ABSTRACT: Garcìa Marquez tells us how his country, Colombia, is being impoverished and strangled by the mafia of the drug traffic. The author reveals the existence of talks and even of hypotheses concerning an agreement between the drug traffickers and the Bolivian government, to put an end to drug traffic and terrorism. These hypotheses were boycotted and made to fail by Ronald Reagan. Considering these elements, Garcìa Marquez states that the war against drugs, triggered by the U.S., is in fact the alibi to legitimate a military intervention and the North-American political control over the countries of Latin America.

(El Pais Domingo - 5 November 1989)

At the beginning of October the press suddenly revealed one of the best hidden secrets of Colombia: for at least a year, authorized representatives of the government held formal talks with drug traffickers. The official spokesman denied this, the one of the drug-traffickers confirmed it, and the one of the government finally admitted it with no further explanations. In the end, as always in this war full of great mysteries, nothing was cleared. However, the revelation allowed us to establish, once more, to what degree the story of this war tends to repeat itself, from the moment it began and during all of its course, without ceasing and without finding solutions. The fact is however that it repeats itself with renewed strength and more tragical manifestations.

The first attempt to establish a dialogue which reached the public opinion, was that of May 1984, when Pablo Escobar Gaviria, boss of the "càrtel de Medellìn", got into contact with Alfonso Lòpez Nichelsen, in a hotel in Panama, in order for the latter to transmit a formal request to President Belisario Betancur, on behalf of all the Colombian groups of drug traffickers.

They promised to quit the drug trade, to dismantle the bases for the refining and the marketing of cocaine, to return their immense fortune to Colombia and to invest it into national industry and trade in the complete respect of the law, and also to share with the State the heavy burden of foreign debt. In exchange for all this, the drug traffickers did not even request an amnesty. They only wanted to be judged in Colombia, without the government applying the extradition treaty with the United States, which had been resumed in that period after several years of non-enforcement. Amnesty, which was then fashionable in Colombia, represented the gift President Belisarion Betancur offered, from his first day of government, to armed movements, some of which had been hiding into the mountains for thirty years. Therefore there was nothing strange in the fact that the drug traffickers were expecting to find shelter under that same umbrella of forgiveness and oblivion, and all the more so because it was almost imposs

ible to ascribe any serious offence to them. Especially so in a country in which there were few wealthy people who would have had the courage to confess their original sins. It was with relief that President Betancur received that offer, which as a matter of fact was perfectly consequential to his own policy of dialogue. Carlos Jiménez Gòmez, General Attorney of the Republic, who for over a year had been having direct and reserved conversations with the most important drug traffickers with the purpose of reaching an honourable agreement, met them once again in Panama. It was never said if this time the meeting was authorized by the President or not. I believe it was, and there was nothing to blame him for.

But he was able to do no more. On the 4th of July of the same year El Tiempo, a local newspaper, denounced the meetings, thus alarming the public opinion on the possibility of agreements. As a consequence, President Betancur was forced to retract his position and even to publicly deny having had anything to do with the affair. And what is worse is that the government at no time - neither before, nor during, nor after - had alternatives other than dialogue with the drug-traffickers: neither a judicial offensive, nor a punitive commando, not even a a clear-cut policy. Six years after it is clear that on that occasion the country missed out on a great opportunity to spare itself many of the horrors it has to endure now.

There are reasons to believe that the sabotage of the talks was inspired by the United State, for reasons that had little to do with the drug traffic and much to do with the anti-Communist frenzies of President Reagan. The person charged with that special mission was Ambassador Lewis Tambs, leader of the Santa Fé group and of the Reagan Administration's right-wing activist group, who reached Bogotà in those days with much clamour on the press and a word especially created for the occasion: "narcoguerrilla".

In his long academic circumlocutions, it became clear that Tambs was contrary to any hypothesis of a negotiated peace, that is to the main proposition of the Betancur Administration. Furthermore, the U.S. ambassador was obsessed with the resolve to obtain the confirmation of the validity of the treaty, signed by the previous administration, by which the infamous clause establishing the extradition to the U.S. of Colombian citizens had been ratified.

With his drastic interpretation of the treaty, Ambassador Tambs wanted to prove that the drug traffickers and the guerrillas were but one thing; a "narcoguerrilla". His aim was to send troops to Colombia with the pretext of imprisoning the former but in fact fighting the latter. After all, sooner or later, all Colombians could have been subjected to extradition.

This was the impression I gathered during a lunch I had with Ambassador Tambs, soon after his arrival in Bogotà. Time proved my impression to be true. As a matter of fact, after having been appointed to the U.S. Embassy in Costa Rica, Tambs became the main protagonist of the Irangate affair, and helped Colonel Oliver North to build a clandestine airport for the Nicaraguan "contras". And what's worth is that it was built with the money coming from the drug traffic.

