Book Blog: Cutting for Stone

This from Cutting For Stone, a novel by Abraham Verghese that I liked very much. It sags quite a bit in the second half and I don’t totally understand the choices the author made about which moments to expand and which to collapse or leave off-stage. But I found the characters in the first half so well and tightly drawn, and the story line was propulsive enough to carry me through the duller parts.  I also really admired the way that he wove the story of Ethiopia into the fabric of the narrative. Not overwrought or thick with exposition, but also not at all secondary. The turmoil, politics and even geopolitics play decisive roles in key plot turns, but the book never stops being about the individual characters and their complicated entwinements.

The excerpt below got me thinking about the American health care system, and the yawning gap between the most elite medical centers and the most marginalized ones. For all our endless discourse about how broken everything is, we never really look at that disparity head-on, nor talk much to the folks on the down-side of it:

“The poorest in America are the sickest.  Poor people can’t afford preventive care or insurance. The poor don’t see doctors. They show up at our doorstep when things are advanced.” 

“Who pays for all this, then?” I asked. 

“The government pays with Medicaid and Medicare from your taxes.” 

“How come we can afford a helicopter and a helipad if we’re so poor?” The bull’s-eye atop the newer four-story part of Our Lady, with the blue flashing perimeter lights and the shiny helicopter that came and went, seemed incongruous for our setting.

“Salah, you don’t know abut our claim to fame? Our number one industry? Sometimes I forget you just got off the road. Man, that helipad was paid for by hospitals that are the opposite of ours. The helicopter is really theirs not ours. Rich hospitals. Taking care of the wealthy, the insured. Even if some of them take care of the poor, they have a big university or a university private practice to underwrite their costs. That kind of taking care of the poor is noble.” 

“And our kind of taking care?” 

“Shameful. The work of untouchables. Those rich hospitals up and dow the East Coat got together and paid for our helipad so they can fly here. Why? Ischemia time! You see, what we have here in our neighborhood is an abundance of guns, ABMs, ALMs - Angry Black Males, Angry Latin Males, and actually angry males of all stripes. Not to mention jealous females. The man on the street is more likely to carry a gun than a pen. Bang! Bang! Chitty! Chetty! And so we wind up with too many GPO patients - good for parts only. Young, otherwise healthy, but brain dead. Pristine hearts, livers and whatnot. Under warranty to keep going long after your pecker droops. Great organs. Great for transplant. Transplants which we can’t do. But we can keep them alive till the vultures get here.They get the organ and run. Next time you hear the whup-whup-whup-whup, don’t think helicopter blades. Think pays, moola, dinero! Heart transplant costs what, half a million dollars? Kidneys a hundred thousand or more?”

“That’s how much they pay us?”

“Us? They don’t pay us a fucking cent! That’s how much they make. They come, cut, and take, show us the middle finger and ride off in their whirlybird leaving us on our camels.” 

Dead Darlings Blog: Outtakes from the Colombia Piece

This one crossed the finish line a few weeks back. I’m pretty happy with the final product, but I do lament the loss of this bit which felt both colorful and important to me. Most of it made it into the final draft in different form, but I liked the structure and flow here and I don’t think I was able to capture it as well in rewrite.

***

In Seeing Like A State, his seminal history of social engineering schemes gone awry, Yale political scientist James C. Scott details the power of statistics to not only describe reality, but to shape it. Before we can manipulate or control the world around us, Scott explains, we have to map it. Before we can map it, we must distill it down to a handful of what he calls synoptic details. It’s this distilling that warps reality. “There are virtually no other facts for the state than those that are contained in documents,” he writes. “An error in such a document can have far more power, and for far longer, than can an unreported truth.” Scott’s examples deal mostly with urban planning — the making of cadastral maps, the design of cities, the metric system — but his thesis applies equally well to the global quest against disease and death. If there is a single essential prerequisite to that quest, it is an accurate head count. Some initiatives — vaccination, clean water, nutritious food — are no-brainers. But without an adequate sense of how many people are being born and how many are dying (and where and of what and at what age) even those triumphs can only ever be partial.

Victor Hugo glimpsed this phenomenon first hand in the late 1980s, when he was a newly-minted doctor working in Colombia’s Orinoco region. The Orinoco is an almost unfathomably vast swath of wilderness, and Victor and his colleagues would trek for months at a time through rainforest and grassland, delivering supplies to the small and widely dispersed indigenous communities that dot the region, and providing what medical care they could. The list of ailments was long: malnourishment, respiratory and parasitic infections, mosquito-borne and diarrheal diseases, preventable contagions like measles, mumps and rubella. The official response to these crises was maddeningly off-kilter, Victor says. Donor nations would send incubators to communities that had no electricity. The national government would provide loads of medications of varying practical use, but do little to address the clean water crisis that was making people sick to begin with. For their part, Victor and his colleagues would spray DDT indiscriminately, and then watch with bewilderment as mosquito-borne diseases came roaring back in some places, but not others.

The problem, he quickly realized, came down to a lack of data. The Colombian government had little presence and little apparent interest in the regions where he was working. Because they didn’t care, they didn’t count. Because they didn’t count, they couldn’t see. And because they couldn’t see, they not only couldn’t fix, they couldn’t necessarily grasp what there was to fix in the first place. “You can’t understand what’s happening, or make a plan to fix it if you don’t know how many people you have to begin with,” says Victor, who has spent nearly three decades at Colombia’s Ministry of Health and Social Protection. “You also can’t really tell if what you’re doing is working or not if you don’t know how many cases you have, of which diseases in which places.”

In the Orinoco, such data was paltry. “Community leaders would report births and deaths and disease outbreaks to the radio technicians who manned the war sentinels,” he says. “And the technicians would write that information down on napkins or whatever scraps of paper they had.” Sometimes health workers like him would collect scraps, and sometimes they wouldn’t. Victor began training community members to collect that data more systematically, so that it could be organized into reports and used to guide their efforts. He designed forms and created databases. Almost immediately, he says, patterns emerged. For example, the communities where malaria returned after DDT was sprayed had a much higher proportion of people who worked in the mines where nobody was spraying at all.

At the time, there was still no real civil registration system in Colombia. Births, deaths and marriages were logged first and foremost by the Catholic church. In fact, parents could not even obtain birth certificates for their children without baptizing them. But that began to change in 1991, when a new constitution divorced the church from such matters of state. In 1993, a law guaranteeing health care to all citizens created new incentives for parents to register their children with the national government. Victor joined the health ministry in 1995 and began working to merge a roster of disparate entities into a new agency that could collect that data and use it to produce statistics. By 1998, that system had been fully established, he says. Within a decade it was almost completely digitized. But if those advances improved the government’s ability to count and analyze its population, they also created a yawning disparity between wealthy urban centers like Bogota and Medellin, and impoverished rural regions that claim most of the nation’s physical space. “Nationally, we have about 85 to 90 percent coverage now,” Victor told me.  “But that last 15 percent makes up the poorest, most disenfranchised segment of the population. They live in regions where armed groups still have more control than the national government. You’re talking about five or six million people. And because they aren’t registered, it’s as if they don’t exist.”

Book Blog: Philip Klay on Iraq, Afghanistan and .... Colombia

Posting these excerpts from Missionaries, a novel by Philip Klay that examines the globalization of violence and the ways that America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq intersect with its operations in Colombia. Klay won the National Book Award for his first book, Redeployment (a short story collection on American war vets returned from the Middle East). This book is every bit as good, and very much worth reading.

From Abel, who becomes paraco after his village is slaughtered by guerrilla (page 49):

As a child, I thought there were guerrilla, and there were paracos, and they were at war with each other, but with Jefferson I learned that it was so much more complicated. There were cocaleros, like I had been, working the fields and sometimes organizing into little self-defense unions. And there were narcos, who bought and transported coca. And there were police and army. But within each group were different factions. Narcos who worked with us, but not the guerilla. Narcos who worked with the guerrilla, but not us. Narcos who worked with both. Guerrilla who would work with us against other guerrilla. Paracos who would work with narcos against us. Cocaleros who protected the guerrilla. Army officers who asked us to do the work they could not. Police who worked for everyone and no one. Sometimes it seemed like it was all a great game. Sometimes it seemed like hell. And always, it seemed so much bigger than I had imagined. Those days, I would sometimes think with wonder at how little worth I had possessed in the world, and how easily I could have been erased from the earth, and how even a whole town, like the one I had come from, could be destroyed without changing the calculations of the powerful.

From Juan Pablo, an Army Captain trying to steer American support (page 119):

What we want is not simply a new front in the war, but access to that thing the Americans, and only the Americans, can provide. The same thing that killed Raul and Reyes, and which the Americans have been using to hunt people in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Philippines and Somalia and Niger and Colombia and Ecuador and who knows where else. And it is something we deserve access to. After all, it started here, in Colombia, thirty years ago.

This was during the war against Pablo Escobar, who had been the herald of a new type of criminal. A drug lord of such scale and wealth that he was able to wage an asymmetric war against the foundations of the state itself, focusing as much on murdering police officers, judges, and politicians as on holding territory. When ISIS started murdering every state worker in Iraq they could find, including garbage men, as part of their war, they were acting as Escobar’s children. Break down all order, all civilization, so the cockroaches can breed in the ruins.

In response, we formed a special unit, the Search Bloc, about whom much has been written. Behind the scenes, men like my father worked with the Americans to create an integrated network of differing agencies designed to tighten the loop of finding targets, fixing them in place, finishing them, exploiting and analyzing the intelligence collected, and then disseminating that intelligence to the agencies and the commands able to act on it most rapidly. It created a model in which the operations of special forces, military intelligence, police intelligence, signals and human and image intelligence services were reorganized and integrated to reduce stovepiping, maximize information sharing, and tighten the circle of analysis and execution into a seamless, never-ending cycle.

That system is something often ignored in discussions of military capabilities, because it is not a particular unit, or weapons system, or technology, or style of training, but something more amorphous, a system that ties all of those elements together and multiplies their lethality and speed. This is no exaggeration. The Americans would use the same system in the Balkans, and then would pump steroids into it in Iraq. The outcome: a special operations command that was executing 12 raids a month in 2004 turned into an industrial-scale killing machine that was conducting 250 raids a month only two years later.

An American officer once described it to me this way: “When civilians think about war, they tend to think about the mechanisms of death. The heroic Navy SEAL firing a tight cluster of bullets into a bad guy’s head. The creepy, mechanical drone delivering a bomb. But those are just the flathead and Philips-head screwdriver at the end of a targeting system. And it’s the system that’s the real killer.”

The Americans took the system back to Colombia ten years ago, and after a lucky NSA intercept of a phone call with Hugo Chavez, used it to help us kill Raul Reyes. And Negro Acacio. And Martin Caballero. And many others. Of course, we can run the system, in a limited sense, on our own. In fact, we teach the system to other military allies around Latin America. But access to U.S. assets turns it into a monster.

Book Blog: America's Many Colombian Wars

More Terrible Than Death: Drugs Violence and America’s War in Colombia by Robin Kirk, takes readers from La Violencia and the beginning of FARC through the rise of the paramilitaries, to Medellin cartel, with a focus on the role the United States has played in each of these catastrophes. Kirk does a good job of laying out the backstories of FARC and the AUC (a major paramilitary), the leading guerrilla and paramilitary groups, respectively. She also offers detailed biographies of their founders (Manuel Maurlanda, aka Pedro Marin, aka Tirofijo for FARC and Carlos Castano for AUC).

 But the book’s stated purpose is to unpack America’s involvement in Colombia.

The book does not argue that the United States is responsible for all of Colombia’s ills; certainly, there is blame to generously share. Yet there is one conclusion I hope most readers will take away from these pages: American habits and ideas and actions on the ground give speed and bite to the wars now gripping Colombia. We share responsibility. But we have yet to acknowledge this, or to think deeply or truly about how to stop. To the contrary, we delve ever deeper into Colombia’s conflict.

I want to make note of three distinct chapters that emerge from her account.

The war on communism

Certainly, the Communists took advantage of what became known as the Bogotazo. A few agile comrades even managed to raise a Soviet banner over the town hall in faraway Barranquilla, on the Caribbean coast. A single army officer pulled it down. In fact, the Communists were as shocked by the magnicidio as anyone. Looters even sacked their tiny office. City blocks smoldered after rioters torched the wood and straw buildings. Nevertheless, within hours, the Conservatives had blamed Communists for Gaitán’s murder and the riots that followed. Rioters, charged President Ospina, were inspired by “a spirit alien to us, a movement of communist inspiration and practices.”

 Americans found Ospina’s words intoxicating. They seemed to confirm every suspicion circulating in Washington of the Soviet plan for domination in the hemisphere. On April 14, 1948, the New York Times reported on a statement by Secretary Marshall, which struck a new and ominous tone… U.S. election-year politics had a strong influence on Marshall’s view. At the time, the Republicans were calling President Harry S. Truman naive in the fight against communism. Campaigning for the Republican nomination, Governor Thomas E. Dewey said in a stump speech on April 12 that Truman’s mismanagement of American intelligence was to blame for the failure to detect what he called “Communist plans” for revolution in Colombia, “just two hours’ bombing time from the Panama Canal.”... Eleven days later, New York Herald Tribune columnist Walter Lippmann described Marshall’s assessment as well as the fears of an imminent Communist rebellion as based on faulty logic. The Americans were engaging in what he called “the very human propensity to insist on making the facts fit one’s stereotyped preconceptions–in this case to treat a South American revolution as a phase of the Russian Revolution, and then to suppose that all revolutionary conditions in the world begin and end in Moscow, but for Moscow there would be no revolutions.” But Lippmann’s voice of reason was lost…. In the American view, communism was afoot in Colombia and it had to be stopped. The Colombians were ill-equipped to face the Soviets. President Ospina hadn’t even been able to save his own capital, much of which lay in ruins. Only through more active intervention—meaning military support and picking leaders who firmly shared Washington’s views—could the menace be stopped…

 Prior to World War II, the Colombian army had looked to Europe for military assistance. But as concern mounted about the Communist advance in Latin America, the United States courted the Colombians aggressively. At the time, influential advisers were telling President Dwight D. Eisenhower that the Soviets were winning the Cold War. In places like Colombia, they were doing it, the explanation went, by using unconventional techniques, among them peasant guerrillas like those holed up at El Davis. Colombia had signed its first military aid agreement with the United States in 1952….

