The cycle of violence extending to this day started on April 9, 1948 with the assassination of Liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. Despite being a bourgeois-democrat, he had managed to mobilize even the lowest-level masses and was a clear winner in the presidential election. Immediately after the assassination, a people's rebellion known as "Bogotazo" erupted. For three days the masses held control of Bogota. At the same time, a conference to establish the Organization of American States (OAS) was being held in a luxury hotel (the head of the American delegation was none other than General George Marshall, famed author of the Marshall Plan for Europe) that soon found itself under siege from the total chaos and massive destruction outside.
Another conference was also underway in Bogota. This was the Congress of Latin American Students -- a gathering of groups of students representing a democratic and nationalist line opposed to the establishment of the OAS. When the "Bogotazo" erupted, however, the Congress was also immediately caught by surprise in the swirl of events.
Heading the Cuban delegation to the Student Congress was 22-year-old Fidel Castro. Fidel tried to participate in the defense of the people, but he realized that a true resistance was in reality impossible to organize, since the people didn't have a clear alternative project and were then, following the murder of Gaitan, also deprived of leadership. Later Fidel summarized his recollections of the event in an interview with Colombian reporter Arturo Alape, which was afterwards published as a book. Fidel was deeply impressed by the power of the masses, but also by their tragedy of not having something clear to defend.
The outcome of the Bogotazo was the usual: The elites quickly regained the strategic offensive and went ahead with their customary brutal repression. Gaitán's murder was never cleared. And the Organization of American States finally got established, later receiving the ironic continental nickname of "The U.S. Department of Colonies."
Pretty much the repetition of Bogotazo was the 1989 "Caracazo" against the wild neoliberal policies of then President of Venezuela Carlos Andres Perez. "Caracazo" led to the emergence of Hugo Chavez and HIS project, which began with the ideological task of recovering Bolivar's true ideals by ripping the Liberator's name off the aristocracy's saloons. (The 1991 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles represented much the same thing, as did very probably, too, the Watts neighborhood riots of 1964.)
Returning again to Colombia: Its guerrillas emerged in the 1950s to provide protection to the peasants and working people against a reign of total lawlessness disguised as "democracy" and "rule of law." As decades passed, coffee exports were becoming increasingly mixed up with drugs. The drug lords penetrated the "legal" aristocracy and the State apparatus, which gave rise also to the right-wing paramilitary bands that, under the familiar excuse of "fighting communism," kept on expelling peasants from the last piece of land by means of full-blown genocide.
Colombia, meanwhile, continued to be formally ruled by "democratically elected" presidents. (One of them entered history with a really cool phrase: "Corruption must be reduced down to its just proportions."!) The army and the police were either not acting at all, or were doing so along with the paramilitary. Justice was corrupt, and was letting it all happen.
Internal terrorism reached its peak with Pablo Escobar, who came to amass a fortune worth billions of American dollars. TeleSur is now broadcasting the documentary series "The Victims of Pablo Escobar." It recounts the "select" killings of the few remaining honest public officers and reporters, as well as the sheer terrorism perpetrated against civilians: A civilian plane was brought down with a bomb and car-bombs in the middle of the street in broad daylight, just to show off Escobar's power. Another Liberal presidential candidate, Luis Carlos Galán, was killed right in the middle of a campaign appearance for proposing the idea of an Extradition Treaty with the U.S.A. A left-wing movement, the Patriotic Union (the UP), which proposed a re-foundation of the country, was totally wiped out, the toll including six presidential candidates killed in a single campaign and thousands of members over just a few years. (The UP has just now re-appeared, however, and plans to participate in elections this year). Finally, two guerrillas who signed peace agreements in the late "80s in exchange for entering political life as parties, were massacred once disarmed. (It was for this reason that FARC and ELN, the two remaining guerrillas, didn't take the same bait back then.)
Pablo Escobar was finally killed by the President Cesar Gaviria, but the paramilitary inherited everything. FARC embarked on peace talks with the President Pastrana, but the talks dragged out to near the end of Pastrana's presidency, which was constitutionally limited to a single term of only four years. A few months before the conclusion of his term, Pastrana abruptly ended the peace talks, causing horror for everyone from the lower middle-class upwards. A fanaticism for "security" followed, which resulted in the election of Uribe, whose father had long before been killed by a guerrilla. Once in office, Uribe's government, with support from his acolytes in the congress, waged war against the guerillas and pardoned the paramilitary for the massacres they committed.
