Kim Woods Only

N THE FORTY.SECOND AND LAST YEAR OF HIS LIFE, CHANCE handed Alvaro Medina, a justice of the Superior Court of

Mcdellin, Colombia, a case that would eventually require him lo indict Pablo Escobar, the most important cocaine trafficker in lhc world. Other fudges in Medellin had faced this dilemma lrcfore. Doing nothing would make a judge rich and greatly im- prove his chances of living a long life. Issuing an indictment, on llrc other hand, would be a futile gesture, there being no chance, rrone at all, that there could be found police who would arrest I'lscobar, or witnesses who would testify, or jailers who would lrold him. Since the late 1970s, when Escobar became the head ol'the Medellin traffickers, every judge confronted with this di- lcrnma had made the only rational choice. Until Alvaro Medina irrdicted Pablo Escobar.

'l'he case, which reached Medina in 1984, was part of a chain ol:cvents that started in 1976, cocaine's Stone Age, with the biggcst cocaine bust in Medellin that year: thirg-nine pounds of tlrc drug found in the spare tire of a huck driven by one Pablo l,lscobar, age twenty-seven. Escobar was a small-time hood who lrgan his professional career by stealing gravestones, erasing the irrscriptions, and reselling them at a discount. Later he became ir t:irr thief. Now he was trying something new, cocaine. Escobar wt'rrl to jail for three months. In I981, after Escobar was again irl llrgc, thc two policemcn who arrcsted him in 1976 were killed. 'l'lrc jtrdgc invcstigating thc policcrncn's nrurclcrs clroppccl the t'irst: irftcr shc rcccivcd dcath tltrcitts, llrt it was rcopcucd latcr.

24 I Curr-DREN oF CnrN

After seven more judges had dropped the case , it reached Gustavo ZtJruaga, a justice on Medina's court, who mounted a serious investigation. Zuluaga was repeatedly threatened, and on fanuary 18, 1984, a man in a cab stopped Zuluaga's wifc as she drove home one morning from bringing her husband to his office. He beat her with the butt of his revolver, stole her car, and pushed it off a cliff. It was this crime-the beating and intimidation of Zuluaga's wife and the destruction of her car-that Medina was investigating.

There was little unusual about the case. It was typical of the choice the judges of Colombia faced in almost all cases involving the cocairre traffickers, a choice tl-rat has t'ecome known as plata o plomo ("silver or lead," a bribe or a bullet). Because of plata o plomo, the traffickers have few concerns within the Colombian justice system. They need worry only about being extradited for trial in the United States, and their obsession with ihis prospect is so great that the Medellin traffickers call themselves the Ex- traditables. 'l'hey make phone calls, send tapes, and write letters on Extraditables stationery, the letterhead of whicli reads, "Better a Grave in Colombia Than a fail in the United States," with a little picture of a man in chains, his head bowed. The letters sometimes run to two or three pages, but their message is a simple one. In 1986, during one of the Colombian Supreme Court's periodic reexaminations of the extradition treaty, each justice received a letter that began, "Hold, miserable." The theme of the letter was that the extradition treaty was unjust, and the Extraditables would be forced to reply in kind. "lnjustice breeds violence," the letter said. "We will finish off your family. We have no compassion of any kind." From 1980 to 1990 the Ex- traditables were presumed responsible for the murders of 300 judges and other employees of the judicial system, about 40 journalists, and more than 500 police.

The rise of the Mafia, as Colombians call the traffickers, was just the latest manifestation of several centuries'worth of violence that had incapacitated the Colombian justice system and, to a lesser extent, thc whole government. It was a big circlc: 'l'hc Mafizr took holcl in Coloml>ia bccausc thc justicc systcnr was irrca;l:rlllc of figlrtirrg it, arrd tlrat, of corlrsc, frullrt'r rrrrrlcntrirrc<l llrt'irrslir:r'systcrrr.'l'lrc slurrr: silrtltliorr r'ottl<l llt's('('rr on rt l;trgc:r scrtlc irr lltc t'ottrrlry irr gt'rrt'r:tl.'l'ltt'govt'tntncttl tv;ts loo wr':tk

QUIJOTE 125

Io provide a way to solve problen-rs through the legal system, so pcople turned to violence, which produced more breakdowns and yct more violence.

Medina hoped to break the vicious circle. His indictment of l,,scobar was an act of blind faith in his country's system of justice, lvlrich for all practical purposes had ceased to exist. Medina was :rrr idealist, a man who took his children to the local army barracks Io watch flag-raising ceremonies on Sunday mornings, who got rrristy-eyed singing the national anthem, who was putting his rrraid's children through school. His favorite book was Don Qui- jrte. "He always said that if everyone did his duty, we would lrrvc a better world," said Luz Estela, his widow.

It was a maxim whose truth no one could doubt, but most 1rt'ople did not try to live by it. Why had Medina? The best cxplanation was that he had been reared that way. His mother, l,irrgcnia-a small, trim, intelligent woman with short gray lr:rir-invited me into the family home in the middle-class neigh- lrorhood of Los Laureles and seemed eager to talk about this son, rvlro had been the second oldest of ten children. We sat in the liviug room. The usual pictures of Christ and the saints werc rroticcably absent; hard work was the religion of that household. 'l'rvo of the children had gone into their father's business, a brick l.rclory. Another was a lawyer, one an engineer, one a doctor; ,,rrt'had been a journalist, and one was in seminary. When the lrrrurgcst brother became addicted to basuco-cocaine paste ci1;rrrcttes-the whole family gathered to help him.

lrr a household of serious children Alvaro Medina had been llrt' r rr<lst scrious. "When he was eight, " said his mother, "l woulcl ,,t't' lrirn falling asleep as he studied at night. I would tell him kr 1io lo sleep. He would say, 'l can't, Mom, I have to kccp ,,lrrrlyirrg.'"

Alvrrro grcw up to be a stern young man. Newspaper photos ,,lr,,rvcrl a clark-haired man of middling height with a rnustachc, ru'r':rrirrg tintcd, black-rirnn-red glasses. Since childhood hc had ,rlrvrrys warrtcd to be a lawyer. He becar-ne a ludgc at twcnty-tlrrcc ,rrrrl rr Srrl>crior Court justicc, onc notch bclow thc Strprcnrc ( lrurl, rrl twcnty-ciglrt, onc of thc yotrngcst justiccs in hisklry. 'l'lrc lollowing ycar lrc nrarricclLtrz lrstcla Oiralclo, a twcrrty-orrc- r'.',rr .rkl lltw slttrlcrrt wlto lut<l workc<l its att itttcnt irr lris olllcc. Wlrt'rr I rrrt'l lrcr, slrc wlrs tlrirly-scvc'rr, lr <ligrriIrctl l>t'lrrrly, lrt'r.

96 ICHILDREN oF CetN

black hair pulled back into a bun, lipstick subdued, and finger- nails unpainted. The couple had bought a small house with a terra-cotta roof near the house in which Medina had grown up.

In Colombia it is the unusual lawyer who wants to become a iudge. It was not a dangerous iob in the days before cocaine, but it had other headaches. The Latin American legal system-based on the Napoleonic code-requires that iudges themselves inves- tigate crimes to determine guilt or innocence, but the state pro- vides them with few resources. In theory they could ask the |udicial Police for help, but as Luz Estela explained, "The fu- dicial Police don't even have telephones." At night she and Me- dina drove around town to track down evidence or talk to witnesses. He, at least, had a car. Other iudges take the bus.

Luz Estela is a lawyer in the luxurious new Municipal Build- ing, administering budgets for the city of Medellin. Her office is large, with striking black furniture. "But I work for the city," she said. "Alvaro worked for a branch of the government the politicians didn't care about. They gave him basic furniture, a desk, simple chairs. 'Ihe rest-bookshelves, curtains, an ash- tray-we had to bring from home."

Medina's office was in the Old National Palace. With its court- yards and layers of hallways with maroon arches and Spanish tile foors, the palace reminded me at first sight of the giant wedding- cake house etchings of Maurits Escher, in which the water always

seems to flow downward yet ends up back where it starts. Garbage

carpets the hallways. The walls in each office are lined with fat notebooks of handwritten case records. In faded ink they trace tortuous paths that almost always end in dismissals for lack of evidence. In each office six or eight men sit in front of manual Olivettis with keys missing, solemnly typing the judicial orders that circulate from iudge to iudge and produce nothing, justice

flowing around and around, ending up back where it starts. Colombia's judges have never been well paid, but with the

rise of the Mafia and the cocaine dollars many have managed to find adequate compensation from other sources. If the couple's modest house and Luz Estela's current econonlic troubles were any indication, this was not Medina's way. His younger sistcr Clarita said that he had been offcred nrillions of pcsos bttt was proucl rtcvcr to havc acccptcd a l>ribc. Irttlcctl, ltc was slrtrckccl ll tltc cxtcrrt o[tltc corntptiolt itrtltttttl lrirrr. Ilt'olit'rr scttl lt'ttcrs

QUTJOTE le7

lo tlrc police, asking for new investigations and setting out details ol cascs he knew about. The police rarely did anything, and Mtrlina explained their lack of response by saying that the letters rrrrrst have gone astray on their way to the proper authorities. 'l'lrc:n one day he personally handed a letter to a police official, ,rrr<l hours later he received an anonymous phone call; the caller rcirtl l>ack selected parts and warned him that his efforts were r,;rrrring him a death sentence. After that he stopped talking about k'ltcrs getting lost in the mail.

Mcdina's heroes, Luz Estela said, were Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, llrt' crusading thirty-six-year-old justice minister, and Alfonso l(r'ycs Echandia, the president of the Supreme Court. Honest ,rnrl llrave men, they were leaders in Colombia's struggle to arrest ,rrrrl cxtradite the traffickers. By the end of 1985 they both would ,rlso lrc dead.

l{cycs Echandia was killed with ten other Supreme Court jus- Irct's whcn the army bombed the |ustice Palace after the M-19 lirrt'rrillas stormed it in 1985. Many people believed the raid, u,lrit'lr took place just before the court was due to vote on the lrlr;r<litior-r treaty, was financed by the drug traffickers.

l,irra Bonilla had been killed the previous year. On April 30, l')1i4, two hired killers, known as sicarios-the word means "syt'ol>hants"-pulled up next to his car on a red motorcycle and rlrol lrinr in the head with an Ingranr machine pistol. The trig- fl('uniur, who was sixteen, went to jail and awaited a trial. Six lcrrrs lirtcr the case was still unresolved. The judge who indicted l'irlrlo l,lscobar as the mastermind of the crime was killed shortly ,rlk'r wlrcn five sicarios shot him thirteen times as he sat in the lritt'k o[a taxi in a traffic jam.

Mctlina rcceived his Escobar case-the indictment for the trrlirrri<latirxr of Ztlllraga's wife-in thc samc rnonth that Lara llrrrillir was killed. If Medina had been wavering on whether to lirkc it, tlrc iustice minister's death convinced him. "He was sick ,rl lrt'irrl irlxrut it," said Clarita, his sister. "Hc felt he had t<l clo rut r rt'lIt ittg. "

l"illt'crr tlays aftcr hc took thc czrsc thc thrcats startccl: lcttcrs, lrrlx' r'irsscttcs, rnd ciglrt or uinc plronc calls a day-"1)r. Mcclina, n'r"rt' r'rrllirrg fronr thc Carrrpo dc Paz Ccrrrctcry, your gravc is tcrtrly. l)r. Mcrlirra, wc'rc callirrg [r'onr yorrr chiklrcrr's rllrool. . . . l)r. Mcrlirrl, wc will scrrrl it lxlrrrll llrrorrglr tlrc lrxll:

28 ICntLDREN oF CntN

of your house. " Respectful voices described, with creativity and gusto, the many possible ways that Dr. Medina could die. Somc of the threats used f udicial terms and were apparently written by lawyers, Luz Estela said. Others read back parts of legal opinions Medina had written over the years.

Fernando G6mez, president of the Superior Court, where Me- dina worked, had brought Medina onto the court and shared an office with him. He wept as he talked to me about Medina. "Every day we'd get calls with threats that his children would be kidnapped," he said. "We would change the phone number, and a few hours later the calls would start again."

Medina's family pleaded with him to quit. fuan David, a younger brother who ran the family brick factory in the green hills just outside the city, told me that he offered Medina a partnership in the prosperous business. Medina wouldn't listen.

He didn't listen to Luz Estela either. "You don't have to abandon your principles and make it a whitewash," she recalled having told him. "fust resign. Leave the country; go into private practice. "

"A judge has to have a good legal reason for bowing out of a case, " he said. "l don't have one. If I retire and become a lawyer, how can I ever expect a judge to be firm and honest?"

"l did all I could do to persuade him," Luz Estela told me. "T'hen, when he had decided, I had two choices: leave him or accept it. I accepted it."

Medina wrote to various branches of the police, requesting protection. He never received the bulletproof vest he wanted, but police intelligence assigned him a bodyguard, who came to pick him up in the morning and take him home from work. He stopped going out in the evenir-rgs. He had always been reserved, even to tl're point of curtness with family mcmbers; Luz Estela had often gone with the boys to family gatherings while Medina stayed home and read. Now he withdrew cven more. He began to drink alor-re late at night in the house, listcning to music.

Then, in November 1984, something changed. "lt's final," he told l.uz Estela. "l've been setrtenced, and there's no pardon." Shc ncvcr kncw why; but for sornc rcason thc tttrccrtainty was srrtldcnly gonc, ancl this, in a strangc wrry, liflc<l lris spirits. "lI tlrcy kill rrrc lorttorrow, lrt lcltsl itr rrry lltsl li'rv rrrorrllrs wt"ll lr:rvc

QUTJOTE 129

lrvccl well," I're told her. He began to laugh and joke with ihe l.rrrrily for the first time.

On March 8, 1985, his twenty-nine-year-old brother Diego, ,r j<rurnalist who worked at the Medellin newspaper E/ Mundo, rrrrs killed when his car ran offa cliffon a bad curve. The death , otrld have been an accidcnt, but Medina always suspected that rl rvas a warning, his sister said. Later that month Medina, Luz l,islcla, and the boys went to Cartagena, a resort town on the ( l:rlil>bean coast, for eight days of vacation. Medina was rclaxed ,rrrtl happy. The family returned on a Saturday.

'l'lrat Monday, for the first time since the bodyguard had been ,rrsigrred, neither he nor his replacement showed up to take Me- ,lirrr to work. Luz Estela dropped him offdowntown. At four hc ,:rllcd her; the electricity was out in the building, and he was l,';rving. He went to a tailor's shop to try on two suits. Luz Estela ;,rckccl him up there.

At scven o'clock hrvo men parked a motorcycle down the street lrorrr the family's house. Onc walked into tl-re front yard and stood rrnrlcr a tree, I'ridden from view from the street. Medina's son l(orlrigo, nine, saw the man and opened the door. "Why are you ',l,rrr<ling there?" he asked him. '['he man shooed Rodrigo back rrrlo thc house. A few minutes later, as Medina and Luz Estela 1,ol otrt of the car, the assassin shot Medina in the chest, arm, ,rrrrl lcg. He died almost instantly. It was seven-twenty on April ri t9u5.

'l'lr:rt night another of Medina's brothers, Carlos Herndn, a Lrlror lawyer, received a call. "We've just killed your brother," a r oicc said. "lf you start getting involved with that kind of casc, rr,Jll kill you, too." LLrz Estela, who had seen the face of the l.rllt'r-hc was about twcnty, she said, old for that kind of ru,rrk --rcccived the same call, along with others asking to spcak l, l'rrl>l<l Iiscobar, a warning that shc, too, was being watched.

( lrrstavo 7;rluaga, the magistrate whose wife's car had been ,lrrvt'rr off thc cliff, the crime Medina was investigating, was shot ,rrrrl krllc<l on October 10, 1986. All charges have been dropped nr llrc cirsc of Zuluaga's wifc. I'he first judge who investigated l\l.rlirr;r's rlcatlr rlrr4r;;ccl that cersc aftcr his nrother was bcaten rr1, Wlrr.rr I rctrrnrcrl to (lolontbia irr l9[i9, it was in thc hancls rrl ;rrrollrt'r jrr<lgc, l{iclrrtl<l Lcrirr Ilrrcgo, a slrort, blrkl rrran wh<r

30lCntLDREN oF CatN

laughed a lot. He showed me a stack of evidence two feet high. "l'm investigating," he said. He put his feet up on the desk and laughed some more.

