Pubdate: Mon, 19 Mar 2001
Source: Nation, The (US)
Website: http://www.thenation.com/
Address: 33 Irving Place, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10003
Contact:  2001, The Nation Company
Author: Marc Cooper

Plan Colombia

As the United States becomes ever more deeply enmeshed in Colombia, 
individual Americans here, conscious of the threat of kidnapping or 
guerrilla attack, are rarely seen in public.

Equally difficult to find is any concrete effect of the $2.2 million-a-day 
US aid program.

With the country now into the third year of a crushing recession, factories 
remain shuttered while the unemployed sell tangerines, shoelaces, cookies 
and bootleg CDs on the clogged streets.

Farmland is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few rural barons, 
causing a million recently dispossessed campesinos to crowd into Bogota's 
satellite slums.

The country's infrastructure--its roads, schools and clinics--slowly waste 
without repair.

Indeed, to glimpse any effect of US aid you have to travel to the grimy 
southern side of this capital to a cluster of incongruously gleaming and 
heavily fortified buildings that are, in effect, Colombia's Pentagon. Walk 
into the marble-floored and track-lit headquarters of Colombia's national 
antinarcotics police and the generosity of that aid, as well as the 
incestuous relationship between Washington and Colombia's military machine, 
are suddenly evident.

Outside the door of Commanding Gen. Gustavo Socha's office, mounted on a 
tripod, is an oversize photo of a grinning George W. Bush celebrating his 
election.

Next to it is a full-color promotional illustration of a US-made Black Hawk 
attack helicopter. In the general's waiting room, visitors are attended to 
by a young, uniformed press officer, a polished graduate of the recently 
renamed School of the Americas, run by the US Army. Also present is an 
equally young security officer just returned from an intelligence training 
course at Lakeland Air Force Base in Texas.

In case there's any doubt about the level of American involvement here, the 
office adjoining General Socha's is occupied by a craggy, Clint Eastwood 
clone in civilian clothes, a former US Army colonel.

A veteran trainer at the School of the Americas, the ex-colonel now works 
with the State Department's Narcotics Affairs Section and is deployed as 
full-time adviser to General Socha.

Countless other federal drug and intelligence agents also work in Colombia. 
In addition there are a couple of hundred or more US military advisers 
training three new elite battalions of the Colombian Army. Dozens of US 
choppers are also arriving here: one fleet of "Super Hueys," mostly for the 
Colombian Army, and a squadron of top-of-the-line Black Hawks, allocated 
mostly to Socha's antidrug troops.

Along with them come an unknown number of private contract US pilots and 
helicopter technical crews.

Another batch of private contract Americans are here to fly the 
crop-dusters that spray toxic herbicides over the coca-rich countryside. 
Supporting this operation are four new so-called Forward Operating 
Locations--US military intelligence outposts--in Ecuador, Aruba, Curacao 
and El Salvador.

General Socha, in an interview, calls the US aid "crucial" to his efforts. 
"The value of the American technical assistance, the exchange of know-how, 
the electronic intelligence, the exchange of intelligence, cannot be 
overestimated," he says. And of course, neither can the helicopters. "They 
give us irreplaceable mobility and security for our operations."

All this largesse is paid for by a two-year, $1.6 billion US aid package 
shaped by the Clinton Administration, approved with little Congressional or 
public debate and wide bipartisan support, now inherited by the Bush White 
House. Commonly called Plan Colombia, its stated goal is to aid the 
Colombian government in wiping out half of the 300,000 acres of coca fields 
in Colombia within five years.

About 80 percent of the program is strictly military, most of it focused on 
a "push" kicked off in early December into southern Colombia's Putumayo 
region, where about half the country's coca crop grows.

Colombia is now the third-largest recipient of US aid in the world, after 
Israel and Egypt. And it seems likely that more US aid will soon be on the 
way. Colombian President Andres Pastrana met with President Bush in 
Washington in late February and asked for an ongoing US commitment.

American supporters of the plan point to Colombia as the source of 90 
percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States and about 60 percent 
of the heroin that flows to the East Coast. The billion-dollar interest in 
Colombia, say US officials, can be summed up in one word: drugs.

But critics claim Plan Colombia is a blueprint for war. They argue that 
Colombia has a surplus of violence and warfare and that the last thing it 
needs is another military-based program, especially one that embroils the 
United States in armed conflict with Colombian guerrillas who have their 
strongholds in the coca-growing countryside.

Indeed, rifle-toting groups--from the army and police to various guerrilla 
groups, counterguerrilla death squads and criminal gangs--are so prevalent 
in Colombian political life that most analysts simply lump them together 
under the deceptively delicate term "the armed actors." And what a ghastly 
tragic-opera this ensemble has produced.

