The Foreign Service Journal, April 2006

involvement there, but Colombians themselves don’t find it easy to define what went wrong or how to rectify it —or how America can help. Thirty years ago, Colombia was a star graduate of the Alliance for Progress, the initiative launched by President John F. Kennedy to pro- mote growth and democracy in Latin America. It had put together more than a decade of healthy economic expansion, new export opportunities and had even, according to United Nations figures at the time, achieved a modest closing of the income gap between rich and poor. Competitive, if still elite-dominated, politics had become the rule, and the two main leftist rebel groups — the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the National Liberation Army (known respectively, in English, as the FARC and ELN) — were seen as diminishing threats. Colombia was so sure of itself that in 1976, the talented economic minister Rodrigo Botero called in the U.S. ambassador to tell him his country no longer needed the still-substantial assistance Washington was providing, and ordered the closure of the USAID mission. But the picture had seriously darkened by 1999. The Colombian economy was in the middle of its first reces- sion since the 1930s. Per-capita income dropped several years in a row, and half the population was classified as poor. As the majority saw their access to health care and education shrinking, the better-off found their security threatened. The country recorded 2,500 kidnappings that year and murder rates climbed: more than 400 per 100,000 inhabitants were killed in each of the country’s two largest cities, Bogota and Medellin. Extortion became com- mon, especially in small towns, on farms and along the highways, where outlaws set up roadblocks, armed not just with threatening weapons, but also laptop computers loaded with purloined official tax and financial records, to determine the ability of passers-by to pay tribute. Violence from the Left and Right Worst of all, the central government’s ability to protect citizens, never strong, seemed to be collapsing in the face of a two-pronged attack. By the late 1990s, the FARC, an old-line communist guerrilla band, had grown from a force of 7,000 to 18,000. For the first time in its four decades of existence, it was not just overrunning police and military outposts and ambushing government patrols, but began defeating the army in set-piece battles. For its part, the ELN— a product of 1960s-era universi- ty students’ enthusiasm for Fidel Castro and liberation theology — was said to have as many as 5,000 fighters in the field. The group had come close to annihilation in the late 1970s but was revived by pipeline-related extor- tion, making headlines with regular bombings of the Cañon-Covenas pipeline, important for the country’s oil exports. In 2000 the government lost a third of its expect- ed revenues from petroleum exports. While these leftist rebels were showing off their prowess and the government its vulnerability, a new form of violence was emerging: organized rural militias to counter the guerrillas. These “paramilitaries,” as they were called, soon came to be responsible for some of the bloodiest massacres in Colombia’s long history of civil conflict. Teams of these “paras” would enter small vil- lages, call out those they suspected of guerrilla sympa- thies and assassinate them on the spot. It was unadulter- ated terror, the most brutish form of counter-guerrilla tactics. Most local and international human rights organiza- tions have long believed that the paramilitaries were closely associated with the army. Many saw the events in Colombia as a direct replay of the depredations of death squads in El Salvador a decade earlier. Evidence does exist that a number of attacks received official aid, evi- F O C U S 34 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 0 6 Phillip McLean, a Foreign Service officer from 1962 to 1994, served in Brazil, Panama, Bolivia, Colombia, Italy and the U.K. He was also deputy assistant secretary of State for South America, among other Washington assign- ments. After retirement from government service in 1994, McLean was appointed assistant secretary for manage- ment at the Organization of American States and served as an adviser to OAS Secretary General Cesar Gaviria until 1997. He is now a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an adjunct pro- fessor in the Elliott School at The George Washington University. Helping a country with the history and size of Colombia is a formidable task, even under the best of circumstances.