"The case is making the rounds," said Luz Estela. "Nobody wants to touch it. It's too dangerous in a city where you can have sonreone killed for fivc thousand pesos." I had heard of sicarios who work for as little as three thousand pesos, about ten dollars. "Everyone knows who's behind the killirtgs," said Fernando G6mez, Medina's officemate. "But to get the proof necessary for a court of law is difficult. You're lucky if the sicarios talk. But often they don't even know who hired them, and sometimes after a sicario does an important killing, he himself is killed."

Luz Estela was not angry with Medina; she had known all along what kind of man she married. She was angry at Colombia. "Nowadays most people just want to be iudges if they can't do anythir-rg else-after they get fired frorn every other iob," she said. She said that some students come out of the universities wanting to be honest judges. "ln the universities people still have illusions," sl're said. "Everyone, at one point in his life, is a Don

Quijote. Then gradually you lose your idealism and become Sancho Panza."

"Your husband never did," I said. "Some people die of Quiiote," she said. She had been working for the city comptroller's office for a

year. Before that she had worked as a lawyer administering the justice budget for Antioquia, the state whose capital is Medellin. The man who first hired her, Carlos Mauro Hoyos, had gone on to become attorney general of Colombia and a strong public backer of extradition. After her husband was killed, Luz Estela asked Mauro Hoyos for a job. "No, my child," Mauro Hoyos replied. "You've had enough troubles." On January 25, 1988, Mauro Hoyos was kidnapped on a Medellin highway; his body, punctured with multiple gunshot wounds, was found later that afternoon.

Luz Estela talked about leaving Colombia or moving to the countryside. Medellfn, she said, was I'ro place to bring up a family. "l want to raisc nry sons not to bc suclt good pcoplc," shc saicl. "l clort't wattt tltcttt to lrc iclcalists. I wartt tlrcrtr to think oI tlrt'rtrsclvcs nlorc. l'ttt ctlttt'ittittg lltcltt lo livc."

Q U r J O T E | 31

Iltrt there was another possibility for Luz Estera. She was think- ing of becoming a fudge. She had always wanted to become a l,lr,r judge but could r-rot be named a judge while her husband rvrrs a justice. Labor judges in Medellfn had to take cases from Urabd, a zone i. which labor disputes had already pr,duced lrrrrrdreds of murders, and ruling in favor of , *o.k". was not rr rrrch safer tha. indicting a cocaine trafficker. She knew all about llurt, she said. "But the experience I have in admi,istration would l," .seful. I know how common it is for workers to get cheated." slrc had a dreamy expression on her face. "you

"oIld do some-

llrirrg in that job," she said, "something really important.,,

!(/,,,,,* I .rns, wr1N'To Meoeu-fN rN l9gg, I was naone AFRATD llrirrr I had ever been in my life. 1'he night before I arrived, I lr;rrl dinner in Bogotii at the house of Tim Ross and sarita Kendall, llitish journalists who had lived in colombia for fourteen vears. l'irrr had been covering "bang-bang," as the war cor.esponde.,ts

r ;rll it, for a long time. Most correspondents bur, out on trouble;'lirrr had just become addicted. I ioked with 'I'im about my lt rrcsorllc image of Medellin, fed by years of reading the headlines ;rlr.rrt drug violence and watching the evening news-. 'l'here would lx'grr,shots on the street, random knife fighti, the man watching rrrt' fr,,r the shadows, phone calls warning me to mind -y o*ulrrrsi.css. I wanted Tim to say, "Don't *or.-y, it,s a piece of cake.,,'1.r, had seen everything. Instead, he laughed. ,,That sounds ,rlx,rt right," he said. He told me with rerish of the contract pabl<r l',st'.bar had put on his life. "They'll know about you the secor-rcl 1'orr gct to the airport in Medellin,', he said.

l)irr,cr was a slow process of getting drunk, looking at '['i*'s l,l;r.k-a.d-white photos of Bogoti's sheet childr.n ,.,iboy pror- Irlrrlcs i, filthy jeans and delicate high heels, heari,g storics of'l'irrr's cscal>c from a Bolivian pris., witrr containJrs of filrrr ',lr,vul trp his rcctuu-r, and listening to his tapes of r;attlc rcp,rts rrr l'll S,lvadel-"11e147-llrcrc's machi,e-gun drc co,ring ur", ,.,ry r rlilrl sl*^rlclcr . . "-)cffcrs,. Airplancls s;r,,ky "whit"c llabl>itl, ,rrrrl llrc l)oors'clirgc "'l'lrc l,)rrl." [.lrrdcr aliy otlicr circrunstarrccs llris w,rrkl lr,vc l>ccrr rrry irlcrr ,Iu grlrxl tirrrc. l]rrt lwirs grirrg

32 lCutt-DREN oF CetN

to Medellin the next day, and "The End" played in my head all

night. "lt *r, still buzzing "nry only frie.d, thc cud" as I arrived in

V"d"ttin in a thunderstorm so violent that thc plane could barely

ir,rJ. o"ri"g the 6ourlo,g drive into the c.ity tl.re rai, kept push- ;;;;, "ff tlie wi,ding

n-r-our.rtain road' 'fhen rny taxi got a flat

iirZ. gy that time I *L so terrified I was certai. t.at thc Mafia f,rJ a."ia"a that shooti.g me i. the airport was too rnerciful and trJ lr,tt.rd designed the flat tire, the rain, and thc precarious rir"

"f the road io finish me off slowly' I reached my downtown

hoi"t, "t,".ked

in, ar"rd rushed upstairs' I shovcd a chair and J*rr", against my door and lay down in the dark, listening to ,f,."tri,r,"-y h"ri still full of )im Morrison and "'['5e E'd'"

The next morning my fears vanishcd' 'fhc air was fresh from

the rain. lt was warm and dry, and the sun was shining' Medellin

i,l"rrtif.,l, nestled in green mountails' I bought plastic bags itt.J *i,t', siices of pineaf,pl", papaya, and mango from a sidewalk vendor a'd gave rnyself a tou. of in. city's center, witS its mirrorcd

,tfr.rrp.tt Ind Catifornia-style brick shopping malls with atria'- 'M"d"Uir], at least acco,diirg to the people who-live there,' is known as Colombia's city of p'ugt"ss' Rcsidents' Paisas' as they

ar. "alled,

sniff at Bogot6's bu'""'"ta"y and inefficicncy' In the

.rpi,ri, according to lhe Paisas, peoplc shuffle papcr around' In

rrrriJaii, people"make things. The Paisas l"rave long beeu con-

sidered thl captains of Colombia's legal and illcgal industries, du-i.,rti,lg textiles, fl owers' coffee, cattle, mariiuana' and.smug-

;lt;;. M.eelli.'s hospitrl, are the Lati. Arnerica. leaders in Srgr? nrnrplants. The work cthic here is almost Puritatr. Paisas

,r3 .onrid.ied efficient, punctual, friendly, and' as the world

would note, effective businessmen' ,"t in tt it city of gardens and glass twenty murders a day have

U..o-. co**or',plr"ce, and fifty a day not unusual' T'he drug toa" Urt crept lii<e moss over

'Medellin, burrowi'g into each

."*t, "ou.ri.,g

the city's glittering surfaces with a layer of rot' g,r"ry prtt of tll city-the gc'vernment, the Catholic Church' ifr. Urnkr, t6e busincss*.'',1l-'" slurns-6as madc its pact witS

cocainc. I camc to Mcclcllin to find <lut how a sttcccssful, tnodcrtt

"iiy t,,,, lccl Col<xrbia's brcakclowrt irto c5tt.s .ttcl w6y, i, t;c

n,."' ,,f sttclt ovcrwlrclntirrg corrttlltiort atrd violcrrcc' 1rco1llc likc

Alvrtro Mctlirrrr lrt' still willirrg to <lic ol-Qrriiott''

Q U r J O T E | 33

C,r"or*" cAME To Colonmm rN THE uro-1970s. UNlrrn Psnu or Bolivia, Colombia has neither land suitable for coca farming rurr a history of coca use in its indigenous culture. Only about 15 percent of the coca leaf used in the business is grown in (lolombia. The Colombians merely process the paste and export cocaine. When General Augusto Pinochet's crackdown drove t'ocaine traffic from Chile, the Paisas, who had the requisite lxrsiness skills and proximity to the U.S. market, took it over.

Pablo Escobar and forge Ochoa, the most important of the Mcdellin drug lords, began as two of hundreds of small-time lrlffickers. What brought them to the top was their association n,ith Carlos Lehder, a German-Colombian who, while serving ;r prison term in the United States for nrarijuana smuggling, met ollrcr smugglers and set up a U.S. cocaine distribution network. l',scobar and Ochoa knew each other, but they did not pool their r('sorlrces until 1981, when Ochoa's sister was kidnapped. The rlt'lth squad they formed to kill the kidnappers was the first in a rcrics of collaborations that knitted them together into the Me- rk'llin Mafia. Since the mid-1980s the Medellin traffickers have ,'rrgrrged in low-intensity warfare with the trafEckers from the ci$ ol (lali. 'l'he casualties, notes pinned to their clothing stating, "l rr,:rs killed for working for the Medellin traffickers," are often l,rurrrl along Colombia's highways, and the next day more bodies, "killccl for working for the Cali traffickers," appear. But aside lrorrr thc violence it uses against its Medellin rivals, the Cali lirorrp liurits its activities to selling cocaine, eschewing the polit- rr:rl rrction and death squads of the Paisas.

lrr Mcdcllin violence became the trademark and primary busi- rrcss lool of the drug trade. The victims range from slum boys l.rlk'rl irr pctty turf wars to Cabinet ministers, politicians, jour- rr,rlrsls, lrrd judges who get in the traffickers' way. 1'he first co- ,,rrrrt'nurgniciclcs, as the assassinations of the farnous are called, ru't'rt' ;rcts of tcrrorism dcsigned to intirnidate thosc who prosecuted llrl lr:rllickcrs or supportccl extraclition.

As llrt'ycrrls l)rrssc(I, thc violcncc sprcad to touch 1rcrplc wlro lr,rvc rrollrirrg to rlo witlr rlrrrgs or lxrlitics. M<lst rcccrrtly tlris was llrl rcsrrll ol llrc turl-fit'kt'rs' <k'lilx'r'rrlt' policy. Wlrcrr llrc Mrrfirr

34 IcHILDREN oF cntN

carried out its most important magnicide-that of Luis Carlos

C;i;;, Cuto*uir't l"'iing presidential ca.didate' in August 1989-President Virgili; B';t declared war on the traffickers' i..*.i"t ,f.r"-r.riu,iof the extraditio, treaty a.d i,itiati.g an iil;;;nhunt for the drug lords' Thc Mafia' in respouse' began dirccting its terrorism Igainst ordinary

citizcns' ltr trine

ntotttlts 259 peoplc *"" fiff"a"UV bom!1l>lowing up in schools' tfr"Ot'r"a p,rUf i" buildingt- InApril 1990 thc Mcdellin

trafEckers

;ff;;; p;y four t'ous'Id doll'it to anvone killing a policerna,; io.riy-t-"'nl.a.tti,, police were killed the next tnonth'

But drug violence 'it'1"ft a more indirect routc into the lives

"f rJirrry pcople. The traffickers created a F'rankenstein's

mon-

il';;;;;JJurttv ,tipp"d out of thcir -conkol: the sicarios' In

f qiq ."" .f Er.ot,t'' men created the first school for sicarios; a ;;;;i met told *" ii"lp"ricc took her on a raid of one such school, with classroo''", Ui"ttUoards' and diagrarns

of 'how ^t<l

follow victims n"d h;;'to shoot them irr the head with a '38 from the back of , rnoto'"y"le' The schools sometimes also

pro-

vide the weapon and the bike' E'mploying a hit-man is not new

in Colon-rbia, U"t i,Jtf" p"t it *" a potitL" with a certain grade of

'o.or; a hit ''ran;;i;[

worked fL' o'.'" boss a.d usually felt

;;;;;iof politic,l allegia,ce' The .ew sicarios work for anvone who pays them, r,"ftinf it close to impossiblc to track

the real

author of a crime' 'fhe sicario clid for murder in Medellin what the transistor

did

for the radio. Killing;;; cheap' and popular 'Olt" thc mark

.?,t. a*g arade, th"e 'i'uiio'1'auc ''o* diversified' Hugo L6pez'

a professor uf ".or,o"'i"s at the University of Antioquia' told me

"f"r l* t.fronl gi,i*l'o was looking fot a sicarioio kill a romantic

rival. L6pez ,l* tn"* oi o *'n *i''o *" angry at his neighbor' whose new constructiotl was causing water

to flood the man's

house. The neigh[" *as ti"f'er tha"n he' and !!''9 rn"1 feared

that if he ,,r"a, tn. ,,.igllbot would simply pay o{ the.iudee' His

solution was to t'l'" ' iit";o ancl havelhe neighbor killed' ,

The siccrios havc become their own mastcrs' 'they rurr thcir

own cle:rth squads, *itt' '*a.r Itamcs as Lovc for Mcdcllirl' l)cath

t, Ikrnroscx.,rlr, u. trr.l-Vrnrpircs.'['hcy kill lcftists, p.blic. of-

ficiirls, lxrlicc, ,,*ittti', t" tttl'"t' tlrtrg acldicts' antl caclt otltcr:

sitrlrio"^ gutlrcr t.,';;;i ,i,;i; rrcigS5,rlr.rxls ,[ .sicarir.,s. or.rr1>s ,f

Q U I J O T E | 35

lroo<lcd men shoot up slum streets, bars, and dance halls at r,rrulorn, killing sometimes thirty people at a time.

Under its modem surface Medelhn has beconre a medicval city. Citizens pay tribute to the drug lords who control the king- rkln.'l'he wealtl'ry live in fortresses and hire private armies for prolcction. 'l'he slums are ruled by bands of assassins. "ln the l,rt c of the overwhelming annual murder rate," wrote the Bogotd rr,'rvswcekly Semand, "Colombians have forgotten that it is pos- rrlrlc to die of old agc, in bed."

lly 1989 Colombia had almost as many men working in privatc ,,r't rrrity as in tlte seventy-thousand-man National Police. Ss- tnd,td's advertiscments offer readers bullctproof cars and super- ,,('( rrrc apartments. T'hcre were 789 kidnappings in 1989; ( lrlonrbians joke that to be truly acceptcd in high society, onc lr;rs lo l>c kidnapped at least twice.

Killirrg permeates the lives of pcople who have nothing to do rlrllr <lrugs or politics. 'l'he newspaper E/ Mundo one day carried llrt'skrry of a woman who locked her doors after her baby was l,,,rrr rrrrd vowed not to go outside until thc girl was grown. 'fhe ru,,rruur's attempt to pull up the drawbridges did not succeed; her rr,rrrrc rcnched the papers because solreolre broke into her h<lusc ,rrr,l bcgan shooting, gravely wounding the infant with a stray l,rrllt'|. 'l'lrc baby was undergoing a series of operations, and thc pr,lirrosis was uncertain. If she was lucky, she could look forward 1,,;r lilc like that of her mother, who had renounced even going lrr llrc conrer store to buy bread because of the overwhelming r,',rlilv of violcnce.

No trrrgct is off limits. The most common reasol-l childrcrt rrrrrlt'r twclve are brought to the emergency room itr Medcllin is rr.l llrc rrurmal sprains and breaks of childhood but gunshot ru',,untls. lticardo Aricapa, a reporter, told me that whcn he was ,r,,,,r1irrt'rl kr cover the wake of Luis Fcrnando Vdlcz, a hutnatr rrlilrls lt'rrrlcr, hc wandcrecl from V6lez's wake into the othcr salorr ,,1 llrt'lrrrrcrirl 1>arlor, which contained thc body of a priest. 'l'hc

1,rr.sl lrlrl lrccn <lriving his VW Bectlc in lll Poblaclo, Mcdcllin's ru,',rlllrit'sl ncighlxrrhoocl, wltcrt ltc rcfusccl to yiclcl thc riglrt-of- ru,rr' 'l'lr<' ocr:rrpants of tlrc othcr car shot hinr to tlclrtlr.

