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).