"I love Colombia," shouts law
student Alejandra Turbay over the music, as
she snaps her fingers to a favorite song.
"There's no place like Colombia! Sure,
there are problems in the country, but we will
solve them."
A year after peace talks with the main
rebel group collapsed, Colombians seem more
determined than ever to snuff out a
four-decade-old insurgency that kills 3,500
people a year. They must now decide whether to
maintain the tough line against outlawed
groups backed by the president, or back off in
the face of a brutal rebel offensive.
The war is strangling the economy.
Atrocities occur with alarming regularity —
car bombs devastate city blocks in attacks
similar to those carried out by the Medellin
drug cartel 20 years ago; priests are
kidnapped or killed; rebels or their
paramilitary foes execute civilians in front
of their families.
Despite the devastation, Colombians are
proud of their country and positive about its
future. A recent poll in Semana newsmagazine
showed a surprising 79 percent of them share
Turbay's optimism about its future.
Musicians like Shakira and Juanes have
brought sensuous Colombian music to the world.
The country's rich coffee fills cups in cafes
and espresso bars in the United States and
beyond. Emeralds and oil abound in this land,
which is bigger than Texas and California
combined.
A joke often told by Colombians says God
placed jungles, soaring mountains, beaches,
natural resources and varied wildlife on this
land, but then compensated by populating the
country with some of the world's nastiest
people — guerrilla groups, outlawed
paramilitary forces and drug smugglers.
Anxious to end the violence, voters last
May overwhelmingly elected hardliner Alvaro
Uribe as president.
In short order, Uribe has added thousands
of troops to the nation's armed forces —
paid for by a new "war tax" imposed
on wealthier Colombians — recruited
farmer-soldiers to protect their remote
villages and pressed for more international
help, even as the United States has sent Green
Berets to train Colombian Army troops and
hundreds of millions of dollars in aid.
However, some observers are worried that
the government is focusing too much on the
military side, and is not addressing social
and economic imbalances that led to the growth
of the insurgency, especially in wide areas of
Colombia where the government has little or no
presence.
"The lack of jobs, essential services
and legitimate authority converts these areas
into abandoned regions which are taken over by
those who use force to impose their own
rule," Colombia's most-read newspaper, El
Tiempo, said in an editorial this week.
Colombia's main rebel group — the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — has
responded to the crackdown with bloody
attacks. In the past two weeks alone, rebel
bombs in Bogota and in the southern city of
Neiva have killed 54 people and wounded more
than 200.
In Bogota — a city of gleaming office
buildings and Spanish-colonial neighborhoods,
where bulletproof Mercedes Benzes muscle past
burro-drawn carts — police have begun
randomly searching for bombs among vehicles
stopped at traffic lights.
Colombians are now realizing they are in
for a rough time, but most appear determined
to endure it in order to vanquish the leftist
insurgency that began in the countryside and
has now moved into Colombia's cities.
"It's time to get tough, and if we all
fall into the abyss together, then so be it.
But we've got to end this," said Milcedes
Rincon, a tennis pro in an upscale
neighborhood in the capital.
Washington, which gives more aid to
Colombia than any country other than Israel
and Egypt, wants to see Uribe succeed. But
U.S. diplomats here fear his support will
begin to evaporate as the death toll mounts
from what they believe will be a sustained
rebel terror campaign.
Uribe, for his part, is determined to forge
ahead. This week, he told participants at a
leather-crafts fair that Colombians appear
united in the struggle to defeat the
insurgents.
"This unselfish attitude is a direct
response to a small group of terrorists who
are trying to turn us from the path we have
chosen: to find tranquility," Uribe said.