Soct't'r rt'lcrccs arrtl llcitttty crttttcst jrrtlgcs rcccivc tlcrtllr tlrrcitts. I lr,' rrt'rvsp:r1lcr I'l/ (,'o/ortrltfurtu c'ltrrictl it ttolc orr ils t'tirltt' l)ilgui

36 lcHtt-DREN OF cntN

about two gunlren who shot their way into Our Lady of Chi- quinquira Church during a wedding, killing the photographer and wounding the father o[ the bridc. The archdiocese an- nounced it would excommunicate the guilty parties.

'fhe murder rate, which had been nlore or less stcady for twenty years, began to rise in the late I970s with the comitrg of cocaine and to skyrocket in 1986. The style of nrurder has changed as well: In 1979, 80 percent of the murders in Medellin were com- mitted with knives, most of them occurring in thc course of drunken fights. In 1988 guns were the weapon of choice in more than 80 percent of the killings. By the latc 1980s Colombia had the highest homicide rate in the worlcl for a country not at war: 68.I murders per 100,000 people in 1989, eight times the rate in the United States, a country that is usually no laggard where violence is concerned. And Medcll(n has thc highest tnurder rate in Colombia: an average of l5 a day in a metropolitan area of 2.2 rnillion in early 1990, twelve times that of mctropolitan Detroit. The murder rate is so high that the Medcllin Metro- politan Health Department's report from 1986-a document that in most other cities would speak of diarrhea, tuberculosis, cancer, heart disease, and the like-begins with a quotation from H6ctor Abad G6mez, who had been the presidcnt of the city's Human Rights Comnrissior-r: "Why at this moment hcrc, and in so many other corners of the earth, are the livirlg things most dangerous to man not viruses, nor microbes, nor parasites, but human beings?" Abad G6mez's words acquired a personal twist when he

himself was murdered in August 1987, shot in the street by two human beings. Medellin, Colombia's city of progress, has ad- vanced to the point where the single leading cause of deaih is no longer disease, but multiple gunshot wounds.

At the emergency room of Medellin's Metropolitan Clinic on a weekend night, the farnilies of victirns stood outside, protected from a pouring rain by an overhang. A drunk man scolded himself loudly. In front of me stood an apparition, a man of about twenty whose head and hair were matted and caked with blood. He was srnoking and talking with friends; apparently the bloocl was uot his owrr.

fivcry fcw nritrtttcs a car, ttsttally it taxi, <lrovc tt1l, alrcl tlrtlcrlics rrrslrctl rlrrt with rt slrctcltcr trl fctc'lt lltc worttr<lc'<1. Itrsirlc, a fcw tkrzt'n youllg llr('tr, rrrillly lroltlirrg lltt'ir ort'lr lll;tsttl;t llottlt's, llry

Q U r J O T E | 37

,,rr bAre green rnetal tables. "Wc've becomc specialists in knifc ,rrrrl gurr traumas," said Jorge G6mez, a doctor who spoke to nrc lrrrr ricdly between patients.

N,lost of the patients I saw were bleeding frorn the chcst. A nr:ln came in with knife wounds on his arms. "Wc can't see yoll," ',,ri<l the nllrse. "Go around the corner to intermcdiate wounds."

I rrskcd about hcad wounds, the mark of a sicario. "We gct grk'nty of thern," said G6n-rez. "But you wor.r't sce them waiting lor :rttcntion hcre . All we can do for tl-rem is this," he said, making llrc sign of the cross.

I stayed four hours and saw two prostitutes who had overdosecl, ,r rn irldlc-class wornan with a troubled pregnancy, and about thirty r rclirns of knifc or gur-rshot wounds, four of thenr women. A marr ',,rrrl lrc was herc to look for his cousin, a sevcnteen-year-old girl rrlro had disappcared the day bcfore. She had gone shopping irr llrr' ;rftcnroon and nevcr rcturncd. A woman waitir-rg outside tolcl rnt' llrat her twcnty-three-ycar-old nephew had beer-r knifed in a rlrrprrtc over a gold chain. The nephew dicd. Another wonriu) ',,rrrl shc was waiting for her brother-in-law, who had yelled at a l,rri <lriver for rcftrsing to pick hinr up and been shot through tlrc r lrcsl by the driver. After each patient came in, a heavy rnidcllc- ,r1i,'rl woman nropped up the blood from thc hallway. It was vcry lr,rrrl work, and just before midnight she put her rnop down, arrcl ',,r1 in a chair, unable to keep up, while the tracks of blorxl lir,rtlrurlly spread to cover the whole floor.

( )rr rrry next trip to Medellin, El Mundo carried a report tlurt lrlo sicrtrios had forced thcir way into the emcrgency roorn to lrrrislr off a woman they had only managcd to wound bcforc. I,r'irlt'rrtly, this was r-rot unusual. I talked to a rnan who saitl tlrat lrc lrrr<l sccl) a variation on this therne: sicarios approaching tlrc l,rrrrilics of victinrs waiting outsidc the hospital, offcring tlrcir ',r'rvit'cs to avcr.rgc the shooting of a lovcd onc.

'l'rvo rlirys after my visit to thc hospital Lll Mundo rcportcd tlrll llrcrt' lur<l bccn an average of onc violcnt dcath an hour ovcr tlrc rlt.r'kt'rrrl. Arr articlc givirrg an lrourJry-hour dcscriptiorr of llrc ,L:rllrs lronr Saturclay niglrt to Suntlay niglrt was rrotablc Iirr, ,unong otlrcr things, thc nrthor's skill in findirrg cliffcrcnt wirys lo rr'porl :r rrrrrlrlcr: "Sorrrcorrc ttxlk tlrc li[c of l,rris Allrcr'to l,<i;lcz ,rl Lrrik'1xrirrt. . . . l,rris Allrrto l)ulino ccrrsc<l kr t'xisl rvillr ir lrrrllt't rrr lris lrt'rr<1. Mlrrio l(t'slrt';xr lrrlrrtrl rrp <lt'rr<l w,illr l lrrrllt't

3slCHrr-DREN oF CnrN

in his head. An unidentified person killed N6stor Alvarez with three shots. . . Sabino Piedrahita was found dead of knife wounds. . . . Rub6n Dario furado died when an unidentified person shot him. . . . Eugenia Romero appeared assassinated." In twenty-seven different murders the author repeated the phras- ing only once.

Tr" gr"arroN oF wHy AN ENTTRE NATT.N 'EEMS

BENT oN DyrNG in the street has produced a new local science called vio- lentology-as far as I can tell, a field of investigation found or-rly in Colombia. The first studies of the roots of Colombia's social chaos were done about thirty years ago, and they have increased dramatically in number, a product of the unfortunate need to keep up with events. One recent publication on the subject comes from a group of sociologists, anthropologists, military officers, historians, and engineers. In March 1986 these violentologists began meeting every week or two in Bogotd for four months to study contemporary violence in Colombia.

The book the group wrote, Colombia:Yiolencia y Democracia, argues that violence is caused by the breakdown of government institutions, and its recommendations focus on strengthening those institutions. "Medellin was poorer forty-five years ago, and much less violent," said Santiago Pel6ez,, the director of the Center for Economic Research at the University of Antioquia and one of the book's authors. "lt's not just poverty that creates violence. It's breakdown. The state does not have the power to say that something is good or bad and impose a system of sanc- tions. We have 'big government' in Colombia, but that doesn't mean we have strong government. A government is strong only when the community reinforces it. If people in the community don't feel part of the system and don't back it up, it can't work."

In a successfully functioning society, the group said, a government-together with its institutions that create a sense of community and shared values, such as courts and schools-is an arbitrator. It teaches children that killing is wrong, for cx- anrl;lc, and punishcs pcople who kill. In Cokxnbia tlrc govcnr- rncnt is trxr wcak to play tlrat rolc. Pcliicz rrscrl llrc triviirl cxirnrplc olt liltcr. 'l'lrc slrrrrc I;rlirro wlro llrrows u cigirrt'llt'wnrpllcr orrlrr

QUIJOTE l3e

llrc street in Medellin would carefully put it in a trash bin if he rvcrc visiting Disney World, first, because he knows he will have Io pay a five-hundred-dollar fine for littering in Florida, and st'cond, because no one around him litters; there is a common ,rt,cord that all will be better off if each puts his litter in a trash crur. You need this social consensus to make the state work, PelAez s;ricl. The state can exist only if people believe in it.

It is hard to pinpoint exactly what in Colombian history set in rrurtion the forces that created levels of violence approached no-

rvlrcre else on the planet. Colombia's conquest and colonization rvcrc not very different from those of its neighbors-bloodier, lrcrhaps, but the conquest was bloody all over Latin America.

l,'our hundred fifty years ago the legend of El Dorado began lo circulate in Spain. El Dorado, the golden man, lived among so nruch gold that he covered his body with it. Explorers thought llurt Iil Dorado could be found in the mountains of South Amer- rt rr in a place that became known as Colombia.

l,ll Dorado was a myth, but there was gold, all right, and ,'rrrcralds. Some of the worst criminals of Spain came to Colom- lril to find tl'rem. Spanish conquerers killed the whole tribe of tlrc Muzo Indians to find out the location of an emerald minc rrrrrrored to be especially rich. Colombia was born of piracy, .ontraband, and desperate, feverish greed.

(lolombia's geography-more diverse than that of most of its rrt'ighbors-also contributed to violence. It was not one cotllltry lrul rnany different countries: the hot, tropical coast of Cartagcttr; cool, high, green Bogotd; temperate Medellin; flat plains; junglc;

rrrorrntains. Today half-hour-long flights link Bogotd and Mcdcl- lrrr u clozen times a day, the local equivalent of the New York Io Washington shuttle. Before the airplane, the trip was a pcrilotts rrrorrrrtiriu journey that took weeks. Because of difficult c<lnr- rrrrrnicirtiotrs, each landowner was effectively isolatcd, had lris o\vn lnlry, and made up his own rules.

'l'lrc cstablishment of a centralized govenrmcnt thrcatcttctl lltc,

lx)w('r' <lf thcsc landowners. The strifc betwccn thcnr antl tlrc t'r r rt'r gir rg ttrbaur t.nerchants evcntually lrccamc tltc Cottscrval ivc- l,ilrt'r;rl conflict. Bctwcctt lUl0 and 1903 Colonrbia hatl rrirrc rr;rlionltl civil wars, f<lttrtcctt ltlcal civil w;trs, twtl irttcrtllttiorrltl rv;rrs willr l'lcrut<l<tr, two stt(:ccssfrrl lrrilitlrry coltl)s, ttrr<l oltt'tltltl l:rrl.'tl. llt'lwt'ctt llJll(r rrrr<l l()00, 170,(X)0 (lrlorrrlri:trrs, I ol t'r't'ry

40lCHrr-DREN oF CerN

20 citizens, died in wars. Although the conflicts concerned which set of elites would control Colornbia, the people who died in them were not the landowners but their serfs.

There were sorne constants. hrdependence from Spain in the early nineteenth century brought Colombian-born rulers to power, but they still governed for the upper classes. 'l'he Liberals and the Conservatives (both parties were formed in the 1840s) preferred seeir-rg 5 percent of the population killcd to rclir-rquishing power. 'fo thc vast n'rajority of Colombians, however, which party was in office was irrelevant; their misery remaincd the same.

The other constant was the Catholic Church. In all l,atin America only Colombia has a concordat, a treaty with the Vatican that makes thc church a quasi-official body. 'l'hc church has never been shy about its political rolc, and at timcs its identifi- cation with the Conservative party took on the overtonc of a crusade. "Liberalism is a sin," wrote one bishop, "a veritable |ewish Sanhedrin against Christ and the Catholic Church." Priests flatly forbade Catholics to vote Liberal and warncd Co- lombians that their choice was to vote Conservative or suffer the pains of hell.

In other countries with fossilized hierarchies and a rcactionary church, large waves of inrmigration brought fresh blood and new ideas that opened up the political spectrum. The Italian and fewish in-rmigrants of the first part of this century who brought the trade union movement to Argentina, for examplc. 'l'hcre was no such immigration to Colombia.

Only onc man in Colombian history threater-red to break the oligarchy's stranglehold on the political system. It was thc spark for the darkest age of Colombian history, one whose conscquences are still in evidence today. Jorgc Eli6cer Gaitdn, a small dark- skinned man from a lower-class family, was a lawyer, congress- man, Cabinet minister, and mayor of Bogotd. ln 1947 he took over the Liberal party, and he seemed destined to bccome Co- lombia's next president. The oligarchy's contempt for Gaitdn was evident; both Conservatives and the traditional wing of his own Liberals called him El Negro. For them, Gaitin was a dangcrous man, a spcakcr who could turn an anccdote about zr high watcr bill into a spcllbincling call to rcvolution. In l,'clrnrary l94tt Oai- tiitt orgattizccl a rttarch to 1;rotcst tlrc g<lvcrrrrrrcnl's rcprcssi<lrr of

QUIJOTE l4'.l

llrr';xror. 'fhousands of men atrd wotnen holding candles walked rrr luruutirtg silence through Bogot6's streets.

f rrst before noon on April 9, 1948, a man in a gray suit walked rr;r lo Gait6n on a Bogotd street and killed him with three shots. \\/rtlrirr minutes crowds had beatcn Gait6n's assassin to death, ,rrrrl tlrrcc hours later Bogoti was in flames. Hordes burned the Irorrscs of the rich, stores, government buildings, convents, and .r'r'rr thc cathedral. They broke the locks on the iail doors. Army l,rrrks rolled into the central plaza and began shootir-rg into the , r,rrvrl. Probably more than three thousand people were killed llr;rl <lay; over the next five years between two hundred thousand

,rrrrl tlrrce hundrcd thousand died. Even by Colombian standards

llrost'figurcs merited capital lettcrs;the era became known as La Y rlancia.

Wf rat was La Yiolencia about? It began with Gaiten's death, l,rrl llrcrc was little class conflict involved. La Yiolencid soon lr,rrrslurnrcd itself into a supercharged version of what violence rrr Oolombia had always been: a power struggle between two

;r,rrlics whose maior difference was their names. ll rvas nrost intense in the courttryside, where political alliances

rucrt'str<mgest, there was little or no government to be seen, and

1,,'oplc knew one another; instead of humanizing the conflict, l,, rrrg ncighbors iust meant that no one could stay out of trouble l,r lrirling ltis political views. In thc cities the police and courts ru','rt' irblc to maitrtait-t some setnblance of order. Urban Colombia ,,,rrv littlc clisruption; indeed, business boomed during La Violen- r',{,, willl tltc cconomy growing 6.2 percent. In the countryside llrt' Lil>crals forr-ned guerrilla arrnies to defend themselves against llrr' (lorrscrvatives, the govcrning party. 'l'he police ceased to bc , r rr rrt' Iiglttcrs and instead spcnt their time killing Liberals. There \\',rs no ncutrtrl ground. After thc presidential elcctions of 1949, ru lriclr tlrc Lilrcral party boycotted, thc Conservativc govertlmcttt r,',lrrirctl (lolombians to carry idcntity cards stating that tltcy hacl rolcrl irr tlrc clcctit-rns. Beirtg caught with the c;rrd wtrs a clcatlr ',r'rrlt'nt'c irr sontc placcs; failing trt ltroducc it was a clcath sctttcltcc n r olltt'rs.

lrr l()53 tlrc rrrilitary took <tvcr tltc govcrrlltrcltt atltl llttt it stoll lo rrrosl olt tlrc violcttcc. l,'<lttr ycllrs latcr civiliart gtlvcrttltlcttt r,.lrrrrrt.tl rvlrcn tltc O<lttscrvrtlivt' lttt<l l,ibcrll Pltrtit's sigrlctl lt llltt'l

42 I CHTLDREN oF CntN

called the National Front, in which the parties alternated in government for twelve years. The pact was later extended until t974.

The two political parties are no longer at war. But Colombia's many different contemporary violencias have their roots in those years. The relationship is most direct in the case of the guerrillas: many of their armies were formed during the political unrest. Medellin's random urban violence, on the other hand, is the result in part of the loss of community caused by the migrations prompted by La Yiolencia. According to Santiago Pel6ez, the violentologist, three million people fled to the cities to escape the violence in the countryside. "ln rural areas everyone knows his role," he said. "ln the city all of a sudden you have to compete with everyone else. The traditional sanctions have evaporated. In the country boys are raised with responsibilities. In the city' they get no chores. The parish life of the church is lost. The sense of community is lost. "

Paradoxically the National Front, the pact that ended La Yi- olencia, helped create Colombia's contemporary violence. While placating both parties through the guarantee of alternation in power, it effectively shut the rest of the country out of the gov- ernment. The oligarchy's traditional domination was now codi- fied in law.