 In 1954, the first Colombian soldiers completed U.S. Army Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia. One year later, graduates started the country’s own Ranger unit, named the Lanceros, the first counterguerrilla training center in Latin America. Among other things, Americans began to instruct Colombian pilots in how to handle and use napalm, to apply “discreetly,” in Ambassador Bonsal’s words, to Communist settlements in the central Andes…

 In 1959, the United States sent the first of many military advisory teams (made up of Philippines and Korea veterans) to Colombia to assess the war and the methods used by its army. The three-volume U.S. report advocated an extensive network of advisers and direct U.S. involvement in counter-rebel actions there. By 1961, U.S. military hardware designed to vanquish the “independent republics” included helicopters, vehicles, communications equipment, and small arms. Within a year, the Colombians flew their first air assault on an “independent republic” using an American helicopter piloted by a Colombian with a U.S. air force instructor at his side.

 In February 1962, the U.S. army sent another team to Colombia, this time headed by Brigadier General William P. Yarborough… [a cold war expert whose assessment of Colombian military capability was grim] He stressed the central role of “civic actions,” some carried out with food donated by the Americans (including for the soldiers themselves, whom Yarborough described as poorly fed and poorly paid). But [he also believed that] Colombia’s only hope lay with the direct intervention of the United States. Only if Americans took what he called “positive measures” could the Communist threat be eliminated. “Even complete implementation of the recommendations made in the basic report will not bring decisive or lasting results,” he wrote in a secret supplement. The Americans needed to create what he described as a “clandestine” force able to perform “counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions and as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents. It should be backed by the United States.” This combined civilian and military force should respond to U.S. command, not Colombian, he noted. “This would permit passing to the offensive in all fields of endeavor rather than depending on the Colombians to find their own solution.”

 He wanted this force to take independent action and hit rebels where and when they least expected it: not in battle, but at rest, through their neighbors, their habits, and their stomachs. Yarborough also recommended that within this clandestine force, the Americans create “hunter-killer” units to collect intelligence and execute suspected rebels or their supporters. In Vietnam, the hunter-killer units were part of the CIA’s Phoenix Program, launched in 1967. Vietnamese operatives were supposed to target civilian members of the National Liberation Front, thus hampering its ability to fight. In its first four years, Phoenix Program operatives killed over 20,000 people, many of whom, its critics claimed, were civilians wrongly accused of rebel activity. activity. In Colombia, these units faced a similar issue. How were they to identify the enemy?

 In the end, [that question] went unanswered. Imperceptibly to some and all too gruesomely to others, La Violencia transformed from a clash between political parties to a campaign against subversives and their suspected supporters within the society at large. Instead of being guilty because they were Liberal or Conservative, people became guilty because they lived in or near an “independent republic” or had thoughts that could be said to be influenced by the Communists. [As the book explains, there weren’t actually that many communists in Colombia at all. The Colombian leaders framed it that way to secure US investment, and the US accepted that framing because it suited them.]

The war on drugs

If I had more time I’d grant this one a whole separate post because there’s tons of great details and illustration of how the paramilitaries and Colombian military - and by extension the Colombian government — are awash in drug money, and how the FARC went from taxing narco-trafficking in their territory to becoming major traffickers themselves. And how the U.S. contributed to so much of that first with our irrepressible demand for product, then through our atrocious foreign policies and dim politicking.

In 1972, Richard Nixon was the first president to use the phrase “war on drugs.” A decade later, Ambassador Louis Tambs went a step further when he coined the word “narco-guerrilla” to refer to the FARC, since the group levied taxes on cocaine. There was both manipulation and truth to the description. When Tambs used it, the relationship between the FARC and drug trafficking existed, but it was no more pronounced than the FARC’s relationship with any other business. He could have called them “cattle-guerrillas” or “oil-guerrillas.” Guerrillas “taxed” coca and charged fees but did not themselves make or sell cocaine. Nevertheless, the choice of term served a political purpose. It worked as a hinge to connect what had been a war on communism to a new campaign, waged with the same tools and against similar targets.

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed Directive No. 221, which declared drugs a national security threat. Funding for the treatment of drug addicts in the United States began the decline that continues to this day. Instead, what began to be called “the war on drugs” was focused on the source countries, among them Peru (where the coca was grown) and Colombia…

Drug-war scholar Peter Reuter once described U.S. drug policy as “frozen in place” since the mid-1980s. Instead, American presidents engaged in small changes, tweaks, shifts in language that go virtually unnoticed in the United States but have huge impact in places like Colombia.

In 1990, top Colombian officers came to Washington and told Congress quite pointedly that they intended to use any U.S. aid to fight the FARC. The announcement caused little comment, a sign of how neatly the war on subversion had already melded into the “war on drugs.” “The arms are given to the government in order that it may use them in the anti-narcotics struggle,” commented former U.S. ambassador to Colombia Thomas MacNamara, a Bush administration supporter. “But this is not a requirement.” That same year, the United States sent yet another team of military advisers to Colombia, this time to once again revamp the Colombian military’s intelligence system. It had been two decades since General Yarborough delivered his scathing report, but little had changed. According to the U.S. Defense Department, the goal was to make the Colombian system more “efficient and effective” in the fight against drugs. Those in the Colombian military accepted the advice, as always. Then they directed the system not against traffickers but against people they suspected of “subversion.” For human rights, the consequences were disastrous.

Colombia’s military brass had resisted the conflation of the drug war and counterinsurgency. They wanted no part of chasing down traffickers or busting labs, a dirty job better suited to the police. In 1992, the Colombian military had flatly rejected a U.S. offer of $2.8 million to set up army counter drug units. Of course, anyone who followed Colombia also knew that the traffickers themselves had been important army allies through MAS and Castaño’s Head Splitters. The generals also wanted nothing to do with human rights talk, which inevitably accompanied American dollars. But by the mid-1990s, things had changed. Even with Castaño’s help, the generals continued to lose the war. Regularly, Marín’s forces outmatched soldiers... Meanwhile, millions in U.S. aid—money, equipment, helicopters, and training—was bolstering the army’s bitterest rivals, the Colombian police.

[Also in 1992] The Republicans were accusing President Bill Clinton of being soft on drugs and even “sabotaging” the drug war by failing to fight it hard enough in Colombia. Clinton’s campaign trail admission that he had tried marijuana but hadn’t inhaled enticed some Republicans to portray him as a drug-addled dilettante. It was a cynical, shallow tactic. In fact, little distinguished Clinton’s record from that of his predecessor, George H.W. Bush, or for that matter Ronald Reagan. All favored an emphasis on supply-side eradication and interdiction, even as funding for treatment in the United States—considered the most effective way to reduce demand and therefore the amount of cocaine sent into the country—dwindled.

In 1994, President Clinton presented his first budget for the drug war. It differed little from the Bush administration’s plan. Of the $13 billion requested, President Clinton asked for a 1-percent increase in spending on demand reduction. But he succeeded in getting something that had eluded President Bush: an agreement by Colombia to drop its opposition to the use of herbicides… Since 1995, when the United States began spraying coca bushes with herbicide, thousands of acres have been destroyed. Police and customs agents have seized millions of pounds of pure cocaine in ships, airplanes, submarines, and trucks. Every day, passengers enter the United States, their intestines holding condoms or balloons filled with cocaine; they either shit it out or die trying. Yet in 2002, the CIA reported that there was more land planted in coca than ever before in Colombia’s history.

Coca was spewing out of the Andes, 550,000 metric tons of raw leaf in 1996 alone. The actual size of coca fields shown on the embassy’s oversized maps seemed manageable, even tiny. In terms of acreage, it was equivalent to the land devoted only to malt barley in south-central Idaho. But the profits were astronomical–$53 billion annually, calculated on the basis of the average U.S. street price of $175 per gram of cocaine. That was five times the amount of foreign aid spent on the entire African continent. At best, even the most committed drug warriors could only say that American efforts had “slowed the rate of increase”—in other words, shaved some seconds off the run of an accelerating train fueled by their fellow Americans.

It was 1997 and the U.S. Congress was beginning to debate new military aid for [Colombian] troops. Suddenly, the word “narco-guerrilla” was everywhere, the magic spell that would ease millions out of the American treasury… In U.S. government reports and the congressional testimony of administration officials, Colombia’s military was described as little changed from the disorganized and largely passive force that General Yarborough had assessed in 1962. Washington [was] now convinced that the only way to wage war on drug trafficking was by increasing the firepower available to Colombia’s soldiers. Strengthening the army was necessary, American drug warriors argued, because the FARC units that controlled the coca fields were themselves heavily armed.

[Also] In 1997, U.S. law for the first time required embassies to screen security force units receiving security assistance anywhere in the world for credible evidence of human rights violations; such evidence would disqualify them from receiving aid. Drafted by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the measure, called the Leahy Amendment, won congressional support in large part out of concern over the relationship with Colombia’s tainted army.

A month before my arrival, the Americans had begun a new spray campaign in the Putumayo, the “push into southern Colombia” that had motivated an emergency $1.3-billion aid request for the Andes to the U.S. Congress in 1999. Most was meant for Colombia’s military and was packaged by proponents as “Plan Colombia.”

On September 10, 2001, while Secretary of State Colin Powell was in Peru, the State Department announced that it had placed Castaño’s AUC on the list of foreign terrorist groups.

In 2002, the Bush administration finally acknowledged a fact that was clear to anyone traveling Colombia: The two wars were inextricable, the trunk of a tree and its rotten fruit. The White House asked the U.S. Congress to lift the requirement that all military aid be spent only on counterdrug operations. The request was granted with little opposition. opposition. Although the decision simply acknowledged what anyone with eyes could see, it also marked yet another entanglement in a war that would not have such a lethal punch without American consumers.

Colombia’s use of U.S. funds and advice—and the human rights abuses that resulted—caused little outrage in Washington. To the contrary, officials rejected proposals to place human rights conditions on aid, claiming that they would be counterproductive. Reform, they argued, would come by a kind of osmosis, as Colombian officers saw that good behavior translated into more goodies from the Americans. Assistant Secretary of State Bernard Aronson articulated the U.S. position before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Denying aid or imposing conditions impossible to meet defeats the goals of improving human rights. In the real world, the perfect is the enemy of the good.” A different message was understood by Colombia’s generals. The gringos would turn a blind eye to abuses as long as the military paid lip service to the drug war. For the politicians, cutting aid on human rights grounds risked making them appear soft on drugs. Especially in an election year, this was unthinkable.

 

The war on terror

In Washington, Colombia is now the Latin front of the global war on terror and America’s most enthusiastic ally in the region. In his speeches, President Uribe has explicitly linked Colombian violence to events in the Middle East, thus making the case for the continued funding that he believes is necessary to win against guerrillas. As the United States prepared the invasion that would topple Saddam Hussein, Colombia volunteered for the “coalition of the willing,” becoming the only South American nation to do so… In the short term… President Uribe’s political calculation has paid off. At a time of shrinking resources in the United States, Colombia remains the top recipient of U.S. aid in the hemisphere. In 2002, the White House asked the U.S. Congress for and received permission to use military assistance in Colombia to directly engage groups identified by the U.S. State Department as terrorists. Previously, this aid could only be used in counter-drug operations. In 2005, Colombia will likely receive another half-billion dollars in mostly military and counterterrorism aid from the United States. But here is some useful history that needs to be shouted from the rooftops: there are no global terrorists in Colombia. Neither Osama bin Laden nor his backers creep through the gullies of the Colombian backland. That is as hallucinatory–and false–a specter as the Communist basilisco was in the 1950s. It doesn’t, and didn’t, threaten Colombia. As I explain in these pages, during the Cold War, Americans saw in Colombia the reflection of our most pressing fear, not reality. For its own reasons, Colombia played along, sealing the alliance by joining the coalition of the willing of the day, for the Korean War. Then–president Laureano Gómez reaped the diplomatic and military benefits, using U.S. support to mount an entirely unrelated extermination campaign against his political rivals, the very un-Communist Liberals. The ramifications of that hideous chapter in history, still so mysterious to most Colombians, remain palpable today…

 Americans continue to fight, in someone else’s country and at someone else’s cost, our demon of craving and addiction. Too often, that cost is measured in human lives. Certainly, there are weapons that cause massive destruction in Colombia. They are called guns, and they are made in America and Israel and Belgium and Brazil. Certainly, there is terror. No other word fits what it feels like to be in a town when guerrillas launch their gas cylinder bombs or when paramilitaries start going, lists of names in hand, door to door. Americans should help Colombians who want democracy and peace. Some of that help must be military aid; as a human rights activist, I am too familiar with the brutal ways of both guerrillas and paramilitaries not to acknowledge that many will fail to be convinced by argument alone. But help must, in greater measure, also come as schools and medicine and roofs. Americans must recognize our role in this disaster, through our craving for the drugs we classify as illegal. The solution lies in our communities and in Washington, not in Colombia. All the bullets in the world will not cure Colombia; only hope and ensuring Colombians power over their own future has that kind of magic.

Book Blog: The Desterrados and the Dead

The Dispossessed by Alfredo Molano contains a series of first-person accounts from the country’s internally displaced people, including the author himself. Molano was forced to exile in Spain in 1998, after the paramilitaries targeted him for assassination over his famous El Espectador column — which routinely denounced their brutality against peasants. “In spite of its pains,” he writes, “the drama of my exile is but a pale reflection of terrible tragedy that millions of Colombians live each day, uprooted and exiled in their own country.” 

