Wall Street Journal
January 16, 2003

Violence as a Way of Life
By Edward Schumacher

The bare facts are disturbing enough. Colombia is America's third-largest recipient of military aid. Yet leftist guerrilla and rightist paramilitary groups roam the countryside, the latest combatants in a 50-year conflict that has taken some 35,000 lives in the past decade alone, creating along the way some two million refugees. Various attempts at negotiation have failed, and outlaw groups grow ever more powerful, their followers fueled less by ideology these days than by drug trafficking. In an unholy embrace, American cocaine and heroin consumers stoke the killing while our aid seeks to suppress it. It is altogether an appalling state of affairs.

Yet somehow it sits at the margin of public awareness, another distant battle zone in America's war on drugs. Robin Kirk brings Colombia back to center stage in "More Terrible Than Death" (PublicAffairs, 311 pages, $27.50), a vividly written and often mesmerizing first-hand account of the violence there. "Colombia is, in its way," she writes, "a great laboratory of human feeling, pushed to the limit of what is bestial, monstrous, unthinkable. But delivered with unmistakable elán. It is a beautiful car with a body in the trunk. It is incongruous, hideous, but has style to burn."

Too often the people who write about Colombia, including human-rights workers on the scene, come off as apologists for the left-wing guerrillas, bewailing government violence while playing down the abuses on the other side. Ms. Kirk will have none of that. She is indeed a human-rights worker, for Human Rights Watch, but she writes with admirable political balance and honesty, even about herself. "As I write this," she says at one point, having described her belief that time and hard work would show her good intentions to skeptics who saw her as a mere meddling Yanqui, "I'm dismayed by the naivete that shines through. Of course, I was naive. I am American to the core, guilty by passport."

The current violence is merely history's latest turn of the wheel. The origins of the main guerrilla group (known by its acronym as the FARC) -- and of its 70-something founder, Pedro Antonio Marin (known by his adopted name of Manuel Miranda) -- lie in "La Violencia," a civil war that occurred in the 1950s between the country's two mainstream parties. It was a bloody affair, claiming 200,000 lives. In the countryside, Mr. Marin emerged from the killing with a disdain for the leaders of both parties, who from the safety of the cities, he claimed, engaged in politics as a parlor game and source of patronage while differing little ideologically. Mr. Marin migrated to Marxism, but his political identity has become less distinct in recent years, and arguably less important.

"The powerful logic that had rescued Marin from the senselessness of La Violencia had become an end in itself, as stuck in place as the trigger of a rusted gun," Ms. Kirk writes. "The same qualities that allowed him to survive treachery -- an animal caution and a loyalty only to those closest to him -- prevented Marin from examining the cost of this war to Colombia and his increasingly remote chance of ever seizing power."

The aspirations of his younger recruits, Ms. Kirk notes, are anything but ideologically ascetic. This rising generation is perhaps best epitomized by Marin's likely successor, the 30-something Jorge Briceno Suarez, "a jolly, vicious, fun-loving murderer who drives a flashy vehicle with his pistol on his hip, girls on the running boards, and a rum bottle at the ready."

The genesis of the main right-wing paramilitary group, known as the AUC, was a civilian irregular force set up by Colombia's military in the 1960s to fight the guerrillas with their own tactics. In its various forms, it has been both legal and, as now, illegal. The social views of its outlaw leader, Carlos Castano, sound remarkably like those of the guerrillas, from whom the AUC has ruthlessly retaken rural territory and drug business in recent years.

The price of all this violence has been paid by civilians caught in the middle. In Ms. Kirk's striking words: "Had a store owner bought from or sold to a guerrilla? Death. Had a telephone exchange operator placed a call for a paramilitary? Death. Had a teenage girl danced with a teenage boy who happened to be an army recruit? Death."

Unlike many of her human-rights colleagues, Ms. Kirk supports U.S. military aid. She hopes that Washington will use it as leverage, to force the Colombian military to fight the highly unpopular guerrillas ethically and - -- this is the hard part -- to turn on the paramilitary forces as well. Her larger hope is that such leverage will force all sides into a negotiated resolution. Colombians would seem to want this too, having voted overwhelmingly last year for Alvaro Uribe, the new hard-line president who is building up the army and who has demanded a ceasefire before negotiating with anyone.

For all its virtues, "More Terrible Than Death" might have offered more in the way of policy prescriptions, and it is weak on economics, overlooking the great growth of Colombia's urban middle class. But Ms. Kirk does not claim to be writing an analytical treatise. She wants to capture the reality of the violence itself, and she does so splendidly. And despite the bleak picture she paints, she is guardedly optimistic. A Colombian friend tells her that "to give up is more terrible than death." Ms. Kirk agrees.

The friend was later assassinated.

Toronto Globe and Mail
December 3, 2003

COLOMBIA
By Paul Knox

It sounded like a heart-warming story from Colombia, a place that doesn't generate many of them. In a carefully stage-managed performance, more than 800 uniformed fighters gathered in a trade-show palace last week and handed over their assault rifles. The ceremony was hailed as a triumph by the government of hard-line President Alvaro Uribe Velez, who hopes it is a first step in ending nearly 40 years of internal war.

The camouflage-clad army was a right-wing paramilitary unit called the Cacique Nutibara Bloc -- one of dozens in the federation known as the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC). Set up to combat left-wing guerrillas in the 1980s, this ruthless organization contains some of the world's most vicious killers -- people with as much blood on their hands as any Middle Eastern suicide-bombing mastermind. The AUC is responsible for gruesome massacres of peasants and villagers, land seizures and protection rackets throughout wide areas of the Colombian countryside. The Nutibara group operated in the outskirts of Medellin, the country's third-largest city and the scene of bitter turf wars between rival gangs.

Mr. Uribe's hope is that all 13,000 paramilitaries will turn themselves in by the end of 2005. That, he believes, will make it easier to conduct an all-out assault on the two guerrilla armies waging war against his government: the 18,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the 5,000-member National Liberation Army (ELN). In theory, with the paramilitaries out of the way, there will no longer be any reason for Colombians to seek protection from the guerrillas.

A paramilitary surrender would also remove a major source of embarrassment for successive Colombian governments and the armed forces, which have had close ties to the paramilitaries in several conflict zones. In More Terrible Than Death, a perceptive, poetic book on Colombia's conflict, human-rights investigator Robin Kirk recounts a colonel's description of the nudge-nudge army-paramilitary relationship: "It's like the affair between a married man and a mistress. One has one, but doesn't bring her home to meet your family." Without the stigma of paramilitary atrocities, it would be easier for Mr. Uribe and his generals to argue the case for aid in Washington and other foreign capitals.

The trouble is that so far the paramilitary peace process is a sham. Top AUC commanders didn't show up last week at Medellin's Exhibition Palace. Instead, three of these accused mass murderers appeared on a video screen to ask, among other things, that they be pardoned for their crimes. Their macabre charade consists of handing over their minions -- many of them recent teen-age recruits -- while continuing to try to negotiate their own terms of surrender.

One of them was the swaggering leader of the Nutibara group, a man named Diego Fernando Murillo, who prefers to be known as Adolfo Paz or, more colloquially, Don Berna. A few days later, he gave a rare interview to the Colombian daily El Tiempo in which he said flatly: "Adolfo Paz isn't prepared to spend a single day in jail." Amazingly, he may get his wish. Mr. Uribe is asking Colombia's congress to approve a law that would allow the AUC leaders to pay fines or do community service for "crimes against humanity" -- presumably including the chainsaw killings of non-combatants the AUC carried out a few years ago.

Don Berna got his start in the Medellin gang business back in the days of drug lord Pablo Escobar. He is said to have acted as an informant for the police unit that killed Mr. Escobar on a Medellin rooftop in 1993. He's also believed to have taken over some of the slain capo's business. He denies involvement in drug trafficking, but few believe him. AUC leaders Carlos Castano and Salvatore Mancuso -- the other two on the video screen in Medellin -- have been indicted on drug charges by the United States, which is seeking their extradition.