Viewed from the outside Colombia today seems like a true democracy: no military coups since I953; two parties competing for the presidency; peaceful transitions between parties. But the political system looks different from within. Alfonso L6pez Mi- chelsen, the first president to be elected after the expiration of the National Front, once said elections in Warsaw Pact countries were horse races with only one horse. Colombian elections, he added, were horse races with two horses, but both had the same owner.

The Liberals and Conservatives monopolize Colombia's pol- itics. But the left dominates the country's social organizations. The majority of the unions and organizations of teachers, cam- pesinos, and indigenous groups are affiliated with the left. But this extensive social force is effectively closed out of the political system. The left-wing political parties might have been an option hacl clcath sclttacls not ravaged thcir ranks. "lf thc rich hacln't bccrr so llrrlllrca<lctl," saicl )rrlio Sittrtana, tltc slttlkcslltatt [<rr ortc, IJrli<irt

QUTJOTE 143

l'utri6tica, "if they had created a real democracy, if people had roorn to participate in politics, people wouldn't be killing each otlrcr today. "

Pcrhaps the most important way that La Violencia laid the knndation for future violence was by eroding tl're legitimacy of llrc Colombian state. The average Colombian was never clear irlxrut just what it was the state did for him, but after watching llrc state not only fail to protect him from LaYiolencia but actively prrrticipate in the killings, his identification with his govern- 111c111-snd its laws-could only weaken further. Unable to per- t't'ivc the benefits of citizenship, Colombians had no reason to rrt'ccpt their society's rules. It wasn't just a matter of perception. 'llrc judicial system and the police, two of the most important rrrstitutions in making a government work, broke down com- lrlcrtcly during LaViolencia. Crime went unpunished, reinforcing llrc country's indifference to the Iaw that twenty years later al- l,rwcd the rise of the drug traffickers.

A state of siege established in I949 to try to control LaYiolencia ,lt'crccd that crimes against the "public order" would be treated rrol as simple crimes but as political crimes-Class A crimes- ;rrrrl judged in military courts. These public order crimes included prrrctically all offenses against the means of production and the liovcrnirtg class, such crimes as robbing a bank, kidnapping a collcc producer, or stealing cattle. All other crimes were Class ll t'rinres. In effect, this established a military court for crimcs ;rgrrirrst the rich and a civilian court for crimes against the poor.

'l'lrc government promptly lost interest in the civilian courts. 'l 'lrc Supreme Court ruled the dual court system unconstitutional rrr l9tJ7, on the ground that military courts should notbe judging livilians. But by ihen the civilian courts had suffered decadcs of rrcglcct. In 1987 the government allotted just 2 percent of thc lcrlt'ral administration budget to run the justice systern; thc lcg- r:,1:rlivc and executive branches got 27 percent. fudges reccivc lorrr Irrrnclrcd thousand new cases each year and are ablc to proccss orrly scvcnty thousand of them. Three quartcrs of thc r.ncn in lVlcrk'llin's jails have not yct bcen tricd; thosc who arc finally ,rlrprillc<l will havc already spcnt ycars in iail. No lalxrratorics lrisl lo cxanrirrc cviclcncc, ancl no onc lx)sscsscs tlrc trainirrg t<r rrrc llrc'rrr irr irrry cvclrt.

'l'lrt' rcsrrlt is irrr;xrnily. A Nirliorrirl l)olir:c strr<ly cirlr.rrlrrlul tlrrrl

44 I C H rr- D R E N o F C e rN

I in every l0 crimes is reported to the authorities, and of those crimes, I in 100 results in a sentence, meaning that 999 of 1,000 crimes go unpunished. "We've reached the point where anyone who is judged for a crime feels he's getting r.bit.rry treatment,,' said Fernando Navas Talero, assistant attorney geneial for human rights.

fustice has been privatized. The recognizable elements of justice-arrests, trials, plea bargaining, sentencing-do not exist within the state in Colombia, but in a pervers. *ry they exist privately. Colombia does not extradite criminals, but death threats force the extradition of judges and witnesses. criminals are punished not by the state but by such groups as Death to car Thieves. Debts are squared not in bankruptcy court but by si_ carios. As with the breakdown of the state in general, it is a vicious circle. The more people take revenge into trreir own hands, the more crimes are committed, the more the climate of impunity flourishes, and the greater the strain on the system of justice.

lN Mencn 1988 rwo MASSACRES TooK pLACE oN THE Hor.louRes and La Negra farms in Urab6, a zone of northern Antioquia. The massacres came to public attention not because thev were unusual in themselves but because they had been investigated, an extremely unusual occurrence. The invesiigation was one of justice's few accomplishments in 1988, but its findings exposed just how grim and disheartening is the task facing the iustice system as it fights Colornbia's violence. It brought to light the links between the traffickers a,d the military, ,nd b.t*.Jn drrg viole,ce and political violence, shadowy forces underlying mucli of colombia's ferocity. All the different pieces of corJmbia's viole.ce-the drugs, the history of political brutality, and the impotence of the justice system-converged in the siory of thc two massacres. Here was colombia's violence distilled a.d crys- tallized.

I needed to strip away Medellin's veil of progress ancr civili- zation to see violer-rce at its p.rest. I took a srrall pla,c fronr Mcdcllf, to [Jrabh. Mc. sho.ccl thc chickcrrs .ff tlrc]

^,wrly :rs

wc rr1>Proirclrcrl lrrr<l larrdc<|. SlcPPing <lowrr fr,rrr tlrt' lll;rnr. lclt

QUIJOTE 145

lrkc tlcscending into a hot bath. I climbed into the back of a truck lrr gct ir-rto the nearest town.

l'lrc lush spread of cattle ranches and banana plantations that rrrrkrlded as we drove had been carved out of the iungle iust thirty r,''rrs before. But in those years Urab6 acquired the savagery that lr,rrl taken four hundred years to develop in the rest of the Co- l,,rrrlria. T'oday Urab6 is the most violent place in the country. Wlrcn people in Urabd need to escape, they go to Medellin for ,r littlc peace and quiet.

Scltlcrs began to move here during La Violencia to grow ba- rr,rrurs and escape the carnage in "civilized" Colombia. In 1959 llrr' [.lnited Fruit Company, under the name Frutera de Sevil]a, ,,rrrrc ir-r and bought tl-re colonizers' land. People who wouldn't ,,,'ll wcrc forced out or killed. United Fruit recruited unskilled, rllilt'nrtc local fishermen or itinerants to pick bananas. The work- ,'rs, who knew little of laws or labor codes, accepted starvatiorr \\',rg('s, at times they were paid in scrip to be redeemed at inflatccl

;rr rct's at the company store. 'fhe banana growers paid no taxcs. 'l'lrt'rvorkers'houses had thatched palm roofs and no floors. Thcrc \\'('r(' llo roads, schools, health clinics, or clean water.

lrr 1964 and 1966 workers formed the first banana pickers' rrrriorrs. Their leaders were killed; new ones stepped into thcir g,l:rccs. Soon the unions had allies: left-wing guerrilla groups. l'lrt' (lolombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) and thc l!'oplc's l,iberation Army (EPL), spotting rich soil in which t<r ,,orv llrcir message of revolution, came to Urabd, feeding off thc ,rrrgt'r of the banana workers and the small farmers forced off llrcir l:rnd by the landowners. The guerrillas paid the landowucrs l,,rt'k irr thcir own coin. An official of Augura, the association of ;rrivrrlc banana growers, said that guerrillas had killed 60 farnr nunllgcrs and 160 crew leaders; 80 percent of the landowncrs rrow livccl in Medellin and traveled to Urabd only unclercovcr. llv l()tlfl gucrrillas were extorting protection fees as higl'r as thrcc llrorrsarrclclollars a month. Some landowncrs had been kiclnappccl l,y llrc I|ARC ancl returned aftcr paying rallsont, only to bc ki<l- rlrppr'<l rrgain by thc ['lPL.

'l'lrc lrirffickcrs havc, at variotts titncs, ftrrnrcd allialrccs witlr llrt' grrcrrillirs. Ccrtain fiortts of thc l"AllC art<l Natiorrirl Lilxrr- ,rlron Alrrry (l':l,N) grurrd ;rrnglc lrrbs firr rttottcy. IJrrl tlrc rlilr('o- lirrcnilllr corrtrt'r:liott is tirry t'otttplttctl lo llrt' lt:trt'<t-rigltl. 'l'lrt'

46 I CHrr_DREN oF CerN

traffickers becamc rich and began to buy Colombia's farms and ranchcs. As lar-rdowners they sought protection from trou- blemaking peasant organizers and guerrillas who kidnapped their family mcrnbers. 'fheir alliance shifted from the guerrillas to the military, which shared tl'reir political views. Death squads were formed, organized by the landowners, staffed by soldiers, and now financed on an unprecedented scale by traffickers.

The addition of traffickers to Colombia's political violence was like pouring oil on fire. From 1986 to 1990 right-wing death squads or bands of sicarios claimed more than eight thousand civilian victims. Most of these were pcasant union members and organizers. (T'he figure does not include guerrillas killed in armed combat. ) The monthly report of the Bogot6 Pennanent Human Righh Commission is simply a phonc book-size cornpilation of the nation's murders and massacres. Eighty-two massacres took place in the first half of 1988 in Colombia; the Honduras and La Negra massacres were merely two of the wcekly massacres in Urabii.

I made my way to the Honduras farm, which lies a half hour's drive fronr Apartad6, Urab6's capital. 'fhe dirt road cuts through miles and n-riles of banana trees, their fruit encascd in blue plastic bags to keep insects away. According to the investigation report I had read, in late February 1988 men wearing the uniforms of the Voltigeros Battalion, Urab6's local army unit, pulled up at a Honduras farm soccer game, shouted antigucrrilla slogans, and roughed up the workcrs on the field. Later Voltigeros officials drove through the steaming clearing where the workers lived. They were accompanied by former guerrillas who pointed out workers they claimed had guerrilla sympathics.

At twelve-thirty on the morning of March 4, 1988, fifteen men parked on the dirt road, walked into the clearing, rapped on the doors of the workers' white cement houses, and yelled, "You're all guerrilla sons of bitches." The visitors read a list of men's names. Seventeen of the men came out of their houses. T'he visitors forced them to the ground and shot thern. 'fhen the killers went to the La Negra farm, a few hundred yards away. As thcy pounded on the doors, they shouted that rcsidcnts wcrc hicling arms inside. Thcy hatrlcd tlrrec mcn outsiclc anrl killcrl thcrn.

'['hc fcw fanrilics wlro wcrc lrorrrc at Ikrn<lrrr:rs wlrcrr I visitcrl wcrc rrcwly lrrrivcrl; cvcryonc wlro lrurl lrt,n llrt,rt,rrl llrt. lirrrt'o[

QUTJOTE 147

llrt' nrassacre had moved away, said a rrran repairing a motorcyclc. l lrc tiny cement houses where the single men had roomed werc rrcrrrly empty. In one there was a pair of purple slippers; in anothcr ,r srrrall suitcase lay open. At La Negra a banana worker Iounging rrr rr pair of jogging shorts told me that the three men killed werc rrrrion leaders. I asked about their politics. Hc shrugged. If they lr;rrl been guerrilla sympathizers, he wasr-r't about to tell me. A l,rrgc pig followed me back to the car.

A fcw days after thc massacre, the DAS, or invcstigations po- lrt't', l>egan to look into the killings, interviewing fifty people who lr;rtl witnessed various parts of the crime. Forty-five days after thc nrirssacres, thc DAS had assembled a sordid tale with a cast <lf ,rrrrry officials, right-wing politicians, wealthy landowners and ,lr r rg barons.

'l'lrc investigation report traced thc Honduras and I-a Negra nrirsl.;lcrcs to the nearby rural zone of C<irdoba and a wealthy r,rrrclrcr and cocaine trafficker named Fidel Castano, who calls lrrrrrsclf Rambo. His story reads like a movie script. He foundccl lris <lcath squads aftcr guerrillas had kidnapped and killed his l,rllrcr in the early 1980s. The DAS concluded that Rambo ern- ;,hryctl two thousand men in his army and cnjoyed the support oI lwcrrty thousand nrore in thc region. Investigators found dozens ol lr<xlics, bcaring signs of torture, in mass graves on his property. 'l'lrcy also found ihat police in one town had a special radio lrt'tlrrcncy set asidc to contmunicate with hirn.

l(:rrrrlr<r ran a school for sicarios with nrore than a thousan<l yirr<lrratcs. Arnong the instructors were Israelis, Germans, :rn<l Nortlr Americans. 'l'he school was financed by the Mafia ancl rrrrr by right-wing police and arrry officers and the mayor of thc lorvrr <)f Pucrto Boyacd, who was widely thought to be the hcarl ol llrc rcgion's paramilitary death squads. (At thc cntrancc to l'rrcrlo lloyacai a billboard proclaims the city thc "antisubvcrsivc lrr;rilrrlof Coklnbia.")Oncc in Urab6, Voltfgcros soldicrs showctl llrt' sicrrrios whonr tu kill.

( )rr thc l>asis of thc I)AS investigation, a judgc in Bogotri rrrrlit'lc<l l)abl<l l,lscobirr iurcl Gouzllo ll<xlrigrrcz Oacha, wh<l wirs rvrrlt'ly krrowrr rrs thc trrrffickcrs' nrilitary chicf. Shc also irrrlictcrl llrt' nr;r1,or o[ l)rrcrlo l]oyacii, lr lxrlicc captuirr, lru<l scvcrirl offir.t'rs , rl llrt' Volligr.r.os Ilirllrrliorr.

r\rrrl llr:rl's rrs lln ;rs slrt'gol . Wlrt'rr slrt. lrit.tl lo lly lo llrt'silr,

48 ICstLDREN oF CetN

of the sicarios'school, her plane was hiiacked to a remote runway,

where police held her all day, then returned her to Bogotri. She told a reporter that when she went to rcquest the military's co- operation from Defense Minister Rafael Samudio, he responded that she was a leftist trying to discredit the military. "And if you don't have a leftist past, we'll find one," he added ominously. She left the country. Her father, a promincnt Liberal governor,

was killed. 'I'he secor.rd iudge on the case was killed. When Rodriguez Gacha, the country's second most wanted

drug trafficker after Escobar, was killed by policc in late 1989 after the crackdown following Gal6n's death, Rambo and his paramilitary groups continued their alliance with others of the Medellin traffickers.

Outside Urab6 the rnarriage of drug violencc and politics is a less visible but much nrore scriotts thrcat to the future of thc state. The traffickers have takcn the lead in a campaign of death against the entire political left, now killing their iclcological ad- versaries as well as their business opponents. Ran-rbo is widely suspected of ordering the killings of two leftist prcsidential can- didates in 1990. Both opposed extradition, but both were leaders of small left-wing parties created by forn-rer guerrillas. Bemardo

faramillo, shot to death in Bogotd's airport, was thc candidate of Uni6n Patri6tica (UP), a legal party formed by former FARC guerrillas in I985. Carlos Pizarro, thc dashing sou of a Colom- bian admiral, was the candidate of the M-19, whose gucrrillas signed a peacc treaty with the govemment in 1990, piled thcir guns in a heap under a Colorrbian flag, and registered as a political party. As a reward for renouncing violerlce and acccpting democratic rules, Pizarro was shot to death on a commercial airliner seven weeks later. Despitc his lcgendary audacity, he had been shoi only once before in his twenty years as a guerrilla; it was also whilc he wore a suit, during ofEcial peace talks with the Colombian government. In truth, it was much safcr to be a guerrilla than to be a leftist politician. More tl'ran a thottsaud of Uni6n Patri6tica's meurbcrs werc killcd in thc party's first five years.

Yct thcrc wcrc always tttrlrc tttclnl)crs, lllorc carrclitlatcs. Onc of [)nirirr Patrititicrr's <lfficiirls wls thc Illayor of Allartrt<l<'r, sttrcly orrr'of lltc t:ottrtlry's riskicr jobs. I gitvc llis scctc'titry llly lllllllc

QUTJOTE 149

lnd stood and waited with dozens of other people in the white irdobe room. After half an hour an nncombed man in a red T- shirt who seemed to be in his early twenties approached me. "You're waiting to see me?" hc said.

