Murder shocks Colombians inured to violence
Rebel slaying of mother called outrage, Remaining support for guerrillas shaken

OAKLAND ROSS
FEATURE WRITER


She was a mother, a part-time university student, and a schoolteacher. Now she's dead.

In Colombia, this is nothing new. Last year, left-wing guerrilla armies in the South American republic of 41 million people murdered approximately 3,500 civilians.

It was not just the addition of Ana Cecilia Duque's name to that long list of grief that has outraged her compatriots, shaking what little popular support may still have remained for the guerrillas.

It was the way that her killing was done.

"An act of madness," said Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who took office last August vowing to step up his government's struggle against three leftist insurgent armies, a conflict that next year will enter its fourth blood-smeared decade.

"It was a terrible act that shows the state of degeneracy of this conflict," said a journalist in the northwestern city of Medellin, located about 80 kilometres from the town of Cocorna, where the young woman lived until she was kidnapped on the morning of April 21.

"It's not surprising," said Judith Teichman, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto and an expert on Colombia's long civil war. "Colombia has a very violent past, a consistently violent past."

But even Colombians, for whom violence is nothing new, were shocked by the last dreadful days of Ana Cecilia Duque.

On her final morning of freedom, she and a colleague were walking to El Jordan school where they taught, on the outskirts of Cocorna.

Along the way, they were accosted by several rebels, members of the ELN, the Spanish abbreviation for the National Liberation Army, second-largest of Colombia's three main left-wing insurgent groups.

The rebels took Duque with them and sent her colleague back to town, carrying a letter to be delivered to the captive's father, Gabriel Arturo Villegas.

The letter instructed Villegas to seek out the leader of a local right-wing paramilitary outfit that had evidently been causing the rebels trouble, a man who goes by the name of Matute.

"We will exchange your daughter's life for Matute's," said the letter, which was littered with spelling mistakes. "If you kill Matute, we'll free your daughter safe and sound. It's the only option you have."

What could Villegas do?

Kill a man he had never met, because someone ordered him to?

He refused, and the hard part — the waiting — began.

Last Saturday, it ended, when his 31-year-old daughter's body was discovered lying by a roadside outside the town.

She had been shot once through the head.

The murder immediately made headlines across the country and has struck a chord of outrage among people at all levels of Colombia's chronically unbalanced society, split between the very wealthy few and the impoverished masses.

Hundreds attended the woman's funeral this week, and hundreds of thousands watched and listened as Duque's 9-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Serna, appeared on national television, reading a letter that had been found on her mother's body and that contained what were among the last words she would ever compose.

"My little daughter," said the letter, written on both sides of a leaf of paper torn from a school notebook, "today I miss you, need you and love you more than ever. I want to be at your side and never be separated from you, because you are the reason for my life."

The girl made photocopies of the letter and has passed them out to her classmates, many of whom have wrapped them in plastic, just as the now motherless child has done with the original.

Almost no one in the country was left unaffected by the killing or by its perverse senselessness.

"The repudiation was so great in the whole country that even the leadership of the ELN tried to prevent it," said a journalist in Medellin, who works for a local paper called El Mundo but who did not want to be identified by name.

During the six days of the woman's captivity, several captured ELN leaders appealed from their prison cells, calling out to their comrades not to carry out their threat.

But they did, and the rebels' already abysmal standing in the public's estimation descended even further.

Unfortunately, observers do not expect the pointless murder of the young Cocorna schoolteacher to hasten an end to Colombia's fiercely intractable domestic conflict, which began in 1964 and has haunted the country ever since.

Unlike their counterparts in most countries wracked by civil war, the Colombian rebels do not appear to need much in the way of popular support. In fact, as the killing of Duque powerfully suggests, they seem perfectly willing to do whatever they can to alienate what little popularity they still have.

The reason is simple, and it is called cocaine.

"Some would argue," said Teichman , "that they really don't want anything but to continue fighting and becoming powerful and wealthy."

As the source of roughly 90 per cent of the cocaine that is consumed in the United States, Colombian narcotics traffickers control huge amounts of illicit wealth. In recent years, the leftist rebel armies — which started out in the 1960s with idealistic goals of social justice and Marxist utopia — have been siphoning off substantial shares of the relentless flow of drug money, mainly by providing armed protection to growers of coca, the raw material for cocaine.

Former Colombian president Andres Pastrana spent more than three years trying to hammer out a peaceful settlement with the rebels, but he abandoned those efforts early last year, when the largest guerrilla army — known as the FARC, for Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces — hijacked a domestic airliner and kidnapped one of its passengers, a federal senator who is now one of hundreds of Colombian citizens held by the rebels as hostages.

When he was inaugurated last summer, Uribe promised to take a more aggressive approach to dealing with the rebels, but the conflict has continued without any sign of an end.

Many observers believe that the only hope for a peaceful solution to the fighting in Colombia is held by Washington.

"My view," said Teichman, "is that if you were to legalize the drug trade tomorrow, you would get rid of all that trouble. Immediately, you would see a drop in drug production and violence in Colombia."

But she does not believe that such an outcome is even remotely likely, especially not with an administration in Washington that sees U.S. drug use as primarily a Colombian crime problem and increasingly seems to favour muscle over most other responses when it comes to trouble overseas.

In Washington to meet with U.S. President George W. Bush, the Colombian leader appeared relatively conciliatory towards the rebels in his country, urging them to lay down their weapons — as some 500 FARC fighters have recently done — and to return to civilian life, where he promised they would be made welcome.

However, when Bush was asked by a reporter to address the same subject — whether his government would help Colombia to "reinsert" rebels into mainstream society — he at first appeared not to understand the question and then went on to rule the option out, saying that killers are terrorists and they should be dealt with "severely."

Meanwhile, in Colombia, they continue to mourn.