People told me thousands of stories and there was, and is, a common element to all of them: the forced displacement of people for political reasons and economic gain. The wealthy accuse campesinos of being Liberals, or Conservatives or communists in order to force them to flee and take their land. The spoils of war in Colombia have always been paid in land, and our history is the history of an incessant, almost uninterrupted displacement.

Colombia has somewhere around three million internally displaced people, one reads over and over when making study of this place. That’s the largest or second largest (or third largest after Syria) internally displaced population on Earth. It’s a travesty so colossal it's changed the face of the country. As the introductory essay notes:

Displacement is a palpable and tragic reality. But it is also a metaphor for life today in Colombia. Colombia is a country that for the people who live there has been transformed into a foreign land. It is unrecognizable, not only because of violence, but because of other processes that have been strengthened in recent years. The state has weakened; there is an absence of ideological discourse to link people to a struggle for democracy; unemployment looks like a ghost; socioeconomic imbalances resulting from drug trafficking and corruption are profoundly unsettling; the bankruptcy of industries that could not survive free market reforms which liberated imports and the crashing of coffee prices – all of these phantoms are the life companions with whom the Colombian people have had to learn to co-exist in recent years.

 What I’ve wondered in reading other books is how, exactly this happens. What sequence of events lead a person to flee? How and where do they go? What does it look like on the ground, from the eyes of the people it’s happening to?

Seven Stories

Taken together, Molano’s recounting make flesh and bone of something that too often is described exclusively in flat, heartless numbers. They are relayed as testimonios, “a distinctively Latin American literary movement that flourished in the 1980s,” and that dates back to 16th century Dominican friar, Bartolome de las Casas who recorded the accounts of indigenous people brutalized by Spanish conquerors.

The Defeat: [Two old men living peacefully and happily on a quiet beach are joined by a young couple and the four form a community. After they shares a meal and drink with some passing Guerrillas, one of the old men is murdered and the others flee.] “You are a guerrilla son-of-a-bitch,” said the one in charge. “And we’ve come to pay you back for partying with those bandits.” Without another word, he pulled out a pistol and shot Anibal three times in the face.

Angela: After that the man who owned the yonson told my father he couldn’t work on the river anymore because the paramilitaries were furious when they found out the men we took across the river were guerillas. [the family is forced to abandon the house they spent their lives building and saving for and flee to Bogota.]

Silences: [A man flees the hometown he’s spent his entire life in after a massacre that kills half the people he knows, including his little brother. He returns after a few months because he can’t bear to live anywhere else.]  When I went to have a closer look, I almost passed out. It was the president and secretary of the union hanging there…. The main problem was still the ranchers and lumber men and their greed for land…

The Turkish Boat: [A little boy flees his village alone after his entire family is slaughtered in a massacre. He hops boats and buses to the slums of Cartagena where he becomes a street criminal, and a doctor eventually tries to rescue him.] That’s what you hope when someone goes away, that you’ll see them again and be able to tell them you’re still alive. The thought that my family had been killed thinking that I was already dead tormented me because it would have made them even sadder.

The Garden: [A woman is forced to flee her home after her father is killed by paramilitaries when a jealous neighbor makes a false report about him being a guerrilla. She and her husband try to make a new life by growing illicit crops, but the husband is then killed by guerrillas when he accidentally pays the paramilitaries instead of them] Alvaro went back down to close the deal and came back with the seeds. We had no idea of the problems and pain that came with them. We were selling our souls to the devil. But after seeing so much death, crime and poverty, we had to take the risk… or resign ourselves to staying the way we were… I don’t understand how they can kill someone without even letting him speak. Sure, they told Alvaro not to have any dealings with the paracos, but how were we supposed to know the men who came for the money were paras?

Osiris: [A mother is forced to send two of her teenage children to live in Bogota, after her other three are murdered. Eventually she is forced to flee, herself, as the town becomes too violent.] I can’t seem to find myself here in Bogota. When you’re used to the country and the chickens and roosters, it’s very hard to get used to living all together in one room… I have nothing bad to say about people from the countryside and towns like Apartado, because they’ve suffered an awful lot and bled a great deal. But there are some envious people here who think as the rich do: everything a poor person has is stolen. They say things that hurt you. One day some girls from one of the schools here looked at us and said, “You’re turning this into a barrio of displaced people.”

Nubia, La Catira: [A young woman loses her mother and brother, and then her husband, to violence, and is forced repeatedly to flee her home to escape paramilitaries or guerrillas.] They whacked at him until the machete bent. He was mostly in pieces by then, his head hanging off his neck, and the killers left him that way. But he was still alive, and a neighbor was with him in his last moments. He asked her to move his head out of the puddle it was in and to clean him up as best she could.  

 

But why

Over and over, the book comes back to the same central thesis: Displacement is the point. Terror is the point. Violence is not the true reason for anything. It’s only the instrument or weapon.

Forced displacement is a phenomenon linked to the history of Colombia and to the country’s unfinished historical processes. The economic and political elite have used displacement to homogenize the population in a given area and to maintain and expand large estates… people are not displaced “by violence”; rather, violence is the tool used to expel the population. The true causes for displacement include strategic control of military and political areas, restructuring of local and regional powers, control or disruption of social movements, control of production and extraction activities (of natural resources and minerals). Mega-projects, expansion of stockbreeding estates and agricultural industry, control of illicit crops, etc.

I found this list helpful.

Displacements are linked to historic tensions and contradictions such as:

1.     Large urban migrations that have not been accompanied by an industrialization process (revolution) or economic development to ensure that this new labor force is absorbed into the formal sector

2.     Permanent rural colonization that has never been regulated by the state, resulting in co-existence that is organized by the local people and groups rather than the state

3.     Absence of state institutions in large regions and semi-feudal regional and local structures used to wield power

4.     Increased cooperation among the armed actors who have turned violence into a means to serve their interests and to guarantee their survival

 I could recount the entire book just unpacking each item here. But I think a good way to summarize is to say that displacement can be divided into three strands which all ultimately braid together.

 

One: La Violencia

As with so much of Colombia’s story, this one begins with Bogotazo and its long aftermath. From the book’s introduction:

 For the first century and a half of Colombia’s existence as an independent state the elite-based Liberal and Conservative Parties whose influence reached from Bogota to every rural town, rotated in and out of government with regularity. Periodic Party competition led to armed conflict, with militias of Liberals and Conservatives squaring off in rural areas. Throughout most of this time, the mass of the population remained excluded from the political spoils or in the case of some peasants, remained tied to the Liberals or Conservatives.

This began to change in the 1930s, when, during the Great Depression, labor and peasant organizing put pressure on the political system. The Liberal governments of the 1930s enacted measures providing for social security and workers’ rights akin to US president Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal or the state-led reforms of Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas. As in the US, this period of reform was short-lived. The Second World War and the subsequent Cold War put a damper on popular aspirations, giving the Colombian Right an opening to roll back the 1930 reforms. President Alfonso Lopez Pumarej, who had played the FDR role in the 1930s, returned to power in the war years, only to lead a retrenchment in the reforms he had championed.

This ignited a populist movement inside (and outside) the Liberal Party, in which the Left, workers, and peasant organizations rallied behind the charismatic politician Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. Gaitan came in third in the presidential elections of 1946, not far behind the official Liberal candidate. He looked to be in a strong position win the 1950 election. However, on April 9, 1948, an assassin cut down Gaitan on a Bogota street. The assassination ignited the Bogotazo, weeks of mass rioting in the capital and beyond as Gaitan supporters accused the Conservatives or official Liberals of murdering their leader. After a brief respite, the violence reignited, this time engulfing the country in a cycle, which has since been called La Violencia, lasting through 1958.

 In all, some 300,000 people died, more than two million were forced to flee, and the basically never the same again. Among other things, more than 300,000 ownership deeds changed hands, “vast tracts of farmland wound up in the hands of estate owners and businessmen,” and the country as a whole tipped from predominantly rural to predominantly urban.

 

Two: Guerrillas, Paramilitaries, Cartels

In the middle of La Violencia, the Colombian government launched a major, U.S.-backed military campaign against pretty much any group who wanted to protect or extend the land reforms of the 1930s (mostly peasants who were duly labeled as communists and / or bandits). Those operations triggered the formation of peasant “self-defense” groups into actual guerrilla armies. These guerrillas tried to establish independent republics in some of the country’s most remote, uninhabited regions, including Meta and Coqueta, where they hoped to work the land and live without interference from the Central government. But the Central Government obviously did not stand for that, and so we ended up with a full-blown guerrilla war marked by the rise of FARC and other guerrilla groups.

 By the 1980s the Colombian government was inviting these groups to lay down their arms in exchange for amnesty and a promise that they could form their own political parties and put their own candidates forth for public office. FARC and others took them up on the offer, forming the Union Patriotica, a political front that they hoped would win seats in the 1986 elections. But the government and the armed right famously and surreptitiously reneged on the agreement, and in a few years’ time some 3,000 UP members were murdered by the armed right. The guerrilla war thus resumed, only it was much worse because by then you had drug cartels and paramilitaries entering the fray.  It started with the cartels investing their mega profits in land and cattle. The guerrillas responded by kidnapping cartel members, or their families, for ransom; and the cartels responded by creating or funding paramilitaries to protect their assets. Things spiraled quickly from there.

The result of all this was a huge increase from the 1980s to today in paramilitary activity, including massacres, disappearances, and forced displacements. Since the drug cartels, the traditional oligarchy, and the military represented an alliance of sectors of Colombia’s ruling class, it wasn’t long before paramilitary activity became directed not just at guerrillas, but at any force inside Colombian society that dared to challenge the status quo. Human rights workers, trade unionists, peasant leaders, left-of-center politicians, and others having little or nothing to do with guerrilla activity became targets of the paramilitaries. In the cities — especially in the slum areas where many of the displaced concentrate when they flee to urban areas – “social cleansing” by hired assassins (sicarios) annually murders hundreds of street children, prostitutes, and others deemed “undesirable.”

In the end, you have chaos with no clear purpose and a lot of terrified people basically running for their lives, over and over.

The lines separating the various armed groups are constantly changing and as a result… these areas can go from the control of one actor to another without warning. Residents of these communities are guaranteed to undergo some form of terror when power in their area changes hands, as they will most definitely be accused of supporting the previous controlling actor, or defeated party. In many cases the only choice left for community residents is to flee to the so-called shantytowns on the peripheries of the big cities, where anonymity and a certain degree of security are usually guaranteed.

 

 Three: Landlords and Multinationals

Of course, it was not just the cartels and guerrillas and corrupt government officials who sewed and/or profited from the chaos.  Wealthy landholders were all too happy to join the free-for-all. Using the threat of communism or the suspicion of guerrilla activity or some other related excuse to expel campesinos from various territories that they coveted for themselves. “War is the continuation of economics through other means,” as the introductory essay notes. The quote is from Claude Von Clausewitz, a Prussian military theorist. But it aptly describes “the historic employment of private landlord armies to seize prime farmland.”

 A Census carried out by the National Farmers’ Association (ANUC) revealed that of 15.5 million farmers in 1990 at least five million left their lands or had given up traditional farming at some point during the preceding decade. This meant that 1.7 million hectares of farmland were abandoned and occupied for the most part by armed actors… and by large or medium estate owners who used terror to buy land at undervalued prices or to acquire the deeds of abandoned farms. 

 (It’s worth reiterating here that cartels themselves became vast estate holders. By 1997, according to the book’s concluding essay, they controlled some 4 million hectares of good flat fertile land).

 And of course, it’s not just the wealthy Colombian landowners playing this game. The thing I most appreciated about the introduction and summary essays in this book was their focus on multinationals, something I haven’t encountered in the other Colombia books I’ve read so far. Turns out British Petroleum financed some of them paramilitaries themselves, and the United States based Occidental Petroleum pushed Congress to expand Plan Colombia to regions where the company had interests. Other multinationals ­— ones that invested in minerals, cash crops, timber, etc. — “contributed to the pressure to expel populations” whose communities were built on the land that they wanted or needed to access.   

 

Again, interests (in this case, of rich landholders and global corporations) bleed into one another:

The elite have now entered into an alliance with multinational credit institutions and capital assets, which requires an expansion of capital circuits, bestows privileges upon capital assets, strengthens the economy’s primary sector (agricultural industry) through foreign markets, promotes foreign investments and exports, and toughens repression against social protest…. The Development Plan of the Pastrana administration envisaged the construction of eight transversal highways and eight main highways plus railways as well as air ferry and sea transportation and communications. The purpose was to guarantee multinationals and private investors access to the country’s resources. [which include more than 30 million hectares of non-commercially controlled forests of usable timbre.

When people flee, local landowners or multinational companies (and the alliances among them and other actors) can then appropriate these abandoned lands or buy them at very low costs. This is extremely easy in colonization areas where land deeds do not exist (for instance 80-85% of the land in Putumayo is not registered) …. [For example] In middle and lower Atrato, only two weeks after the plans for the Atrato-Turando interoceanic canal project were announced, land prices skyrocketed. Two months later, paramilitary groups appeared on the scene to intimidate the area’s local population and force them to leave.

Meanwhile, neoliberalism in general makes it harder and harder for Colombians to have say in how the nation’s land gets used. It also leads to the aggressive curbing of public services like education and health care, and huge swaths of the country are ultimately left “untouched by any state presence except the military.” It’s a void that the paramilitaries, guerrillas and cartels have been all too happy to fill. The rural outreaches of Colombia, “immune to Bogota’s influence,” are just about wholly governed by these other entities.  

 

 Some more bullet points:

  1. -       Antioquia alone represents 25% of the national total of displaced people

  2. -       People under the age of 18 comprise nearly half of the displaced population

  3. -       Though Guerrillas participate in more acts of displacement, their interventions affect fewer people. Paramilitaries, through a terror-oriented communication strategy, carry out more effective actions in terms of numbers: it is estimated that each massacre they perpetrate causes 170 people to flee.

