. I’ve met many Pedros, and not all run with the same “luck.” Most are barefoot. Their mothers work for no more than $100 a month. Their homes do not have proper plumbing, running water or electricity; they are not even finished because there is never enough money to complete the roof or the second floor or even to lay a cement floor on top of the yellow dirt. The lucky ones go to school, and at night they all sleep in the same bed, regardless of how many there are.

Pedro has seen all of his friends die. The survivors--women, children, teen-age girls--bear the unbearable weight of this violence, as did their ancestors, peasants, who fled the rural areas to escape other horrors before narcotics traffic was the fashion. Pablo Escobar, himself the product of the barrios, became an idol among those who, like Pedro, were trying to escape poverty. Head of the infamous Medellin cartel, he was at the same time the evil scapegoat of the multinational drug business.

Colombia’s centuries-long struggle over land ownership and political power was only escalated by the rise of the cocaine trade, where money is equated with God. Pablo Escobar’s death is not going to alleviate the social ills that lie at the very soul of our society.

It is a cold winter morning, and the wind is blowing outside my window. I am looking down from a hilly ridge at another city: New Haven, Conn. Two blocks below, kids are dealing crack and handling guns just like the Pedros do back in Medellin. These American teen-agers, too, belong to gangs, like expensive designer clothes and, possibly, wear gold chains around their necks. They ride low in the seats of their speeding cars looking out the windows at the disappearance of their own generation. They carry the same scars of poverty, drugs and violence muted only by the blast of their music. The difference is that Medellin is just ahead of the game.