Harper's Magazine
Dec, 2000

MIRACULOUS FISHING.(Colombia's drug war)

Author/s: Patrick Symmes

Lost in the swamps of Colombia's drug war.

Bomb dogs would stop around my hotel in the capital every few nights. Usually it was a pair of handsome German shepherds, eager warriors who padded through the lobby, dreaming of biscuits and sniffing for cordite. The hotel was located in Bogota's red-tiled neighborhood of La Candelaria, where the Street of Sighs passes that of Hope, and because it was just two blocks from Colombia's congress there were always men in the bar who needed protection. I waited out these nocturnal sweeps in a little plaza across the street, buying plastic cups of aromatica, a tea made of lemongrass, honey, and lime juice. This keeps you warm in a city set at 8,500 feet, where the wet, penetrating fog is almost perpetual.

On my left was the house where Colombia's first president, Simon Bolivar, survived an assassination attempt thanks to his mistress. She tossed him from a second-floor window, followed by his sword, and then his pants, and she stalled the conspirators for a few precious seconds. Meanwhile the father of his country sprinted up this very street, retreating into the night with the last tatters of Colombian idealism clutched to his privates.

While the dogs sniffed each car in front of the hotel, there was time to discuss the news of the week with the aromatica vendor: a nun had killed another nun a few blocks from here, then chopped the body into pieces and burned them.

Americans usually don't wander the streets of Bogota at night. When a lame-duck President Clinton came to Colombia last August, he avoided the capital entirely for the safer precincts of Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast. Clinton was shepherded through his eight-hour visit by 5,500 Colombian troops and 350 U.S. agents, with four frigates and eighteen patrol boats standing by. He pronounced his support for Colombian democracy in the form of a billion-dollar "anti-drug" aid package that came with as many as 500 military trainers and sixty helicopters attached. Reflecting the relative strength of aerospace lobbyists and their captive congressional delegations, that $400 million fleet is divided between Texas-made Huey troop transports, a la Vietnam, and Connecticut-made Black Hawk gunships, a la the Gulf War. This aid, Clinton vowed, would accomplish what every previous initiative in the drug war has failed to do: reduce the supply of drugs in America while increasing their price.

This venerable logic was torpedoed only a week later, when police discovered that Colombian drug smugglers were building a sophisticated double-hulled submarine that could slip 200 tons of cocaine right under the keels of American policy. The Colombian guerrillas who benefit from the drug trade are also, already, adapting to America's thoughtless intervention in a messy civil war that kills some 3,500 people a year. They have been fighting for decades, under different names, in different parts of the countryside. Today there is the ELN, which has about 5,000 men and is often called "Cuban-inspired" in the U.S. media. But the real threat is the much larger guerrilla army called FARC, which now earns about $250 million each year from taxing the cocaine business. After almost forty years of unsuccessful warfare, FARC is suddenly flush with cash, weapons, and recruits. It has 17,000 soldiers, has kicked the government out of huge swaths of territory, and has come within thirty miles of Bogota twice. FARC has already announced that it will match the increased American aid by the simple project of kipnapping more Colombians for ransom. The escalation of the war will generate hundreds of thousands of new refugees, while driving many of them into the arms of our enemies. Colombia produced 570 tons of cocaine in 1999, almost 70 percent of the world's supply. But if, to some small degree, the Clinton plan succeeds here, then drug production will simply balloon elsewhere, as already happened after drug war successes in Peru and Bolivia. All these omens of failure have been duly noted in the New York Times and in the halls of Congress, but we sleepwalk steadily forward, driven by the needs of helicopter manufacturers and pothead politicians eager for bona fides in a moral crusade.

The drug war now enters into the relentless logic of escalation. Helicopters need crews and mechanics, who in turn need trainers; trainers need guards; when guards die, more guards are needed. This is always how it starts. Colombia isn't Vietnam in 1965; it is closer to Vietnam in 1955, when America's wise men offered military aid, not civil reform, and shipped ammunition, not electoral monitors. The course of action we set now will close off future options and lead, inexorably, to next year's events, and then those of the year after that. We have tactics without strategy and short-term goals without any endgame. This is the exact scenario for failure described by Barbara Tuchman in The March of Folly, her pioneering work on policy disasters across the centuries. Like British generals in 1776, or American generals in 1966, we have fatally misunderstood the nature of the enemy we are fighting.