  4. -       Farmers, black and indigenous people are especially affected

  5. -       The main trend is rural-urban displacement, but urban-urban is on the rise (or was at time of book’s writing)

 

 

 

Book Blog: More on Bolivar and the history of race in South America

These passages from chapters seven and nine of Marie Arana’s incredible biography of Simon Bolivar, because I’m tracking the way the book tackles race in the context of revolution. (I revisit this book every summer because it’s one of my favorites. The South American story is so different from the North American story, largely because of the role that race played):

“…It soon became clear to Bolívar, especially after the first pitched battle of his career at Araure on December 4, 1813, that although he might triumph—as he did, and brilliantly—his army simply couldn’t recruit soldiers as quickly and effectively as the enemy. For every thrashing the republicans could deliver, the Legions of Hell would come hurtling back like the mythical Hydra, with ever more heads and a greater fury. The reason for this was obvious, although republicans were slow to see its significance: the Spanish had race on their side. The vast majority of the nation’s people—black, Indian, mixed-blood—were acting on age-old democratic impulse. They were joining an effort to squelch the people of privilege, level the classes. But it was a narrow interpretation of democracy, promoted by Spanish generals, and blind to the revolutionary struggle at hand. The colored masses understood that the world was unjust, that the Creoles who lorded over them were rich and white, but they hadn’t understood the true pyramid of oppression. They hadn’t factored that the roots of misery were in empire, that Spain had constructed that unjust world carefully, that tyranny was rooted in the colonial, and that its system had been in place for over three hundred years (p. 153).

…In an irony few at the time appreciated, the royalist victory succeeded in toppling the social pyramid that Spain had been building for three hundred years. Overnight, Boves inverted the racial order: The colored, whom he perceived as loyal and trustworthy, were favored; the whites were treated as dangerous foes. To be Creole or Mantuano, for Boves, was tantamount to being a criminal. Only in Haiti had the lower classes achieved such a stunning reversal; but in Haiti the revolution—bloodily fought and won—had been undertaken in the name of freedom, not in the name of a king… It is difficult to overestimate the impact Boves had on Venezuelans, their revolution, the Americans they would become. It was he who first allowed blacks and Indians to imagine they could have a voice in the nation’s future. The Creole revolution had begun, after all, much like its North American version: as a movement that was of, by, and for whites. Boves changed that; the irony is that Spain saw potential in his racial war, and used it. Retrieved from the battlefield, his body was given an elaborate funeral in Urica; in time, it was mourned by Spanish priests throughout the land, most elaborately by that fanatical enemy of the revolution Archbishop Coll y Pratt (p. 164).

 …This incontinent violence had not sprung spontaneously from the Venezuelan people; it was the calculated result of strategies put into place by two rival leaders who were intent on unnerving their enemies. Bolívar was not a truculent man: killing in cold blood sickened him. But he was well versed in the uses of fear. Boves, on the other hand, reveled in death. He had laughed to see an unborn child struggling for life in its dead mother’s belly; he took pleasure in watching a boy witness the mutilation of his father. It is said that Boves was eager to march on Cumaná precisely because his bloodlust had grown extreme. Whatever Boves’s and Bolívar’s intentions, the results of their policies were one and the same: the country stank of death; hospitals were overrun with invalids; populations were displaced; women were transferred from one place to another to care for the maimed and dying. The nation was devastated beyond recognition      (p. 165).

 …As Bolívar contemplated this reduced universe from a distant shore, he must have seen what was so clearly obvious: the uprising he had helped to kindle was unlike any other he had read about in the comfortable library of his old Spanish mentor, the Marquis of Ustaríz, and certainly like no revolution since. This was no uniform group of like-minded whites united by class and faith upending an oppressor and casting out an old system: it was no France or United States of America—or Haiti, for that matter—where strong commonalities existed among the rebels. The overwhelmingly mixed-race population of Latin America existed in few other societies, and it was a population too prevalent to ignore. A revolution would never succeed without engaging it. If Miranda had taught him that Creoles were profoundly afraid to confront the perilous questions of race in Spanish America, Boves had taught him that no war could be won without doing exactly that (pp. 165-166).

…Bolívar’s letter is a brilliant distillation of Latin America’s political reality. His people, he explains, are neither Indian nor pardos nor European, but an entirely new race, for which European models of government are patently unsuitable. Monarchies, to these Americans, were abhorrent by definition; and democracy—Philadelphia style—inappropriate for a population cowed and infantilized by three hundred years of slavery. “As long as we do not have the political virtues that distinguish our brothers of the north,” he argued, “a democratic system, far from rescuing us, can only bring us ruin. . . . We are a region plagued by vices learned from Spain, which, through history, has been a mistress of cruelty, ambition, meanness, and greed.” Most important to the welfare of these fledgling republics, Bolívar insisted, was a firm executive who employed wisdom, dispensed justice, and ruled benevolently for life. His America needed a strong, centralized government—one that addressed the people’s wretched condition, not a perfectly conceptualized, theoretical model dreamed up by idealists on some far-flung shore. But the “Letter from Jamaica” was more than mere propaganda; it was inspired prophecy. In it, Bolívar predicted that revolution-torn Mexico would opt for a temporary monarchy, which indeed it did. He pictured the loose confederation of nations that later became Central America. Given Panama’s “magnificent position between two mighty seas,” he imagined a canal. For Argentina, he foresaw military dictatorships; for Chile, “the blessings that flow from the just and gentle laws of a republic.” For Peru, he predicted a limbo in which privileged whites would not tolerate a genuine democracy, colored masses would not tolerate a ruling aristocracy, and the constant threat of rebellion was never far from hand. All these would come to pass. In some countries, one could even say, Bolívar’s visions still hold (pp. 176-177).

Venezuela, as Bolívar explained, like the rest of the Spanish American continent, was rent by a great many divisions—geographic, economic, human—and it would not be in congress’s interest to enact a government that ignored or exacerbated them. “Unity, unity, unity must be our motto!” he told them. But of all the nation’s challenges, the greatest was race:

Our people are nothing like Europeans or North Americans; indeed, we are more a mixture of Africa and America than we are children of Europe. . . . It is impossible to say with any certainty to which human race we belong. Most of our Indians have been annihilated; Spaniards have mixed with Americans and Africans; their children, in turn, have mixed with Indians and Spaniards. . . . we all differ visibly in the color of our skin: This diversity places upon us an obligation of the highest order. . . . We will require an infinitely firm hand and an infinitely fine tact to manage all the racial divisions in this heterogeneous society, where even the slightest alteration can throw off, divide, or undo its delicate balance.

It wasn’t that Spanish Americans were lesser stock; it was that they were a different stock altogether: a new kind of people, forged by three centuries of history, cruelly emasculated by Spain. “When a man loses his freedom,” Homer had said, and Bolívar quoted him now, “he loses half his spirit.” Codes and statutes were insufficient for a populace laboring under the triple yoke of ignorance, tyranny, and vice; what was needed was wise, considered leadership. It was incumbent on congress to fashion a new kind of government for this new race of man—one capable of governing and nurturing at the same time, for only “virtuous men, patriotic men, learned men can make republics.” Toward this end, he proposed a poder moral as one of the nation’s basic institutions, an educational body that would be responsible for instilling ethics and civic responsibilities (pp. 223-224)…”

Dead Darlings Blog: Outtakes from the CDC feature

The CDC actually invented disease surveillance. Before World War II, the concept referred to nothing more than keeping an eye on individuals who had been exposed to serious diseases like typhoid or small pox and then isolating anyone who developed symptoms. During the war, a smallish team of scientists and engineers working for the federal government began applying the concept to pathogens, not people. The team was initially tasked with protecting all “war areas” from malaria, mostly by spraying DDT in every place where the anopheles mosquito was known to proliferate. Amidst this work, the group noticed something. Nobody seemed to be in charge of preventing or even controlling other disease outbreaks. When amoebic dysentery broke out at an asylum in Arkansas, local leaders asked if the mosquito team could help. They did, and word spread. And by the time the war was over, the group was pressing their federal overseers to both continue and expand their disease-control efforts. Returning vets would likely bring lots of “exotic infections” home with them. And typhus, dysentery, plague and more were already here, “progressively infiltrating and entrenching in new sections of the U.S.,” as senior scientist Justin Andrews explained when he announced the new agency in 1946.

Scientists had learned a great deal about how to identify and treat all sorts of microbial infections by then; they had developed a vaccine for Yellow Fever, and were shepherding newly discovered antibiotics through the pipeline at a steady clip. But preventing and controlling disease outbreaks was still, as it always had been, a local concern in part because it typically involved the exercise of powers, such as forced quarantines and business closures, that state and local leaders were loath to turn over to federal ones. State health departments had more than doubled between 1935 and 1945, but the would-be C.D.C.’s proponents argued that those entities were not capable of developing the technology or the training and research programs needed to really control the spread of diseases. Only a federally run center – one created to serve the states, not usurp them – could lead such an effort. “Nothing like it had ever existed before,” historian Elizabeth Etheridge writes in Sentinel for Health, her biography of the agency.

They started out in Atlanta because D.C. was overcrowded with the nation’s military apparatus. The distance from capitol hill proved both a blessing and a curse. C.D.C. scientists and administrators had more freedom than their colleagues at other federal institutions. But they were also invisible at funding time. For the first decade, their setup was truly ramshackle. Labs were located in a series of wooden buildings made for temporary use during the war. They were poorly ventilated, too hot in summer and freezing in winter, when ice cold air blasted up from a hole in the floor beneath the microscope station. Cockroaches were a regular presence – you could not spray to get rid of them without imperiling the mosquito colonies needed for research — and monkeys frequently escaped from their cages. Plans for a new building were floated regularly, but nearly a decade passed before any money was appropriated.

In the meantime, the agency’s existence hinged on its officers’ ability to sell their services to individual state leaders, who retained the power to invite them to or evict them from any given outbreak investigation. They quickly built a reputation for taking on the jobs that no other agency wanted. They were the first to arrive at any given emergency, the last to leave, and the ones with the most cutting edge techniques (their diagnostic labs especially, were unrivaled). They almost always exceeded their own budget and for the first decade faced the constant threat of closure; but their early successes were impressive. They mapped out the path eastern equine encephalitis (a deadly brain virus) takes from birds to mosquitoes to humans, by tracking birds through the Louisiana Bayou. They discovered that histoplasmosis, a rare but serious fungal infection, was not rare at all but was sickening some 30 million people every year, most of whom were being misdiagnosed. And when a deadly manufacturing snafu nearly ruined the nation’s first polio vaccination program, they proved that the shot was safe, when properly made, weeks before clinical doctors reached the same conclusion (an achievement that scored them their first mention in the New York Times). In the early 1950s, C.D.C. officials were staving off a total shutdown by Congress. By the 1960s, they were launching a global effort to eradicate small pox.

As those wins accrued, a loose pattern emerged. The agency received a flush of emergency funding in times of crises, and praise and more responsibility when it saved the day. But it was often neglected and starved of resources, and it was riven by internal conflicts over how to apportion the money it did receive. Multiple fiefdoms emerged and everybody tried to establish their own thing, Etheridge writes. Each branch of the agency – the epidemiologists working in the field, the laboratory scientists developing diagnostics, the communications and public education teams – had strong leadership, and none of those strong leaders were great at working together. By the end of the century, the C.D.C. had morphed into a global beacon with a roster of storied victories over disease and death, and an even longer roster of programs – everything from tuberculosis to S.T.D.s to obesity — under its purview. But its authority remained meagre to non-existent, its funding relatively flat, and its internal dramas continued to fester.

Book Blog: On racism as a tool of colonization

This from Marie Arana’s biography of Simon Bolivar, on how racial divisions emerged as a result of, and a tool for, Spanish colonizers who needed to oppress native populations. And how that, in turn, led to violent uprising:

 The case of the Spanish American colonies had no precedent in modern history: a vital colonial economy was being forced, at times by violent means, to kowtow to an underdeveloped mother country. The principal—as Montesquieu had predicted a half century before—was now slave to the accessory. Even as England burst into the industrial age, Spain made no attempt to develop factories; it ignored the road to modernization and stuck stubbornly to its primitive, agricultural roots. But the Bourbon kings and their courts could not ignore the pressures of the day: Spain’s population was burgeoning; its infrastructure, tottering; there was a pressing need to increase the imperial revenue. Rather than try something new, the Spanish kings decided to hold on firmly to what they had. At midnight on April 1, 1767, all Jesuit priests were expelled from Spanish America. Five thousand clerics, most of them American-born, were marched to the coast, put on ships, and deported to Europe, giving the crown unfettered reign over education as well as over the widespread property of the Church’s missions. King Carlos IV made it very clear that he did not consider learning advisable for America: Spain would be better off, and its subjects easier to manage, if it kept its colonies in ignorance. Absolute rule had always been the hallmark of Spanish colonialism. From the outset, each viceroy and captain-general had reported directly to the Spanish court, making the king the supreme overseer of American resources. Under his auspices, Spain had wrung vast quantities of gold and silver from the New World and sold them in Europe as raw material. It controlled the entire world supply of cocoa and rerouted it to points around the globe from storehouses in Cádiz. It had done much the same with copper, indigo, sugar, pearls, emeralds, cotton, wool, tomatoes, potatoes, and leather.

To prevent the colonies from trading these goods themselves, it imposed an onerous system of domination. All foreign contact was forbidden. Contraband was punishable by death. Movement between the colonies was closely monitored. But as the years of colonial rule wore on, oversight had grown lax. The war that had flared between Britain and Spain in 1779 had crippled Spanish commerce, prompting a lively contraband trade. A traffic of forbidden books flourished. It was said that all Caracas was awash in smuggled goods. To put a stop to this, Spain moved to overhaul its laws, impose harsher ones, and forbid Americans even the most basic freedoms.

