Robin Kirk understands the situation in Colombia too well to believe that human rights abuses would end even if America could be persuaded to abandon its disastrous drug war. Yet she also knows that there is no hope so long as the behemoth of the north continues to pour enormous resources into Colombia both to acquire drugs and to try to destroy them.
Mono Jojoy is preparing for Christmas, so he approaches the nearest church to make his gift request. In Colombia, children leave requests for presents with the Virgin Mary, who then delivers them to the Baby Jesus. In his note, Mono Jojoy describes his behavior as excellent. He asks for a bicycle. But the Virgin Mary glares. Mono Jojoy has to start over. “I have been trying to be good,” he writes, “and I want a bicycle.” The Virgin continues to glare. He revises his note again and again, each time revealing more of the true nature of his behavior. Nothing works on her. Finally, Mono Jojoy tosses off a sentence and throws it at the Virgin Mary’s feet. “Unless you give me a bicycle,” the note says, “you’ll never see the Baby Jesus again.”
Kirk is unenthusiastic about those who try to simplify the complexities of Colombia by talking about a “culture of violence,” but the joke she reports aptly illustrates why it is difficult for those who know the country less well than she does to think about it except in such reductionist terms. It is a country that endured some 200,000 killings involving extremes of cruelty that seemed to reflect a competition in savagery in a period, beginning in 1948 and lasting until 1962, that is known as La Violencia; and that has spawned an academic discipline, hardly known elsewhere, of “violentologists.” Today’s many-sided conflict in Colombia has roots in the grievances of those who suffered in that period. Yet it is a conflict sustained and nourished by America’s insatiable appetite for the contraband drugs that are grown and processed in Colombia, and by our spectacularly expensive, ineffectual and counterproductive effort to solve our demand for drugs by destroying and interdicting the supply.
For more than a decade, Kirk has monitored the human rights situation in Colombia for Human Rights Watch. It is difficult and dangerous work, which she does with consummate professionalism. Her work also has a tragic dimension because she admires many of the Colombians she gets to know and establishes strong personal ties to them. Yet she cannot protect them. As we apprehend from the moment we encounter one of her Colombian collaborators, Josué, on the opening page of her book, by the time the books closes he will fall victim to the violence. As in the famous Gabriel Garcia Marquez story, his is a death foretold.
I have a little grasp of the frustration Kirk must feel because of my own limited experience in Colombia in an earlier era. Some two decades ago, in the course of my first visit to Colombia on behalf of Human Rights Watch, I met with one of the characters cited in Kirk’s book, Fernando Landazábal Reyes, then the Minister of Defense. General Landazábal had been selected for that post by the armed forces themselves. In discussing with him human rights abuses committed by his forces, and by a shadowy group known as MAS (Muerte a Secuestradores, Death to Kidnappers) that seemed to be tolerated by his forces, I mentioned to Landazábal certain U.S. laws that required sanctions against governments that practice gross abuses of human rights. The Minister of Defense was not impressed. “We fought with you in Korea,” he told me. “I fought with you in Korea. We fought with you in Vietnam. We have always been your most reliable ally.” He knew full well that the United States would not be so moved by a report I might publish so as to take any action. General Landazábal didn’t need to add that America would hardly allow human rights abuses to stand in the way of assistance to armed forces that seemed to be the antagonists of both left wing insurgents and drug lords.
Another frustration I encountered in dealing with Colombia was that it seemed to me almost impossible to mobilize public sentiment against those who commit atrocities because of the number of groups that are responsible. Unfortunately, the proliferation of groups that engage in abuses has become a characteristic of conflicts in several parts of the world. It greatly complicates the task of those who rely on documentation and dissemination of information to generate pressure to curb abuses.
Robin Kirk understands the situation in Colombia too well to believe that human rights abuses would end even if America could be persuaded to abandon its disastrous drug war. Yet she also knows that there is no hope so long as the behemoth of the north continues to pour enormous resources into Colombia both to acquire drugs and to try to destroy them. Her book is an important and a moving account of how America’s inability to solve one of our great domestic problems keeps another country inextricably mired in its own tradition of violence.
Neier is president of the Open Society Institute