It was my intention, arriving on April Fools' Day, to find the guerrillas and gauge their intentions and capabilities against the eight-hour rhetoric of Washington. But as a pathfinder on this march of folly, I was off to a poor start. Sitting in the plaza on different nights, sipping lemongrass while the dogs lingered curiously over tires, I would watch for the city below, always hoping the fog would lift long enough to show me something, to give me a landmark or a point of reference. On some nights the cloud base would rise up, just a few hundred feet, and I could glimpse the sprawling capital, with remote streetlights marking the dark avenues as they ran out toward the slums. There was a hint of distance, of scale and perspective, of the three great Andean ranges that splinter this country into inaccessible valleys and centuries of solitude, but after only a moment the fog would drop down again like a cloak.

I never did see the mountain peak located right behind the hotel.
Not even once.

You might think it difficult or even dangerous to study the wily and elusive Latin American guerrilla in his natural environment, but all you need to do is take a regularly scheduled flight into southern Colombia, and then hire the taxi driver who shouts, "Do you want to meet the guerrillas ? I can take you there."

Indeed he can. Within minutes of landing, I am deposited in a small cement office on the plaza of a flat Amazonian town in the heart of a 17,000-square-mile chunk of terrain that belongs to FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The government has actually ceded this land to the guerrillas, partly as a peace gesture, partly in recognition of the reality that FARC has controlled most of this area since the late 1960s. Known officially as the Zone of Disarmament, and unofficially as FARClandia, this sanctuary is the size of Switzerland. FARC is equally gigantic, equipped with the latest small arms and a decent supply of (homemade) artillery; the rebels are rumored to have surface-to-air missiles and even a couple of helicopters. They have been fighting continually since 1964; their top commander, known as Sureshot (alias "Manuel Marulanda Velez," born Pedro Antonio Marin), has been leading one guerrilla group or another in this terrain since 1956. Apparently Sureshot hasn't been to a city for three decades.

The cement office on the town plaza is inhabited by several guerrillas dripping with weapons and run by a silent female guerrilla in camouflage pants and a spotless white T-shirt. I tell her that I want to ask guerrilla leaders how they will fight this U.S. escalation, and whether they would ever surrender their de facto control over cocaine production. She makes no overt promise of help. The government and FARC are about to embark on another round of delicate peace negotiations, and things are "hot," the usual Colombian euphemism for any form of difficulty. Messages will be passed, she concedes, but action itself is too much to promise. Instead, she sits me in front of a VCR and plays a tape of some guerrillas dancing salsa. Then there's another tape of the guerrillas cooking and cleaning up, building an oven, and standing around in the jungle. Then she puts in another tape, this one of some FARC music videos. The singer is a guerrilla named Juan, who became popular around the campfires and now has his own music videos. Quite a few of them, in fact: I am forced to watch half an hour of Juan, strutting in the jungle with his actual platoon dancing behind him, a dozen men and women in green uniforms, their rocket launchers swiveling back and forth, the heavy M60 machine guns never slowing down the boogie, the bullets and grenades jiggling and bouncing in time with Juan's lip-synching of his own songs.

The peace talks are supposed to take place at something called the Peace Table, which is located near a village called The Wells (Los Pozos), deep in southern FARClandia. The discussions don't start for several days, but the leading comandantes are already out there, so I decide to take things into my own hands. I find the same cabbie--a shifty veteran who looks like he would die if he told the truth--and we depart at first light. I'm confident the journey is safe, if only because so many have been down this road before. Following the example of Colombian business leaders, both Richard Grasso, CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, and James Kimsey, cofounder of AOL, have journeyed to FARClandia to meet guerrilla leaders and open their eyes to the miracles of capitalism. On the other hand, both these men had invitations. The road expires right outside town, and we bounce along a track of mud and gravel in a gray fog that seems to have followed me from Bogota.

Trees loom out of the distance, but not many. The jungle here has been clear-cut for cattle. I'm looking over the fields when I feel the cabbie tense up and move his foot back and forth between the gas and the break without touching either. We are coasting.

On the other side of the road, just visible through the dense mist, are about fifty FARC guerrillas, standing in two loose platoons. Their uniforms are all solid green and neatly matched. Their black webbing looks brand-new. The Galil rifles--Israeli guns, used by all sides in this war--are clean. The guerrillas have plenty of grenades and amino. They are all wearing machetes in elaborately tooled sheaths. Colombians don't fight without machetes.