The Tribunal of the Inquisition, imposed in 1480 by Ferdinand and Isabel to keep a firm hold on empire, was given more power. Its laws, which called for penalties of death or torture, were diligently enforced. Books or newspapers could not be published or sold without the permission of Spain’s Council of the Indies. Colonials were barred from owning printing presses. The implementation of every document, the approval of every venture, the mailing of every letter was a long, costly affair that required government approval. No foreigners, not even Spaniards, could visit the colonies without permission from the king. All non-Spanish ships in American waters were deemed enemy craft and attacked. Spain also fiercely suppressed American entrepreneurship. Only the Spanish-born were allowed to own stores or sell goods in the streets. No American was permitted to plant grapes, own vineyards, grow tobacco, make spirits, or propagate olive trees—Spain brooked no competition. It earned $60 million a year, after all (the equivalent of almost a billion today), by selling goods back to its colonies.

But, in a bizarre act of self-immolation, Spain enforced strict regulations on its colonies’ productivity and initiative. Creoles were subject to punishing taxes; Indians or mestizos could labor only in menial trades; black slaves could work only in the fields, or as domestics in houses. No American was allowed to own a mine; nor could he work a vein of ore without reporting it to colonial authorities. Factories were forbidden, unless they were registered sugar mills. Basque businesses controlled all the shipping. Manufacturing was rigorously banned, although Spain had no competing manufacturing industry. Most galling of all, the revenue raised from the new, exorbitantly high taxes—a profit of $46 million a year—was not used to improve conditions in the colonies. The money was shipped back, in its entirety, to Spain.

Americans balked at this. “Nature has separated us from Spain by immense seas,” exiled Peruvian Jesuit Viscardo y Guzmán wrote in 1791. “A son who found himself at such a distance would be a fool, if, in managing his own affairs, he constantly awaited the decision of his father.” It was as potent a commentary on the inherent flaws of colonialism as Thomas Jefferson’s “A Summary View of the Rights of British America.”

A rich orphan boy wandering the streets of Caracas would not have understood the economic tumult that churned about him, but the human tumult he could not fail to see. Everywhere he looked, the streets were teeming with blacks and mulattos. The colony was overwhelmingly populated by pardos, the mixed-race descendants of black slaves. European slave ships had just sold 26,000 Africans into Caracas—the largest infusion of slaves the colony would ever experience. One out of ten Venezuelans was a black slave; half of the population was slaves’ descendants. Though Spain had prohibited race mixing, the evidence that those laws had been flouted was all about him. Caracas’s population had grown by more than a third in the course of Simón Bolívar’s young life, and its ranks swarmed, as never before, with a veritable spectrum of color. There were mestizos, mixed-race offspring of whites and Indians, almost always the product of illegitimate births. There were also pureblood Indians, although they were few, their communities reduced to a third of their original numbers. Those who weren’t killed off by disease were pushed deep into the countryside, where they subsisted as marginal tribes. Whites, on the other hand, were a full quarter of the population, but the great majority of these were either poor Canary Islanders, whom the Creoles considered racially tainted and markedly inferior to themselves, or light-skinned mestizos who passed themselves off as white. Even a child, kicking stones in the back alleys of this crowded city, could see that a precise, color-coded hierarchy was at work.

The question of race had always been problematic in Spanish America. The laws that forced Indians to pay tribute to the crown, either through forced labor or taxation, had provoked violent race hatreds. As centuries passed and colored populations grew, the system for determining “whiteness” became ever more corrupt, generating more hostility. Spain began selling Cédulas de Gracias al Sacar, certificates that granted a light-skinned colored person the rights every white automatically had: the right to be educated, to be hired into better jobs, to serve in the priesthood, to hold public office, to marry whites, to inherit wealth. The sale of Cédulas created new income for Madrid; but it was also a canny social strategy. From Spain’s point of view, the ability to buy “whiteness” would raise colored hopes and keep Creole masters from getting cocky. The result, however, was very different. Race in Spanish America became an ever-greater obsession. By the time of Bolívar’s birth, a number of race rebellions had erupted in the colonies.

The trouble began in Peru in 1781, when a man who called himself Túpac Amaru II and claimed to be a direct descendant of the last ruling Inca kidnapped a Spanish governor, had him publicly executed, and marched on Cuzco with six thousand Indians, killing Spaniards along the way. Diplomacy hadn’t worked. Túpac Amaru II had first written to the crown’s envoy, imploring him to abolish the cruelties of Indian tribute. When his letters went ignored, he gathered a vast army and issued a warning to the Creoles: I have decided to shake off the unbearable weight and rid this bad government of its leaders. . . . If you elect to support me, you will suffer no ill consequences, not in your lives or on your plantations, but if you reject this warning, you will face ruin and reap the fury of my legions, which will reduce your city to ashes. . . . I have seventy thousand men at my command. In the end, the royalist armies crushed the rebellion, costing the Indians some 100,000 lives.

Túpac Amaru II was captured and brought to the main square of Cuzco, where the Spanish visitador asked him for the names of his accomplices. “I only know of two,” the prisoner replied, “and they are you and I: You as the oppressor of my country, and I because I wish to rescue it from your tyrannies.” Infuriated by the impudence, the Spaniard ordered his men to cut out the Indian’s tongue and draw and quarter him on the spot. But the four horses to which they tied his wrists and ankles would not comply. The soldiers slit Túpac Amaru’s throat instead; cut off his head, hands, and feet; and displayed these on stakes at various crossroads in the city. The torture and execution were repeated throughout the day until all members of his family were killed. Seeing his mother’s tongue ripped from her head, Túpac Amaru’s youngest child issued a piercing shriek. Legend has it that the sound of that cry was so heartrending, so unforgettable, that it signaled the end of Spanish dominion in America.

Word of Túpac Amaru II’s fate reverberated throughout the colonies, inflaming and terrifying all who would contemplate a similar rebellion. For blacks, for whom slavery’s depredations were ever more untenable, the urge for an uprising only grew; they had nothing to lose. But for Creoles, the thought of insurgency now spurred a fear that revenge would come not only from Spain but from a massive colored population.

Those fears were tested in New Granada months later, when a Creole-led army of twenty thousand marched against the viceroyalty in Bogotá to protest high taxes. One of the leaders, José Antonio Galán, swept by the fever of the moment, proclaimed the black slaves free and urged them to turn their machetes against their masters. Galán was executed—shot and hanged—as were his collaborators, and, for the moment at least, Spain succeeded in quashing the malcontents with a brutal hand. But Spain could hardly quash the eloquent calls for liberty that were issuing from the European Enlightenment and traveling, despite all injunctions against foreign literature, to the colonies. In 1789, the “Declaration of the Rights of Man” was published in France. Five years later, one of the leading intellectuals in the viceroyalty of New Granada, Antonio Nariño, secretly translated it along with the American Declaration of Independence and smuggled the documents to like-minded Creoles throughout the continent. “L’injustice à la fin produit l’indépendance!” was the rallying cry—Injustice gives rise to independence!—a line from Voltaire’s Tancrède. Nariño was arrested and sent to the dungeons of Africa. But in the interim, as French republicans stormed the Bastille and guillotined the royal family, as Marie Antoinette’s severed head was held high for all Paris to see, a bloody echo resounded on the streets of Santo Domingo, and Venezuelans, too, took up the battle cry.

Book Blog: Heroes and massacres and lost contacts. Colombian death squads revisited.

My parents were close with the Colombian family that facilitated our adoption. The baby finder was a woman named Margarita, and she had four or five kids, including a daughter named Vicky who stayed with my family for an entire summer once, and who remained pen-pals with my mother for nearly two decades after that.

I’ve only found two or three of those letters in my mother’s things (all of them from the late 1970s, when we were babies and Vicky was a teenager). But I still remember reading one in the early 1990s, when I was in junior high. It explained that paramilitary men had visited the family’s farm and expelled them from their own land: Just pounded on the door one morning, brandishing weapons, and told them to leave immediately with only the clothes on their backs, or else.

The letter filled me with both relief and worry, I remember: I was grateful for the fact of my adoption and that I was being raised in the United States. But I wondered about my biological family, and if they were safe, and if Vicky and her family would be ok. It also made me deeply curious: What on earth was going on down there? And how could it be allowed to continue?

There Are No Dead Here: A Story of Murder and Denial in Colombia by Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, answers those questions in more detail than anything I’ve read so far on the subject. The book is about the atrocities paramilitary groups committed against peasant farming communities deep in the Colombian mountains in the mid-1990s — and about the people who tried to stop those atrocities, expose them, and hold the guilty to account for them. The outcome of those efforts is aptly summarized in the book’s title, as Camila Osorio notes in her review for The New Yorker:

 “There Are No Dead Here” is a paradoxical title for a book in which I recorded, in the margins, at least forty-nine murders. The phrase is borrowed from Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” in which one man, José Arcadio Segundo, is a witness to the state-sponsored murder of three thousand union workers. He is doomed to solitude when no one, not even his brother, will believe him. “The official version,” Márquez wrote, was finally accepted: “There were no dead.”

Anyway, the book came out in 2018. I’m revisiting it now because a new chapter of the story is unfolding in real time.

The backstory

A quick, crude history, here: It started with La Violencia – a nearly decade-long crush of violence that erupted in the late 1940s after the assassination of leftist politician Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. It got so bad that a siege was declared and Congress was temporarily suspended. It only ended after the government was wholly restructured to allow for power-sharing arrangement between left and right, and by then some 200,000 people (out of 12 million total) had met brutal ends.

Some groups refused to put down their arms, though, and the municipalities they controlled were deemed independent republics. Those groups eventually morphed into Guerrilla outfits, like FARC and ELN, which still exist today. In the 1960s, the U.S. began pressing the Colombian government to launch aggressive counterinsurgency programs in those regions — which the government did and which involved dropping bombs and napalm on small peasant communities across Antioquia. That only made things worse, of course: by the mid-1980s, the Guerrilla groups were well-established, and a violent struggle between them and the Colombian government was well underway.

It was from this morass that paramilitaries emerged. “While also describing themselves as “self-defense” groups organized to protect their communities from guerrillas,” McFarland Sanchez-Moreno writes, “the paramilitaries were hard to distinguish from death squads for the military or private armies for wealthy land owners and drug lords.”

Here’s McFarland Sanchez-Moreno on the net result:

In Colombia the war between the government and the FARC certainly had ideological roots, but after 40 years it had become much murkier, in part because of the explosion of the drug war which in the 1980s and early 1990s pitted the Medellin and Cali cocaine cartels against each other and the Colombian government…. Former Escobar associates had picked up the reins of a cocaine business far too profitable to drop. These groups portrayed themselves as heroes trying to defend the country from the FARC. Instead they operated like a massive mafia, seizing peasants’ land for themselves, taking over key drug trafficking corridors and killing anyone who got in their way.

By 2004 the violence had forced more than 3 million people – nearly a tenth of the country’s population – to flee their homes. Hundreds of thousands of Colombians had been killed, and thousands more were being held hostage or had been forcibly “disappeared.” Massacres had become so common that nobody could say for sure how many had taken place over the previous decade or two…Guerrillas had recruited hundreds of children to serve in their ranks and laid antipersonnel landmines around rural communities, regularly maiming civilians to protect their turf. The paramilitaries were enforcing their control in towns and cities through torture, threats, and murder, and hardly anyone was ever prosecuted or even investigated for these crimes.

 The suffering was on a scale that, as a relatively inexperienced activist in my twenties, I had not imagined. IT often seemed as though everyone I met — cashiers at grocery stores, taxi drivers, newspaper editors, doctors — had a story; everyone had been touched by the war in one way or another.

The real heroes

The book has three protagonists: Jesús María Valle, the lawyer and human rights activist who first drew attention to what the death squads were actually doing in the remote reaches of the country; Ivan Velasquez, the prosecutor who took Valle’s extensive documentation and pressed forward to seek justice; and Ricardo Calderon, the journalist who worked with Velasquez to shine a light on the horrors. Valle was murdered by sicarios for his efforts; Velasquez and Calderon received death threats for years and were periodically forced into hiding, but they soldiered on to great effect.

 Here’s what McFarland Sanchez-Moreno writes about Valle:

In Valle’s view, the mission of a lawyer should be to serve the poor. Even though he could have made large sums of money as a defense attorney, he spent much of his time on his activism and working for the people of Ituango. He lived extremely frugally – that was why he had never bothered to update or replace the manual typewriter in his office, or to install a security camera outside its door, even when there were threats against him. He gave most of his money to his family, buying a house where he lived with many of his siblings, and, once his parents retired, a plot of land near Medellin, where they could grow some of their own food and raise animals, more for fun than out of need. He had a habit of giving money and things away – once in a while, decorative items around the house would disappear. His sister Magdalena would ask Valle about them and he would explain: “Oh so-and-so was here and really admired it, and she’s very poor while you have lots of things, so I gave it to her.”…

Valle’s colleague and friend Beatriz Jaramillo was struck by one incident in particular around 1997, when he called her at 5:30 a.m. to tell her that they needed to go to Blanquizal a squatter community on the outskirts of Medellin, because the city government was about to evict its residents to make way for a highway construction project. They had to protect those people, he told her. Once in Blanquizal, he called the community together to talk about the problem. Seated on a modest little bed in one of the houses, “he spoke to them so beautifully, making them feel important, telling that they were Colombia, that they had rights,” she recalled. Repeatedly, he asked them “not to respond to violence with violence.”

Eventually the police and the bulldozers arrived and started to demolish the precarious little houses. It was tragic, Jaramillo recalled, to see how they loaded the municipal garbage bins with the pieces of wood the residents had used to cobble together their homes, “knowing that the wood was the fruit of enormous efforts to get some way to protect themselves from the elements at night.” … At one point, a young pregnant woman, with a toddler in her arms, came out of one of the few houses in the community that was built out of bricks. She started to cry, wondering what she would do now. As the bulldozer approached, Valle sat in front of the house: if they wanted to bulldoze the house, they’d have to drive over him….

