Remora
The Colombia business.

Colombia seems especially cursed by fantasy. The Spanish, the English, all its earlier explorers and ravishers, were pressed forward by a crazy vision of El Dorado -- that story came from reports of Indians in Colombia. El Dorado is not defunct. It has simply changed to something you smoke or put up your nose -- our fantasy, their product, and our fantasy of protecting ourself against their product. There are many logics to the drug war, but they are all oddly divorced from the ostensible purpose of it. For thirty years the US has fought against the statistical norm of drug use within a population able to afford its tastes, and every year (surprise!) it loses. However, in war, loss is sometimes gain. The structure that fights the war, now, exerts a considerable economic pull, from the prison industry out there in the hinterlands, employing former dairy farmers, to the exciting world of rent-a-cops.

The war in Colombia is multi-purpose, and the politics of left and right have long ago been hollowed out by bloodlust, revenge, power plays, and fantasies more reminiscent of the night-battles recorded by Italian historian Ginzberg than anything else in modern politics. Ginzberg's book shows how the inquisition took a group of Friulian peasants who thought of themselves as supernatural witch fighters, appointed to leave their sleeping bodies and engage in battles with evil spirits during certain ritually significant times, and slowly cast them in the role of supporters of the devil, until they actually changed the self image of these people - the benandati.

The night battles in Colombia have undergone a similar dialectical alchemy. Every drug-dealer eventually becomes a populist, and every policeman eventually becomes a drug dealer. The government acts like pirates, and the pirates act like the government. This has long ceased to be a country, and become Walpurgisnacht.

So here's a sad piece in the LA Times about it:


"Soldiers and military police were already a part of life here. They inspected bags and purses at bus stations, stood guard at bridges and overpasses and patrolled street corners. Violence, too, was a fact of life. One night late last fall, I arrived at a party where the guests were abuzz. Just before my arrival, the building's night watchman had rushed into the apartment of the party's hostess and started shooting from her window at a suspicious looking man who had just stolen a gun from him. The guests dropped to the floor until the shooting ended, then resumed their conversations. But until last week, the danger and the military presence were part of the background. The culture had learned to live with a constant, low-level hum of violence. Now the volume of the conflict is once again a piercing cry.

As I sat and watched the tanks and then the truckloads of soldiers pass on the street below early on the morning of Feb. 21, I thought of my father. Fifty years earlier he watched as the very street I was looking at became a battleground. The violence that time around flared up after a charismatic political leader was killed outside his office in downtown Bogota. His murder plunged the country into a bloody war between conservatives and liberals that later became known simply as La Violencia. Some 200,000 died and many of those who remained behind became actors in the wars to come."

Limited Inc's first sympathies are with rebels. But we can apply to the rebels of Colombia a phrase used by da Silva and Gall in an essay on police abuse in Brazil: the rebels suffer from perverse incentives.

"We define perverse incentives as the devices of law and custom rewarding behavior that undermines the stated purpose of institutions. Perverse incentives divert resources and motivation from local police responsibilities for preventing crime into bloated bureaucracies and swollen units of shock troops inflicting unnecessary civilian casualties."

The institutionalization of rebellion in Colombia has turned the liberating impulse into a territorial one. Territory is now defined by terror -- one side or the other wins by terrorizing a significant section of the population.

Point is: down, down, down we go. This is not a country to which we should dispatch a billion dollars in military "aid" without, uh, thinking about it. But of course the U.S. has never allowed the irrationality and sheer cruelty of its programs to impede their implementation in the South.