The greatly escalated US involvement comes as a forty-year dirty war 
between the Colombian government and the continent's most entrenched 
guerrilla army spins into a blood frenzy; as an armed right-wing 
"paramilitary" force burgeons in size and asserts its presence by 
butchering unprecedented numbers of civilian victims; as hundreds of 
thousands of rural families are "displaced" by the rampaging violence; as 
Colombia becomes the kidnapping capital of the world; as a national peace 
process hangs by a thread; and as the worst economic recession in a 
half-century ravages the lower and middle classes and drives unemployment 
to a stratospheric 20 percent. "No less than a generalized humanitarian 
crisis" is how Colombia's semiautonomous national human rights ombudsman, 
Eduardo Cifuentes, describes the situation.

Against this backdrop, the US plan to put four-fifths of its mammoth aid 
program into a Colombian military buildup seems to many the precise 
opposite of what is needed.

Says political analyst Carlos De Roux of the Jesuit-run Fundacion Social, 
"If you have a patient who is very ill and whose internal organs are 
inflamed, you don't just intervene with a scalpel and start tearing away at 
more flesh and tissue.

Instead, you make a diagnosis of the root causes of the problem and you 
begin treatment by stabilizing the patient, not further aggravating him."

A Typical Day: 26 Massacred, 10 Missing

The tectonic class divide in Colombian society emerges in this mountainous 
Andean capital of 6 million as a near-perfect geographic split.

The southern half of the city melts into the legendary Ciudad Bolivar, a 
sprawling and violent Casbah-like ghetto whose inhabitants boast that it's 
too dangerous even for the army to enter.

Northern Bogota, meanwhile, flaunts designer boutiques from Hugo Boss to 
Mont Blanc, along with Colombia's equivalent of Wall Street. At its edge, 
it neatly melds into foothill neighborhoods festooned with elegant 
high-rise condos whose rooftops are often shrouded in a gossamer mountain 
fog. On any Sunday, take a stroll down Avenida Chile toward the discos, 
casinos and outdoor cafes of the northern Zona Rosa and there is a cop, or 
even a soldier, on every corner--not to menace, but to protect the social 
elite bunkered into this rarefied enclave.

For while the war that rips through the countryside is barely heard here in 
the capital, its byproducts, especially pandemic kidnappings, haunt the 
daily routines of the better-off. It might be a short-term abduction 
triggered by stepping into a "taxi" whose driver, at gunpoint, forces his 
fare to sign a sheaf of blank checks or surrender his ATM card and code. Or 
it could be the real deal--one that demands the family patrimony as ransom.

So, to enter just about any public building, or even a private apartment 
house, in Bogota is to go through the same security routines as at the 
jumpiest of international airports: sign in with armed private security 
guards, trade a photo ID for a visitor's badge and, often, pass through a 
metal detector.

Which is precisely the ritual that precedes a visit with David Buitrago, 
legal director of Pais Libre, a nonprofit that fights kidnapping. "Hardly 
anyone feels safe here anymore," he says as he pulls out a sheet with the 
latest tallies. "In ten years we have gone from 100 kidnappings a year to 
3,706 during the year 2000." That's not only a 16 percent increase over the 
previous year but also about 50 percent of all the kidnappings in the 
world. All the "armed actors" do it. Usually for money.

Last year 75 percent of abductions were carried out by guerrillas, mostly 
by the largest of the insurgent groups, the FARC and the ELN; 10 percent 
were committed by the right-wing paramilitaries. "While the paramilitaries 
kidnap fewer, their victims most frequently just disappear," Buitrago says 
dryly.

And he worries that Plan Colombia will make matters worse. "If the plan 
really cuts into the drug trade from which all the armed actors profit," he 
says, "it might force them to increase kidnappings to make up the 
difference." And it's not just the rich who feel threatened. A recent poll 
showed that a mind-boggling 43 percent of Colombians fear they could be 
kidnapped. "Let's face it," says Buitrago, "Everyone wants to leave Colombia."

Consider three news articles on the front page of the Bogota papers on 
January 19, the day I meet with Buitrago. One piece reports that a 
right-wing paramilitary group entered the northern town of Chengue two days 
before, rounded up the villagers and beat twenty-six of them to death with 
stones and machetes.

As sixty homes were set on fire, the attackers fled with ten other live 
victims.

The article goes on to say that this is the latest in more than 150 
"massacres" by the paras in the past eighteen months, which have cost more 
than 1,500 lives.

The leader of these death squads, Carlos Castano, says the news report, is 
wanted on twenty-two different warrants but has not been arrested.

Another article reports that Bill Clinton's State Department, with only 
hours left before the Bush transition, employed a loophole in the US aid 
package and "voluntarily" decided to "skip" having to certify that the 
Colombian government has complied with US human rights demands attached to 
Plan Colombia legislation--specifically, suppression of the paramilitary 
death squads. The third news article reports that Gen. Peter Pace of the 
Pentagon's Southern Command has arrived in Bogota to say that eighteen 
Super Hueys have been put into the hands of the Colombian military.

The deadlier Black Hawks, says General Pace, will arrive by July.

Clinton's wink at the human rights certification on the same day as the 
Chengue massacre should provoke no special outrage.