Over time, Valle would represent the entire community in proceedings against the city, and he ultimately succeeded in getting them resettled in good housing elsewhere in town.

I appreciated these bits especially, because I’ve been frustrated by how readily the story of Colombia is reduced to one charismatic villain – Pablo Escobar — and the sheer audacity of his run. Escobar cultivated a Robin Hood image, which we’ve allowed him to keep for far too long because it lets us marvel at his exploits without feeling as guilty. Those exploits are a marvel, to be sure: He got elected to Congress, killed presidential candidates and federal officials with impunity, blew up a plane, blew up a capitol building, built his own prison, had his own pet hippos, and wooed a famous television news anchor who was supposed to be reporting on him. He also remained one of the richest men in the world, even as he was forced into hiding and living on the run.

But the far more impressive story, the far more moving one, is of the many honorable men who took a stand against Escobar — and the paramilitaries — and in many cases paid with their lives. That sacrifice might sound pointless, foolish or even dull (what does martyrdom achieve amid so much bloodshed?). But these are people who held to their principles, even in the face of death and even while so many around them succumbed to fear or bribery or both. The list of such heroes is long (Hector Abad, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, Guillermo Cano Isaza to name just a few) though casual observers will not recognize a single name on it.

 

The actual massacres

There were far too many to account for all of them, as Chomsky and McFarland Sanchez-Moreno both note. This book focuses on the one in El Aro which McFarland Sanchez-Moreno describes in clear and devastating detail:

The paramilitaries stayed in the town for five more days. Miladis later heard from other townspeople who fled to Puerto Valdivia that the day she left, they killed Marco Aurelio Areiza after accusing him of selling food to guerrillas. Ignoring the pleas of Areiza’s domestic partner, who insisted that he had only sold the food under guerrilla threat, the paramilitaries had dragged him away. His body was later found tied to a tree near the town cemetery with his eyes gouged out, deep knife wounds in his ribs, and his testicles cut off and stuffed in his mouth.

She also heard that paramilitaries had forced a young woman to lead them to a guerrilla campsite nearby – Miladis heard that the young woman might have belonged to the guerrillas but had deserted them. Later on, Miladis said, people found only the bottom half of her body. It was rumored that the paramilitaries had thrown explosives at her.

The paramilitaries raped more women after the family left, though the victims remained too afraid or ashamed to tell the authorities. Survivors did report that the paramilitaries had gang-raped Elvia Rosa Areiza, a woman who did domestic work in the priest’s house. They had then dragged the young mother of five through the streets, transforming her face into a purple bloody mess before tying her up in a pigsty, where they left her to die of thirst.

People said that the paramilitaries laughed as they talked about how they had killed Miladis’s little brother. He kept crying, they said, calling for the Virgin Mary to protect him and for them to let him go back to his mother.

By the time they left, the paramilitaries had killed fifteen people. They finally ordered the remaining residents to leave as they burned down most of the town, leaving only eighteen houses and the church standing. In total, more than seven hundred people fled El Aro and the surrounding region as a result of the operation. Over time, one of Miladis’s aunts – an elderly woman whom the paramilitaries had forced to cook for them during their incursion – would tell her that she had seen aa helicopter arrive nearby. Another young man talked about how the paramilitaries had forced him to tie the bodies of dead combatants to the legs of a helicopter.

During the entire hellish week, nobody — neither the military nor law enforcement – responded to pleas for help from the community. Nor did anyone stop the paramilitaries as they left, taking with them as many as 1,200 head of cattle that they had forced townspeople to herd for them from neighboring farms.

We lost touch with Vicky and Margarita and their family many years back, but we know that they made it to safety: Vicky and her brothers got visas and settled in the U.S.. Margarita passed away (a few years back, we think), but appears to have lived in a decent apartment in Medellin in her later years (a fellow adoptee that I know traced her there). One of my most ardent hopes for the coming year or two is to find Vicky and her brothers and see what their part of this story actually was. They were middle-class landowners so I don’t think it was quite as dire as the peasants McFarland Sanchez-Moreno writes about. But I know it involves displacement and loss.

The future is unwritten

Alvaro Uribe is best known in the U.S. as the Colombian president (2000-2010) who rescued his country from the brink of failed statehood by defeating both the Guerrillas and the Narcos with a sustained U.S.-funded counterinsurgency initiative. We gave him the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom for this feat.

But he was governor of Antioquia before that, and he’s long been suspected of playing a role in the atrocities that unfolded as the paramilitaries expanded there. How deep his complicity goes depends on who you talk to, but McFarland Sanchez-Moreno does an excellent job of laying out the case against Uribe in narrative detail — including, among many other details, the fact that Valle pleaded with the Governor to intervene in El Aro, to no avail.  

After his presidency, Uribe served as a Colombian Congressman (2014-2020), a position that protected him a bit from prosecution. But he recently resigned that seat amid scandal, and is now under house arrest for witness tampering and facing a fuller Supreme Court investigation into his other alleged crimes. No less a figurehead than U.S. Vice President Mike Pence has called for Uribe’s release, touting him as a freedom-loving hero to make the case. But, however oblivious the U.S. is, most Colombians know better. 

 

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Book Blog: The Great Liberator and the history of race in South America

I am re-reading Bolivar: American Liberator, by Marie Arana because I loved it so much the first time, and because I wanted to revisit the passages on race.

“What are you?” is a question I actually get asked fairly regularly. Meaning “Are you white?” I don’t really know how to answer that (in part because I am adopted and didn’t know my birth family’s background until recently). The simplest response is that I’m a fair-skinned Colombian, but I’ve never been quite sure what that even means. If 23&Me is to be believed, I am about 46 percent Southern European, 33 percent Native American, and 14 percent West and Central African. That’s the entire history of my motherland — centuries of conquest and uprising and suppression and liberation — dancing in my blood and bones.

Here’s Arana laying out the mechanics of that saga (this all comes from chapter one).

Spanish colonizers started by enslaving Native Americans:

Alongside this march of history, however, was the steady hardening of a racial hierarchy that would define South America into the modern age. It had begun when Christopher Columbus’s men had landed on Hispaniola, and imposed their will over the Taíno people. At first, Queen Isabel and the Church roundly censured the capture and massacre of Indians. Columbus’s men had committed harrowing atrocities, burning and destroying whole tribal villages, abducting natives as slaves, unleashing murderous plagues of syphilis and smallpox on the population. The priests who accompanied the crown’s “civilizing missions” made a point of recording it all. As a result, the state tried to take a strong stance against any kind of institutionalized violence. It introduced a system of encomiendas, in which Spanish soldiers were assigned allotments of Indians and, in exchange for the task of instructing them in the Christian faith, were given the right to put them to work on the land or in the mines.

The soldiers were often harsh and corrupt, killing natives who did not comply with their brutal demands, and, eventually, the system of encomiendas had to be abolished. But the notion of encouraging soldiers to work the land rather than live from plunder opened the way for a new era of plantation life. Throughout, the state had a hard time enforcing laws that prohibited slavery. Even the queen had to agree that without the use of physical force, the Indians would refuse to work and the mines so necessary to Spain’s economy would cease to function. There could be no gold, no silver, no sugar, without the systematic subjugation of American Indians. In 1503, a mere decade after Columbus stepped foot in America, the queen hedged on her initial disapprobation of slavery and decreed:

“Forasmuch as my Lord the King and Myself have ordered that the Indians living on the island of Hispaniola be considered free and not subject to slavery . . . I order you, Our Governor . . . to compel the Indians to cooperate with the Christian settlers on the said island, to work on their buildings, to mine and collect gold and other metals, and to work on their farms and crop fields.”

In other words, killing was a Christian sin and genocide would not be tolerated, but “compelling” rebellious natives was a necessary evil. The Spanish colonizers understood the tacit approval in this. Despite the official condemnation of slavery, the state had conceded it would turn a blind eye. Indians continued to be a commodity to be owned and traded. And though Spanish sailors and Indian women had propagated freely from the start, a psychology of superiority and inferiority was established. It was best to be Spanish—unfortunate to be indigenous—in the New World that Europe had made.

From there, they imported enslaved Africans:

The Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas took issue with all this, especially the moral dithering about slaves. A former slave owner who had undergone an emphatic change of heart, he fumed about the brutalities Spaniards had visited on the Taíno people and the boatloads of indigenous slaves that Columbus was transporting regularly to Spain. “Slaves are the primary source of income for the Admiral,” Las Casas wrote of Columbus. Finally, in an impassioned plea to Charles V, he argued that institutionalized barbarism had cruelly decimated the Indian population: “Spaniards are still acting like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples.” In Hispaniola, they had reduced three million people to “a population of barely two hundred”; on the mainland of South America, they had stolen more than a million castellanos of gold and killed some 800,000 souls. A “Deep, Bloody American Tragedy” he called it, “choakt up with Indian Blood and Gore.”

To mitigate the damage—to prevent the depletion of these “humble, patient, and peaceable natives”—he advocated that Spain begin the importation of African slaves. Eventually, Las Casas was to see the hypocrisy of that proposal, but not before the colonies had swung into a lively commerce. By the time Simón de Bolívar had made his children and grandchildren indisputably the richest landowning aristocrats of Caracas, there were ten thousand African slaves working the fields and plantations of Venezuela. The Indians, less able to toil in the sun, too easily affected by heat prostration, were sent off to work in the mines.

 

Then they established a brutal racial caste system, to prevent the lower classes from ascending, and to keep them from collaborating on rebellion:

As soon as the crown was able to impose some semblance of control, it moved to enforce strict divisions between the races. A ruthlessly observed system of racial dominance was put in place. At the top were the Spanish-born, crown-appointed overseers, such as Simón de Bolívar; below them, the Creoles—whites, born in the colonies—such as de Bolívar’s own son. After that came the pardos, an ever burgeoning mixed-race population that was either mestizo, part-white, part-Indian; or mulatto, a mixture of white and black; or sambo, a combination of black and Indian. As in most slave societies, labels were fashioned for every possible skin color: quadroons, quintroons, octoroons, moriscos, coyotes, chamisos, gíbaros, and so on.

For each birth, a church registry would meticulously record the race, for there were concrete ramifications for the color of a child’s skin. If he were Indian, he would be subject to the Spanish tribute, a tax imposed by the crown; if he were unable to pay, he was forced to meet his debt through hard labor. Indians were also subject to the mita, a period of compulsory toil in the mines or fields. Many of them didn’t survive it. Chained, herded in gangs, separated from their families, those serving the mita would often be shipped great distances to satisfy the viceroy’s demands. Indians were also forced to buy goods according to laws of repartimiento. The governors would sell them food and supplies and expect them to pay with gold or silver. Often, the result was a disgraceful trafficking of sick mules, spoiled food, or faulty goods, sold at double or triple the normal prices. Sometimes these commodities were absolutely useless: Indian men who had no facial hair were made to buy razors. Women who wore tribal wraps were forced to buy silk stockings. The proceeds were gathered dutifully and sent off to the royal coffers in Madrid.

For blacks, life in Spanish America was equally punishing. Severed from family, country, language, they were brought as fishermen, pearl divers, cacao and sugar field workers. They were Bantu from Angola and the Congo, Mandingo from the Gold Coast. In the course of a little more than two hundred years, an estimated one million slaves were sold into South America by the Portuguese, Spanish, and English. Uniformly disdained as the lowest rung in the human hierarchy, they nevertheless left an indelible imprint on the culture. They worked their way from field hands to skilled craftsmen, from house slaves to beloved nursemaids, but it wasn’t until after Bolívar’s revolution that they were released into the mainstream of possibility.

None of those efforts were enough to prevent racial mixing:

For all of Spain’s attempts to retain absolute control of its colonies, it could not prevent the interracial mixing that was inevitable in a world forged by male conquistadors. The crown quickly—and by necessity—took the attitude that marriage between races was acceptable, as long as Spanish men could persuade non-Spanish women to be baptized Christians. In truth, the Spaniards were hardly racially “pure” Europeans. After centuries of tumultuous history, the bloodline contained traces of Arab, Phoenician, African, Roman, Basque, Greek, Ligurian, Celt, German, Balkan, and Jew. But once they began mixing with Indians and blacks in the Americas, a cosmic race representative of all continents began to emerge.

When Simón de Bolívar, the Spanish overlord, arrived in Venezuela in the late 1500s, the population counted 5,000 Spaniards, 10,000 Africans, and 350,000 native Indians in the country. Two hundred years later, when the Liberator was born, according to anthropologist Alexander von Humboldt, Venezuela had 800,000 inhabitants, of whom more than half were mestizo or mulatto. Today, more than two thirds of all Latin Americans are mixed-race. Nowhere else on earth has a civilization of such ethnic complexity been wrought in such a short span of time.

Of course, Arana is referring to Venezuela, here. But the story was much the same in Colombia. And by the time we get to true revolution, we are talking about all six countries that Bolivar liberated from Spanish rule.

Book Blog: Noam Chomsky on the United States intervention in Colombia

 Just finished An American Addiction: Drugs, Guerrillas and Counterinsurgency by Noam Chomsky. It’s really just an old spoken-word, but we call those audio books now, I guess. Anyway, it’s a good review of the U.S. war on narco-terrorists in Colombia and an excellent counterpoint to the Bowden book, for several reasons. It was recorded in 2001, almost a decade after Escobar had been found and killed, and it makes very clear that the troubles did not stop — or start — with him.

According to Chomsky, the U.S. went into Colombia under the guise of fighting the narco-traffickers, but actually just funded a massive campaign of brutality against the peasant class. The country as a whole is (or was) profoundly unequal, with a high concentration of wealth and land ownership on one hand, and massive poverty (more than half of the population below the poverty line) on the other. That of course begot an endless cycle (for at least the past century) of uprising and violent suppression.

