Colombia (Lonely Planet, 5th Edition) - Jens Porup [13]
But there has been some improvement of late. For instance, in March 2008 the UN World Food Program began a three-year, US$157 million program to assist 550,000 people. Yet some locals feel they have waited long enough. In September 2008 several dozen displaced Colombians briefly occupied Bogotá’s Parque 93, in the ritzy north of the city, in protest about the lack of government aid.
Read personalized tales of the poverty the displaced face in Alfred Molano’s The Dispossessed: Chronicles of the Desterrados of Colombia (2005).
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COCAINE POLITICS
Colombia is the world’s biggest supplier of cocaine, despite exhaustive efforts to track down cartel leaders, drop devegetation chemicals on coca farms, and step up military efforts. All for that little erythroxylum coca leaf – which you can buy in its unprocessed form in some Colombia markets. When the first Europeans arrived, they at first shook their heads over locals chewing coca leaves, but when (forced) work output started to decline, they allowed its usage. Eventually the Europeans (and the world) joined in, and in the centuries to follow, Andean cocaine eventually found its way worldwide for medicinal uses and disco parties.
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Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw (2002), by Mark Bowden, is an in-depth exploration of the life and times of Pablo Escobar and the operation that brought him down. While the book has some small inaccuracies, it is a fun crime read.
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Cartel Days
The cocaine industry boomed in the early 1980s, when the Medellín Cartel, led by former car thief (and future politician) Pablo Escobar, became the principal mafia. Its bosses eventually founded their own political party, established two newspapers and financed massive public works and public housing projects. At one point, Escobar even stirred up secession sentiments for the Medellín region. By 1983 Escobar’s personal wealth was estimated to be over US$20 billion, making him one of the world’s richest people (number seven according to Forbes magazine).
When the government launched a campaign against the drug trade, cartel bosses disappeared from public life and even proposed an unusual ‘peace treaty’ to President Belisario Betancur. For immunity from both prosecution and extradition, they offered to invest their capital in national development programs and pay off Colombia’s entire foreign debt (some US$13 billion!). The government said ‘no’ to the drug lords, and the violence escalated.
The cartel–government conflict heated up in August 1989, when Liberal presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán was gunned down by drug lords. The government’s response was to confiscate nearly 1000 cartel-owned properties and sign a new extradition treaty with the US, which led to a cartel-led campaign of terror resulting in bombed banks, homes, newspaper offices, and in November 1989, an Avianca flight from Bogotá to Cali, which killed all 107 onboard.
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Many midlevel drug traffickers, getting their first taste of wealth, become obsessed with Mexican mariachi gear. Most of it is kept out of public, but if you see a mariachi, you might not want to ask him to show you what’s in his guitar case.
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After the 1990 election of Liberal César Gaviria as president, things calmed briefly, when extradition laws were sliced and Escobar led a surrender of many cartel bosses. However, Escobar soon escaped from his luxurious house arrest and it took an elite, US-funded 1500-man special unit 499 days to track him down, shooting him dead atop a Medellín rooftop in 1993.
Amid the violence, the drug trade never slowed. New cartels have learned to forsake the limelight; by the mid-1990s, guerrillas and paramilitaries chipped in to help Colombia keep pace with the world’s rising demand.