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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
You describe the FARC and the ELN as leftist guerrillas, but do they really have an ideology at this point?
Not anymore, no. They still mouth the platitudes, but Fidel Castro doesn't even support them. They grew out of the 1950s and '60s tradition of revolutionary socialism in South America -- the Che Guevara, Castro mold. But that was many, many years ago. I don't see how their principles can align with narco-trafficking.
One time somebody asked Andres Pastrana, the current president of Colombia, what the guerrillas want, and he got up out of his chair, turned around and said, "This chair." Beyond that, no one knows what they want. They just want power. And if they get power, then Colombia will be in the same boat as it would have been if Pablo Escobar had ever been elected president: It will be a narcocracy.
After being immersed in the Escobar story and the larger subject of the war on drugs, this huge international effort, where do you think it's headed and what is its continuing effect on places like Colombia?
Well, this is a cheap way to answer that, but I've become a lot more aware of how complex the whole thing is. There are so many Americans who want to say, "We should legalize drugs." And I think just about everybody would agree that we are never going to stop the flow of cocaine into this country by military effort. That's not going to happen.
They just seized 13 tons of cocaine about a week ago, suppposedly that's the largest quantity ever intercepted.
And that's not even going to make a dent, because as long as Americans are willing to pay exorbitant prices for the stuff, there will be people who will risk their lives in order to produce it and deliver it. Even if they were able to shut down Colombia altogether, it would be grown somewhere else. It might make a dent for a few months, but it wouldn't stop it.
But, does that mean that we shouldn't be making any efforts down there? If you say that, look at what some of the consequences would be. Colombia, it seems to me, is a government that has its flaws. It's a troubled place with a really lousy history of human rights violations. There's a lot of corruption in that government; it's definitely an oligarchy in that it's controlled by a wealthy elite. But it is a democracy and it does, as a result, have the potential to become a much better place for everybody. And the truth is that most Colombian people support their government.
So, what would have happened to Colombia if we hadn't gone after Pablo Escobar, or if we don't go after the guerrillas? Do we let the FARC overthrow the government of Colombia? What do you have then? I think, for instance, this "Plan Colombia," which is being sold as an anti-narcotics effort, is really an effort to preserve the government of Colombia, to help Pastrana force these guerrillas to negotiate, put down their arms. If it has that effect, I think it will be worthwhile. I've spent enough time in Colombia; I respect the people I've met who are trying to do the right thing and I think they deserve to be supported.
