Death and Drugs in Colombia

Death and Drugs in Colombia
by Daniel Wilkinson

Published in: The New York Review of Books.June 2, 2011

In February 2003, the mayor of a small town on Colombia's Caribbean coast stood up at a nationally televised meeting with then President Álvaro Uribe and announced his own murder. "Señor Presidente, I am the mayor of El Roble," Tito Díaz said as he walked toward the stage where Uribe sat with several cabinet ministers and officials from the state of Sucre, where the meeting was held. Pacing back and forth before the President, Díaz delivered what was probably the first public denunciation of a web of violence and corruption involving politicians and paramilitary groups-what he called a "macabre alliance"-that would eventually become an explosive national scandal. Singling out several local officials, including the governor, Salvador Arana, seated at the President's side, Díaz declared: "And now they're going to kill me."

President Uribe listened impassively for several minutes, then cut the mayor off midsentence: "Mr. Mayor, we have allowed this disorder because of the gravity of the matter, but we also ask that you be considerate of our time." Uribe is a small, tidy man, with a bland face that is boyish yet stern. When he addresses the public, it is with the commanding tone of the wealthy cattle rancher and the intensity of a man on a mission. "With utmost pleasure," Uribe then assured Díaz that he would order an investigation, "for transparency cannot have exceptions, and security is for all Colombians."

Within weeks, the national police stripped Díaz of his bodyguards. On April 5, 2003, he disappeared. On April 10 his corpse appeared on the edge of Sucre's main highway. He had been tortured, shot, and left in a crucifix position-feet crossed, arms extended, palms upturned-with his mayoral certification card perched on his forehead. A note, found later at his house, told his family he was setting out for a "dangerous meeting" with Arana. "If anything happens to me," it said, they should flee.

The mayor's then-twenty-three-year-old son, Juan David Díaz, left Sucre. But he did not abandon his father's case. Instead he joined a small, disparate group of Colombians-mostly journalists, justice officials, and other victims' families-who were seeking accountability for paramilitary crimes. Until then, attempts to investigate such cases had rarely produced results, other than the death of those who pursued them. Yet remarkably, over the next several years, their efforts would bring about what few had imagined possible in 2003: investigations-like the one Uribe had promised Tito Díaz-that would uncover a "macabre alliance" far more extensive and sinister than what the murdered mayor had denounced on TV.

More:
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2011/06/02/death-and-drugs-colombia

Editorials and other articles:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x605723

But that's not all it is. Being intimately aware of the possibility of his own death and yet choosing to publicly announce the names of the would-be killers, even in front of their faces, is something not everyone in a similar position could ever -understandably- aspire to do. Which is what makes this event simultaneously inspiring and worth remembering as well as depressing and tragic.

The courageous efforts of the man himself, together with those of Claudia Lopez, Gustavo Petro and the Colombian Supreme Court, to say nothing of countless named and nameless others, demonstrates there are still many people in Colombia capable of opposing, denouncing and even occasionally punishing many of these brutal acts despite the decades of impunity, mountains of death threats and literally infinite related risks.

Is that, however, a cycle doomed to repeat itself? One is inclined to say yes, at least for the time being, but sooner or later this will in fact come to an end. You could call that a belief or perhaps even just a hope, but history is known for taking many twists and turns nobody ever expected, including both those who seek to extend the status quo and those who seek to change it.