Rich life style, poor people's habits

We Colombians still wonder why the drug traffickers were proposing that armistice and if their intentions were sincere. I believe they were. And a sentence of theirs, uttered with the greatest bombast proved it: "we prefer a tomb in Colombia to a prison cell in the U.S.". It is obvious that they feared the extradition treaty. But there was more to it. I believe that that the fundamental reason was of a cultural nature which is often not taken into account: the traffickers, because of their origin and education, were not prepared to live outside of Colombia. The coffers of Alì Babà were of no use to them in any other place in the world, in no other place could they feel safer or better show off their wealth. They did not want to die, especially not in prison, and especially not with the immense fortune they had accumulated. Instead, they wanted to spend that fortune with their closest pals, to use the poor people's expressions, and to eat Creole food cooked at home. The only thing they needed - and that worr

ied them - was a place within society. The means by which they claimed that place for themselves once the dialogue solution failed were undoubtedly unacceptable, infamous and counter-productive.

The refusal provided them with the possibility and the time to look for other alternatives for survival, whereas the extradition treaty was dropped and forgotten. They lacked neither the imagination nor the resources to find them. Drug traffickers had been fashionable from the beginning. They enjoyed complete impunity and a certain prestige among the people, owing to the charity they gave in the neighbourhoods where they spent their alienated childhood. If someone had wanted to arrest them he could have asked the policemen in the street to do so. But a large part of the Colombian society considered them with curiosity and an interest mixed with complacency. Journalists, manufacturers, business-men and even common people took part in the permanent party in the Nàpoles estate, near Medellìn, where Pablo Escobar owned a zoo with real giraffes and hippopotamuses, imported from Africa to entertain his guests. At the entrance of the estate, representing a sort of national monument, was the airplane that transporte

d the first load of cocaine to the United States. Encouraged by the complacency of many and the indifference of justice, they were not content with wealth, but also wanted power. Escobar had been elected to take over in the Chamber of representatives, and organized workshops on human rights. Carlos Lehder, a manager of discotheques for young people who scarcely worried about losses, erected a statue of John Lennon to perpetuate his memory in the sybaritic city of Armenia. He also organized a political movement and founded an extreme right-oriented nationalist newspaper, printed in green ink as a homage to "grass".

He reportedly used to go with his escort of "pistoleros" to the Congress, and, laughing his head off, place his feet on the balustrade.

Jorge Luis Ochoa, of the "càrtel de Medellìn", and Gilberto Rodrìguez Orejuela of the "càrtel de Cali", who are now lethal enemies, traveled around the world at leisure, buying thoroughbred horses and searching for European partners for their legal business. They were both arrested in Spain, extradited to Colombia, and, once there, released. With such favourable circumstances, none of their political friends made them the favour of warning them that attempts at someone's life, apart from being ominous crimes, were also a political mistake which would have caused their ruin.

An act of revenge

The first important assassination was that of Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, in April 1984. Unfortunately, Betancur did not behave wisely on that occasion. Besieged by public accusations of passivity, perhaps owing to his personal emotion, he resorted for the first time to the extradition treaty he himself had rejected and which perhaps he secretly disowns today as well. He did so undoubtedly due to the lack of a more intimidating and immediate legal instrument, without thinking that resorting to the treaty, from that moment on, would no longer have been a question of principle, but would have become an act of revenge.

The infernal circle was soon unleashed. Carlos Lehder, captured, it seems, thanks to an internal delation, is serving an extravagant life sentence, plus an additional 135 years. About 20 Colombians and three foreigners resident in Colombia have been extradited at the end of October. The drug traffickers have not denied their "intellectual participation" to the death of an indefinite number of people, except to that of Minister Lara Bonilla, which triggered the war against the public opinion. At least 800 members of the "Uniòn Patriòtica", including their presidential candidate, Jaime Pardo Leal, have fallen victim to a fierce extermination campaign. The assassination of the unforgettable Guillermo Cano, editor of the newspaper "El Espectador", was for me a personal tragedy which I have not been able to overcome. Nor have I been able to overcome the subsequent fury against his newspaper, in which I worked for many years as a reporter, and which I am grateful to. Judges and magistrates, whose modest salary we

re barely enough to live but not to provide for the education of their children, found themselves in an insoluble dilemma: either they sold themselves or they were killed. The most admiring and terrible thing is that over 40 of them, together with journalists and officials, chose to die.