A dissident AUC commander known as Rodrigo has denounced the peace process as a manoeuvre by paramilitary narco-chieftains to avoid paying for atrocities while keeping their units intact, though temporarily disarmed. A recent report by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group notes that the paramilitaries have always had close ties to powerful and influential Colombians. "They may be preparing to use the peace talks to cleanse them politically and thus legitimize their wealth and power," the ICG says.

If that happens, no one inside or outside Colombia will take demobilization seriously -- least of all the FARC or the ELN. Mr. Uribe, the bar is a lot higher than you seem to think.

San Francisco Chronicle
March 9, 2003

Eye-Opening View of Colombia's Heart of Darkness
Reviewed by Frank Bajak

We Americans like our conflicts tidy. Give us a ruthless foreign tyrant with weapons of mass destruction, and our wood-paneled Washington warriors will craft the rhetoric required to sell the nation on military intervention on a spectacular scale.

But how do we treat a not-unfriendly nation that merely supplies us with most of our cocaine? Where a long-simmering class-based civil conflict is beginning to look more like a civil war every day as seething outlaw armies of the right and left keep adding more muscle? Such a country is Colombia, where U.S. military involvement has moved forward slowly over the past decade but could soon be measured in leaps.

Guaranteeing Colombia's stability has been relatively low on Washington's balance sheet of global strategic imperatives, even as the Latin American nation grew in the 1990s to become the No. 3 recipient of U.S. foreign aid, most of it guns, not butter. The enthusiasm of our "drug warriors" has waxed and waned in their periodic crusades to reduce the cocaine tonnage that crafty Colombians deliver to the United States. Washington policy wonks never lost much sleep over Colombia and eschewed entanglement in its messy politics of internal combustion.

But on Feb. 13, a surveillance plane carrying four Americans went down over rebel territory in Colombia's southern highlands. One of the Americans was shot and killed along with a Colombian colleague. The three others were escorted from the wreckage of the Cessna by guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). This sort of thing was bound to happen. How will we respond?

Americans would do well to familiarize themselves with this unruly nation into which we look to be delving deeper. Robin Kirk offers an exasperatingly appropriate guide with "More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs and America's War in Colombia."

As an investigator for Human Rights Watch, Kirk has spent the past decade compiling evidence against Colombia's patrones of political murder. With an uncanny reservoir of guts and fortitude, she has put herself at considerable risk in gathering the evidence she needed to campaign effectively for what she believes is needed: more justice and a more intelligent U.S. policy.

Kirk takes us along on her journeys into Colombia's peculiarly piquant heart of darkness. Her stories of tempting the assassins are disturbing and engrossing, and she provides as complete an explanation of the country's predicament as readers will find in English.

The book helps explain why so many Colombians last year figured that the only way to end the FARC's 39-year-old insurgency was to elect a president, Alvaro Uribe Velez, who says he won't negotiate with the rebels unless they accept a cease-fire. The cease-fire is improbable. More likely is another assassination attempt against Uribe, who survived two of them even before he was elected.

Colombia is a nation where horrific massacres have for so long been weekly headlines that the world is inured to them. It's got a weak central government and is run largely by regional power brokers whom Colombian journalist Fabio Castillo, author of the narco-chronicle "Cowboys of Cocaine," calls tropical Machiavellis.

Over the past few decades, cocaine corruption has not just bred blustering kingpins like the late Pablo Escobar and compromised smart politicians such as former President Ernesto Samper, whose 1994 election was secured with the help of at least $6 million in Cali cartel contributions. It has also spawned legions of "boy assassins," or sicarios, who'll kill for a few hundred bucks. Life is cheap. Kidnapping and extortion are epidemic.

Then there are the rebels. They were around long before Escobar stumbled onto the lucre of cocaine and really began to benefit from the cocaine trade only after Escobar was gunned down in 1993.

Trying to make an honest living in Colombia is too often like negotiating a thicket -- not of brambles but concertina wire. You don't get scratched, you get gashed. Or you give up and leave. Since the mid-1990s, several hundred thousand Colombians have fled the country. The country has 10 times as many internal refugees, or desplazados. These are the pawns, the common folk who bear the brunt of Colombia's political bloodletting. They're the ones who get massacred by landowner-backed paramilitary death squads for breaking bread with leftist rebels, or by FARC rebels for dancing a cumbia with paramilitaries.

Do not doubt Kirk's earnestness. She has invested so much in Colombia, exposing her own vulnerability to people she knew would one day be snuffed out for defending the defenseless, rights workers like Josue Giraldo Cardona.

"Colombia loses its best. Mediocrity rules," Kirk writes. Any time a leader of consequence rises from the rabble to challenge the status quo, somebody somewhere with something to lose has that person killed. Giraldo gives Kirk the book's title even as he steels her against exasperation. To give up the struggle for justice, Giraldo tells Kirk, would be "more terrible than death."

And so Kirk bounces in a four-by-four over dirt roads through steamy cattle country in the northern state of Cordoba to visit Carlos Castano, the right- wing paramilitary leader whose "Headsplitters" practice political murder that makes mutilation part of the message. Or she sits down with a Colombian military chief who accuses her of doing the devil's work by exposing the complicity of army commanders in massacres of civilians.

The fighters of Castano's United Self-Defense Forces, whose murderous ties to Colombia's military Kirk has documented, were placed on the U.S. State Department's list of terrorist groups in 2001, joining a rogues' confraternity that already included its foes the FARC and the National Liberation Army, the country's second-largest leftist rebel force. Castano was subsequently indicted in the United States on drug trafficking charges.

For getting the paramilitaries so classified, credit the U.S. diplomats who came to recognize that Colombia's redemption can only begin with a rule of law, by strengthening the country's judiciary and protecting its judges and investigators.

In Washington credit the likes of Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. But also credit Kirk. Human rights activists are often branded guerrilla sympathizers in Colombia, and although Kirk's ideological affinity may lie with the rebels' avowed cause of land reform and a more equitable distribution of wealth, she is no fan of the FARC. Rather, Kirk believes it has "lost interest in building broader popular support for a political agenda and is simply piling up cash for the slow bleed of endless war."

The book traces the roots of the FARC and its commander, Pedro Antonio Marin, a septuagenarian who was baptized into guerrillahood during a vicious struggle called La Violencia in the 1950s that pitted the country's long- feuding Liberal and Conservative parties against each other in an orgy of bloodlust that by conservative estimate cost 200,000 lives.

Although allying himself with Communists for self-preservation during La Violencia, Marin probably didn't know much about Marxism until a city slicker who would later become his biographer, Arturo Alape, showed up at his mountain hideout four decades ago. The taciturn Marin, a skilled peasant warrior known as Tirofijo, or Sureshot, remains bitterly suspicious of Americans, for U.S. Special Forces gave training and materiel to the Colombian soldiers whose 1964 attack on Marin's mountain settlement of Marquetalia spurred the FARC's creation.

Kirk believes the rebel group has been thwarted by younger opportunists seduced by the drug trade's easy money. Kirk disdains Jorge Briceno, the FARC commander some believe is truly in command. She calls Briceno a "jolly, vicious, fun-loving murderer."

Perhaps because she has invested so much in Colombia, Kirk refuses to accept that it may be doomed by a seemingly endless cycle of vengeance, where blood feuds are inherited and no slate wiped clean of eye-for-an-eye reckoning.

"Occasionally, I hear Americans say that Colombia has a 'culture of violence' that no amount of financial aid or military intervention or human rights advocacy will change. Of all the mutual misperceptions, this is the one I abhor most," she writes.

Yet doubts haunt Kirk. She says she refuses to harbor hate for those who ordered her friend Giraldo's assassination on Oct. 12, 1996. But she also recalls Giraldo's explanation for why Colombians fight: "Colombians do not believe that another way is possible, that life can be different. It was a lack of imagination. It was the absence of faith."

Frank Bajak was bureau chief in Colombia for the Associated Press from 1996 to 2000.

The Seattle Times
May 25, 2003

A Cry for Help to End the Bloodshed in Colombia
By Bradley Meacham (Seattle Times business reporter)

While Iraq continues to capture much of the world's attention, the United States is quietly becoming more involved in a war closer to home.

In recent months the U.S. has sent more than 400 military personnel to Colombia, where a four-decade-old war of bombings and kidnappings shows no sign of ending. The U.S. already has ties to all sides of the conflict and may be on the verge of getting in deeper.

