People in many parts of what is called the Third World live in misery and poverty not because their countries are poor in resources, but because the riches of their nations are used to add to their misery. Examples can be found in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Among those in news now is Colombia.
On paper, it is one of South America’s most fortunate countries, rich in oil and gold, silver, emeralds, platinum and coal. Yet more than ten percent of its 39.5 million inhabitants have already fled the country and the figure looks set to rise. The world knows it as one of the major sources of narcotics. But it is not principally because of the activities of the drug barons that ordinary Colombians are deciding that their country is no longer a fit place in which to live and bring up children. The drugs lords are only a symptom of a far deeper malaise which is leading Colombia ever closer to the brink of anarchy.
Colombian society, historically split between a small wealthy elite of settlers of Spanish origin and an underclass of indigenous Indians and former black slaves, has been riven by civil wars since long. The majority of these conflicts was between the different wings of the ruling elite. In 1970, when a defeated former dictator, Gen. Gustavo Rojas, formed a guerrilla movement — M19 — whose weapon was terror, it added the destabilizing force of an insurrection also to the mess. Kidnappings became a favorite weapon of the terrorists, who first seized foreigners and then extended their crimes to ordinary Colombians. Parallel with these developments, crime syndicates had begun to develop substantial cultivation and processing of narcotics, principally cocaine. The drug barons thrived by suborning politicians in the capital Bogota and by intimidating or, if that failed, murdering local officials.
When M19 and some other rebel organizations formed links with the drugs cartels, the chaos began to assume dangerous proportions. The United States, the major market for Colombian narcotics, had once overlooked the political corruption and the activities of brutal right-wing death squads because it needed the Colombians to be part of its anti-Fidel Castro front. But under President Clinton, the agenda changed and Washington began to pressure the Colombian authorities to act decisively against the drugs cartels. Success has been mixed. There have been sensational seizures of raw narcotics and hundreds of tons of the chemicals necessary to process them, but the drugs barons, with their billions of dollars of profits, can afford to sustain even substantial losses.
The key to Colombia’s problems rests in its stratified society. There are many Colombians who, seeing no end to their poverty and deprivation, have become easy prey for drug cartels or guerrilla thugs. They have either gone along out of fear, or they have actively backed the forces of chaos, in the belief that nothing could be worse that their present quality of life.
Every one knows what the only lasting solution to the troubles is: a root-and-branch political reform, which gives everyone a reasonable stake in their country’s future. But that is a solution which no one in power is keen on.
That situation is not unique to Colombia. That is a story familiar to the Third World.