The most incomprehensible thing of all is the fact that the drug traffickers never ceased to look for ways of dialogue, not even during the slaughter. It is by now impossible to determine the number of secret and public attempts in that sense. As far as I know, at the end of 1985 I met an emissary of Pablo Escobar in Mexico who wanted to repeat to the Colombian government the Panama proposition, but with a sensational change: they would have dropped the part concerning the extradition treaty, which had always been the main problem, postponing until after the agreement. It was an attempt which failed just like all the previous ones. In any case the Supreme Court of Justice declared the treaty unconstitutional a few months later, but the intensity of the slaughter did not diminish. It is not altogether crazy to think, however, that this fury was due to serious reasons that were never revealed to the country by any of the parts involved in the conflict. I believe that due heed was not taken of how far the polit

ical and social situation represented an appropriate and privileged field for the culture of drug traffic, in a vast and unfortunate Colombia, with several centuries of mountainous feudalism, 30 years of endless guerilla and a long history of governments with no people. In 1979, when General Omar Torrijos visited the cattle farms of the Sinù, in the Colombian Caribbean, he was surprised by the number of armed civilians escorting the breeders. He remembered that it had begun the same way in Salvador, when he was a lieutenant. He informed the Colombian President of the time, Julio César Turbay, in due time. The latter replied, through the person of his defence minister, with one sentence: "In Colombia we have social peace". Torrijos was not mistaken. A few miles from the prosperous estates he visited - in the central part of my imaginary river Magdalena - a process of social decay was already going on, which would have reached its climax in a few years with the creation of a government-controlled empire, under

the protection of the drug traffic.

The way in which it started is well known. In the sixties, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionaries Colombianas (FARC), which are the secular arm of the Communist Party, had established different guerrilla fronts in the Magdaleno Medio, with the explicit purpose of protecting the defenceless farmers from the insatiable land-owners. But the initial intentions of the FARC degenerated when they started to finance their war by means of kidnaps, blackmail and extortions on the breeders.

The latter, exasperated by the persistence of violence, established private armies, legitimated by the government as groups of self-defence. "In the beginning it was all a campaign for the physical elimination of Communism", a journalist who had lived in the region for six years wrote. "But after they attacked the cattle thieves in the country, the burglars in the villages and even beggars and homosexuals". The breeders who had survived were ruined and threatened by the gangs of delinquents which they themselves had armed.

A state within the state

It was the breeders themselves who, reduced to poverty, got in touch with the drug traffickers who were eager for new causes in which to invest their immense fortune. That alliance gave birth to what is now the Magdaleno Medio: a vast empire of 50.000 square kilometres, twice the size of El Salvador and by far more armed than the one General Torrijos saw in his youth. All this occurred during several years, at less than three hundred kilometres from the Presidential palace and at a very short distance from the military garrison, and became public only a few months ago, when a deserter told the whole story.

The drug traffickers provided the money, the technical means and their unquestionable entrepreneurial skill. Amateurish violence became scientific violence, with a paramilitary messianism and "police" schools run by mercenaries paid with gold in London and Tel Aviv. At least for one of these mercenaries, it seems that the embassy of Bogotà had been informed: Israeli Yair Klein, a well known personage since 1973, when his commando freed in less than two seconds a hijacked plane in the airport of Lod. That school formed the juvenile delinquents taken from the poor neighbourhood of the city, who in the corse of these years have diffused terror and death in the country. However, due to a dialectical and irreparable irony, that which the FARC conceived as a revolution ended up by really being one, but in the contrary sense: a world apart, no longer with its primal security services but with legitimate police Corps headed by mayors and municipal officials elected by the people. The social programmes for urbanizati

on, health and education seem to have been conceived as a challenge to the central government. Their intrepid and self-conceited managers created a right-wing party, an extreme right-wing party, which some time ago tried to obtain legal acknowledgement. Their symbol is the telescopic foresight of a rifle.

When the rest of the Colombians, and myself among them, opened their eyes on this dismal reality, it was too late. The state within the state was not content with the fertile prairies and beautiful sunsets of the Magdalena, but expanded and camouflaged in the least imaginable corners of the country. An acute observer of our reality said that the whole of the Colombian society is drugged. Not so much because of its addiction from cocaine - which is in fact not alarming in Colombia - but for its addiction from a more perverse drug: easy money. Industry, trade, banks, politics, press, sport, science and arts, the State itself, all the public and private organizations are involved in some way - perhaps with a few exceptions, perhaps without being aware of it - in a bundle of created interests which no one can undo. It's incredible: 1,700 army officers and police officers have been tried, sentenced and dismissed in three year's time because of relations with the drug traffic; 25 politicians appear in a list of b

eneficiaries of the drug trade published in the U.S.; copies of the confidential papers of the Security Council have been found in the briefcase of a drug trafficker; the personal phone calls of high public officials have been listened where they should not have been, and in several home searches the names of well-known compatriots involved in dirty business have been found.