The violence of the Uribe administration was accompanied by corruption. The President's entire family was investigated for drugs, which gave rise to the term "narco-politics" in Colombia. One investigation after another was started and then blocked. One of the generals complained in public that the army's involvement in massacres against civilians was "damaging the army's prestige." Despite all this, two Pentagon generals appeared before the U.S. Congress to defend Uribe as a "firm freedom fighter," and argued for continuation of the anti-drug "Colombia Plan."
According to a report prepared at the request of Joseph Biden, then Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, the Colombia Plan had been a failure. FARC accused the Plan of being not anti-drug, but counter-insurgent. Colin Powell called on Hugo Chavez to subject himself to a presidential recall referendum that was going to take place in Venezuela anyway, and at the same time pronounced himself in favor of Uribe's re-election in Colombia. In the end, Uribe was re-elected through a modification of the Constitution (effected by the congress, not via referendum) and, again, by his reputation for "exemplary security policy." It was Chavez who got the blame for the still incomplete defeat of the guerrillas. Uribe had gathered with Chavez several times to discuss bilateral relations, despite which the right-wing Colombian paramilitary planning to kill Chavez got arrested in Caracas. (In 2006, Chavez also expelled the DEA, accusing it of being "a drug cartel.")
The Role Played by Drugs
Coca is a medicinal plant with so many properties that it alone can sustain an entire economy. It can be used in refreshment drinks that are driving "Coca-Cola" out of the market in Bolivia, in "legal" medicines, in soap, etc. Still, coca remains "small potatoes" as an economic factor compared to illegal drugs. Within a year after Evo Morales expelled the U.S. Ambassador Goldberg, the DEA, and Usaid from Bolivia in 2008, the capture of illegal drugs in the country had tripled despite the legalization of coca for traditional uses.
Colombian peasants who grow coca for drugs do so out of the need NOT JUST for money, but specifically for dollars. An economy that isn't involved in "developing the underdevelopment," as Andre Gunder Frank described it over 45 years ago, needs protectionism for a critical period of time, so that it can develop an internal market with its own sound and stable currency that is equal to successful counterparts in the fully industrialized world. "Free trade," on the other hand, destroys "legal" industries in Third Word countries and thus pushes their national currencies down to ratios of thousands for a dollar. This, along with the property structure inherited from the époque of the colony, ruins peasants, workers and artisans, pushing them into crime. (That is how underdevelopment basically works: People live on crime when all other options get exhausted. Career criminals, by contrast, cut deals with "legal" elites and are allowed to thrive instead of being prosecuted.)
As part of the alleged "anti-drug" "Colombia Plan," even carrots and lettuce grown by peasants for subsistence were fumigated and exterminated, making Colombia home to the largest number of internal refugees in Latin America. Property titles formally delivered by Uribe ended up under the boots of the paramilitary, who became the new drug lords while also serving the interests of land owners growing "legal" crops (coffee). Uribe didn't care. Rafael Correa, President of Ecuador, ended the lease of the Manta base to the Pentagon, but Uribe and the Pentagon soon after pulled seven American military bases into Colombia. Uribe's Minister of Defense Santos (co-owner with his brother of Colombia's biggest newspaper) bragged about being the brains behind an operation in which the new chief of FARC was killed. For reasons that are still unclear, it turned out that the FARC chief's camp was a few meters into the territory of Ecuador. In any case, since some foreign students of the Social Sciences also got killed in the operation, but were identified by Uribe and Santos as "terrorists killed in action," Colombia and Ecuador suffered a temporary break in relations.
After the electoral authority of Colombia finally closed down the possibility that Uribe could run in a third election, Santos won the election as Uribe's candidate. At the time, there were rumors of joint American-Colombian open aggression against Colombia's neighbors, Venezuela and Ecuador. Santos, however, surprisingly cooled off, repairing relations with both Venezuela and Ecuador, starting new peace talks with FARC (now in progress in Havana, Cuba), and distancing himself from Uribe to the point of triggering brawls between the two (at least in public). American troops, apparently destined to be deployed in the largest of the seven American bases then in Colombia, finally landed in Costa Rica. (Costa Rica doesn't have an army of its own, but has instead seven police bodies that are trained mostly in The School of the Americas, "The School of Assassins," where all the criminals of Central and South American regimes were trained.)
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