Robin Kirk's book, "More Terrible Than Death," puts human faces on the quagmire and makes a plea to raise awareness of the worsening tragedy.

Her heartbreaking book is a collection of stories resulting from a decade documenting atrocities as a human-rights activist. Beginning with the story of the murder of her friend and colleague, Josue, she shows how the lives of countless Colombians have been ruined by the war.

The fighting, she writes, cuts across all classes. Airliners are bombed as a show of guerrilla force, peasants are tortured and killed because of accusations they are sympathetic to rival drug cartels, and families are wiped out because of military politics.

Before long the book begins to read like a catalog of gruesome murders, sometimes resulting from simple misunderstanding or bad luck. Violence is everywhere, infecting everyone's lives:

"It's like the weather. Will it be cloudy today or clear? Will there be a massacre or just bodies along the road? Mostly, it is something most Colombians barely notice, except on days when it interferes with some personal task, like when you prepare a picnic and it rains."

Taken together, the book is Kirk's personal attempt to get someone to do something.

The problem is that all sides in the war are fueled by the insatiable U.S. thirst for drugs. Rebels and drug cartels use the proceeds from the sale of cocaine to fund a drumbeat of random violence, tools they use to maintain control over most of the country.

The army, which has committed its share of brutal murders, is trying to assert control over the countryside with U.S. backing. Since 2000 the United States has given Colombia $2.5 billion as part of its failed strategy to fight the supply of drugs.

This informative book, perhaps the only contemporary history of Colombia in English, stops short of offering solutions even as the pace of events quickens. Colombians last year overwhelmingly elected a strongman president who vowed to conquer the rebels — to bring peace with more fighting. He wants the U.S. to broaden aid to Colombia as part of the global war on terrorism, a prospect Kirk sees as a recipe for endless bloodshed.

While fuller portraits of the unfortunate victims would have made this book a more powerful read, it convincingly corrects the assumption that violence is somehow an irrevocable part of Colombian culture.

She shows that right and wrong have very little to do with the conflict. Diplomats, fighters and ordinary Colombians are all stuck in a vicious cycle of a disease that's fed by the U.S. demand for cocaine. At the very least the book is a cry for the United States to be aware of its role.

Bradley Meacham: 206-515-5066 or bmeacham@seattletimes.com

Foreign Affairs
March/April 2003

More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs, and America's War in Colombia.
Reviewed by Kenneth Maxwell

A long-time researcher for Human Rights Watch, Kirk brings the reader to a closer understanding of the conditions that have turned Colombia into what she sees as a vast and horribly violent slum, with Colombian society becoming brutalized and fragmented by the destructive impact of the drug trade and multiple guerrilla insurgencies. The U.S.-supported drug war, she believes, is frozen in place. On the one hand, the United States refuses to deal with the problem of demand, instead emphasizing supply-side eradication and interdiction.

And since September 11, Washington has compounded the problem by accepting the self-interested arguments long advocated by Colombia's generals: that it is a war against leftist terrorists as well as a struggle against narcotics traffickers. As a result, the United States overlooks the Colombian military's abuses against civilians -- notwithstanding Congress' demand that military aid be linked to human rights. Meanwhile, American politicians fear cutting military aid on human rights grounds because they do not want to appear to be soft on drugs. The story Kirk tells is not new, but she offers vivid touches rarely provided in most reports, stemming from her many years of research on the front lines. In effect, she concludes, the United States is fighting on both sides, "funding illegal arms with our purchases, and then fighting them with our charity." A depressing but vital contribution to the growing literature on Colombia's tragedy.

Baltimore City Paper
March 26, 2003

More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs, and America's War in Colombia
Review by Patrick Sullivan

What happens when paranoia reaches its perfect pitch? Here's how Robin Kirk describes it: "Contact was contamination and contamination was death. Had a store owner bought from or sold to a guerrilla? Death. Had a telephone exchange operator placed a call for a paramilitary? Death. Had a teenage girl danced with a teenage boy who happened to be an army recruit? Death."

Welcome to Colombia, where the War on Drugs meets the War on Terror--and where drugs and terror win every time, as Kirk vividly demonstrates in More Terrible Than Death.

With all eyes fixed on the Middle East and the Korean peninsula, it might seem an odd time to pick up a new book on a country that, for many Americans, is little more than the punch line to a coke joke. But poor, tortured Colombia--now in the sixth decade of a civil war involving leftist guerrillas, right-wing death squads, and an increasing number of U.S. military advisers--may be more relevant to world events than we realize.

Not that Kirk herself dabbles in such global speculation. Instead, More Terrible Than Death plunges readers into the gruesome specifics of life and death in Colombia, a country with the highest murder rate on Earth, a nation where, as the author explains, "no law but gravity holds true."

Indeed, some will fault More Terrible Than Death for being too specific, too episodic. Kirk is a human-rights investigator who spent a decade in Colombia, and she wrote this book because she had a head full of stories to tell. Part memoir, part analysis, part cry of frustration, More Terrible Than Death mixes Kirk's personal experiences with thumbnail accounts of important personalities, trends, and events. As the author herself admits, her slim volume can't possibly tell the full story of this half-century-old conflict. But she does pick out important threads and hold them up for our scrutiny. And she does it in a highly accessible, almost novelistic, manner.

Personality sketches are the book's greatest strength. Kirk introduces us to army officers, paramilitary killers, guerrilla leaders, a priest corrupted by narcotics, and teenaged assassins who boil up from the Medellín slums to kill on command. Of course, it's easy to wring exciting copy out of such cinematic characters. But Kirk does something harder: She makes them human, understandable, even sympathetic.

Many ordinary Colombians also appear here, including the immensely tragic Josué, the beleaguered human-rights lawyer who gave Kirk the title for this book when he told her that giving up on his country would be worse than death. "Although it may be hard for American news consumers to believe it," Kirk writes, "most Colombians are more like Josué than they are like Pablo Escobar, a better-known figure."

Unfortunately, more than a few of Kirk's people turn up later as corpses. That's only to be expected in a conflict in which all sides increasingly regard human rights and the rules of warfare as luxuries they can't afford. "Of the bodies found in Colombia, 90 percent show signs of torture," Kirk notes.

Yet More Terrible Than Death is far more than a catalog of atrocities. Kirk is more observer and investigator than analyst. But she does suggest reasons why this conflict is so bloody and intractable. And it's here that she will provoke outrage in some quarters.

As the book's subtitle suggests, substantial blame goes to the United States. Kirk carefully notes that America did not start this fire. What we have done is pour gasoline on the flames, in part by shooting, snorting, and smoking an estimated $36 billion worth of cocaine every year. Much of that money gets turned into bombs and bullets by the Colombian paramilitaries and guerrillas who increasingly control the drug trade.

But our government also fuels the conflict by pouring money and weapons and training into the Colombian military, with ever fewer restrictions on how these resources are used. Though U.S. aid to Colombia is often justified by the need to curtail the supply of illegal drugs, that rationale gets more threadbare every year. Our money and men help seize product, smash cartels, and hose down vast coca fields with dangerously potent herbicides. "Yet in 2002," Kirk writes, "the CIA reported that there was more land planted in coca than ever before in Colombia's history."

Moreover, we don't even really know where our money and guns end up, since, as Kirk convincingly demonstrates, Colombian army units and right-wing paramilitaries often work as partners in the bloody business of kidnapping, torturing, and killing suspected subversives. Indeed, this gruesome twosome has helped make an El Salvador-style negotiated solution to this conflict almost unimaginable through an utter disregard for truces and noncombatants. The guerrillas--themselves no strangers to murder and deal-breaking--understand that surrender equals death.

What does all this mean to a world currently fixated on al Qaida and Saddam Hussein? Kirk desperately wants us to care about Colombia for its own sake. But if we can't do that, perhaps we should at least see the country as an object lesson, an example of the worst possible outcome of waging a ruthless war against irregular combatants--whether they are Marxist guerrillas or Islamic terrorists. If war without rules is the wave of the future, she suggests, we may all wind up living in Colombia.

