Magdalena by Wade Davis

Author:Wade Davis [Davis, Wade]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Pablo Escobar’s death, as Juan remembers, was a profoundly cathartic moment. But it made little difference in the Medio Magdalena, and Colombia as a nation only continued its downward spiral. In 1994, running as a Liberal, Ernesto Samper, scion of one of the most illustrious families in Colombia, was elected president by the narrowest of margins. Within weeks, accusations surfaced that his campaign had accepted a $6 million contribution from the Cali Cartel. Ultimately, he would be acquitted by Congress, but not before Colombia, desperately in need of strong leadership, endured the humiliation of being ruled for four years by a president unable even to travel to the United States, where his visa had been revoked.

With the nation’s duly elected leader accused of collaborating with the cartel, and international institutions threatening to decertify the country for human rights abuses, Colombia was in danger of becoming a pariah nation. Internally, things were only getting worse. By the end of the 1990s, more than six hundred innocent men and women were being held captive by the FARC, hostages of war, snatched from their homes and families, their lives in the balance, condemned to trudge through fetid jungles by night, sleeping in cages by day, tormented by flies, mocked by child soldiers scarcely taller than their guns. Cruelty was a trait of character carefully nurtured by those in control of the fourteen thousand children recruited to fight and die by illegal armed groups on both sides of the conflict.

Oddly enough, what historians may remember as a turning point in Colombia’s fortunes was the moment U.S. ambassador Lewis Tambs coined the term “narco-guerrilla,” bringing together in neat and cogent alignment two of America’s three great demons: communism and drugs. The devil would have to wait, forgotten for a time as lightbulbs went off in the heads of every American politician. For years, the U.S. embassy had been divided—with the CIA targeting leftist insurgencies and the DEA in charge of the war on drugs. The CIA and the U.S. military, hopped up after half a century of fighting Communists, had long dismissed the efforts of the DEA as police work. The DEA agents, marked men who put their lives on the line every time they left the embassy, could not believe that the CIA was chasing Cold War ghosts when boatloads of drugs unleashing waves of violence were reaching American shores every day. Missing from this in-house squabble was the obvious fact that what allowed the FARC and every other dissident group to fight was cocaine.

Once this connection was made and diplomats began to speak of narco-terrorists—a term that resonated in the halls of power in Washington—the floodgates of American military and development aid opened. The $54 million offered by President Bill Clinton in 1996 would within four years increase to $765 million. In the six years beginning in 1999, Colombia would receive well over $4 billion, making it the third-largest recipient of U.S. aid, behind only Egypt and Israel. Colombia did not squander the support.

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