Generations of Violence

In Colombia, there are no new wars, just brief pauses followed by resumptions of violence.

War officially resumed here on Feb. 20, just after 9:30 p.m., when Colombia’s president proclaimed the death of peace talks between the government and the country’s largest rebel group. By 11:32 that night, I could see the first signs of war from the window of my apartment: tanks rolling down the Avenida Septima, Bogota’s equivalent of Wilshire Boulevard. The rumbling sound of metal replaced the usual cacophony of buses, cars and street life.

Soldiers and military police were already a part of life here. They inspected bags and purses at bus stations, stood guard at bridges and overpasses and patrolled street corners. Violence, too, was a fact of life. One night late last fall, I arrived at a party where the guests were abuzz. Just before my arrival, the building’s night watchman had rushed into the apartment of the party’s hostess and started shooting from her window at a suspicious looking man who had just stolen a gun from him. The guests dropped to the floor until the shooting ended, then resumed their conversations.

But until last week, the danger and the military presence were part of the background. The culture had learned to live with a constant, low-level hum of violence. Now the volume of the conflict is once again a piercing cry.

As I sat and watched the tanks and then the truckloads of soldiers pass on the street below early on the morning of Feb. 21, I thought of my father. Fifty years earlier he watched as the very street I was looking at became a battleground. The violence that time around flared up after a charismatic political leader was killed outside his office in downtown Bogota. His murder plunged the country into a bloody war between conservatives and liberals that later became known simply as La Violencia. Some 200,000 died and many of those who remained behind became actors in the wars to come.

My father, a young soldier then, was sent out to patrol the streets of Bogota. He watched as the Septima was set ablaze, as looters broke into shops, as snipers fired down from atop the city’s national cathedral. Colombia was in chaos.

The brother of my father’s close friend was beaten and shot to death, his body dragged through the streets of his hometown. Already disillusioned with the government, my father’s friend was spurred by the incident to leave the army and head to the southern part of the country to help form one of the Colombia’s first guerrilla movements.

My father stuck it out for more than a decade of continuing violence, but eventually he decided to move his family to the United States. His reason was simple: the United States had opportunities. Now that I’m living in Colombia myself I understand that what he really meant is that Colombia does not. Nothing changes here. In the three decades since he left, the violence he saw as a young soldier has continued to flare up and die down.

In the 1980s, the government declared war on cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar and the narco-trafficantes of Medellin, a war that spurred new violence throughout the country. Overlaid on the drug wars was violence from the now-defunct Marxist M-19 guerrilla movement, which staged a daring attack on Colombia’s Justice Palace in November 1985 that left the courthouse littered with the bodies of 11 Supreme Court justices and 84 others who died in the attack.

These days the war is against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the country’s largest rebel group. In November 1998, the government granted the rebels a chunk of land the size of Switzerland and peace talks began. Now, after more than three years of negotiations that tamped down the violence but were otherwise unproductive, the country is back at war.

In the cities, residents worry about bombs placed in shopping centers and office buildings. Rumors of poisoned water reservoirs abound. And it’s hard to know what to believe. One day the newspapers dismiss the stories; the next they report that irregular substances have been found in the water supply. Doctors and nurses are being trained to deal with attacks on their hospitals.

But Colombians have learned to live with fear, or so I am told. A taxi driver recently spoke of the benefits of living with a long war. You learn to cope with uncertainty, he maintained. Still, he added, “I tell my family to avoid going to the mall if they can.”

In the countryside, campesinos are afraid the violence that has already pushed thousands of them to abandon their farms will intensify. The cities are bursting with displaced families; some beg on the streets, other stay in the shantytowns that have popped up on the outskirts. Most eat little more than a small plate of food a day.

And in the former demilitarized zone that was given to the FARC in 1998 and now is the target of a bombing campaign, people are afraid. Last weekend I traveled to San Vicente del Caguan, once the headquarters of the rebels. Residents there had just one question for President Andres Pastrana when he arrived to announce that their region was once again part of Colombia: How would he protect them?

A poor hamlet tucked into the jungle, San Vicente’s residents watched three years ago when the rebels came through to build their camps. Recently, they watched the same rebels hastily moving out in their four-wheel drive SUVs. When I visited, residents had spent the past two nights without electricity, listening as bombs fell in the distance. They had watched as hundreds of soldiers arrived to see what the rebels had left behind. The soldiers were followed by dozens of reporters. Pastrana’s announcement was met with little applause. Villagers were less concerned with whether they were part of Colombia or not than with what they would face in the days to come.

“No one ever asked us if we wanted to live in the zone. We just woke up and suddenly we were living in the safe haven,” one woman told me, as she watched Pastrana arrive in San Vicente del Caguan surrounded by Black Hawk helicopters.

She described sleepless nights spent in darkness recently because the electricity had been cut off. Her daughters stood close to her and stared at the sea of reporters and soldiers. The soldiers were here now, but she feared that violence would break out as soon as they moved on. Paramilitary groups were rumored to be nearby and rebels were nearby too.

I watched the young girls by their mother’s side and realized that they will be the next generation to learn the lexicon of war. Unlike my family, which left, those who remain have few choices. The war will deal them their hands. They will become rebels or soldiers. They will bury their dead and grieve. They will flee to the shantytowns or silently suffer. They will write the next chapter in Colombia’s seemingly eternal war.