NACLA: North American Congress on Latin America
March 2003

BOOK REVIEW --
By Winifred Tate
More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs and America's War in Colombia
Robin Kirk, Public Affairs, New York: 2003
Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala
Daniel Wilkinson, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002

Human Rights Watch researcher Robin Kirk says her intention in More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs and America's War in Colombia is "to tell stories," the complicated, emotional and contradictory stories excluded from the legal-document format of human rights reports.

Daniel Wilkinson, in his book Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal and Forgetting in Guatemala, makes the absence of stories the central thread of his narrative: Guatemalans' refusal to talk about what was happening in their country during the waves of political violence from the 1950s to the present. Both books offer valuable and timely reflections on under-reported aspects of on-going conflicts in Latin America. Both highlight U.S. culpability in these conflicts. Kirk indicts U.S. drug use and failed drug policies for "provoking Colombia's home-grown demons" such as the rampant corruption and illegal armed groups that have become more violent as their ideology has faded.

Wilkinson uses the wealth of U.S. government documents declassified during the Clinton administration to examine the role of U.S. support for Guatemalan military regimes. In both accounts, the voices of a range of "local actors"-military officials, activists, guerrillas-are woven together with personal reflection and historical detail to offer compelling reading and raise timely questions: How do we ensure security for threatened civilians while guaranteeing human rights? How does the global economy link us to and exacerbate conflict? How does history shape how we think about and react to terror?

Kirk's book features dramatic, often funny and sometimes terrifying tales of her travels as a human rights researcher in Colombia. While her writing occasionally misfires-for example, while touring a garbage dump, one of her companions "swoon[s] like a sapling felled with an ax stroke"-her vivid style more often hits its target, capturing the sensory pleasures and trials of travels in small-town Latin America. The book is framed around the life and 1996 assassination of human rights activist Josué Giraldo. Kirk uses the origins of his activism in the doomed efforts of the 1980s to establish the independent-left political party, the Patriotic Union, to launch a swing through Colombian history. This is brought to life by incorporating stories from other, primarily Colombian, journalists and writers. Given the complexity and breadth of the ground she covers, there are necessarily many gaps in her fast-paced narrative. She does a remarkable job of synthesizing Colombian history for a U.S. audience, but her focus on the conflict leaves aside much of Colombian economic and cultural history.

Silence on the Mountain contains a more sprawling narrative that follows the author's attempts, through a series of research trips, to unearth events in one coffee plantation during the years of the Guatemalan war, an endeavor that requires extensive asides on the coffee economy, agrarian reform efforts and the role of international investment in Guatemala. The deeply detailed historical digressions, and the chronological presentation of the evolving narrative, means a slower and sometimes frustrating pace, but a fuller picture of the forces and actors in Guatemala's recent history.

Well written and wide-ranging, both books offer something to novice readers and Latin American experts alike. For those interested in further reading, Wilkenson's extensive sources listing for each chapter will provide more direction than Kirk's single general bibliography, but as she notes, English-language sources on Colombia are disappointingly slim.

Such engaging and reflective histories are particularly important as the United States faces a new generation of foreign policy challenges, and the public struggles to articulate a response. Understanding how the United States is linked to Latin America, through diplomatic and military ties as well as coffee and cocaine, is crucial. I lived in both Guatemala and Colombia during the 1990s, and found the difference in tone between the books striking. In Guatemala, I found the silence Wilkinson struggles with almost unbearable, while in Colombia I found a niche among an educated middle class that found ways to celebrate life and was anxious to share political views despite the ongoing war. Since then, the war in Guatemala has officially ended, with a peace settlement and Truth Commission, while the fighting in Colombia only becomes more entrenched. Silence on the Mountain concludes with a visit by the Guatemalan Truth Commission and a tone of cautious optimism; "at the very least, there was reason to hope that the silence of the last century would remain a thing of the past."

Kirk's book ends with the 1996 assassination of Giraldo as he played in his frontyard with his two daughters. As hopes for a negotiated settlement in Colombia-or any other kind of resolution-recede, it is hard to find any kind of optimism, even the cautious kind. We would do well to remember the complete phrase from which Kirk draws her title: when pressed to go into exile or give up his risky commitment to human rights, Giraldo would say, "to give up is more terrible than death."

Winifred Tate is a Ph.D. candidate at New York University currently writing her dissertation on political culture and human rights activism in Colombia. She is a former a Senior Fellow for Colombia at the Washington Office on Latin America.

Raleigh News & Observer
March 1, 2003

untitled book review
By James Varney

It’s not hard to identify flaws in the average American’s conception of Colombia. There are so many. The biggest may be the notion that the country is merely a combat-cratered hellhole. In fact, it’s a splendid place. Colombia is suffused with every appealing aspect of Latin America, from picturesque Colonial architecture to world-class modern art; from glorious forests and beaches to gregarious and polite people.

If you tried to identify flaws in Robin Kirk’s “More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs, and America’s War in Colombia,” your labor would be severe. It has so few. The only one catching my attention was a dearth of purple passages that give justice to the country’s beauty.

But then, Colombia’s beauty isn’t the focus of this book. Kirk, who lives in Durham and has monitored Colombia for Human Rights Watch, combines a scholar’s knowledge with a foreign correspondent’s fearlessness, to paint a harrowing portrait of the war and ensuing anarchy that has engulfed Colombia. Although Colombia’s civil war stretches back at least 50 years, Kirk shows how it has been fueled in recent years by American people’s appetite for marijuana and cocaine and their government’s “war” on drugs. Her compelling link between the horrors that grip Colombia and U.S. habits and policies adds a new moral dimension to the issue of drugs in America, suggesting that decriminalization may represent the path of principle.

And within those parameters — history, war stories, details on American involvement — the book proves immensely satisfying. Most important, it is sound in pitch. Too much about Colombia gets filtered through a polished partisan lens. Kirk, fortunately, has made a genuine effort to not play that game. That’s not to say she doesn’t have her political leanings, just that she doesn’t let them blind her. For instance, she tries with unnecessary vigor to find something redeeming in the decision made decades ago by the FARC’s supreme leader, Pedro Marin, now known as “Tirofijo,” or “Sure Shot,” to become a Communist and start killing people. And while describing her creepy personal encounter with Carlos Castaño, the confessed murderer who directs the paramilitaries, Kirk makes a somewhat less heartfelt attempt to humanize him. Anyone skimming chapters to find a political bias will seize on these and other instances to challenge her objectivity.

To which one can only say, forgo the skim and read the book for real because Kirk repeatedly circles back on an issue or key player and invariably gets it right. This circular storytelling is neither a dodge nor a political ax. Instead, she tries — and I believe succeeds — to unspool her tale the way it must have wrapped around her.

This sort of narrative redemption is rare in most politically themed nonfiction books, and almost unheard of in those dealing with the political minefield of Latin America. In part, that’s a credit to Human Rights Watch, for which Kirk labored on Colombian reports for years. Her book and those reports — unlike some produced by similar organizations with a lopsided and politically shaded focus on the reprehensible actions of the paramilitaries — stand out for their detailed condemnations of both left-and right-wing murderers. But it’s also a credit to Kirk’s own intelligence and experience.

What “More Terrible Than Death” hammers home is the truth that Colombia isn’t being torn apart by politically motivated groups. Ignore the shopworn altruism of guerrilla press releases and the shifting public relations tactics of paramilitaries. These groups battle on, creating an atmosphere in which neutrality is lethal, so they can get rich dealing drugs. The peace process, such as it is, fails less because of the parties’ incompatible visions than because a grotesquely permanent terror fits their needs. The message is clear: No amount of American military aid can stop Colombia’s war so long as America’s drug laws make the illegal drug trade so lucrative.

Kirk paints that overarching and unsettling truth subtly at first and with increasing anger as the book progresses. Her experience gives her big-picture findings heft, and her reputation among many seasoned Colombia hands is sterling. However, a good read is in the details and in that key area Kirk succeeds again. For example, she accurately captures not only the current mood and positions of most Colombians, but also the far-flung battlegrounds. In particular, I liked her descriptions of Puerto Asís, a dusty outpost far to the south where most of the cocaine bound for the U.S. originates.