"l'm waiting to see the mayor," I replied. Ile laughed. "l'm the mayor." He put on a bulletproof vest.

"l have to go sec a new medical post," he said, "but I'll be back irr half an hour."

When he came back, he took off his vest and shoes and sat <lown. FIis name was Ram6n Castillo, and he was really thirty- llvc and a lawyer. He had become mayor six weeks before my visit, he told me, but six weeks were a long time in Apartad6. ( )uc man who had been mayor the ycar before had resigned early irr clisgust, saying, "Four months are like four centuries here." 'l'lrc next mayor had to leave; she got too many death threats. ( llstillo showed me his latest death threat, a Ietter addressed to lrirn and four other UP mayors, signed by a group called Death lo Northeastern Revolutionaries.

llc put on his shoes and his bulletproof vest and shoved his jli into his briefcasc. "l had to gct permission from the army to

crrrry this," he said, not cornmenting on the irony of a demo- r rrrtically electcd mayor's asking the army for permission to protect lrirrrsclf from death squads that likcly were staffcd by its own soklicrs. A ycar Iatcr Castillo left the country. His successor, l)irrrra Cardona, also from the UP, was killcd in early 1990.

I ll) nrenrbers paticntly tried to explain to me that the leflwing p;rrlics offered thc only way to work for peaceful changc; thcir rlrrblxrnr assumption that this was possiltle to do left nrc norc rrrvstificd than ever. "You can recruit guerrillas on cvcry strcct t onrcr," Julio Santana, thc UP's spokcsman, told me when I ru't'rrl to sec him in Bogoti, to try to fathom the rnysterics of his lrrrrly. "Political leaders arc harcler to find." Ancl gctting harclcr lo lirrrl cach day; sevcnty-thrce nrorc UP urcrnbers wcrc killcd irr Icss llurrr two months in carly 1990. Santana showcd ntc a twcnty- ',r\ l)rgc conrputcr printout of UP's dcacl. "Wc acccltt thc hw," l.,rrrl:rrrrr s:rid. "Wc arc a lcgally rccognizccl, pcaccftrl political orli:rrrizlrliorr. If wc <lo cnckrrsc thc gucrrillas, thc g<lvcrrrncnt lras ,'r'r'rv riglrt to iail rrs. Iwislr thcy wotrlcl jail rrs. Itworrl<lbc bcttcr llr;rrr rvlurl is lrirlllrcrring to rrs now."

50lCutt-DREN oF CatN

"Mo*" pEopLE THINK rHB Uttt6N Pernl6rtce PEoPLE ARE THE 'good Communists,' " said Colonel Eduardo Ar6valo, the press spokesman for the armed forces at the Defense Ministry, his feet up on his desk. "lt's a lie. They go back and forth between the UP and the guerrillas. Hell, they're really guerrillas."

Ardvalo is a friendly, lively, informal man. He has another important quality, from a iournalist's point of view: He is com- pletely blind to the implications of his argument. Anyone who doubts that the miliiary is killing the left merely has to listen to Ar6valo deny it. I asked about the indictment of the Voltigeros officers for the Urabii massacrcs. "That iudge is on the extreme Ieft," he said with a wave of his hand. "What you've heard is just propaganda. Besides, a civilian judge car-r't investigate an officer. She should pass the case over to the anny.

"These so-called paramilitary groups are not the army," he continued. "lt's just a convenient word the left uses to blame us. What really happens is that people see a Uni6n Patri6tica man in a suit and tie in the Senate, and even though he's wearing a tie and he's a senator, people recognize him as a guerrilla, so they contracta sicario to kill him. We can't have him just arrested; the judges will let him go. You don't understand what we're up against. T'he judges here either are threatened by the subversives or are leftists themselves. Mar-ry of the people in the law here have links with the extreme left. Most of the law professors ir-t the National University are extremely left-wing. Amnesty Inter- national is manipulated by the Communist party. That's well known. " A better spokesman could have figured out how to negate military involvement in the death squads without instantly con- firming it. But military officers never seem to learn. When an attorney general accused 59 soldiers of participating in the death squad Death to Kidnappers in 1986, the military high com- mand accused him of instigating a war against the military. The attorney general's name then appeared at thc top of a list of ihirty-two people targeted for death for crimes against "ottr nril- itary institutions. " We havc rtothing to do with thc dcath sclttatls, thc nrilitary was sayittg. And if yotl sily wc <lo, wc'll ltrtvc yott killc<|.

Q U r J O T E I sl

"You can't compare left-wing and right-wing violence," Ari- vrrlo said as we walked out the door. "When your body is infectcd, you need to create antibodies. Sometimes the antibodies havc lr,cl side effects, but ii's not the same kind of thing as the infection ilsclf. Colombia is infected."

I asked how the infection should be fought. He thought for a rvlrile. "Sometimes you have to cut off a finger to save the pa- licrrt," he said. "Argentina is a good example." The Argentinc gcnerals in the late 1970s had killed or disappeared more than rrinc thousand people. "The surgeon had to take drastic action. llrrt it came out fine. The patient survived."

Urabd had acquired a new chief surgeon before my visit: Vol- ligcros commander General fesfs Armando Arias. I asked hinr r'lry in a zoue where there were three soldiers for every two bana.a rvorkers, in a zone where I had been stopped and asked for rrry l);ll)crs twice in a half hour car trip, the army had never arrcstcrl ,,r fought a member of a death squad. "ln spite of the prcscncc ol'so many troops, there are still guerrillas here," he said. "'l'hal rkrcsn't mean we help or tolerate them. We just can't find thcrrr. 'l'lrc sane is true with the death squads." The first indict,rc,t lrrrtl bcen handed down for the Honduras and La Negra rnassa- ( r('s, a Voltigeros lieutenant named Pedro Bermridez. "'l'hc irr- tlrr:lurcnt was a mistake," Arias said. "Maybe he's from anothcr lrr igacle. He's not one of ours."

While waiting to talk to the general, I had fallen into a corr- 'r'r'srrtion

with another Voltigeros officer. we were sitting on thc lirrrss in lawn chairs, drinking orange soda and watching thc rct'nrits play soccer. It was a most entcrtaining gane, nrainly l,r'r'lusc the field was pure mud and the players kept slipping irrkr prrtl<llcs. The officer-he didn't want me to use his nanrc or r:rrrk-offcred his analysis of the political situation in Urab:i. lt rr':rsr r't complicated.

"'l'lrc Uni6n Patri6tica and the unions are gucrrillas," lrc sairl. "ll:rvc you talkcd to thc mayor?" I said I had.

"Wcll, hc's a gucrrilla." I rrskcrl him about thc casc of Licutc.ant llcnntlclcz, wlrr, li,

,rll I krrcw, r.ight havc bccn ,,c <lf tlrc nrud-s<lakcrl socccr pllrycrs. "'l'lurl irulgc is civilia. a.d had rrr juris<licli.rr t, irr<lict lrirrr," lr. srrirl. "l"ilst rfall, lJcrrrrrirlcz is irr irrrclligcrrc.c, rrrrtl lris jrlr is l, l:rlk lo cvt'ryorrc, s, llurl's wlry lrr. lv;rs r.rr.glrl l;rlkirrg l, llr.

s9 ICHtLDREN oF CetN

death squad. Only a military iuclgt can have a soldier arrested

i* ro*.,f,i"g done in the courst of d"ty' A military iudge should i;;;r,tgri;,r"n"d if there is a reason to detain him' but I don't think he'll find one.""'iii

if,ir I had no doubt. There were some contradictions be-

tween what the general and the officer had said' Bermfdez' who'

,.""tai"g to th"e general, did not exist, was' according to-the ffi;;;; ; tt. int!iligence unit' According to the officer' .Ber- *ta., was conversiig in the course of his duty with death il;;-J;rth ,q,rrd, ih,t *t" able to operate freelv' according ; ,h" general, b."rur. they had eluded being -spotted by .the il;. I:;;*ry iiffere.t *,v f'o- that which the officers had i.rt.na.a, they were getting ihti' *ttt'ge across' They' along *itt th.'trrffickers ,ia *'J landowners, are in a war with the i"fi,- ,if the left, and in a war the victims have no rights and kiiling them is committing no crime' Whenever new evidence

;;: ,rp tint ing the miliiary with the death squads' the officers J""y i,.

'But the-more they deny it, the more they tell the truth.

"l o* o"rr*ISTIC," ENnlgun Low MunrRA, THE JUSTICE MINIS- t.r, tofa me back in Bogota' It-was his last day in office'.Low il;ri;r, t thought, wo,rli have the wisdom of his ten months on tl* ,b and th"e i.ankness that usually accompanies imminent departure-not to mention the tranquillity that came from his

olan to move to Argentina' I hoped to hear iustice s real possi-

t;iil ro, uri"gin/law to Colombia. He was bald, with liver soots and a constant tremor; it was hard to believe he was only

Hra;;.. H" t ra t."t his daughter out of the country and could ;;.;;;;" to Sundav -ass *ithout his escort: a bulletproof car ;;ih ,;;6.r car in front and a motorcycle on each side' and his U"iyg"rta with machine guns-sometimes six men' sometimes

t*;1". ;, fifteen. (The bodyguards could not protect him forever; ;;Mry I, 1991, Low Murtra was assassinated in Bogot6')

Finding a iustice minister on his last day in office was no. great

tricl;CarJo ran through ten of them in his four years as president'

Lo*'farf"tttr, who left"because of a political dispute' was the only

"""'a resign of natural causes. 'fhc othcrs wcrc sackccl l>ccitttsc

tfr"V ",aaJ.ly

startcd t, back away frortr cxtratliti.rr wSilc it was

QUTJOTE ls3

rlill government policy, or they resigned after evidence of their corrrrption had been uncovered or after one too many death I I r rcltts.

I irsked Low Murtra about the dangers to judges, how Colombia corrltl fight crime if fighting crime required justices to commit collcctive suicide. "fudges are not as strong as they should be ,rrrtl will be," he said. But he added that judges received better lrrolcction than before. "We're building bunkers in military bar- rrt'ks to protect them," he said.

Another improvement, Low Murtra said, was that he had won ,r srrrall increase in the department's budget. He also pointed to rr,krrnrs in the Judicial Police. I told him that I'd talked to the rrurrr in charge, who told me that he was sending judges to in- lcstigate rural cases in canoes, alone or with one assistant, usually prrvirrg for the trips out of their own pockets. "l feel a little Itrrslrittcd," Low Murtra said, smiling.

llis real reason for optimism, Low Murtra said, was that a llrgolh iudge had indicted Rodriguez Gacha for the Honduras irrrrl l,a Negra massacres, and an indictment of Escobar was in llrt' rvorks. "lt is a very good sign," he said. "lt means we're getting rlror rgcr. "

l,ow Murtra was not talking about prison for the traffickers, or Irrrrls, rlr even arrests. It was a simple indictment, and not even llrc lrrst; Alvaro Medina, among others, had done it. That an rrulit'trncnt was a victory indicated the scarcity of victories in ( l rkrrrrl>ian justice.

F,,,a n r,'r,:w GloRrous MoNTHS AFTER THE MURDER oF GALAN rN Arrlirrsl 1989, public outrage and President Barco's determination Itrrrrt'rl thc justice system into the muscular and single-minded h'irrrr o[ l,ow Murtra's dreams. Police arrested traffickers, jailers Irckl llrcrn, and they stayed put until they were loaded onto plancs hrr llrt'ir cxtradition to courts in Tarnpa or facksonville. But the r trtckrkrwrt's very success created a backlash so destructive that llrttco lritrl to abernclon it. Whcn thc traffickers began rcplying wtllr lxrrrrlls in sclrtxlls, slropping ccntcrs, aucl orliuary nciglr- lxrrlrorxls, Colourbians lrcgau to rcl>cl. 'l'lrc g<tvcrnrncrrt was ol> t'rorrsly rrot ctprilryctl to wirgc wAr on thc tlrtrg tnrffickcrs, rrrlrry

54 lcHrr-DREN OF cetN

peoplc bclievcd, and sincc it was not so cquipped, it should not have provoked their wrath. Even former aides to Galdn were calling for dialoguc with thc traffickers as the key to stabilizing Colombia.

The backlash had several parts. One was anti-U. S. sentiment. Even lrcfore the crackdown I heard people express their angcr at the Unitcd States for asking Colombia to destroy its own insti- tutions when they rlidn't sec thc Unitecl States gctting tough on nroney laundering or the sale of guns or chemicals used in pro- ccssing cocaine. With the crackdown the feeling intensified that Colombia is not corrupting the United States; the United States is corrupting Colonrbia, and Colombians don't hear any thanks for the trcmendous cost of their sacrificcs. "Let's not turn Co- lombia into the Vietnam of the war on drugs" was a standard applause line of presidential candidate Ernesto Sarnper in the 1990 campaign. 'l'he U.S. plan is "educational videos in the United States, bombers for Colombia," he said at a press coll- ference, "persuasivc chats in the consumption centers and he- licopters for Colombia." 'l'he spectaclc of Washington Mayor Marion Barry as a political candidate after dozens of witnesses had detailed his use of crack was a sorrrce of endless bitter amuse- nrent for Colombians.

"'['he United States' problcm with drugs," Medina's widow, Luz Estcla, told me, "is not the pain it causes but the dollars that are leaving thc country as a result. You don't really care about drug addiction. It's public; it's tolerated; tl'rere are even magazincs that teach you how to smoke. You iust don't want us to get the money." I would guess that the majority of the Co- lombians I met believed this to be truc, and they aren't all anti- gringo leftists: Luz Estela defir'res herself as a cor)servative, and she can hardly be considered soft on drugs.

A second phenomenon was a shift in the way Colombians viewed the sins of traffickers. With the crackdown thc traffickers' crime became not narcotrafficking but the narcoterrorism de- stroying tl-re state and threatening ordinary people. Although drug addiction is a terrible problern in Colombia, the cottntry has so many tcrrible problcms that worrying al>out clrtrg addictiott is tt Iuxury (lolornbiarrs canr-rot yct aff<rrcl. If dnrg rtcltlicti<ln worrics llrc grirrgos, rruury Oolorttl>i;ttts tlrirrk, lct llrc grirrgos litkc t:ltrc <lf il rrp llrt'rt'.

QUTJOTE ls5

It was thc widespread view in Colombia that the best way t<r lrglrt narcoterrorism was to give up the fight agailtst narcotraf- lrt king. If thc state had simply allowed the traffickers to go about llrt'ir busincss, they would not bc killing judges, cops, journalists, ,rrrtl presidential candidates, and bombs would not bc blowing rrp innocent bystanders. Most Colombians I r-net thought that llrt'way to end thc violer-rce was to quasi-legalize cocaine, to treat rl rrs nrarijuana is trcated in the United States.

'l'hc government seemed to agrce. It bcgan its crackdown only ,rllcr thc traffickers had killed Gal6r-r, a prominent member of the l,,rlitical elite. The crackdown was conccntrated on Flscobar and lrrs rroisy, politically opinionated, and violent Medellfn traffick- ,'rs, while leaving alone the rival traffickcrs fron thc city of Cali, rllro arc less vocal and simply interested in doing business. And rvlrcn the traffickers showed that they could raise thc stakes in- ,k'lirritcly, the govcrnment backed away.

T' ,,,, a,rao"*rowN BROT.,GH'r' r'H, ISSUE oF' ,LATA o pLoMo lto*rt, lo t'vcry Colombian. Suddenly, even those with no previous r,rrLlcts with the drug world had to worry, twenty-four hours a ,l,ry, almut the traffickers'bor-nbs. 'l'trey worried whcn they scnt llrcir children to school, as thcy shopped, even as they walkcd orr city strcets. They soon grew weary of living in terror becausc ,,1 ;r llrol>lem they believed bclonged to another country. 'l'hcy r,'rponclcd in the natural way: 'l'hey wantecl to make peacc.

lhrt cocaine's hold on Colombia was nruch more complex and rrrrrt'lr nrore sinister. Cocainc had transformed all it touchcd in ( lrlorrrbia. fust as it made the country's traditional political vi- ,,k'rrt:c nrorc widcspread, ranclom, and pcrvasive, so it intcnsificd llrt' violcucc of Colombia's strcets. Just as it corruptccl thc gucr- rrll;rs rurd thc rnilitary, so it corruptcd civic lifc. Colonrbia is ,rrklit'tcrl to cocaine. It proviclcs cmployrncr-rt-pcrhaps half a rrrillion Clokxnbi:urs workecl in cocainc in 1990-and harcl crrr- rlrrcy. It has helpcd clcstroy, througlr plata o ltlonto, thc irrsli- lrrliorrs tlurt lrright othcrwisc havc rcstrainccl it.

llrrl rrs I slrcnt tinrc in Mcdcllin, I l>cgirrr kr scc a rrrorc clrillirrg ,r,,1x't'l ol'llrc rlrug's iurprrct. 'l'lrrrl was its cfr'cl <lrr ortlirurr.y pt.oplr., llrt' t'rtst' willr lvlrit'lr (lrkrrrrllirtrrs lclrr.rrc'<l kr livt' rvillr cot:rirrt,

s6 lcHrr-DREN OF cerN

In a religious and moralistic country trafficking is now an ac- cepted, even admired, activity for a large number of people. Corruption and violence have become routine, ordinary, for all but a few Colombians.