U.S. policy has tipped the scales heavily towards violent suppression in large part because its military aid goes to the same groups that are responsible for the biggest, most sustained human rights violations: the paramilitaries, which are essentially part of the military. Chomsky cites estimates of one massacre a day by early 1999. “These are not just killings,” he says. “They are brutal vicious atrocities.”

Not sure I agree with everything he says (feels like he gives way too much quarter to FARC, for one thing), but I agree with a lot of it — including the excerpts below, where he addresses questions that I have been grappling with.

 

How did Colombia become a top cocaine producer to begin with?

Colombia was a weak coca producer at one point. That ended in the 1950s because of a program that we are very proud of here, called Food for Peace. FFP is a program which compels U.S. taxpayers to pay U.S. agribusiness to flood poor countries with subsidized food, which drives out peasant producers and provides “counterpart funds.” Those funds go to government, which usually spends them to enrich the already wealthy, or for military forces that kill the same peasants who were driven off their land. That’s called Food for Peace. In the 1950s, it undermined and then destroyed Colombian wheat production.

In the 1960s, nonaligned countries [low-income, global south, 80% of world population] were strong enough to issue a call for a form of globalization that would respond to the concerns and needs of overwhelming majority of the people of the world. And in fact the U.N. instituted its main economic planning and development unit UNCTAD, in 1964 to develop programs for a new form of international integration. But by the 1970s, a different kind of globalization was instituted by western countries, which instead has incidental concern for 80% of the world population and great concern for private corporate power and elite elements that are connected to it.

One casualty of that shift was a program to stabilize commodity prices. For countries of the south, which are primary producers, that’s extremely important. If commodity prices oscillate wildly – take coffee, the second commodity in world trade after oil, and for Colombia a huge product – if coffee goes up and down sharply, it doesn’t affect agribusiness much. But if you are a small producer, you can’t survive.

The stabilization programs are not unusual. Every rich country has them. The U.S. has massive subsidies to agribusiness to keep prices stable. $25 billion this year [2001]. But the law of economic history is that economic development and growth depend very heavily on a massive state sector, which violates market principles but in a very carefully calculated direction: It provides support for the rich and powerful, but those devices are not available to the great masses of poor. This was a case in point. The UNCTAD program to stabilize commodity prices was destroyed with the immediate and understood consequence that it would drive poor people to produce something for which there is a stable market. And there is one. It’s called coca. And marijuana.

That’s gotten a lot worse in last 10-20 years under neoliberal globalization. Countries of the south – most of the world – are compelled to accept “rational economic programs” to open up their borders to imports from rich countries. To highly subsidized agribusiness exports,  which will wipe out their agricultural systems, which is happening from Mexico to southern Latin America, to Africa.  So you open up your borders under what’s ludicrously called free trade, to imports from highly subsidized western agribusiness. And then the peasants who are driven out of production by this, are taught that they are supposed to be rational peasants: they have to produce for agro-export, not local market, and they have to maximize profit. So if you live in Bolivia or Colombia the way to do that is to make drugs. And then, if you do that, you are rewarded by military and bio warfare, they kill your children, terror and so on.

You could stop it with commodity stabilization programs in the third world. You could provide a fraction of the money that goes to killing people to develop alternative crops instead. You could try to change internal structure of the country to follow programs that benefit instead of oppress the population. The other way is to kill them.

 

When and how did current U.S. policies in Colombia begin to take shape?

In the early 1960s, the U.S. moved into Colombia in force, under the Kennedy administration. This was Kennedy’s general program, which focused a lot of attention on Latin America. One of the most important things they did, with long lasting effect, was to shift the mission of the Latin American military, which essentially controlled by the U.S., from hemispheric defense to internal security. Hemispheric defense was a holdover from the second world war (nobody left to defend against except Washington). But internal security means war against your own populations. and the new policies and new armaments and training led to a major war against the populations of the western hemisphere from southern cone and Chile and Argentina up to the Caribbean and Mexico. These were terrible atrocities that peaked in the 1980s with wars in central America. And Colombia was one of the places targeted for these changes.

In 1962, a U.S. military mission went to Colombia headed by General Yarborough, a special forces general. And he gave advice to the Colombian military about how to deal w internal problems. His advice was to develop paramilitary and terrorist activities against known communist proponents – meaning priests nuns human rights workers journalists, anybody not supporting the current brutal system. And this was not just advice, it went along with military missions, training, armaments, and it changed significantly the modalities and level of atrocities, and turned it into a war of terror, largely through paramilitary organizations against elements of society which were trying to change these brutal and vicious conditions.

 

How central is the war on drugs to the U.S. presence in Colombia, truly?

The drug war is not taken seriously by any competent analyst. One reason is that narcotrafficking is part of elite culture in Colombia. The D.E.A. had a major report a year or so ago where they said at every level of Colombian government, there is full, direct, extensive involvement in narcotrafficking. That includes the military — and paramilitaries, who  have announced publicly that 70% of their funding comes from narcotraffickers, and they are also direct producers. Remember that is where the anti-drug money is going. This is so extensive in Colombia that it reaches to the U.S. mission as well: The wife of Colonel Hyatt, who trains the counter-narcotics brigades, was just arrested and jailed for bringing drugs into the U.S. And the Colonel will have to plead guilty on complicity charges.

So the sectors of the population to which the arms are going are up to their necks in narcotrafficking, and that’s no secret. They are furthermore not being targeted. And there’s good reasons for that. They are the armies of the landowners, narcos, oil companies, and so on. The Colombia Plan is specifically directed against areas under guerrilla control. Peasant areas, which have been calling for a long time for programs to develop alternative crops.

That’s not part of Colombia Plan. Clinton’s plan has a few dollars out of the $1.7 billion for new crops, but excluding the guerrilla controlled [peasant] areas. So not a penny goes there. U.S. insists on measures that even Colombian government is opposed to, including experimental bio and chemical warfare programs that are now being carried out. That’s a U.S. program, not a Colombia program. They have to go along, they haven’t got any choice. The Clinton administration was particularly impressed w president Gaviria who was presiding over most of these atrocities. Described him as very forward looking in promoting democracy under conditions of great danger (didn’t add that most of the danger came from his admin and our support of it). Also forward looking in carrying out economic reforms and incorporating Colombia into the international economy. And as a result of these forward looking attitudes, Clinton said he should be appointed assistant secretary of Organization of American States, which he then was.

 

So what even is the point of U.S. involvement?

It’s well known how to deal with the drug problem. It’s not a small problem: the worst is tobacco, next is alcohol, and then lots of other drugs. The way to deal with it is treatment, and prevention, which means alleviating the conditions out of which it arises. Treatment is effective. A major study by RAND compared prevention and treatment to criminal justice in terms of cost-effectiveness. It was about 7X as effective. They compared it w interdiction: 11X as effective. And 23X as effective as source-country control. But Nancy Pelosi put in an amendment to the Colombia plan, for a small amount of money for treatment, and it was killed.

Why no Delta force raids on U.S. chemical companies in New York, or U.S. Banks in New York and Boston? It’s well known they are heavily involved in narcotrafficking. In the 1980s, the CIA published a report on chemical exports to Latin America, pointing out that they are way in excess of industrial needs, and that the ones that are sent are the ones used for drug production. So what about that? Nobody knows how much money goes into narcotrafficking, but it’s estimated somewhere on order of $500 billion a year. Estimated that over half of it passes through U.S. banks. That is not very hard to monitor. The federal reserve system is so well organized that any deposit over $10k is registered. It was monitored in late 70s and early 80s, when drug production was picking up really fast in Colombia. Federal prosecutors in Florida detected sharp increases in deposits in Florida banks, and began operation greenback to determine what it was, though everyone knew, and bring criminal charges against the people involved. But it was called off by the drug Czar of the Regan administration – George Bush – and that was the last time there was an attempt to look at that.

The plan is not to end drug use, it’s to kill peasants. For years critics have noted that these programs completely fail to meet their stated objectives, and it’s widely acknowledged on all sides. Criminalization at home and mass murder abroad are the methods. So you intensify those and do none of the things that would actually meet stated objectives. So what does that tell us? That the true objectives are being met. They are just different than the stated ones. So what are the true objectives? To make sure that social change of the wrong kind doesn’t take place in Colombia, and to get rid of the superfluous population in the United States. It’s a war against poor and minority communities. And secondarily, to terrify everyone else.

Book Blog: The hunt for Pablo Escobar and the roots of Colombian violence.

Just finished Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw by Mark Bowden. The book does a pretty good job of laying out the mechanics of the hunt for Pablo Escobar, the U.S. involvement in that hunt, and the ways in which it taxed, tormented and ultimately compromised everyone who played a role. The U.S. poured hundreds of millions into the effort to capture Escobar, but what ultimately felled the kingpin was a dirty alliance that Colombian officials (and probably U.S. ones) made with rival cartels. Once Pablo was dead, those cartels merely picked up where he left off (in fact, the collaboration to get Pablo helped the Cali cartel and other narcos solidified their relationship with the Colombian government, making the narco trade that much more difficult to fight in the years that followed). Lots of innocent people died; lots of probable criminals died without any due process, and little justice was achieved. The cocaine trade not only flourished without really missing a beat, but was actually made much worse as a result. And all the while the massacring  of innocent people continued unabated.  

This excerpt from Chapter One has stayed with me, in part because I found it both eloquently written and deeply misguided:

Colombia is a land that breeds outlaws. It has always been ungovernable, a nation of wild unsullied beauty, steeped in mystery. From the white peaks of the three cordilleras that form its western spine to the triple canopy equatorial jungle at sea level, it affords many good places to hide. There are corners of Colombia still virtually untouched by man. Some are among the only places left on this thoroughly trampled planet where botanists and biologists can discover and attach their names to new species of plants, insects, birds, reptiles and even small mammals.

The ancient cultures that flourished here were isolated and stubborn. With soil so rich and a climate so varied and mild, everything grew, so there was little need for trade or commerce. The land ensnared one like a sweet, tenacious vine. Those who came stayed. It took the Spanish almost two hundred years to subdue just one people, the Tairona, who lived in a lush pocket of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta foothills. European invades eventually defeated them the only way they could, by killing them all. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Spanish tried without success to rule from neighboring Peru, and in the 19th century Simon Bolivar tried to join Colombia with Panama, Venezuela, and Ecuador to form a great South American state, Gran Colombia. But even the great liberator could not hold the pieces together.

Even Since Bolivar’s death in 1830, Colombia has been proudly democratic, but it has never quite got the hang of peaceful political evolution. Its government is weak, by design and tradition. In vast regions to the south and west, and even in the mountain villages outside the major cities, live communities only lightly touched by nation, government, or law. The sole civilizing influence ever to reach the whole country was the Catholic Church, and that was accomplished only because clever Jesuits grafted their Roman mysteries to ancient rituals and beliefs. Their hope was to grow a hybrid faith, nursing Christianity from pagan roots to a locally flavored version of the One True Faith, but in stubborn Colombia, it was Catholicism that took a detour. It grew into something else, a faith rich with ancestral connection, fatalism, superstition, magic, mystery… and violence.

Violence stalks Colombia like a biblical plague. The nation’s two major political factions, the Liberals and Conservatives, fought eight civil wars in the nineteenth century alone over the roles of church and state. Both groups were overwhelmingly Catholic, but the Liberals wanted to keep the priests off the public stage. The worst of these conflicts, which began in 1899 and was called the War of a Thousand Days, left more than 100,000 dead and utterly ruined whatever national government and economy existed.

Caught between these two violent forces, the Colombian peasantry learned to fear and distrust both. They found heroes in the outlaws who roamed the Colombian wilderness as violent free agents, defying everyone. During the War of a Thousand Days the most famous was Jose del Carmen Tejeiro, who played upon popular hatred of the warring powers. Tejeiro would not just steal from wealthy landowning enemies; he would punish and humiliate them, forcing them to sign declarations such as “I was whipped fifty times by Jose del Carmen Tejeiro as retribution for persecuting him.” His fame earned him supporters beyond Colombia’s borders. Venezuelan dictator Juan Vicente Gomez, sowing a little neighborhood instability, presented Tejeiro with a gold-studded carbine.

A half-century later, La Violencia bred a new colorful menagerie of outlaws, men who went by names like Tarzan, Desquite (Revenge), Tirofijo (Sureshot), Sangrenegra (Blackblood), and Chispas (Sparks). They roamed the countryside robbing, pillaging, raping, and killing, but because they were allied with none of the major factions, their crimes were seen by many common people as blows struck against power.

La Violencia eased only when General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla seized power in 1953 and established a military dictatorship. He lasted four years before being ousted by more democratic military officers. A national plan was put in place for Liberals and Conservatives to share the government alternating the presidency every four years. It was a system that guaranteed to prevent any real reforms or government-initiated social progress, because any step taken during one administration could be undone in the next. The famous bandidos went on raiding and stealing in the hills, and occasionally made half-hearted attempts to band together. In the end they were not idealists or revolutionaries, just outlaws. Still, a generation of Colombians grew up on their exploits. The bandidos were heroes despite themselves to many of the powerless, terrorized, and oppressed poor. The nation both thrilled and mourned as the army of the oligarchs in Bogota hunted them down, one by one. By the 1960s, Colombia had settled into an enforced stasis, with Marxist guerrillas in the hills and jungles (modern successors to the bandido tradition) and a central government increasingly dominated by a small group of rich, elite Bogota families, powerless to effect change and, anyway, disinclined. The violence already deeply rooted in the culture, continued, deepened, twisted.

Terror became an art, a form of psychological warfare with a quasi-religious aesthetic. In Colombia it wasn’t enough to hurt or even kill your enemy; there was ritual to be observed. Rape had to be performed in public, before fathers, mothers, husbands, sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters. And before you killed a man, you first made him beg, scream and gag… or first you killed those he most loved before his eyes. To amplify revulsion and fear, victims were horribly mutilated and left on display. Male victims had their genitals stuffed in their mouths; women had their breasts cut off and their wombs stretched over their heads. Children were killed not by accident but slowly with pleasure. Severed heads were left on pikes along public roadways. Colombian killers perfected signature cuts, distinctive ways of mutilating victims…. These horrors seldom directly touched the educated urbanites of Colombia’s ruling classes, but the waves of fear widened and reached everywhere. No child raised in Colombia at midcentury was immune to it. Blood flowed like the muddy red waters that rushed down from the Mountains. The joke Colombians told was that God had made their land so beautiful, so rich in every natural way, that it was unfair to the rest of the world; He had evened the score by populating it with the most evil race of men.