Even more telling are her throwaway lines, such as, “the Miss Colombia pageant coincides with Colombia’s pre-Christmas massacre season,” or a casual mention that she, “has never been in Cartagena,” the Caribbean port many consider Colombia’s most beautiful city. There’s no reason for her to admit that. In less limpid hands it would stick out as a phony attempt to establish credibility, but in Kirk’s it underscores her sincerity.

Similarly, there is one outrageous moment when Kirk is interviewing military brass in Bogota. The close ties between the Colombian army and the paramilitaries moved past allegation long ago, but the generals nevertheless despise international human rights groups who highlight the bonds. In Colombia’s topsy-turvy universe, exposing such links equals tacit if not outright support for the guerrillas. When an ostentatiously devout general puts Kirk in that firing line, she tells him she believes heaven will offer her “sex with seventy of the handsomest men imaginable. Except, I added (thinking of the female virgins promised to suicide bombers), I hope they were experienced.”

But something about the remark, given the setting and topic, struck me as almost joyous. It’s funny, of course, and even brave, but more importantly it’s nothing a zealot would ever say. A zealot is a tiresome and ultimately unreliable guide, but the kind that prolonged exposure to a horrifying, internecine world like Colombia easily produces. Kirk never dons that mantle, and thus “More Terrible Than Death” soars above polemic and boredom. All it is is excellent.

James Varney covers Central and Latin America for the The Times-Picayune of New Orleans.

The Independent
May 19, 2004

Finding Some Truth in Colombia
By Jon Elliston

For most of the past half century, Colombia has been at war within itself, in a vicious conflict that is fueled from the outside by the money and prerogatives of the most powerful country in the world. The U.S. role in Colombia's turmoil is a central theme in Robin Kirk's More Terrible than Death: Violence, Drugs, and America's War in Colombia. Published last year, the book was released this month in paperback with a new epilogue.

Kirk, a former journalist who is now a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, lives in Durham and has spent much of the past decade in Colombia, where she's talked to all sides in the country's seemingly ceaseless civil war. Her analysis, while casting a close eye on the U.S. hand in events, focuses on the role of Colombians, who must be, she believes, the ones to craft a genuine peace.

Kirk's book may be English-speaking America's best chance at getting a grip on a conflict that can be confounding in its complexity. For decades, Colombia's Liberals and Conservatives, poor and rich, communists and capitalists, have waged bitter battles over resources and ideology. Heavy infusions of U.S. military aid have exacerbated the violence--but such aid is dwarfed, Kirk points out, by the billions Americans spend every year on Colombian cocaine. "Colombia can never truly find a peaceful existence until the United States finds a different way to deal with our own drug problem," she says.

In short, there are elements of truth in those ham-handed TV ads that suggest the drug trade bankrolls terrorist violence. But there's much more to it, Kirk says. What the ads don't mention is that Colombia's paramilitary death squads, which often work hand-in-hand with the U.S.-backed regular military, are largely financed by the coca bonanza. Nor do the ads note that the drug war itself is responsible for many of the costs, both in terms of dollars and human lives, and that the rhetoric and reality of the so-called "war against terrorism" could dump fuel on Colombia's fires.

The Nation
August 16, 2004

Latin America's Longest War
by Peter Canby

More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs, and America's War in Colombia - by Robin Kirk

Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia - by Steven Dudley

Inside Colombia: Drugs, Democracy and War - by Grace Livingstone

Loyal Soldiers in the Cocaine Kingdom: Tales of Drugs, Mules, and Gunmen - by Alfred Molano

Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia - by Michael Taussig

In May, Jan Egeland, the United Nations Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs, called a news conference in New York to declare publicly what he had been warning people about for some time: that the nation of Colombia had become "by far the biggest humanitarian catastrophe of the Western Hemisphere."

Chronic and intractable warfare among paramilitaries, the army, cocaine traffickers and leftist guerrillas has so wreaked havoc on the countryside that, Egeland pointed out, 2 million of its 36 million inhabitants had become refugees. This made Colombia the country with the largest number of displaced people after only Congo and Sudan. Many of the displaced, he went on to say, had fled to shantytowns on the outskirts of Colombia's cities, thereby joining a larger Third World flight of the rural dispossessed into poverty and despair on the edges of cities. In Colombia, refugees have settled in shantytowns like one outside Cartagena, where, Egeland noted, 10,000 people are "floating in a sea of sewage and garbage." With few prospects for either jobs or education, the young and the unemployed in these slums had turned to crime or become easy recruits as gunmen for left-wing guerrillas and rightist paramilitaries.

Colombia's problems are of long standing and are deeply tied into the country's tortured and violent history. They do not appear to be amenable to quick fixes--especially military ones. Colombia is already awash in guns. More and bigger guns aren't likely to bring the country's warring parties any closer to a peace accord. But over the past few years, while the world's attention has been transfixed by events in Iraq, the United States has become deeply involved in a military buildup in Colombia and is rapidly becoming more so. At present, the United States has some 400 military personnel in Colombia as well as another 400 of the increasingly ubiquitous civilian contractors. And in March the Bush Administration announced its intention to request authority from Congress to double the number of military personnel to 800 and raise the number of civilian contractors to 600. This is part of the Administration's effort to renew, in 2006, "Plan Colombia," a program under which the United States has already spent some $3 billion (more than 75 percent of it on military aid). On the eve of the Iraq war, Colombia was the third-largest recipient of American aid after only Israel and Egypt.

The goal of Plan Colombia is to stem the nearly $40 billion-a-year flow of cocaine to the United States, 80 percent of which comes from Colombia. In the aftermath of 9/11, glib analogies were made in Washington between cocaine, terrorism and Osama bin Laden. Colin Powell declared Colombian insurgents "terrorists with a global reach" and said they posed a threat to US interests. What had been strictly an antidrug campaign was thus, by a deft use of the terrorism trump card, transformed into a counterinsurgency campaign. But nothing is easy about cocaine in Colombia, and eradicating--even slowing--cocaine growth there is a formidable task. Indeed, if cocaine remains pervasive in Colombia, it's arguably because of the failure of American drug policies elsewhere in Latin America. Until the early 1980s, coca growing was largely confined to the Andean countries of Peru and Bolivia, where it is indigenous (and where its leaves are chewed to ward off hunger and exhaustion). But US-led eradication efforts in those countries led to the spread of coca production in Colombia, where it fuels several insurgencies that have grown to the point where they now control large swaths of Colombian territory.

In her eloquent and insightful book, More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs, and America's War in Colombia, Robin Kirk, Human Rights Watch's former Colombia researcher, notes that in Colombia, cocaine is a "marvelous, terrible thing. It defeats ideology, the United States, moral concerns, reason. It is a money-making whirlwind that simply anyone can ride." Certainly cocaine has been successfully ridden by FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), a peasant-based and largely peasant-led Marxist insurgency that is the hemisphere's oldest and most powerful revolutionary group. FARC's strength derives not from trafficking cocaine (although there are reports that it traffics to a small degree) but by taking a 10 percent protection fee from peasant supporters who grow coca. This adds up to a not inconsiderable amount of money. No one really knows how much, but there are reports that it approaches $500 million a year. This has allowed FARC to field a well-armed military force of up to 20,000 that, by the 1990s, had grown strong enough to fight pitched battles against, and sometimes defeat, the Colombian Army.

Arrayed against FARC is a loose consortium of paramilitaries known as Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC. The paramilitaries, sometimes referred to as the "armed wing of the middle class," initially arose in response to FARC's other major revenue stream--kidnapping. Before long, however, they developed close, unacknowledged ties to Colombia's military. Kirk quotes a Colombian officer who coyly likens the relationship between the army and the paramilitaries to that between a married man and his mistress: "One has one but doesn't bring her home to meet your family." But there is nothing light-hearted about the AUC, which during the 1990s waged a vicious war against real and imagined FARC sympathizers, often colluding with the army to cordon off towns and then committing gruesome, high-profile massacres of suspected FARC sympathizers using, in addition to the usual arms, chainsaws, axes and hammers. By most reports, the paramilitaries have become so involved in cocaine trafficking that they and the traffickers are essentially one and the same.