Medellin is not under siege. Life is not conducted to a constant Muzak of gunfire; people do not have to dodge bullets to cross the street. The city is modern and pretty; life goes on. Residents, therefore, can think of violence as part of everyday life. A middle- class Paisa can live a normal life, if avoiding any type of political or union activity, choosing neighbors and relatives who also avoid any political activity, taking extra care when driving not to scratch a car owned by undesirables, and never Jeaving the house after dark can be considered a normal life. Their insistence that life in Medellin is perfectly ordinary is symptomatic of how its people have learned to live with violence.

I found myself in a bar one night with an agreeable Medellin couple who own an art gallery. After a few shots of aguardiente liquor, the topic turned from the art scene to how foreign jour- nalists have invented Medellin's violence because it was a good story; "vultures" was the word the woman used.

"l don't know," I said. "There was a man shot right in front of my hotel one evening by two sicarios. I've never seen a murder anywhere else I've been."

She leaned forward in her chair. "But that's nothing," she said. "That happens all the time. I've seen that four or Eve times myself. "

Initially such blitheness struck me as the product of either extraordinary courage or mental illness. Later, after talking with dozens of people who were similarly nonchalant about experi- ences the average person would consider terrifying, I came to see it as a necessary defense mechanism for living in places like Medellin. Maybe that is what courage is. Violence has become "normal" in Medellin because it is not possible to live in a society in which massacres and assassinations occur daily and still retain a capacity for horror and pain. There's just too much of it; one goes numb.

But below the surface something infinitely more disturbing is occurring. The vast majority of the people I rnct in Mcdcllin have scvcrcd the link lrctwccn the violcncc and its pcrpctrators. Whilc thcy c<lnclcnru tlrc killirrgs, tlrc rroliorr tlrirt sorrrcrorrc is

Q U r J O T E I 57

rcslxrnsible for them seems to have disappeared. Medellin's pricsts, bankers, judges, and politicians speak about the cocaine problem with concern. But they talk about it in a fog of passive voicc, as if the problem were as anonymous and unpredictable ;rs a sudden storm, for which no one is responsible and about rvlrich nothing can be done. They are free to condemn the vi- olcnce while paying respect to its perpetrators.

'l'he psychological accommodation necessary to live with Me- rlcllin's violence was a mystery to me until I completed the jour- rrcy rnyself without even realizing it. My guide was a man named ( )itano, a former policeman. A rnutual acquaintance had ar- rrrrrgcd for Gitano to come to my hotel one evening. When he rrrshed into the hotel lobby, he grabbed me by the hand and prrllcd me out onto the street, where a man had been shot just rrs Oitano was arriving. By the time we got there, three minutes Lrlcr, the body, alive or dead, had been removed, and a crowd ol irlxrut twenty people was pressed around bloodstains in a door- rviry. A man opened the door and yelled for the crowd to scatter. "ll's over. Now leave, everybody," he said. It was seven-thirty on ;r Wcdnesday night, just getting dark, and all the stores were o;rcn. Hundreds of people must have seen the hit, but when we sl;rrtccl asking, no one had seen it. Finally Gitano spotted two lricrrcls who owned a barbershop. They saii that two young men orr ir rnotorcycle had shot four times at a man walking in the slrcct, who then shot back at them twice. Then the motorcycle rgrrl away.

Wc went for a walk around downtown Medellin. It was fully ,lirrk rrow. Gitano, which means "gypty," was twenty-six. Good- hroking, he wore his hair in a long ponytail and was dressed in liglrt tattersall jeans and a red shirt open to the waist. He had h'lt tlrc police force for reasons that were murky and was working ;n ir private security guard. Guayaquil, the neighborhood we were visilirrg, was full of storefronts. All we could see when we peered irr llrc cloors was the glow of basuco cigarettes rising and falling likt' fircflics. People were sleeping on the sidewalk. On Bolivar Slrct'l tlrcrc were prostitutes, one or tw<l on every corner, iu rrrirriskirts, hccls, and tight blouses. 'fhey werc tall f<rr Colombian tv(,urcn, antl thcrc was sonrcthiug strangc altout thcnr. . . . Ci- l;ttro wirs larrghing. "'l'lrcy'rc all nrcrr," hc saicl.

( lilirrro sccnrcrl l<l flccrl irt ltornc. I w;rs bcgirrrrirrg lo gcl tlrc irlcir

58 ICHtLDREN oF CetN

that the line between the cops and the criminals in Medellin was

a blurry one. The typical policeman was a slum kid with a third-

or fourth-grade education-exactly the profile of a trafficker' "A

policemari is a human being who wants to live," Gitano said' ;'Th.y send you to arrest someone who is certainly very dangerous

and certainly not alone." With a sweep of his hand he indicated

the basuco houses. "How do you arrest someone in there? You

can't arrest these people. I would arrest them with lead," he said,

pretending to shoot. "You have to be violent' No one should trust the police here."

I asked about corruption. He laughed. "Everyone thought that

I foined the force to get rich," he said. "lt wasn't true' I was broke the day before payday and the day after." But going a little

easy was tempting, he said, both for the cop's safety and for his

Uilifold. ,,The police are fighting mafiosi who make two or three

million p.ro,, *onth' A policeman gets fifty thousand a month, and thai's only if he's married. What would you do?" Semana magazine estimated that 80 percent of Medellin's city police had

some business relationship with the traffickers' "l have to talk to two sicarios tomorrow," Gitano said later that

night. He said a friend of his was looking for some people to kill hii father. "His father is not a good person," he said' "He treats the family badly." He asked me if I wanted to come' I said I didn't want to go to where they worked, but maybe we could meet somewhere else.

fournalist Silvia Duz6n conducted a series of interviews with

siiarios and their families; Semana published some of her re-

search. In Medellin's northeastern neighborhoods she saw bands

roaming the slums headed by boys as young as twelve' Even if they make some money, they don't move out of their neighbor-

hood; outside they are nothing. Instead, they live with their moth-

ers, whom they tend to idolize and protect, and use their earnings

to add another story to the house or buy their mothers appliances.

They are deeply religious, praying to the Virgin of Carmen to guide their aim, lighting candles before going out on a f o-b' favier, Z sicario of fifteeir, told Duzdn, "l'll die soon, but they'll re- member me for having given rny mother a nice refrigerator'"

one of Duzdn's interviews was with a twenty-ycar-olcl naurccl I1,l Angcl, hcacl of thc vigil:rntc group Sclf-l)cfcrtsc of thc North-

QUIJOTE l5e

t'astern Communities of Medellin. El Angel said he had started by killing a rapist. "The next day we just hung back and listened lo people talk, and we realized people were pleased with the killing," he said. He and his friends moved on to killing drug rrrlrlicts and sicarios, and by the time of the interview he had killcd about three hundred people. "We are just responding to llrc problems the govemmcnt doesn't resolve," he said. "Here tlrc police never come, and when they do, they become ac- t'ourplices of the thieves. The community gives us force and brrcking." (Silvia Duzdn was killed on February 26, 1990, in Magdalena Medio while interviewing three peasant leaders for a rkrry on a town's new peace plan.)

'l'he afternoon after our conversation Gitano came to my hotel rvitlr the friend, C6sar, and two sicarios, Rodrigo and Gilberto. Wc: went to the restaurant on the roof, with a breathtaking view ol thc city and the mountains, and ordered coffee. We maintained rrrr uncomfortable silence as the waitress poured the coffee. Fi- rurlly I said, "What do you do?" It was an awkward scene. I rvrrntcd to ask, "So which of you are the sicarios?" but it seemed ir rtlclicate.

Oisar said he worked as a private security guard. Gilberto and l{rxlrigo said they do "whatever comes up."

I tlccided to plunge right in. "That includes killing people for nroncy, right?" I asked.

( )illrcrto nodded, but it was clear he didn't like the word I had rrstrl. I,l/ asunto ("the business") was the word they used.

'l'lrc sicarios seemed nervous. They said they both were twenty- lwo. 'l'hcy looked younger, both with acne, Rodrigo dressed in jcirrrs rnd a T-shirt, Gilberto in a fancy sweat shirt and tan gr;rrrls, with elaborately styled long hair. Rodrigo was married, he krkl rrrc.

'l'lrcy said they had first killed people when they were sixtecn. l(rxlrigo had started unintentionally. A friend of his was feuding wrllr iuxrthcr rnan and asked Rodrigo to shake him up a bit. l(rxlligo knifcd hirn, and the man died. "lt was an accidcnt," hc r,rrtl, I lc said he was uervous the first time he did a hit f<rr moncy. Now cxllcricucccl in the tradc, thcy use the tirne-tcstcd rncthod ol rr rrrokrrcyclc ancl a .J8 ancl altcrnatc who clrrcs tlrc driving rttrrl wlr<l rlocs c/ usutto. "Wc irlways havc to wrlrry that tlrc pcrsolr

60ICHtLDREN oF CetN

is carrying a weapon," said Gilberto, "or that he has a godfather

who'll g.[ ut back. We don't work in our own barrio or where we're known."

But Rodrigo said they feel in control. "ln the moment when you pull the trigger, your heart races and you concentrate very

hard. It's like a high." Their rate schedule was variable. Rodrigo said that he and

Gilberto often help out their friends. "We advance them money'

or we just work for free," he said. They said they would charge

a person they didn't know a million pesos for a hit ($3,300)' I suspected they were exaggerating; Ihe sicario who had killed UP

presidential candidate Bernardo )aramillo told police he made

bZlO for his trouble. Most of their hits went more cheaply, they

said, and sometimes they took payment in cocaine or jewelry'

When they accepted a client, they would sit down and go over

in detail the routine of the obiectof el asunto. Then they would

spend two or three days following him. Sometimes they cut in

the police if they needed helP. I asked if they had any moral qualms at all. "We don't really

think of the person but of their family," said Gilberto' "lt's true,

the family is going to suffer. But we mostly think about the money

*" *akeiit's ou, *ork. Besides, in most cases they are bad people' We're doing everyone a favor. "

Gilberto had bee., offered a iob as a bodyguard for a small-

time trafficker. The money was good, a hundred thousand pesos

a month, but he turned it down. "lt's too delicate," he said' "The

man has too many enemies' If someone was going to kill him, they'd kill his guards as well."

'ihey said they had no interest in becoming drug dealers them-

selves. "My brother is trying to get me to come work with him," said Rodrigo, "but it's very dangerous to work with drugs' You don't want to be walking around with a quantity on you'" Rodrigo

mentioned that he *orii.d about word getting back to his family if he became a dealer. He was less concerned about his family's

finding out about his current profession. They said that there was

a highir possibility of getting arrested, or "falling," in drugs than in their business. Gilberto had "fallen" once, spending eighteen

months in iail for theft, and it wasrt't a pleasant cxpcrictrcc' "Wltat clocs yottr fanrily think yotr cl<l?" I askctl'

Q U r J O T E | 61

"'l'his and that," Rodrigo said. A woman had told Duz6n: "The mothers don't ask when kids

,,rurc home from school with articles they stole from their class- rrr;rlt's. '['hey end up washing their boys'clothes stained with other ;x'oplc's blood, without saying a word."

I irskcd them what they wanted for the future, say, five years Irorrr rrow. "Five years from now-l don't think that far ahead," ',,rrrl Oilberto. Even saving money for tomorrow was a problem. "\'orr have no idea if tomorrow you'll be in jail or get hit yourself, ro I rrsually use up all my money in one night." He put a finger lo lris rrose, imitating the use of a local product.

l(rxlrigo was more of a dreamer. He was hoping to score one Irrr11'contract, make a lot of money, and go to Miami. He knew ,r hrl of people who had done it.

"( lc:tting a visa is a problem," said Gilberto. He looked at me. "Wlratashame,"Isaid. 'l'lrcy were eager to end the interview and get down to business.

I h'lt thcm talking to C6sar about their deal. 'l'lrc ncxt day it hit me that I had witnessed a murder being

l,l,rrrrrcrl and had done nothing about it. A week earlier I would rrol lrirvc thought this possible; now the idea of doing something Ir,rrl rrot cven occurred to me. What could I do? Asking for details lr,trl slrrrck me as imprudent, and the police, overwhelmed with rrrrrrrlcr, would pay little attention to a story about one not yet r orrrrrrittcd.

llrrl nrrrrc than that, the sicarios'hit hadn't seemed to me like Irrrrrrk'r. I had severed the connection between the four men in rrrt' lrotcl rooftop restaurant and the imminent death of C6sar's lrrllrcr. Aftcr only a short time in Medellin I was thinking about vlolcrrcc irr the passive voice, as something that just happens to

lrrogrlt'.

It, I ,;,)ur,r) sr.Frr)p lHRoucH coNSpIRACy ro coMMIT HoMICTDH rrlllr lt'rr rlays in Medellin, it should not have surprised rne that lrroplt' wlro hacl livcd hcrc all thcir lives werc capablc of con- rL'rrrtrirrg tlrc traffickcrs'corruption of thc city's youth in spccchcs lrriur('('(l lly thc traffickcrs' nlor)cy. It shotrlcl rrot havc surpriscd

62 I CHtt-DREN OF CntN

me even when these people wore cassocks. Many priests boast of accepting donations from the traffickers; the Catholic Church in Colombia is a tower of ambiguity where violence is concerned.

Father Elias Lopera Cdrdenas is a lawyer and theologian in Medellin's archdiocese, whose offices occupy the third floor of a modern brick shopping mall witl'r an atrium in the center and a Hardee's on the first floor. Speaking a floor above a shop that billed itself as selling "Shoes and Fantasies," Lopera criticized the violence and consumerism of Colombian society. "We live in a very aggressive society," he said. "We've lost respect for life." He spoke forcefully, leaning forward, pur-rching the air with his Coke-bottle glasses. "Young people think happiness is to have money. The sixteen- or seventeen-year-old risks his life to get money for a television. Kids say when they're big they want to be mafiosos. We're learning the laws of the Mafia: Pay me or I kill you."

He said that he had heard the dying confession of a man known to be a sicario. The man confessed to Lopera that he had once stolen some money. "ls that all you have to confess to?" Lopera said.

The man nodded. "Aren't you a hired killer?" Lopera said. "But that helps people," the dying man replied. "lt helps the

people I kill because they have a very hard life. It helps the people who hire me, and it helps me because it gives me money to live."

Lopera mused for a while about the fallen morality of the city. I asked him why the church accepted money from the traf-

fickers. "We don't always know who gives the church money," he said. "lf the priest is clear about it, hc wotl't accept it. But a lot of the times when we pass the collection plate, we don't know who puts the coin in."

