The Dispossessed. Aviva Chomsky

connections are more direct. The narrator of “The Garden” relates that her father was a guerrilla during La Violencia. “They turned over their weapons to the army during the [1953–57] Rojas govern ment—getting nothing in return that time—and that’s when he met my mother” (p. 119). The narrator of “Silences,” describes his father as a guerrilla who joined a Liberal unit founded “to avenge the murder of … Jorge Eliécer Gaitán” (p. 82). The mother of Nubia, La Catira, was president of the Unión Patriótica party in her town, chosen, no doubt, in recognition of her work in pressuring the government to deliver roads, health care, and schools. Sadly, her mother was one of the thousands of UP activists who died at the hands of military-controlled death squads that wanted to close Colombia’s “opening to democracy.”

      As the guerrilla war began again, two new elements jumped into the vortex of violence: the drug cartels and the paramilitaries. In fact, the two rose side by side, as the major drug cartels in Medillín and Cali financed and armed many of the original paramilitary forces. Colombian peasant farmers, facing ruin and poverty in the 1970s and 1980s, turned to coca production as a lucrative and easily transportable crop. Guerrillas levied “war taxes” on middlemen who facilitated transport of the coca from the fields to the cartels, allowing them to finance a range of social services for the rural poor. But the cartel leaders invested part of their superprofits in land and cattle—placing them in league with the traditional enemies of the rural poor and guerrillas. And when guerrillas turned to kidnapping and ransoming of wealthy “narco-landowners,” the druglords created “death to kidnappers” paramilitary groups to fight the guerrillas. The drug cartels’ creation of death squads overlapped with the traditional oligarchy’s opposition to any negotiated settlement with the guerrillas. Forces inside the military opposed to the guerrillas also took advantage of a loophole in Colombian law allowing them to create “self-defense forces,” or autodefensas, private militias armed by the military. The result of all this was a huge increase from the 1980s to today in paramilitary activity, including massacres, disappearances, and forced displacements.²⁵

      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.”²⁶ An account of just such an incident of “social cleansing” forms the core of the story in “The Turkish Boat.”

      Given the horrific conditions and the climate of repression that so many Colombians experience, the continued resilience of labor and peasant movements and the desire of ordinary Colombians to forge a better future is remarkable. Despite the conditions of civil war and the government’s penchant to label all opposition as “terrorism,” more than two million Colombians engaged in strikes to protest austerity measures in 1999. In 2003, Colombian voters defeated a referendum with which President Alvaro Uribe attempted to ram through huge spending cuts and to win approval for near-dictatorial powers. At the same time, voters chose members of the Independent Left Pole, a coalition of trade union, human rights, and social movement activists, to run many of the country’s major cities and departments, including Bogotá.

      The United States and the violence in Colombia today

      What happens in the Colombian cordillera may seem distant from the everyday lives of North Americans. But connections between Colombia and North America—and the United States in particular—are not hard to establish. The United States has actively intervened in Colombian affairs throughout the country’s modern history. As a leading producer of raw materials, including oil, and with its geographic position at the crossroads of Central America and Latin America, Colombia has long figured in U.S. strategic planning. In the early 1900s, the United States helped to sponsor a secession movement in Colombia’s northwest that resulted in the creation of the country of Panama—just in time for the new nation to cooperate with U.S. plans to build a canal there. In the period of the Cold War, Colombia became a major recipient of U.S. foreign aid and the major testing ground for the Alliance for Progress.²⁷ Economic and development assistance combined aid to Colombia’s armed forces. The administration of President John F. Kennedy advised the Colombian military to “select civilian and military personnel … as necessary [to] execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known Communist proponents. It should be backed by the United States.”²⁸ To fulfill that goal, the United States trained as many as ten thousand officers in the Colombian armed forces and security services at the infamous School of the Americas (recently renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation).

      In the 1990s, Colombia once again took center stage in U.S. policy toward Latin America, as the country became the cockpit for the U.S. “war on drugs.” As the Cold War ended, U.S. policy-makers cast around for new rationales for U.S. military intervention that had been justified as necessary to confront “communism.” In Latin America, “fighting drugs,” “narcoterrorists,” and “narcoguerrillas” filled the bill. As a former Reagan administration defense official explained, “Getting help from the military on drugs used to be like pulling teeth. Now everybody’s looking around to say, ‘Hey, how can we justify these forces?’ And the answer they’re coming up with is drugs.”²⁹ Yet, as many observers of U.S.-Colombian policy have pointed out, the focus of the anti-drug war has overlapped closely with guerrilla-controlled areas—even though U.S. and Colombian officials agreed that the guerrillas were not the country’s main cocaine traffickers. In other words, the war on drugs is essentially a counterinsurgency program intended to defeat the guerrillas. In 2002, the Bush administration made this rationale official when it announced that its Colombia policy would be conducted under the rubric of fighting “terrorism.”

      Today, Colombia is the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid, behind Israel and Egypt. Between 2000 and 2003, the United States spent $2.4 billion in aid for Colombia, 80 percent of it directed to the military and police. In 2002, the U.S. authorized $99 million to pay for protection of the Caño Limón-Coveñas oil pipeline, with almost half of its capacity dedicated to U.S.-based Occidental Petroleum.³⁰ In January 2004, the Bush administration released $34 million to the Colombian armed forces, certifying that Colombia had fulfilled State Department human rights requirements to break with paramilitary organizations. The government of Alvaro Uribe, elected in 2002 on a platform promising harsh repression of the guerrilla opposition, remains one of the chief allies of the Bush administration in Latin America. In these ways, the U.S. government stands out as the chief external backer of the armed forces—and, by extension, their paramilitary allies—in Colombia. These are precisely the forces overwhelmingly responsible for turning millions of their countrymen and women into desterrados.

      Luis Adolfo Cardona is one such person whom I have met in Chicago. Luis Adolfo was an organizer in the National Food Workers’ Union, SINALTRAINAL, and a forklift operator at the Coca-Cola plant in Antioquia before he had to flee his country. His story is similar to those recorded in The Dispossessed. Narrowly escaping a kidnapping by paramilitaries in 1996, he fled to Bogotá. After receiving death threats there, he fled the country. The AFL-CIO Solidarity Center’s program to protect Colombian trade unionists offered him and his family refuge in the United States. In late 2003, he won political asylum in the United States. He works tirelessly, speaking to union members, students, and church groups about the repression of trade unionists and of the paramilitaries’ connections to Coca-Cola and other U.S. companies. While human rights reports can describe the repression in Colombia, no one can better convey what it really means than someone like Luis Adolfo or the people whom Alfredo Molano has recorded in this book. We publish The Dispossessed in North America in the belief that if Americans knew the full extent of the misery that their government supports in Colombia, they wouldn’t stand for it.

      “Maybe it would be better for us if we didn’t talk about what happened,