Plan Colombia was originally conceived in 1999 as a peace initiative on the part of then-Colombian president Andres Pastrana. In her concise, well-informed, and sharp-edged primer, Inside Colombia: Drugs, Democracy and War, Grace Livingstone describes how Pastrana's Plan Colombia was hijacked by the United States and transformed into the military program it has since become. This process was facilitated by the spectacular collapse of the Pastrana administration's larger peace initiative. As part of that plan, Pastrana granted FARC what was often referred to as a "Switzerland-sized" autonomous zone in the southern part of the country, a zone that had been largely controlled by the guerrillas anyway and soon came to be known as "Farclandia." The creation of Farclandia was supposed to impress the guerrillas with the seriousness of the government's desire for peace, but FARC somehow remained unimpressed, and the collapse of negotiations between FARC and Pastrana is usually attributed to uncooperative behavior on FARC's part. FARC representatives repeatedly failed to show up for negotiation sessions and, over the course of the peace process, killed the attorney general's wife (who also had a career as a popular folk singer), kidnapped a diplomat traveling in a UN vehicle and captured and executed the chair of the Colombian House of Representatives Peace Commission while he was on his way to negotiate with the guerrillas. FARC has a long history of political obstructionism, a tendency that may reflect what Alma Guillermoprieto described in the New York Review of Books as "the cocoon of isolation and paranoia that clandestinity generates."

But FARC's seeming political ineptness can also be attributed to an understandable skepticism about the Colombian government's intentions. Colombia has a long history of duplicity and betrayal toward FARC, the most dramatic example of which is described by Steven Dudley in Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia. Dudley's book tells the sad chronicle of the Unión Patriótica during the late 1980s and early '90s. The UP was FARC's attempt at a legal political party. Despite its candidates' considerable appeal, the government was unable or unwilling to protect them, and paramilitary death squads ruthlessly picked them off--even assassinating the party's popular presidential candidate in broad daylight at the Bogotá airport. This series of assassinations not only crushed the UP as a party but, by eliminating FARC leaders who might have had the flexibility to negotiate with the government, strengthened the militaristic and even Stalinist tendencies in FARC.

Since the mid-1960s, FARC has been led by a tough, wily, countryman named Manuel Marulanda, known as "Tirofijo," or "Sureshot." Tirofijo has long survived by force of arms and does not appear to have been unduly troubled by the massacre of the UP's leadership. But Tirofijo is well into his 70s, and there are published reports that he is suffering from prostate cancer. Despite this, FARC's militaristic tendencies are likely to prevail for the foreseeable future. Tirofijo's heir apparent is Jorge Briceño Suarez, known affectionately as "Mono Jojoy," a rotund, fair-skinned man who is said to be a military genius with little or no interest in politics. According to Kirk, he once explained to a journalist that "I was nothing when I was a civilian. I was created by weapons."

Throughout Pastrana's term in office, the paramilitaries grew enormously. Under the leadership of Carlos Castaño, a charismatic psychopath who never finished high school, the paramilitaries wrested control of the cocaine trade from the cartels and, like FARC, seized control of large sections of the countryside, particularly in the north. The zone of undisputed government control was reduced, in many ways, to the area around Bogotá, and FARC correctly perceived that whatever peaceful intentions the government might profess, its ability to restrain the paramilitaries was another matter. Such was the dissipation of the government's power by the end of Pastrana's term, writes Kirk, that a joke circulated around Bogotá that Pastrana was the best president Colombia ever had because "he was given one country and made it into three!"

In many ways, the ascendancy of the paramilitaries reached its logical conclusion with the election for a four-year term, in May of 2002, of the current president, Álvaro Uribe. Uribe is from a prominent ranching family and had been governor of Antioquia, a state at the very nexus of Colombia's cocaine trade. He was the undeclared candidate of the paramilitaries. His father had been killed by FARC and FARC twice tried to assassinate him during his campaign. For his promise of a military solution to Colombia's problems, Uribe came to be known as "Colombia's Ariel Sharon." He has been unreservedly supportive of every aspect of Plan Colombia, from strengthening the country's military to--especially--reducing the growth of coca.

Coca reduction is close to the heart of Plan Colombia. The United States has been involved in heavy, Vietnam-like aerial spraying of Colombia's coca fields. Guarded by a small fleet of Black Hawk and Huey helicopters, crop-dusting planes have sprayed hundreds of thousands of gallons of the herbicide Roundup Ultra (which has the EPA's highest toxicity rating), combined with a Colombian surfactant of unknown toxicity called Cosmoflux. The planes are piloted by independent contractors, eleven of whom have been killed and three of whom are being held captive by FARC. A few months ago, in connection with the campaign to renew Plan Colombia, the Bush Administration announced that in the year 2003 alone, spraying in Colombia had reduced the number of coca fields by 20 percent--this on top of a 14 percent reduction the previous year. Peasants in the spray zones have complained of respiratory problems, temporary blindness, the destruction of non-cocaine crops and the death of their farm animals, but no one seems much concerned. The spraying continues.

One of the reasons there has been so little outcry is that many of the fields being sprayed belong to Colombia's poorest peasantry and, not coincidentally, are effectively controlled by FARC. In the midst of the post-9/11 hysteria, the Bush Administration requested and received authorization from Congress to declare FARC a terrorist threat. It was thus able to extend the mandate of Plan Colombia to allow the United States to use its drug funds and helicopters in anti-FARC operations. Under Plan Colombia, moreover, the United States has set up an intensive intelligence-gathering operation on FARC and sought to both professionalize Colombia's army and get it out of the barracks, where it had traditionally spent most of its time. There's little question that FARC has taken a knock with all this. Some of its coca-growing territory has been wrested away by paramilitaries, and the paramilitaries have used some of this land to move in a significant way into growing coca. FARC's income base has clearly been affected. In January, moreover--with the help of American intelligence--its financial chief, a former banker from an aristocratic family named Ricardo Palmera, was captured in Ecuador, where he had gone to obtain medical treatment. There are reports that American intelligence has also succeeded in disrupting FARC's supply lines. Despite these setbacks, FARC is far from being defeated, and many people argue that, if anything, it has simply retreated into the rain forests to wait out the end of Uribe's term. The Colombian congress is currently considering a constitutional amendment that would allow a second Uribe term, but, barring this, the expectation is that his successor will follow the usual Colombian model and, as Robin Kirk puts it, "prove easier to intimidate."

Amid the same post-9/11 hysteria that allowed the Bush Administration to declare FARC a terrorist threat, however, human rights groups achieved a significant victory by having Colombia's paramilitaries similarly tagged. Since many of the paramilitary leaders are known cocaine traffickers--Castaño himself is under indictment and the United States is actively seeking his extradition--this was not a stretch legally. But what has been surprising is the degree to which Uribe has proven more complex than his pre-election characterization and has demonstrated a willingness to move against not just the guerrillas but also the paramilitaries. His approach to the paramilitaries, however, has been cautious. Uribe has offered an amnesty for those willing to serve a brief period of confinement, turn in their arms and pay cash fines. He has also, however, at the insistence of the United States, trained a special antiparamilitary brigade with the express mission of hunting down paramilitaries who persist in egregious human rights violations. To a certain degree this has resulted in kinder, gentler paramilitaries. There has been a discernible decline in paramilitary murders in Colombia--although this may be only the result of their having prevailed in many contested areas.

In the meantime, however, the paramilitaries have become deeply entrenched in the country's power structure. By some arguments they control 30 percent or more of the seats in Congress as well as a number of governorships. Some observers have even argued that Castaño could have been elected president had he not gone into hiding after being indicted by the United States. Given this kind of power, Uribe's amnesty offer has produced violent conflicts between those who effectively want to go straight and those who are reluctant to give up what Colombians call la vida facil--"the high life." In April, Castaño himself was ambushed by a group of his own lieutenants who apparently feared he was going to rat them out to the Americans. According to various reports, Castaño was either killed or somehow managed to flee into a US witness-protection program (which US authorities deny). In either case, he has disappeared, leaving the field free to his rival, Diego Fernando Murillo, known as Don Berna, a man who once took a giant step up the slippery cocaine slope by betraying his boss, Pablo Escobar. Don Berna (who was recently indicted by the United States for drug trafficking) has raised strong objections to Uribe's amnesty terms, insisting he will not accept extradition or spend a day in jail--a move that could sink Uribe's plans. Not long after Castaño's disappearance, Carlos Mauricio García, an AUC leader openly critical of Don Berna, posed a question to a New York Times journalist: "What could happen to me, that they kill me with a bigger bullet...or that they kill me several times?" Shortly afterward he was fatally shot while strolling on the beachfront in Santa Marta.