"We're not talking about coins," I said. "Money isn't bad or good," he replied. "We need money to

create development. We have a demographic explosion here, and we need money to help people. The state sells cigarettes and alcohol, but that doesn't make the state immoral. Most people welcome the money. It helps the economy to accept thc urottey, but you have to do it with rcflcction. I'vc tltought at lot alxrttt this. I havc :r reptttittion :ts a tlccp tlrinkcr ltcrc."

l)ccp tlrirrkirrg lurtl llrtxlrrcc<l sotttt' t:ttriotts t'ottt'lttsitllts. l,tl-

QUTJOTE 163

;,,'r;r lrad worked in Pablo Escobar's campaign when the drug l,,rtl ran and was elected to Colombia's House of Representatives, ,rrrrl irr l98l he had moderated a panel about extradition that l',rcobar had sponsored and participated in. "l knew him when Ir,' rvus a congressman," Lopera said of Escobar. "He thought ,rl,orrt Colombia. He talked about ending poverty. When I knew lrrrrr, hc was a good person and had good ideas. The press talks ,rlrorrl irtrocities. But if he's bad, the state should prove it. It's not rrp lo rlle. "

llrssibly only a lawyer, which Lopera is, and a deep-thinking l,rrvyc'r at that, could have reached the conclusion that the jury ru',rs still out on Pablo Escobar. Escobar has not, of course, been lrrt'rl. Colombian law presumes innocence until guilt is proved, ',,r l,,scobar is an innocent man. Lopera's civil libertarianism rr,rrrl<l have been admirable had he been in a country that had ,r lrr<licial system capable of finding witnesses willing to testifu, a lrr,lgc willing to preside, police able and willingto make an arrest ,rrrrl olrtain evidence, and jailers willing to hold the accused oncc I r,' I rrrrl lrcen convicted. But this is not a description of Colombia.

l\4rrrio Arango is the dean of Medellin's department of rnoral ,rrrrlriguity and one of the city's strangest men. When Arango's lrr,,l l>ook-The African-lndigenous Ancestry of Colombian Irnlilutions-came out in 1971, his mother had sighed artd ,r,,kr'<|, "Mario, my son, why don't you do something that cau rn,rl<' yor-r a living?" Arango caught on quickly. When I went to ',,,'lrirn, hc was one of forge Ochoa's lawyers and an adviser t<r l,,,,t olxrr, and his most recent book on drug trafficking was alrcut l. lrct'onrc a best seller. He had also been economics editor of ( lrrrllcrrrro Cano's paper E/ Espectador, head of the econonrics rL'p;rrlnrcnt at the University of Medellin, and president of a l,,,,rl collcgc. He had recently been elected to the Medcllin City ( lrrurc'il.

llt' was a little dandy of a man, with a big mustachc ancl u lr,rllx'lly, drcssccl in a striped shirt and plaid pants that clashcd lr,,rrrlrly. Wc clrank coffec in his study, <lvcrlooking a garrlcrr 1,,rprrl:rlcrl by giant turtlcs. A portrait of )oscl;h Stalin lruug orr ,,rr,' rvrrll. Ararrgo hacl strrdictl in thc Sovict [Jnion. I Iis argrtrrrcrrl rr',n llurl rlrrrg trlffickirrg slrorrkl bc wclconrcrl bccurrsc it is grxxl l,,r clr;lillrlisrn.

"'llrr' Urrilt'rl Strrlcs slrorrkl lrc vt'ry tlurrrklrrl lor llrt' <lrrrg

64 I cHTLDREN OF cntN

traffic," he said. "lt has brought thousands of people into the consuming society, people with an appreciation for the United States. It has amplified demand for your products and kept the economy from falling into crisis. If not for that, we'd have a whole country of guerrillas. What's better for capitalism? Drug trafficking? Or guerrillas?"

His latest book, The lmpact of Drug Trafficking in Antioquia, contained a survey of twenty Mafia chieftains'life-styles and opin- ions, such tidbih as the information that 40 percent consider themselves devout Catholics, 80 percent send their children abroad to be educated, 80 percent believe that drugs are dan- gerous, 90 percent oppose the sale of basuco in Colombia, and 60 percent have at least two girlfriends in addition to their wives.

I asked Arango about Escobar. "A very intelligent man," he said. "Wise, with a clear vision of the political and economic problems of the country and the world and a good sense of social service. He's charismatic. He's very attractive in the way he com- municates with people; he makes himself liked."

I sensed that he didn't care for the portrait he was painting of himself. "|ust because I'm a lawyer for drug traffickers doesn't mean I support them," he said. "l'm just against extradition." He said the Ochoas paid him very little, but he would not specifu how much. It was principle, rtot tnoney, that had attracted the team of lawyers to work for the Ochoas. "There are four ex- Supreme Court justices," he said, "including two ex-presidents of the Supreme Court. And a former member of the Council of State. People of great moral quality."

Another of Arango's books was called The ldeology and Thoughts of Rodrigo Lara Bonilla. He had been a good friend of the justice minister. "He was a real leader-brilliant, intelligent," he said.

I asked him if it made him uncomfortable to be working for the men who had had Lara Bonilla killed.

"Oh, I'm not really their lawyer," he said. "l'm just a student of cocaine trafficking, and they called me up to clarifr a few legal concepts. It's one of Colombia's principal problems, and I study the problems of Colombia."

Here was a man who could live with contracliction: Hc was/ wirs not a Mafia lawycr, hc did/clid rtot su1>1>orl tlrc traffickcrs,

QUTJOTE 165

Irt' was a supercapitalist who admired Stalin, and he didn't let it lxrther him when his clients had his friends murdered.

T, ',,,

r*oaarcKERs Do Nor owN EVER'.NE AND EVER,THTNG rN Mcdellin, but they own what they want to own. They have not lrorrght into the city's factories on any important scale, but this sccurs to be by their own choice. Running a textile factory isn't vcry glamorous. It is hard work, offers small rates of return, and, rrrost important, is subject to government controls and strict re- porting of financial transactions that make it a poor way to launder rkrllars. Cocaine money goes instead into farms, luxury goods, irr(l nore glamorous, harder-to-monitor businesses that are better irl lriding money's origins: contraband cigarettes; hotels; restau- r;rrrts; discos; horses; fighting bulls. Many of the soccer teams in ( lokrrnbia are owned by the traffickers. Colombians have in- vt'rrtcd new words to describe the businesses: That team plays rrrrrcofutbol, they say, or we're going to a narcodisco.

'l'hc way the traffickers help their business through sharing llrcir wealth is by now famous. In the judicial system, a govern- rrrt'rrt lawyer told me, the prosecutors are the least corrupt, but rl is a question of logistics, not morals; it is simply easier for the Mrrfia to win cases by bribing policemen or judges. There are nriury, many corrupt judges, he said, many corrupt officers in llrt' lrrmy, investigations police, customs office, and, above all, llrt' lxrlice. Others told me that the only rival to the police in rrrrrttcrs of corruption is the Congress. Campaigns are expensive rrr (hlombia, and there are no burdensome government regu- lirliorrs concerning financing. Possibly the only two men in the ( lrlonrbian Congress who did not take secret donations from lrirlllckcrs were Luis Carlos Gal6n-and Pablo Escobar.

l'r'rhaps as important as the outright bribes, the government rt\ r wlx)lc accepts a more subtle legal payoff. It seemed to have rk,t'irlcd that while cocaine has brought the country so many ;rrolrlcrrrs, Colornbia might as well enjoy cocaine's benefits. The ('( r)nonly is hcalthy by Latin American standards, growing stead- rly rrl rrrorc than 5 pcrccnt a year in thc late l9tlOs, and with a vcrrrly irrflation ratc in 1987 of 22 pcrccnt, ctluivalcnt to thc

66 lcHrr-DREN OF cerN

monthly rate in Peru, Argentina, and Brazil. As during La Yi- olencia, business has never been better; amid the violence and chaos of 1989, investment rose 60 percent over the year before. This is in part because of prudence; Colombia borrowed little during the 1970s and is not burdened with a huge debt. But partly it is because of cocaine, which in the late 1980s was bringing at least $I.5 billion a year back into the country-as much as the hard currency earned from the export of Colombia's legal drug, coffee. Cocaine money, spent mainly on luxury goods, does not create as much solid investment in the Colombian economy per dollar as does money from legal exports. But it doesn't hurt, and each president has done what he can to make sure the traffickers bring the money home and change it to pesos through the state rather than privately, thus ensuring that the hard currency sits in a state bank.

The government offers a trafficker with suitcases full of dollars several ways to turn the money into untraceable clean pesos, no questions asked. Starting with L6pez Michelsen in the mid- 1970s, each Colombian president has offered a tax amnesty, allowing a citizen to repatriate money held abroad without paying taxes. The Barco administration offered nineteen kinds of am- nesties. Not coincidentally, the amnesties also permit the laun- dering of cocaine dollars.

The most brazen way to launder money is through the Banco de la Repriblica's Ventanilla Siniestra ("Left-Handed Window"). The window was created during the government of L6pez Mich- elsen, when the marijuana boom had just started and millions of illegal dollars were entering the country.

On the day I went to the Left-Handed Window of the Banco de la Rep(blica in Medellin, four men in their twenties wearing tennis shoes and jeans were removing envelopes stuffed with hundred-dollar bills from their shirts and passing them through the window. No one ran to call the police. The transaction took an hour. Mine was quicker. I walked up to the window and said, "l'd like to change fifty thousand dollars, please."

The woman behind the counter didn't look up. "Name?" she said.

"Mary Tyler Moore," I said. I signed my new name and said, "Bctter makc tl-rat fifty clollars." I changcd $50 ancl lcft.'l'hc ratc I got in thc bank was slightly lrcttcr tlrarr llrc slrcct black-

QUTJOTE 167

rrr;rrkct rate. In the first three months of 1991, the Left-Handed \\/rrrtlows of the Banco de la Repriblica brought the government '1, t00 nrillion in hard currency.

l'ltta o plomo affects the press as well. Newspapers and tele- vrsrou gcnerally cover the Mafia only when publishing the state- rrrt'rrls of government officials on the subject. If the government ru'r'rt' to keep quiet, it would be possible to read the newspapers hrr yt'lrs in Medellin without realizing that the city had a prob- h'rrr. "liven if I were suicidal enough to write a story and had gonrl information, the paper wouldn't publish it," said Ricardo Atrt';rpa, who has worked for newspapers, magazines, and tele- t'r\ron. "On the one side, you have fear. On the other, the rlr;rrt'lrolders, owners, politicians, and advertisers all are in l,',r1irrc. If they did publish any significant information, it would go on the last page under the movie listings."

"tlrrtil a year and a half ago here you could write what you ru',rrrlcrl," said a friend of mine in 1988 who worked for a news- 1r,r1x'r in Medellin, a man I'll call Arturo. "l wrote about cor- rrrlrlion in the army, the Mafia." Hc had been covering one gr,rrlit'rrlrr crime for a month when he started to receive death llrrlrrls on the phone. What did you do? I asked. "l stopped writ- Irrli irlrout it," he said. He looked at the picture of his small rl,rrrglrtcr on the windowsill above his desk. "I have no desire lo lt';rvc a widow and an orphan. I have no reason to become ,t Itcto."

Wlrcrr he was a student, Arturo had sympathized with the grrt'r rillus. 'l'l'ren he had become disillusioned with the revolution, rrrirrr icrl, found a good job, and decided the system wasn't so bad rrlk'r rrll. IIad he lived in the United States, he could have been rur Ann Arbor peace marcher turned Chicago corporate lawyer. ( )rr llrc rlay before I left Medellin, I mentioned to another reportcr llr;rt I lrird found some parts of the city easy to understand, that ,rotrtt' pcoplc lived here just the way they would live in my courl- It\,, irrul I citcd Arturo as an example. 'l'he man told me that thc 1'1';11 lv('ft1pc-thc day after Arturo had written a particularly hard- lrrllirrg irrticlc on thc traffickcrs-two sicarios had comc looking hrr lrirrr wlrcn hc lcft thc papcr onc niglrt. llc cscapccl by lricling trrrtlt'r ir car whilc tlrcy slrot arourrcl it. In all our tinrc togctlrcr, rtll otrr klrg convcrsltious irlxrrrt pcoltlc irr tlrc city wlro l:cconrc Irlrot's, Arlrro lrarl rrcvcr rrrcrrli<lrrcrl tlrirt to rrrc.

68 lCHrr-DREN oF CarN

MSOBI-TfN'S ATTITUDE TowARD THE TRAFFICKERS IS DIRECTLY related to social class: The poorer you are, the more of a hero Pablo Escobar seems. Indeed, only when listening to young San- dinistas in Nicaragua talk about Che Guevara or women in Ar- gentina's slums talk about Evita Per6n did I hear anything comparable to the adoration expressed by poor people in Medellin for Don Pablo.

In April l98l the Medellin River flooded, destroying the gar- bage dumps on its banks and the shacks of several hundred fam- ilies who made their living picking through the mounds of trash. A week later a stocky man of thirty-four, wearing black pants, a white short-sleeve shirt, and a cheap watch stepped carefully through the garbage to talk to the families that were starting to put their shacks back together. It was Pablo Escobar. He promised the families he would build them new housing. He created a corporation, Medellin Without Slums, and a month later 360 families moved into a new barrio,

The houses in Barrio Pablo Escobar (no one uses its formal name, Barrio Medellin Without Slums) sit on a hill overlooking the city. They are brick, small, and sturdy, with plumbing and electricity and gardens filled with Medellin's famous fowers. The residents pay only for electricity and water. They, of course, cannot say enough good about Don Pablo. "We had never seen a rich man build houses for poor people before," said |uan Fran- cisco Flores, a seventy-year-old man with no upper teeth who gave me a tour of the neighborhood. "We call him the father of the poor. "

Everyone had heard rumors about the source of Don Pablo's money, but like Father Lopera, they weren't jumping to conclu- sions. "l'm not in favor of drugs, mind you," said a man scooping rice into bags in a small store. "They've destroyed many of our young people. But we don't always know how people get rich. All we know is that he brought us here. We can't accuse him of anything. "

"We are very poor, and it's a worldwide prol>lcrn," said [,-lores. "Thcy ought to do somcthing in thc Unitcd Stltcs."

At tlrc foot o[ thc barrio is a clrurch, l srrrlll lrrick llrikling

QUIJOTE 169

ru rllr rr Virgin in the glass window. Escobar's mother put up some nl llrt' nroney to build the church, and the residents held bake ,,rrlt's rrrrtl bingo games to raise the rest, There is no priest, however;

llrl rrrchdiocese, in a sudden fit of moral rectitude, declined to ;rrovirlc one. "We have to say mass in our houses," said Flores. "ll's :r clcar injustice. Don Pablo is the only man around who lr,rr rr ltrll heart."

lsrrrrra Garcia, a woman of sixty-seven, with pictures of Christ ,rrrrl l{ita Hayworth on her walls, told me that she had a friend rulro t'ould not support her two children. Garcia suggested that rlrc rvritc a letter to Don Pablo. She did, and Don Pablo gave Ir,'r ;r lrouse. "Who else would do that?" she said. I could think ll rorrrcone else: That's the way Eva Per6n worked: social iustice 'r\ ;r llvc-year-old

would design it. But it was hard to picture l',,,r',rhur resolving, like Evita, to answer every single letter or ,,lr;rkirrg his fist at the heavens in anger that some people had a lul rrrrtl some had nothing. It is not social iustice that motivates l',rlrlo l'lscobar.

ln l9t]2 Escobar was elected to Congress, running with fairo l)rlt'gl, a congressman who had been dean of the law school at llrr' Univcrsity of Medellin. Campaign posters described Escobar rr,, "l)cfcnder of natural resources with effective programs, out- rl,rnrlirrg sportstnan, sports promoter in various neighborhoods, rrrrlrrslrialist, and constructer." The last items were true, in a way,

'lr(l rrs f<rr the first one, well, who was going to tell Pablo Escobar

llr;rl lrc was not a defender of natural resources? According to ( )rrrirr Alvarez, who worked for the two congressmen, Escobar ru'irs rrrainly interested in the legal immunity that congressmctl rtr joy.

lhrt 1>cople wanted to believe he was Robin Hood. His in- vlslrrrcrrt in houses and soccer fields in poor barrios could not Ir;rvt' krtalcd more than a few million dollars. On such pockct llurrrgc thc richest and most ruthless criminal in the world ac- rprirt'rl it rcputation approaching popular sainthood. As witlr l,lvilir, tlrc poor of Colornbia feel thcy can write a lettcr to Dort l'.rlrlo rtrrd l uragical, p<lwcrful pcrsou will reach clown ancl takc r;rrc olt tlrcnr, cxactly what tnost poor pcoplc watrt wltctl thcy grr;ry lo tlrcir Crtlrolic saittts, only thc rtrail works fastcr. I')vcryotrc I lirlkctl ftr irr Mcclcllitr kncw itllottt tltc ltottsc's, alrtltrt thc soccc:r lrcltl liglrls, rttttl ;tlxxtt tlrc lrirlfickcrs' l9fl4 offcr, rcicc:tc<l [y tlrc

TolCntLDREN oF CetN

government, to pay Colombia's foreign debt in return for am- nesty. Kids in poor neighborhoods, Gitano had said, play a game. The one who has the best clothes or toys is dubbed Pablo Escobar. "He's built more houses than the government," I heard over and over.