It is a silent and elusive monster, which is invisible but present everywhere, penetrating and infecting everything, far beyond our national borders. Perhaps the government itself ignores how far these unnatural profits have helped it ease social unrest. The more cautious people estimate the illegal investments in one thousand million dollars each year. But they could easily be over five times that amount. According to a reckonings made by the press, the three main drug bosses own over three thousand million dollars each. It is unthinkable that a pecuniary capacity of this size would be content with the ephemeral passion for material goods, without entering the obscure mechanisms of the conscience and the will of mankind. However, the Freudian obsession of the traffickers seems to be that of buying land, land, land, land and more land. Some time ago they celebrated with a sensational party the purchase of hectare number 180,000. As if they were attempting to buy the whole country, with its condors and its ri

vers, the yellow colour of its gold, and the blue of its seas, so that no one can chase them away from the places they want to live in. Amidst this raving reality the voice of the presidential candidate Luis Carlos Gàlan had raised itself in sign of hope, invoking a redemption no one believes in anymore. His almost ritual assassination, while in the public square and escorted by 18 body guards, had finally forced the government of Colombia to face its terrible historical responsibility. The reaction of President Virgilio Barco, even if late and foreseeable, could not have been stronger. His first measure, as Betancur before him, was that of restoring the unconstitutional extradition treaty by means of the extraordinary powers granted by the state of siege. The traffickers seemed taken by surprise by a determination that they did not believe possible in a man of such prudence. The unexpected occupation of the palaces and estates, of their clandestine laboratories, of the ghost-planes, of the yachts transporti

ng the drugs, of the secret archives, was a lethal blow from which they will not recover soon, and that without doubt will have its effects on the production and trade of drugs. However, their worst enemies are precisely their methods, which will end up by making the whole nation revolt against them.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Colombians is their incredible capacity to get used to everything, to good and bad luck, and their capacity to recover, which is almost supranational. Some, perhaps the wisest, do not even seem aware of the fact that they live in one of the most dangerous countries of the world. This is understandable: amid the fear life continues, and perhaps becomes even more precious when it is necessary to survive day by day. The same Sunday of the funeral of Luis Carlos Galàn, whose death truly moved the nation, crowds filled with joy invaded the square to celebrate the victory of the national football team over Ecuador.

The war will be long

But urban terrorism is a rare component in the centennial culture of Colombian violence. The bombs launched amid the crowd that kill innocents, the telephone threats that are more serious than any other disturbance of every day life, will finally unite everybody, friends and enemies, against the invisible destiny. Even the worse deaths have an ethics which terrorism does not have. Perhaps it is possible to learn how to live with the fear of what happened, but no one can learn how to live with the uncertainty of that which might happen: that an explosion could massacre the bodies of one's children at school, or that a machine gun could mow you down as you come out of a movie theatre, or that the fruit and vegetable stands could blow up, or that a plane could disintegrate in flight, or that the whole family could poison itself with tap water. NO: in such a long epoch of human follies, terrorism has never won nor will it ever win a war. On his part, President Virgilio Barco, with his difficult destiny of lone

cruiser, surely knows that the war, expected to be brief, will instead be the most difficult and risky enterprise of his years. Also because its multiheaded enemy keeps itself informed from the inside of power by means of ghost-informers who have ears with which they hear everything and eyes with which they see everything. But especially because the resources the government has are no match to the size of the enemy. The United States accused Colombia of negligence in the battle against the drug trade, while in the streets of U.S. cities there were more drugs than in our streets, and while in their lists of accomplices they were concealing the names of U.S. citizens, who thus remained unpunished. And they are surely many, in a country in which last year 270 tons of cocaine were consumed. However, when the moment of truth comes, the help they are giving Colombia in the present situation of emergency is not even to be compared with the help, official and non-official, that the Nicaraguan contras had received in

a period of 8 years: 2,000 million dollars. And it is very likely that the aid given to Colombia will exceed this figure while President Barco insists - as he will do until the end - in not allowing U.S. troops to enter the country, not even to destroy the drug traffic.

All this seems to point to the fact that the war will be a long, ruinous and hopeless war. And the worst thing is that there are no alternatives. Unless a happy, unexpected event occurs: one of those enlightened oddities that so many times saved Latin America from an ultimate disaster. If it is not dialogue, it can be any other thing, provided it does not mean sacrificing anyone's life. Unless the country dies before the endless war stops. This is, unfortunately, the only encouraging sign I can think of, not to conclude this article with a catastrophic conclusion.