If cocaine has such a hold on Colombia, it is in large part because of what Grace Livingstone politely calls the "exclusionary character of the state," which has long been administered, both politically and financially, for the benefit of a wealthy minority. Colombian income inequality has only worsened over the past decade as Colombia, along with much of the rest of Latin America, has fallen for the folly of neoliberal economics. Today, almost 80 percent of Colombia's rural population fall beneath the poverty line, and 46 percent fall beneath what Livingstone refers to as the "indigence line," a line of extreme poverty beneath which "basic subsistence needs are not met." For a peasant living in such conditions, coca farming has a natural appeal. As Robin Kirk points out, cocaine in Colombia has been a "small entrepreneur's dream" and a great boon to peasants who have grown it, despite the havoc it has unleashed. Kirk argues that unlike gold, oil, rubber and other raw commodities that have historically been extracted from the region--the profits from which were often entirely retained by the wholesalers--cocaine has allowed peasants to hold on to some of the wealth they have created, just as tobacco has done for so many small farmers in the American South.

In Loyal Soldiers in the Cocaine Kingdom: Tales of Drugs, Mules, and Gunmen, the exiled Colombian writer Alfredo Molano makes a similar point. Molano's book consists of a series of populist portraits of the little people in the cocaine business--people who for the most part have gambled and lost, the sort of folks whom, as he puts it, "our compatriots would be happy to bury so as not to cause embarrassment at embassy cocktail parties." (Molano interviewed many of his subjects in prison.) Most are motivated by a desperate desire to escape the poverty that afflicts the vast majority of ordinary Colombians. In each case, cocaine offers the prospect of financial relief--of freedom, really, to use a word that President Bush seems to be unable to complete a sentence without. A man Molano refers to as Scuzzball, the son of peasants from the southern state of Putumayo, leaves home at the age of 13 because, as he puts it, "there's no life where we were living and it was time to go looking for it." Endowed with natural intelligence, Scuzzball becomes an artist at cocaine extraction and sets himself up as a chemist, hiring out his knowledge so that his fellow peasants can coax a little more product out of their coca bushes. Eventually, however, Scuzzball's entrepreneurial instincts lead him into trafficking. He is betrayed, and by the time Molano meets Scuzzball, he is doing time in a Bolivian prison in Cochabamba. "In Colombia," Scuzzball ruefully tells Molano, "it's we nameless people who moved [into the cocaine trade]...until those with nice last names started to ask us for help and little by little we gave it to them, and eventually we take them as partners in the business."

The situation is much the same for the poor of Colombia's slums. "The Mule Driver," another Molano character, describes the gamble taken by the "mules" who transport cocaine on airlines. The mules wrap the cocaine in condoms and swallow them. "If the rubber tears, you'll live a few hours; if it doesn't break but the police seize you, you'll spend eight years of your life behind bars; if you carry it off, you've laid the first layer of bricks that goes towards building a wall between you and poverty."

Molano doesn't romanticize this impulse, which is both corrupting and fraught with moral ambiguity. Colombia's legal products have never sold well enough either internally or in the United States to generate significant numbers of stable jobs. The few jobs that Colombia's globalized neoliberal economy has kicked up are low-wage and nonglamorous--offering little more than what Kirk refers to as "the cheap seat at the world's parade." By contrast, the cocaine business offers fabulous riches and far sexier possibilities--what Kirk describes as "integration through crime." Although for a person of few prospects it's a tempting line of work, it has obvious drawbacks. The Mule Driver, for example, starts as a poor liquor-store delivery boy infatuated with a rich girl--the daughter of the owner of a whorehouse. After he loses his job as the result of this infatuation, his brother tells him that the job was beneath his dignity anyway and advises him to get into cocaine. "Why should I have a 'job' that has me stooping to work at the beck and call of a boss," the Mule Driver argues to himself, "killing myself for a lousy salary that would never compensate me." Although he makes good money for a while, he ultimately gets betrayed by the girlfriend and winds up doing twenty-two years in a Madrid prison.

The Colombian cocaine trade is so pervasive that it threatens to turn the country into a collection of narco-run feudal statelets. The central ambition of Uribe's version of Plan Colombia may be to assert the primacy of the state in regions where it has seldom if ever been a factor. This depends on both defeating FARC and taming and integrating the paramilitaries.

But cocaine is a response to poverty, and it's highly unlikely that Uribe will be able to wean his compatriots off what Colombians call "the little parakeet" without some program to address the country's savage inequalities. Uribe has a plan of sorts--economic liberalization and a tight alliance with the United States. Unnoticed in the fuss surrounding the effort to renew Plan Colombia has been Uribe's project to negotiate a bilateral free-trade agreement with the United States. This would reduce Colombia's already small social-welfare programs and open the country up to more foreign investment. What would a country dependent on neoliberal economics and incorporating the new, more reasonable paramilitaries look like?

Michael Taussig offers a glimpse of the possibilities in his book Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia--limpieza being the term the paramilitaries use to refer to "cleansing" a region of its undesirable elements. Taussig, an anthropologist at the other Columbia (the one on the Upper West Side of New York City) has been doing fieldwork since 1969 in a small city in the Cauca River Valley, a few miles from Cali. Some time around the year 2000, a tax-free, free-trade industrial zone was established just outside town. In February of the following year, a group of paramilitaries move in, hired--Taussig's informants tell him--by the "town's business elite." In the 1990s, in other regions of Colombia, the style of the paramilitaries would have been to move into a town such as Taussig's, identify the supposed guerrilla sympathizers and massacre them all at once, thereby creating headlines and embarrassing human rights inquiries. But in the new millennium the paramilitaries operate in a more discreet fashion, and their enemies are no longer so much political as they are economic.

In Taussig's town, they move into El Cupido, a love hotel downtown, with computer lists helpfully provided by military intelligence and go about the work of cleansing the town of its delincuentes--"undesirables," a few at a time. Their victims include not so much leftists or even political activists but street people: kids who've had "problems with the law," beggars, a madwoman, prostitutes not affiliated with El Cupido and a young man who, drunk in the middle of town one evening, makes the mistake of yelling at the paras: Que salgan hijeputas--"get out of here, you sons of whores!" He's killed for his outburst and his body lies on the street all night because people are afraid to move it. In neighboring towns other paramilitaries ban long hair or earrings on men, miniskirts on women, baseball hats worn backward and a gay beauty contest. Life under the paramilitaries doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun.

Taussig's book is based on a diary he kept during two weeks he spent in the town in May of 2001 during the fourth month of its paramilitary reign. His most interesting discovery is the support the paramilitaries have in town. One of his informants tells him that eight of ten of the townspeople are for them. There's a reason for this. Until the 1950s Taussig's part of the Cauca River Valley was dominated by small peasant farms. In their river-valley plots, the peasants (descendants of former African slaves) grew cacao trees, plantain trees, banana trees, coffee trees, orange trees, lemon trees, avocado trees, papaya trees, guava trees and many other trees besides. The peasants thereby created a mixed harvest that mimicked the tropical rain forest, required no store-bought fertilizers, no pesticides, little labor, little capital and, perhaps most important, created a continuous, year-round income.

But, sometime in the 1950s, the sugar industry arrived. The peasant farms were plowed under and everyone went to work on the new plantations (for the ultimate benefit, as Taussig points out, of a few white-skinned families in Cali). At first there was plenty of need for labor, but then, as Taussig puts it, "chemicals and machines made the workers idle." By the time the paramilitaries arrived, a shantytown of the unemployed had grown at one end of town, a slum that became so unruly that the police were afraid to enter. With no prospects for education or work, the kids formed gangs and turned to crime. Gradually, the town fell victim to a youth-gang-based crime wave that it would apparently do anything to solve. Taussig happens upon a gang funeral and witnesses the anarchic violence, the fights, the boombox hip-hop, the weird (for provincial Colombia) fashion, and the weird (for provincial Colombia) hair-dos. He notes one of the kids wearing an English-language T-shirt that says: Death Is Nature's Way of Saying Slow Down.