Nowhere are the violence and drug addiction the traffickers have brought to Colombia felt more acutely than in barrios like Santo Domingo, one of the infamous slums of northeastern Me- dellin at the very top of the hills that stand guard over the city. And nowhere is admiration for the traffickers greater. When I arrived on a Sunday afternoon, there were so many people in the street that I thought some sort of carnival was going on. There was no carnival; this was everyday life. People were sitting on the steps outside small houses built into the sides of hills, radios blared three different songs at once, women laughed and chatted in groups, and men drank beer. In a corner store that sold a few pastries and soft drinks, a group of boys had congregated. They told me that many of their friends had died from smoking basuco. |airo, fourteen, said that his twenty-two-year-old cousin had been shot by sicarios in the doorway of his house six weeks before because he couldn't pay for his basuco. A boy in a torn gray shirt said that his father had been killed in a knife fight over a drug sale. "My dad sold drugs, too," fairo said. "But he's still alive."

I asked them what they thought of Escobar. "He's done a lot for the people," said Bairo, a curly-haired boy of twelve wearing a red soccer shirt. The others nodded.

"He's lowered the price of food," one said. When Escobar inaugurated the lights at the neighborhood

soccer field four years before, a gala event with a marching band-Escobar himself played in the first match-Bairo had gone to see him. "He's a very important man," he said. "I'd like to work for him-run a factory maybe." Another boy said he'd like to fly planes for Escobar. Another said he could already drive and could maybe drive a bus. One boy said he'd like to run a factory or a farm; a farm would be better. This was clearly a favorite topic of conversation. Other boys came over. I think they thought I was recruiting.

"l'd buy a big housc," said otlc. "l'<l go kr thc ttulvics cvcry tlay," alttlthcr sititl.

Q U I J O T E | 71

"You all say that smoking basuco is bad," I said. "You all know

;x'oplc who have been killed. Why do you want a iob that hurts yrlung people?"

"l'rl use my money to help the poor," Bairo said. "Like Pablo." l,lscobar's r6sum6-his beginnings as a robber of gravestones,

lrvo short jail terms for car theft and small-time coke trafficking is one that most Medellin slum boys can identifr with. In 1976

l,lst'obar was one of them; ten years later he had become one of llrr, lcn richest men in the world and in the process had told the plrirrgos, the government, and privileged Colombia to go to hell. A Mafia career offers poor kids the chance to be feared and rrslrcctcd by their peers, to carry a gun and die in the street, or, rl tlrcy survive, to possess fabulous wealth. There are few other rvrrys frrr the poor to get rich in Colombia, which was never a r orrrrtry of great social mobility. But cocaine has created twenty llrorrsand new millionaires in Medellin alone, most of them from origins similar to Bairo's. While the poor revere the traffickers, llrc lraditional bourgeoisie of Medellfn has little use for them, or urther for their white shoes, ranchero music, and taste in rlt'r'orating, which runs to statues of nude women with light bulbs hrr lrrcasts. In 1990 mafiosis were still barred from membership rrr llrc conservative Union CIub and Country Club.

lhrt it was only a matter of time; parents worried about their llriklrcn's social circles. "Your kids say, 'Dad, I'm going to a lr;lrly at fohn Doe's house,"'a financier told me. "l tell them kr lx' careful; you know what kind of family that is. But the kids riry 'l rlon't care. It's his father-not him.'They mix with mafiosis rrr sclrool. The Mafia parents want their children to be socially rrr't't'ptcd. They send them to the best schools. In a few more yr';rrs you'll have a generation of young executives, sons of Mafia lirrrrilics, with nice table manners and degrees from U.S. uni- vr,rsilics. It's like |oseph Kennedy. He made his money in boot- h'lgirrg clrrring Prohibition. His son was President of the United Sl;rlt's. "

'l'lrc Mafia's unpolished habits are not welcome in polite so- lrcly, lxrt its money is. El Poblado, the beautiful, wooded neigh- lxrrlrrxxl with statcly old trees on Medellirt's east side, uscd to bc llrt' lrorrrc of thc city's inclustrialists and ranchers. Now thc tra- rlrliorrll rich arc rctunring ttt thc Inidcllc-class ncighlxrrlr<xxl of l ,os l ,itttrclcs, attcl tlrc ntafiosi arc ltttlvittg flrottt slttltt lrciglrlxlr-

7el CHTLDREN oF CarN

hoods into El Poblado. Arthough new rrome constructio. was dropping in colombia as a whorI, it rosc l5 perce.t in Ha.J"lti,,in I987, and El Poblado was the reason. T'he ncighboriroJ i,full of new high-rise Iuxury apartments, and its ,irin ,ir""i i,lined with Mercedes a,d BMW dcale.sirips ,,rJ ,h;;; ;ff;;.* Persia, rugs, saddles, Italian clothing, an,l printi,_,gr,;r"y;;" by-traffi&ers' girlfriends; a boutique L , poirl* fr"tlrary gf i.

I-askcd my taxi driver about a building i nra r,"ara "r

i. ,ini"r, each apartment had.a private swinnring"pool. Hc sho<rk his lread."'l-hcy'rc already all sold," hc sai<l.

"l'm just looking," I said. !e took me past two wrrite stone towcrs undcr constructiorr,

each with twelve apartmcnts, each apartment with a pool il;i;g like a balcony outside its Iiving room.

One measure of thc traffickcr.s, acceptancc is thai they have become the husbands of choice for corombia s tracritio,;i ;;;, :l:loicc, beauty queens. In Colombia girls of fivc ;r;p"i; i.Decome q.een of trreir kindergarten class. By thc agc uf si*tc"r, they can-be Coffee g:,".1-r, Cattle eueen, Cn.,, F"siiurl A;;;;,Flower Queen, or Miss AntioquialTh. ,r"*rprpers clevotc end_ less coverage to the pageants ancl their contesta.ts. El Munckt runs a regular column calred "eueens"; wrren a urrr i,.ti,a,,i, failed to show up for a ba.qu.tlt, local civic o.grnirrti,r,.,,'tlr" columnist cluckcd ftir wceks about her unrcliabiliti;,ril;;;;ri;; darkly that she should bc replaced.

Missing a banquct is occ.asion for a maior scanclal; dating amafioso is .ormal. The local versio.r of a royal weclding;;: ir;l98J marriage of a forner Miss corombia, Maria r'"r"rl cirr-,., Fajardo,. and Dayro Chica, a frrrmcr stableboy for ttrc dil(one of his jobs was to lcad the family,s small chilclr"n ,r,rr,rd on ponics) and waiter i, their restaurant. Chica grrd;rll;;;; through the organization to become a buyer of horsJr r"a nnrrii."bulls-a.d a trafficker i. his own ,igt,. ;tt," -A;;;;;:'il15in the Rodeo CIub and cost fivc ,r]illion clollars; g;;" f;out of town were given round_trip plane tickets. M"rri, T".;;; was driven up to the club in lrcr'wedding prescnt, , *lrli" Mercedes covered with orchids. .I'hc Ochoa flmily grr;;";;,;_ ple a chc'ss set with gold picces. "r,irr trrc first ti,rc, a ;xrwrr takcsir (f r.rccrr," thc carcl saicl. I,l/ M-unclo prrblislrc<l cxtc,rrsivc, pi.t,;;;; ltnrl irrlcrvicrvs frrlnr thc wcrl<lirrg frrr tlrrc.c ,1,,r,, ,,,,,,,i,,'; ,,,iil,_

QUIJOTE 173

,rrl cvcr mentioning just what it was that the groom did for a l rv rr rg.

"'l'hc good families here used to have a priest and a doctor," l,rrz I,,stcla de Medina said. "Now they also have a mafioso. He's rr,,rrrlly the best-loved son because he gives the family so many llrirrgs. Mama wants to enjoy life; brotl-rers and sisters like riding ur :r ncw car. It may seem obvious why someone who just started ,r rrt'w job would have a car, but they don't want to know."

"llcfore Alvaro was killed," said Clarita, Judge Medina's lrlt'rrty-three-year-old sister, "l never paid any attention to rr'lrt'llrcr I was mixing with the mafiosi. You'rc not conscious of rl rrrrtil it hits you." Clarita studied nutritional science at La Salle llrrivcrsity, a school for Medellin's children of privilege, not a grl:u'c the Mafia would be expected to penetrate. But she said she ,,,nkl l-rardly find friends who didn't mix with the traffickers. "llrcy invite you out, give you presents of clothes and jewelry, l,rkc you to the best restaurants. Now I never accept. I won't even ,,t'l loot in the shopping centers they own. " Her former best friend rrr:rLriccl a trafficker, she said. "She likes to dress well, have dif- Icrt'rrt rings for every day. Well, I like it, too, but not that much. I rkrr't see her anymore."

l'rrblo Escobar's son was a third grader at Colegio San Jos6, a ',, lrool affiliated with Clarita's college. On the last day of school llrc ycar before, the boy's father came to pick him up. Clarita ',,rrr, l,lscobar waiting in the car with his bodyguards and went lrorrrc crying. "l went to the principal and said, 'How can you .rllorv the son of a gangster to go to school herc?' He told me, 'Wlro are you to judge that boy?' "

N<r such welcome existed for General Miguel Maza. Had Maza l,r't'rr a trafficker, there uright not have been a problem. But Maza rr':rs, insteacl, the crusading head of the investigations police. By l()()0 various attempts on his Iife had killed seventy-three bystand- lrs, lxrt no onc liad yet won thc million-dollar price Escobar had lrrrl <lr his head. Maza lived r"rear thc Lyc€e Frangais, and he rr':rs rc'ccivirrg a steady strcam of letters from the students'parents, ,rrkirrg lriur to plcasc nrove out of the neighborhood.

( llrrrita's rcjcction o[ thc traffickers had become a pr<lblem. "l ',,'t' pt'oplc irr whitc shocs with a lot of golcl jcwclry, artd I react loo slrorrgly," slrc sli<I. Shc wrrs sccirrg a psyclrologist to try to 1it'l rirl ol' llrcst' llrrrorrrurl [t'c'lirrgs.

741CxTLDREN oF CnrN

I "r",

oNE MoRE or MeoBrliN's ueleo;usrED BEFoRE I rprr the city. Clemencia Hoyos is a young law professor at the Uni_ versity of Antioquia. With its rolling lawns and old trees, the c_amp-us Iooks as idyllic as any Ivy League university in late May. Couples holding hands stroll amid the trees, and students stujy on the grass. Posters advertising concerts and political meetings cover the walls. I walked with Hoyos past a building of classrooms whose outer wall was a heap of bricks. The day before, she said, a- bomb had exploded there at seven-thirty in the morning. The shattered wall and the glass that still lay on the sidewalk were the only visible evidence of the fact that this pastoral university has become one of the most dangerous places of employment in Colombia.

Hoyos had been vice-president of the university the year before. To plt the university in perspective, she said, it would help to rye lhe black appointment book she had kept during that ylar. In 1987 the university had stopped making education news and had begun to appear, with horrifring frequency, on the police pages. Her book was a year's record of murders. There was some- thing almost every week "fuly 17, 1987: found cadaver of vet- erinary student fos6 Abad Sdnchez, tortured, circumstances of death unknown. August 3: anthropology professor Carlos L6pez Bedoya assassinated. August l4: Pedro Luis Valencia, professor of public health, assassinated, shot at 7 e.rrr. in his house, fifteen rounds of machine-gun fire in his back. " And on and on, sixteen murders of university students or professors in the last four months of 1987 alone. Hoyos kept a black dress and shoes in her office; there was no sense in going home to change every time she had to go to a funeral.

Most of the murder victims were political or human rights activists, and many had been killed while attending the funeiars of other professors and students, creating ,., .ndl.r, spiral of violence. On August 21, 1987, two professors of medicine, Le- onardo Betancur and Hdctor Abad G6mez, both Liberal party members and officials of the Medelhn Human Rights Coninris- sion, were shot and killed on the strcet on thc wiry to tlrc ftr,cral o[ a ruriou lcadcr.

QUIJOTE l7s

lloyos's officemate Luis Fernando Vdlez, a law professor, had lrr','rr onc of the few surviving officials of the city's Human Rights ( irrrrrrrrission. One evening in December 1987 he called Hoyos rtl lurrrrc. "They want to name me president of the Human Rights ( iorrrrnission," he said. "Oh, God, what can I do?" He had a ru'rk' rurd four children, he said. But he accepted the iob. On l)r't'r'rrrl>er ll V6lez gave a speech in the university about the olrlilirrtirxr to work for human rights and the dimension of the lrrrk irr Antioquia. A week later he was driving home at ten-thirty rrl rriglrt when his car was stopped and he was shot twice in the I rr',rr l.

lloyos found out about V6lez's death when she heard it on llrr. r;ulio in her mother's house. She had gone home for a visit lu'r'rrrrsc two days earlier her downstairs neighbor, a professor of r lrcrrristry at the National University, had been shot to death.

In onc year eight of her friends were killed. "They used to call nrc ltt gordd-the fat girl," she said over lunch one day at the rrrrivcrsity's cafeteria. I looked at her in her khaki pants and ll,rrvrriian shirt, with her punk haircut. She laughed. "l'm eight l.r[rs skinnier now," she said. "l lost a kilo every time someone ru,,rs killcd." In August someone had broken into her house and rrllul through her books and papers. Nothing was taken.

"Wc have no sense of nation," she said. "The cardinal is fat, rnr(l llrc church is fat. There was a big scandal seven years ago: 'l'lrt' clrurch's widows and orphans fund went bankrupt; all the nron(:y had been stolen. The guerrillas-ten years ago some

1x'oplc had sympathy for them. Now they're worse than the right. 'l'lrt' Mafia has bought everyone. Congressmen do nothing but rlcrrl rrurney and go to Europe. Everyone knows the army is killing

;x'oplc. l,',veryone knows the Supreme Court declared the extra- rlrliorr trcaty unconstitutional out of fear. Everyone who gets nr(,ncy lcavcs.

"l know a pediatrician whose wife-they were separated- lorrllitctccl a sicario for a million Pesos to kill hit-n," shc saicl. "'l'lu'sicario arrived and said to the doctor,'Give nre a ntillion ,rrr,l rr lralf pcsos atrd I won't kill you.' Wlrat ltavc wc crtule to? Yrrrr t'rrn't cvcrt trttst your own sicario.

"l,lrsl ycar," cotrtirrtrccl II<ly<ls, "tw<l lawycrs clllcrl tttc wlttt rvrrt'w<rrkingFor )<>rgc Oclro;r figlttirtg cxtrittlitiorr. 'l'hcy offlcrctl rr('luoncy ltt go to Ncw York ittttl irrtcrvicw it flcw 1rcrl1llc. 'l'lrcy

761 C H rl D R E N o F C a ru

said I had good credentials, and I would have to do nothing that wasn't completely legal. I said no. I told them that not everyone wants to work for Pablo Escobar. "

I asked if she found it difficult to teach law in that environment. "l tell my students that what I teach has nothing to do with reality," she said. "l teach religion-what should happen. If I tried to teach the law as it really works, I wouldn't have enough material to start class."

|uanxu, her downstairs neighbor who was killed, had saved all his life to build a farm and leave Medellin. He had just bought the bricks when he was killed. "l spend all my money," Hoyos said. "l'm not going to save one peso." She has begun to dream at night about being shot. "lf they want to kill me, it will be easy," she said. "Everyone knows where I live. I have parties and leave the door open." She has stopped reading the paper and listening to the radio. She has stopped going to funerals. "fuanxu isn't missing a thing," she said.

Alvaro Medina was not the only one who would die of Quijote in Medellin. There were a few others. It was possible that I had met all of them-a dozen or so people in a city of 2.2 million, a handful of people who, against all reason, continued to believe in Colombia as a nation. There was no explanation for why Medina indicted Escobar, or why Ram6n Castillo ran for mayor in Urabd, or why Enrique Low Murtra decided to become justice minister, or why General Maza still pursued Escobar despite a million-dollar price on his head, or why anyone joined Uni6n Patri6tica, or why Luz Estela, after everything the family had gone through, was considering becoming a judge. "l want to raise my sons not to be such good people," she had told me. Who could argue with that? It was best for the family and best for the boys; it was what any normal, rational person would want. But there was always the hope, however remote, that she would fail.

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