I’m not dead yet

Turns out if you happen to travel to a country with a history of violence and bloodshed and a 40 year old civil war and not talk to anyone for a couple of weeks, people start to wonder what happened. “I wonder if he got kidnapped?” they say. “Maybe I should drop him a line” you hear. Well you need not worry, the times I have been living in indeed have been exciting but neither the Farc, the ELN nor the Colombian paramilitaries have succeeded in, or to the best of my knowledge, attempted to kidnap me.

And truly in a city like Medellin one should be far more aware of the desperation that rampant poverty produces than the dangerous mixture of revolutionary political ideology and the ungodly profits of narco-trafficers. Truth be told, the civil war that’s been raging in this country for as long as anyone can remember is no where near over, and shows no signs of ever ending. While Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe has succeeded in securing the populated commercial centers and the highways connecting them, the war rages onward in the jungles.

These days it’s difficult to know exactly what’s going on. The Farc, the largest, best equipped and financed terrorist group in the world has been dealt a series of blows as of late. But the obscene profits that they make from the drug trade with the western world means they can afford to keep doing business. In addition to financing their operations through trafficking cocaine and heroin they make a pretty penny in the kidnapping business, which as I understand it, is a well organized and highly developed operation.

As of late though, mostly as a result of the Bush Administration’s Plan Colombia, Westerners enjoy a higher degree of security here than they ever have before, which honestly isn’t saying much. But various paramilitary groups, who most believe are inadvertently funded through the foreign aid received from the United States, have been somewhat successfully waging war with the Farc for the last several years. They’ve put the word out that if a Westerner is captured, they will go after the kidnappers fighting fire with fire, executing family members, burning down homes and destroying entire villages. And since these groups aren’t directly controlled by the government, Uribe and the military can turn a blind eye to these tactics and claim they didn’t order them.

The biggest problem with the Paramilitary groups is that after they have won a battle with the Farc or the ELN they often take over the narco-trafficing and kidnapping operations left behind. And this has left many wondering if the cure is worse than the disease. Hey it’s hard to say no to a pretty profit made from a hard days work.

In theory, the Farc uses the profits from these nefarious activities to fund their communist ideology, but few believe that this war has anything to do with economic theory. The biggest challenge that Uribe faces in dealing with the Farc is that he has nothing to offer them. They are fairly content being the most successful outlaws in the world. So instead Uribe is trying to make the cost of doing business so high for the Farc that they will have no choice but to find a peaceful solution. Unfortunately the gross margins in the market place of the Farc are quite excellent and they can afford to keep doing this for the foreseeable future.

The ELN, the other smaller Marxist group of guerillas, who have never manged to establish as large or successful an organization as the Farc, has been hit where it hurts, in the pocket-book. The war raged by the Paramilitary groups has left them trying to sue for peace with what seem like desperate attacks on civilians to establish some sort of presence in the legitimate government of Colombia. They’ve even managed to successfully enlist the help of Cuba and Venezuela and hold several rounds of meaningless negotiations with the Uribe government.

Given the billions of dollars poured into this project, it’s still amazing that no one really knows if any progress is actually being made. The number of kidnappings is down dramatically and bombs are no longer going off in the streets of Medellin and Bogota. 80% of the coca fields in the country have been eradicated, but the street price of coke in the US is the same as ever and the amount of cocaine exported from Colombia has stayed constant. It seems that the Farc, the ELN, and the Paramilitaries have all just learned to import the raw product from Bolivia and Ecuador before processing it and shipping it out themselves.

Throughout all of this the typical city-dwelling Colombian go about their daily lives, desperately trying to stay blissfully unaware of the war that continues to devastate this country. And only when the passing gringo pushes them on the latest news or a point of view will they grudgingly acquiesce and mumble of a short sound bite, before changing the subject back to more important matters like futbol or whether the girls from Medellin are more beautiful than the ones from Cali.