In Taussig's town, he notes that the paramilitaries have also been recruited out of the ranks of the unemployed. Former soldiers unable to find other jobs dominate their ranks. The murder of the street kids--the children of other unemployed Colombians--is bad enough, but beneath this obvious terror, Taussig perceives a deeper kind of terror. What he sees is an economic "culture of terror" that afflicts everybody in the neoliberal world of his town. The principal arm of this culture of terror is unemployment. Neoliberalism is supposed to generate jobs and solve unemployment, but that's an act of faith, really, and not enough attention has been given to the possibility that it might just be the problem cruelly masquerading as the solution. Although each town in Colombia has its own logic, Taussig makes a convincing case that in this new Colombia, "like the plants that went under, like the forest that disappeared, human nature as much as nature is facing a brave new world for which there is no history or pre-history."

In These Times
May 9, 2003

The Supply and Demand for Colombia’s Misery
By Ana Carrigan

Robin Kirk’s thoughtful and provocative book about Colombia, More Terrible Than Death, raises long overdue questions about America’s shared responsibility for that country’s descent into chaos. Kirk, who has spent 10 years documenting Colombia’s catastrophic human rights situation for Human Rights Watch, does not argue that the United States is responsible for all Colombia’s ills. But her assertion that Washington’s “single-minded focus on eliminating drugs at the source” has fueled, expanded and exacerbated Colombia’s spiraling brutality is based on factual observations on the ground and intimate knowledge of the ways both governments—in Washington and Bogotá—give the runaround to human rights rules intended to protect civilians.

We know the facts about Colombia’s tragedy—or we think we do. We’ve been exposed to numbingly repetitive horror stories, inundated by statistics, debates and official statements that use words to say the opposite of what they mean. (How many times have we heard that the billions of dollars in U.S. military aid for the Colombian army are necessary to “preserve that country’s democracy and support human rights”?) By now, we believe we know who is responsible for Colombia’s mayhem: All the havoc is the fault of the FARC guerrillas; or the paramilitaries; or the elites; or the army; or the drug traffickers. It has nothing to do with us.

Yet the big picture, the beauty of the country, the diversity and richness of its culture, the intelligence of its people and their extraordinary capacity for recuperation, these elude us. It is hard to care about a place we don’t understand, particularly when our only images are the interminably familiar ones of destruction and death. Faced with a humanitarian catastrophe on a scale hitherto unknown on this continent, we retreat into catch-all myths: Colombia, we say, suffers from a “culture of violence; “Colombians are incapable, or unwilling, to staunch the blood-letting”; Colombian history, it seems, has been marooned interminably in a cyclical, tropical bloodbath. Unable to find any good guys to root for, we have long ago told ourselves that the complexities and contradictions of Colombia’s overlapping wars are too difficult to decipher. Convinced that Colombia is hopeless, we have ceased to care.

But Robin Kirk has mapped the connections that link Americans’ $46 billion- a-year spending spree on cocaine and heroin to the monumental fraud of Washington’s 20-year-old war on drugs, and to the cash that flows straight into guns and paychecks for the killers in Colombia. She challenges us to wake up and acknowledge our responsibility. “The point of this book,” she writes, “is to lay bare the context of what lies behind and within America’s war on drugs in Colombia and show how the United States, through its consumer habits and official policies, has provoked Colombia’s home-grown demons. ... What looms in Colombia is more than a familiar tale of Latin corruption and savagery. ... We watch as if it had nothing, really, to do with us. Yet it does, intimately. Our failed policy—dramatically failed, epically failed, and failing with a numbing, annual frequency—is largely responsible.”

Colombians, in other words, have not made the long journey into today’s bloody morass on their own. Tracing the origins of U.S. intervention in Colombia, she resurrects the history of Washington’s first involvement, triggered when an enraged Bogotá mob torched official buildings in the aftermath of the 1948 assassination of Liberal leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. All it took to draw Washington into the middle of the local rivalry between those whom Kirk describes as the “Capulets and Montagues of the Andes,” was for the Conservative president of the day to charge that “a movement of communist inspiration and practices” had inspired the rioters. Overnight, a chaotic and leaderless insurrection in Bogotá had morphed, in American eyes, into the latest sinister example of Russian ambitions to export world revolution. In the days that followed, the pattern of American military support for compliant Colombian leaders took shape.

Ancient history? Colombia’s leaders have been mining American security obsessions to gain Washington’s military largesse ever since. In 1990, when a 40-year-old insurgency was recast from the Cold War mold to the drug war, the fighting didn’t miss a beat. Suddenly, Kirk recalls, the word “narco-guerrilla” was everywhere, “a magic spell that would ease millions out of the American treasury.” In 55 years, only the language changes: “Marxist guerrilla,” “narco-guerrilla,” or “narco-terrorist,” it’s still the same FARC. “Without the American obsession,” Kirk asks, “would there have been a FARC? An Escobar? A Mapiripán?” The question is rhetorical, but it opens a creative space for some new thinking.

In her work for Human Rights Watch, Kirk’s meticulously factual human rights reports consistently provided a credible source of information for other writers and reporters. Now, Kirk has finally written about her own emotional and intellectual journey during those years. Set against the backdrop of recent Colombian history, she combines personal reflections with the profiles of friends and public figures whose lives reflect the larger issues of war, poverty and drugs that are tearing Colombian society apart. Kirk excels in these portraits. A case in point is her profile of the early career of the man she insists on calling by his real name—Pedro Marin. Marin is none other than the 70-year-old leader of the FARC, whom the world knows only by his nom de guerre, “Manuel Marulanda”—or, sometimes, “Tiro Fijo,” “Sure Shot.” Kirk has given Marin back his complexity and humanity; a rare achievement and an essential one if we ever hope to understand his country’s history.

It is the stories of Kirk’s anonymous colleagues and friends, however, that bring us closer to the fragility of life in a society teetering at the edge. These ordinary Colombian citizens, trying to live ordinary, everyday lives, in ordinary places, can never know at what moment an abyss will open at their feet. As we get to know their stories, woven into the larger narrative of their nation, we realize that they are trapped on a path that leads, unerringly, into fatal collision with the impact of U.S. drug policies on Colombian lives.

And then there is Josué.

Josué Giraldo Cardona is a provincial lawyer. He is married and he has two young daughters. Josué loves his family. He loves his life, and he lives it to the full. He loves his country. Though he has traveled and has influence and friends abroad, Josué cannot imagine living anywhere else on this planet. Josué is an idealist. He is an optimist. He believes change is possible in Colombia, and he will not stop trying to make that change happen. He cannot stop. Josué cannot live without hope. “Josué had his own opinions about why Colombians fight,” Kirk explains. “This was it: Colombians do not believe that another way is possible, that life can be different. It was a lack of imagination. It was the absence of faith. You had to believe, as Josué did, that something else was possible on the earth, at the precise place where he had been born and raised, which he believed to be the most beautiful spot life offered. If someone or many someones stand up and point to another path, and convince others, then perhaps change is possible.”

Josué is dead now. Like all the murders in Colombia, Josué’s was a death foretold. Death in Colombia is never senseless, nor random. There is always a reason, always logic, behind each death, and Josué knew he was going to die and why. Josué was killed because he was working for peace and justice, and because he never stopped believing that a new and different Colombia was possible. Josué knew what he would need to do to escape his death. Most of the time, when the death threats start, Colombians have time to leave the country and go into exile. Kirk tried to persuade Josué to take that route, but he would not. He had made his choice. He had decided that death was not the most terrible thing. Giving up, living without hope—that, Josué told Robin Kirk, frightened him more.

Josué’s spirit haunts Kirk’s writing. With his help, she has transcended the North-South, Anglo-Latino cultural barrier to come closer than any other American writer to Colombia’s complex, seductive and paradoxical reality. Kirk might be describing her own experience when she writes of an American colleague: “[He] had been infected by the passion that seizes many who visit, seduced by Colombia’s beauty, the intelligence of its people, and their sense of fun and life in the midst of so much death. Rumba and death, joy and the end of days.”

It is impossible to read this book and come away with one’s view of Colombia unchanged.