You could just as easily describe Colombia as filled with people who love God and value family above all else. You could just as easily say that such violent proclivities were instilled by Spanish colonizers, and abetted by a deluge of U.S. dollars (from both the cocaine market and from military aid).  It’s also a bit rich for an American to write about the inherent violent tendencies of any country, including Colombia.  A chief frustration of reading the book is that it provides exactly zero glimpses into what life was like for average Colombians living through these horrors. (I get that that’s a bit unfair, the book is about the hunt and he sticks to the hunt. But still, it was frustrating. It reminded me a bit of Didion’s book on El Salvador in that way).

Dead Darlings Blog: Outtakes from the Texas feature

I had a piece go live this morning. It’s my fourth cover story for the New York Times Magazine, and you can check it out here. It’s been in the works since late March and turned through about three news cycles (and as many drafts) before crossing the finish line. Lots of little bits of writing didn’t make the final cut — for good reason, but not because they didn’t speak to important facets of the story we were trying to tell. Posting them here in case they of interest to anyone, and with the caveat that they may not make much sense if you’re not versed in the bigger story.

FLU PANDEMIC, 1918, NYC:

On August 11, 1918, the Norwegian vessel Bergensfjord arrived at a Brooklyn port bearing at least 10 passengers who were infected with what looked like a particularly nasty strain of flu — at least four had succumbed at sea to the illness, which appeared to drown its victims from the inside with a mix of blood and froth that filled the lungs. The ship’s captain had wired ahead, so that ambulances and health officers were ready to shepherd the sick to Norwegian Hospital in Brooklyn. That transport – from dock to ambulance to hospital — marked the beginning of a months-long battle between New York City health officials and what would turn out to be the deadliest virus the world had yet known.

The timing could not have been worse: The nation was at war, and New York City was the main point of departure for tens of thousands of American soldiers heading to the European front. Any rigorous quarantine would thwart those movements and imperil the war effort. Normally, the city’s health department — one of the best in the country, if not the world — would have been well equipped to navigate such tricky terrain. But at the moment, it too was embroiled in war. Royal Copeland, the department’s newly minted commissioner, had been appointed just a few months earlier in a blatant act of Tammany cronyism. He had no valid medical training, and he was aggressively dismantling his own agency from the inside – firing experienced civil servants, often on trumped up charges, so that their positions could be filled by party loyalists. When the first deaths came, Copeland insisted that flu was not the cause. As bodies piled up, he denied that an epidemic was underway. And when he could no longer deny, he insisted that everything was under control.

Fortunately, the institution proved stronger than the individual: The New York City Department of Health had more than a century’s worth of experience fighting off contagions of every kind, and it had the protocols and muscle memory to show for it. Within a few weeks of the Bergensfjord’s arrival, the department’s beleaguered staff managed to hang some 10,000 posters around the city so that everywhere New Yorkers looked — in street cars, subway stations and shop windows, in police precincts, hotels and restaurants — they were reminded to cover their coughs and sneezes, and to refrain from spitting. The department eventually codified those strictures, and fined violators as much as $1 per offense.

 Still the virus spread. And so health officers took more extreme measures against it. They banned large gatherings and smoking in public places. They ordered businesses to stagger their hours, so as to minimize congestion on city streets and in the burgeoning public transit system. They forced theater operators to ventilate their establishments rigorously, on penalty of closure; and they tasked teachers with inspecting their students daily and sending any coughers or snifflers home. Their moves were controversial (other cities closed their schools completely), but calculated. While all public venues posed a clear risk of further viral spread, they also provided an unparalleled opportunity for the department to do what it did best: inform and implore the public.

 The health department did not stop at public messaging. By late October, it had established more than 150 emergency flu clinics around the city, and embarked on a mammoth effort to identify, isolate and treat every single infected person within its jurisdiction. Staff from other city agencies were reassigned to the task, new recruits were hired and volunteers solicited; and when those legions proved insufficient, Commissioner Copeland himself (a tardy convert to the effort, but a convert none-the-less) conscripted the whole of Tammany Hall into service.

 None of these measures were enough to spare the city, which lost some 20,000 residents to the great influenza, as it has since been dubbed. But as research has since made plain, public health departments had a substantial impact on how cities everywhere fared during the pandemic and how well they recovered afterwards. Those with robust public health departments and rapid public health responses lost fewer lives and enjoyed faster, stronger economic recoveries than their peers. In Philadelphia — a city whose public health operations paled in comparison to New York’s — more than seven out of every thousand deaths during the pandemic were flu-related. In New York, fewer than five were. That difference may not sound like much, but if New York’s fatality rate were as bad as Philadelphia’s, between 10,000 and 15,000 more people would have died.

“They knew what they had to do and they did it,” Francesco Aimone told me. Aimone studied New York City’s response to the 1918 pandemic as part of his graduate training in public health. He had planned to make a career researching such histories and applying their lessons to the present day; but by the time he obtained his master’s degree, health departments everywhere were cutting their staff. “It was 2009, so it was the middle of the recession,” he says. “At that point, there were zero positions for people with my skill set, and no interest at all in the history of global pandemics.”

 At this point of course, things are different.

PUBLIC HEALTH, 1980s, NEW JERSEY:

Shelly Hearne, a doctor of public health at Johns Hopkins University, has spent most of her life thinking about the disconnect between responding to health crises and preventing them from happening in the first place. Hearne grew up in the 1980s, in a community surrounded by industrial parks, and plagued by asthma and cancer. “Everywhere you turned there was some kind of odd illness that you knew in your gut had something to do with the factories and waste sites,” she told me. “I wanted to figure out why people were getting sick, and how to stop it from happening.”

After obtaining her doctorate in Public Health, she received two job offers from her home state: one in the Department of Environmental Protection and one in the Department of Health. She chose the DEP because the public health department had little funding and no real resources, the environmental movement was thriving. “There were hundreds of advocacy groups cropping up,” she says.  “And there was this sophisticated understanding of how to use that momentum to affect change. When the environment commissioner wanted to tackle a problem, she literally had me call the local environmental groups and ask them to make a lot of noise about it, even take her to task publicly, so that she could then pressure the legislature to give her the resources to address it.”

There was nothing like that on the public health side, Hearne says. Capitol Hill was dense with high-powered health care lobbyists — what some of her colleagues referred to as the Gucci Gulch set — and with individual nonprofits dedicated to curing individual diseases. But none of those factions was focused on prevention. “It was all about getting money for NIH, for the cure,” she says. “Nobody seemed to be asking why all these numbers for asthma and cancer and bad birth outcomes were going up in the first place, and if and how we could stop that from happening. And nobody was talking about our infectious disease system, which hadn’t been modernized since the late 1800s.”

TUBERCULOSIS, 1990s, NYC:

“Even among clinicians, there’s a tendency to sort of dismiss public health, or to think of epidemiology as a little bit like the weather. You can describe it, and predict it and complain about it. But you can’t really change it.”

Frieden learned the folly of such assumptions during his first big public health job – steering New York City’s health department through an outbreak of drug resistant tuberculosis in the mid-1990s. The infection was spreading like wildfire through the city’s poorer quarters, and both drug resistance and nosocomial transmission (where doctors and nurses become infected and unwittingly pass the disease on to other patients) were thwarting efforts to resolve the crisis. Frieden was doing everything he could to increase the number of cases the city identified and treated, when a senior colleague by the name of Karel Styblo asked him a question that he says changed his life. “He looked at our data,” Frieden told me recently. “And it showed, you know, all the thousands of patients we had treated and so on. And he said ‘Ok, that’s great. But how many of them did you cure?’ And I was so embarrassed, because I had no idea.”

Styblo was legendary for his success in eliminating tuberculosis from certain low-income countries, something that was still widely considered impossible. His lesson that day was clear, Frieden says: Clinical medicine focuses on numerators, meaning individual sick people who need to be treated. Public health is concerned with denominators, which is to say population-wide outcomes. “If we wanted to stop tuberculosis from decimating Manhattan, we would have to start thinking about denominators,” Frieden says. He began tracking the outcomes of every single patient diagnosed in the city, and he modified his program until the total incidence of tuberculosis was down by 90 percent.  In the years that followed, similarly “denominator-focused” strategies helped his team tackle the longstanding problem of hypertension, and bring smoking rates to an all-time low. 

COVID-19, HARRIS COUNTY TEXAS, 2020:

When Lina Hidalgo signed the order closing the county’s bars and restaurants, her phone rang off the hook. Her political career would be over, operative after operative warned. This lobby, and that union and those voters would be furious, would attack her relentlessly in the press, would maybe bankroll her opponent in the next election. Like Shah, Hidalgo was struck by the realization that there would be no winning. If they managed to stop the virus, people would never believe the threat had been real in the first place. And if they failed, people would die. “I had this sensation of my brain as a physical space that was completely filled with covid,” she told me. “I thought if I let the politics in it would actually explode.” So she decided to stick to the science, continue erring on the side of caution, and let the chips fall where they would. She placed one call before issuing the order, to her chief of staff. “Hey man,” she told him. “This one might be the end of the road.” And then she pressed on.

 ***

By May, Shah’s team was still struggling with testing shortages. The problems were innumerable. In theory they could erect as many test sites as they needed to, thanks to an earlier funding boost. But they only had enough actual test kits to set up four for the entire county, which meant that most people would have to travel scores of miles to reach one – which meant that most people would not go, even if they had been exposed and were exhibiting symptoms. On top of that, all sorts of different labs were now processing the tests, and each of them seemed to have its own haphazard way of reporting the results. There were faxes and phone calls, and one guy even tried to email Shah directly. Half the department was now tasked with sorting through the deluge and figuring out who any given test result belonged to, where that person lived, and what the result itself actually meant. And all of that was after they got the test results, which could take anywhere from four to eight days after the test was taken.  “We are trying to figure out the state of the forest,” Shah told me at the time. “But we can’t even find the individual trees.” 

In the meantime, Dana Beckham, Shah’s chief epidemiologist was trying to expand her team three-fold. She hired 100 new people in the space of a few weeks that happen to coincide with a surge of cases in Harris County, a task that gave the sensation of building an airplane mid-flight.

It was easy enough to find applicants: furloughed students and recent graduates from the region’s medical schools and universities were eager to help. But the work required a particular skill set.

It involved calling anyone who tested positive and explaining the basics of viral transmission and incubation, then asking detailed questions about every place the person had been in the previous two weeks, and with who and for how long. After that, they had to be persuaded to get tested if they were showing symptoms, and to self-isolate for at least two weeks, even if they were not. You then had to follow up, every single day for those two weeks, to see how they were doing, and if symptoms had developed or changed. None of those were easy asks. “People are suspicious,” Beckham explained to her recruits. “They don’t necessarily want to give a bunch of personal information to some random stranger on the phone.”

For March and part of April, the tracers worked 15 hour days, sometimes for six days a week. Burnout became such a concern that Beckham brought therapy dogs in for the staff, and instituted an hour-long board game break, where the group played family feud. Eventually she had to order people to stay home on their days off: no coming in just to follow up with one contact or another. Stay home and rest when. “Part of the job is building relationships with the people you call, because you need them to be honest with you about what’s going on,” Beckham says. “But that takes a toll, especially when one of the people you’re talking to everyday get sick, winds up on a ventilator, and then doesn’t make it.”

By May the contact tracing system had been partly automated. A retired NASA engineer that worked for the department – they called him the rocket scientist – had created an app with which contacts could log their own temperatures and other symptoms, and tracers could monitor those reports and call only if there was a problem. It made the work go much faster, but Shah worried that they would still not be able to outrun the virus. Other counties, not only in Texas, but also in California, had already abandoned containment efforts (tracing all the contacts of every single positive case in order to stop the virus from spreading) in favor of mitigation (accepting that they virus had spread beyond their ability to contain it, and working to minimize the impact in high-risk communities).  Eventually, he thought, Harris County would have to do the same.

The community outreach team was doing everything they could to prevent that from happening. There were just 12 of them, but they had divided the county into four categories — live, learn, work, play — and were now spending 12 hours a day, six days a week calling every single restaurant, nursing home, apartment complex, retail shop and house of worship to ask the same string of questions: Do you need information on testing? Do you need hand washing signs? Do you need facemasks? Can I schedule a presentation for you, or provide you with any pamphlets, and if so how would you like those delivered? Their work, which amounted to thousands of phone calls a week, was utterly thankless; it had not attracted any media attention and seemed unlikely to inspire nightly rounds of public cheering. But the course of both the Harris County outbreak and of the wider pandemic would depend at least in part on how well or poorly such efforts fared — especially given how much elected officials had deemed a matter of personal choice. 

I asked Elizabeth Perez, who leads the outreach team, what her professional wish list consisted of. “You know that big anti-smoking campaign that the C.D.C. did a long time ago,” she asked. “I would love to do a massive campaign like that. With print and broadcast and online. They spent more than $100 million just to change that one behavior. And you saw all these intense graphic ads all over the place. And you know what? It worked.” It was a pipe dream, of course, given that they still didn’t have enough testing sites or personal protective equipment. But she couldn’t help thinking of how it might help. She suspected that many of the people who still thought the virus was a hoax, or that face masks were useless and social distancing pointless authoritarianism, were being deliberately swayed by the rampant misinformation that had become so commonplace. It reminded her of the tobacco industry and the anti-vaccination movement, both of which had created major public health crises because their ability to promote a message dramatically outpaced her team’s ability to counter it.