New Leader: Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe

RAY SUAREZ:

Despite intense security in Bogotá today, explosions rocked the area outside the parliament building, killing at least ten people. Inside, the people of Colombia celebrated a new President, a man promising to win a very old war. Fifty-year-old Alvaro Uribe Velez is Colombia's eleventh President since 1964. That's the year the western hemisphere's longest and deadliest insurgency began.

In the last two decades, the war among various guerrilla groups and the Colombian army has largely been fought over the country's drug trade. The conflict is taking an average of ten lives per day; that's triple the rate of the current Middle East conflict. It's also created more than two million refugees who have poured into neighboring countries or have been uprooted inside Colombia's borders.

Today's ceremonies come on the heels of several days of surging violence. Mortar attacks heavily damaged an airport, and clashes between military forces and guerrilla rebels left 36 people dead. The new President pledges to bring law and order to this country of 40 million.

PRESIDENT ALVARO URIBE (Translated):

Our concept of democratic security demands that we apply ourselves to finding an effective protection for our people, our political beliefs, and our standard of living. The whole nation is shouting out for calm and security. No crime has a direct line of justification; no kidnapping has a political end that explains it.

RAY SUAREZ:

During the campaign, Uribe staked out a hard-line position against Colombia's guerrilla rebels– rebels who assassinated his father and who tried to kill Uribe himself more than a dozen times. While his predecessor, Andres Pastrana, invited rebel leaders to the peace table, Uribe says he wants to attack them, and he's pledged to double the size of the army. It's a strategy that Uribe has said fits in the context of the world's newest war.

PRESIDENT ALVARO URIBE (Translated):

Acts of terrorism in Colombia have the potential to destabilize South American democracy. It's a conflict that could affect 380 million citizens, so Europe and the U.S. and the democratic world need to help us in our fight.

RAY SUAREZ:

That fight has escalated in the past year. In February, outgoing President Pastrana ended peace talks with the main left wing rebel group. It's known by its Spanish acronym, FARC. Seventeen-thousand strong, the rebels have close ties with Colombia's drug growers, who provide 90 percent of America's cocaine.

Talks broke down when, according to Pastrana, the guerrillas hijacked a plane carrying a Colombian senator. Pastrana then told his army to invade rebel territory, and he sent this warning to the FARC.

PRESIDENT ANDRES PASTRANA (Translated):

It is you who will have to answer to Colombia and to the world for your arrogance and your deceit. This is why I've made the decision of not continuing with the peace process with the FARC.

RAY SUAREZ:

Around the same time, the FARC stepped up its own attacks. The rebels eluded their pursuers and took the war to the cities.

CYNTHIA ARNSON, Woodrow Wilson Center:

I think absolutely the war is going to get worse before it gets better.

RAY SUAREZ:

Cynthia Arnson is deputy director of the Latin America program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

CYNTHIA ARNSON:

The guerillas have mounted an urban terror campaign in an explicit effort to take the war to the cities. They have attacked the economic infrastructure systematically. They have threatened local and municipal officials, threatening them with death if they don't resign their posts. And I think the explicit purpose of these kinds of measures is to make the country ungovernable.

RAY SUAREZ:

Colombia's armed forces outnumber the FARC by five to one, but the army has long been absent in many rural areas. That void has been filled by right-wing paramilitary squads, sworn enemies of the FARC. All the combatants have been linked to war atrocities. Since 1997, the State Department has labeled both the FARC and the paramilitaries as "terrorist organizations." These attacks have taken a heavy toll on civilians, who do not want their identities known.

WOMAN ON STREET (Translated):

It was around 7:00 in the morning, and Guillermo, my husband, they tied him up. And I begged them, "Don't hurt him. Let him go. He's a worker, a farmer. He works so hard. Let him go." My husband, my dear husband, he was my life, the most important thing in my life over everything else. I could lose anything else, but not my husband.

MAN (Translated):

We were completely terrified. The paramilitaries had broken my teeth, they broke my hand, and I knew they were going to kill me. So I decided I would throw myself into the river the first chance I got. I did, and this was how I saved my life.

RAY SUAREZ:

Colombia's ambassador to Washington, Luis Alberto Moreno, recalls one particular civilian tragedy at the hands of the FARC.

LUIS ALBERTO MORENO:

The civilians in this population in this town of Bojaya went to the only place they could go to where they thought was safe, a church. And there were 100 people inside this church. And what the guerrillas did was to shoot a bomb into this church and kill almost all of those people. And that's the kind of thing that is totally against humanity.

RAY SUAREZ:

In late May, the public responded to the growing war by electing Uribe, who pledged to get tough on the rebels. Uribe's win and his agenda was also welcomed at the White House. It had reportedly grown impatient with the slow pace of peace talks. Ambassador Moreno and others say Washington and the new Colombian regime now share a single issue at the top of their agendas: fighting terror.

LUIS ALBERTO MORENO:

We have in the case of our country really perhaps the test case in this hemisphere of the fight on terror. Colombia cannot afford to lose. It will have huge destabilizing effects throughout the hemisphere.

RAY SUAREZ:

Already the U.S. has provided the South American nation with nearly $2 billion in military aid under a program dubbed "Plan Colombia." It pays for modern combat helicopters, resources to spray and kill coca crops, and hundreds of American military trainers. Initially, plan Colombia was meant only to help Bogotá fight drugs, not rebels. But last month, Congress voted to remove that distinction.

CYNTHIA ARNSON:

It means that if there's a massing of guerrillas, that helicopters can be brought in to bomb those positions, and it's an explicit approval of the use of U.S. military assistance to fight a counterterrorism war.

RAY SUAREZ:

Arnson says September 11 changed the politics of Colombia in the U.S. Congress, which previously had little appetite for joining a South American civil war. Secretary of State Colin Powell and others in the administration promoted the new policy. Powell spoke before the Council of the Americas in May.

COLIN POWELL:

While there is clearly no military solution to all of Colombia's problems, there must be a more robust military and security component to U.S. Policy. We are prepared to expand the scope and nature of our assistance.

RAY SUAREZ:

Still, some lawmakers say the U.S. is being drawn into a familiar quagmire. Democratic Congressman Gene Taylor.

REP. GENE TAYLOR:

That means American troops are going out on patrol with the Colombians, which is how we started off in Vietnam. This is a real live and extremely nasty war, but it's a civil war. It's not a war against America.

RAY SUAREZ:

A separate criticism is that Plan Colombia is failing to win the drug war. The country's cultivation of heroin and cocaine has gone up rather than down lately, often because farmers whose crops are destroyed simply replant them somewhere else. Arnson says it's a simple case of supply and demand.

CYNTHIA ARNSON:

There is an enormous profit motivation for peasants who grow coca to stay growing coca. It's much more profitable. And as long as there is a demand from the United States, from Europe, from other places in the world that is seeking to consume cocaine, there will be an incentive to continue to produce it.

RAY SUAREZ:

On the other hand, Ambassador Moreno says Plan Colombia is working.

LUIS ALBERTO MORENO:

People tend to concentrate on areas of cultivation, but are not looking at production. And that's key, and the production is beginning to drop. The quality of the coca that is coming to the U.S., according to U.S. authorities, is beginning to drop. Something is happening, and we're beginning to make a difference now. This is not something that is fought overnight the same way you cannot get a consumer to drop consuming cocaine overnight.

RAY SUAREZ:

For the near term, President Alvaro Uribe has now inherited Colombia's two-front war on drugs and guerrillas, a war that Washington is backing more than ever.