The bloodshed here is continuous. More than 35,000 Colombians have died in 
political violence over the past decade. "What we have in Colombia isn't a 
civil war," says Ombudsman Cifuentes. "What we have is a war of the armed 
actors against civil society."

La Violencia

President Pastrana was elected in 1998 on a peace platform, vowing to end a 
half-century of violence and war. He spoke boldly of a sort of Colombian 
Marshall Plan that would seek foreign assistance to fight corruption, give 
some depth to Latin America's oldest formal democracy, reform the justice 
system, negotiate a settlement with the leftist guerrillas and, yes, fight 
the drug trade.

He asked for $3.5 billion in foreign support which he would match with $4 
billion in Colombian government funding.

Pastrana's election so stirred the hopes of a war-weary nation that soon 
after his election, millions of Colombians came into the streets rallying 
for peace.

At first blush, the aristocratic, fine-featured President seems an unlikely 
choice to play such a historic role. His father, Misael Pastrana, was a 
lackluster president in the early 1970s. And Pastrana's Conservative Party 
is hardly the voice of the common people.

But, then again, Colombia defies nearly all Latin American stereotypes. It 
has produced no significant stretch of military rule nor any sustained 
populist or nationalist movement of the sort common elsewhere on the continent.

The political left, meanwhile, has been historically weak.

For most of this century, the Colombian political stage has been so 
monopolized by two major parties, the equally ill-named Conservatives and 
Liberals, that from the mid-1950s into the 1970s they even governed 
together with no real opposition. "Strangely, we have a deep democratic 
institutionality that coexists with the most barbaric violence, and the 
state has a foot in both," says analyst Carlos de Roux.

Bloodletting in Colombia became more or less a permanent fixture back in 
1948 when a popular presidential candidate was murdered.

Mass rioting turned into an era known as La Violencia, which stretched into 
the 1960s. At that time, some of the peasant groups that had armed 
themselves as self-defense militias became politicized and, under the 
leadership of the now-septuagenarian Manuel "Sure Shot" Marulanda, morphed 
into the leftist guerrilla group known as the FARC--today a well-armed 
force of 18,000 fighters. Other smaller Marxist insurgencies flowered.

The FARC and to a lesser degree the 3,000 member ELN have through the 
decades extended their reach over sizable chunks of sparsely populated 
Colombian countryside but failed to gain much support elsewhere. "Be clear 
on the FARC," says Mauricio Vargas, an editor and columnist at Gabriel 
Garcia Marquez's weekly, Cambio. "They are not your Che Guevara, Comandante 
Marcos sort of romantic guerrilla force."

That's an understatement. While originally rooted in Marxism, the FARC has 
moved into criminal activity.

Its base of operations in southern Colombia overlaps some of the richest 
coca-growing regions in the world.

For some time now, the FARC has harvested rich revenues by levying a "tax" 
on the coca-growers, in return for which the FARC protects the growers from 
attack. Recently, there is growing evidence that the guerrillas have gone 
deeper into the coca trade, expanding into processing and edging into 
trafficking and sales.

Colombia's--and President Pastrana's--dilemma is this: Poverty and social 
inequality produce not only coca plantations and violence but also dogged 
guerrilla armies.

And eventually they all become intertwined. How to undo this Gordian knot?

Talking Peace--Planning War

President Pastrana met with US officials in 1999, showing them his 
comprehensive national reconstruction plan and asking them to fund a 
significant part of it. He came out of those meetings with a $1.5 billion 
opening commitment. But in those same meetings, the Plan Colombia playbook 
got radically redrafted.

The Marshall Plan aspect of the blueprint was pushed aside.

Shoved to the top were a militarized drug war and an El Salvador-like 
counterinsurgency plan. "Maybe the rewritten Plan Colombia is the price 
Pastrana had to pay the US to be able to proceed with the peace process," 
speculates Carlos de Roux.

Pastrana pushed ahead with his peace initiative, meeting with the FARC's 
Marulanda and even granting the guerrillas a temporary demilitarized zone 
to be used as a staging area for negotiations. But because the talks 
produced no cease-fire, the fighting has intensified as all sides escalate 
in order to win bargaining advantages. Government forces, badly hurt by the 
guerrillas from 1997 to 1999, have gone on the offensive.

The FARC has also ratcheted up its forced recruitment, its drug involvement 
and its kidnapping for ransom.

Not only has the United States been lukewarm to the peace talks--many 
Colombians have also soured on their prospects.

To the revulsion of millions, the FARC used the demilitarized zone to hold 
kidnapped hostages. Meanwhile, it allowed coca cultivation, while its 
attacks on civilian areas rose. The FARC formally froze the peace talks in 
November, demanding that President Pastrana take effective action against 
the right-wing paramilitaries if he wanted to renew the negotiations.

Which brings us to the latest set of "armed actors," the paramilitaries, at 
least 11,000 well-armed troops financed by the wealthiest coca barons and 
committed to exterminating the leftist guerrillas and their supporters. 
 From their stronghold in the north, the paras have started branching out 
nationwide and are locked into a particularly bloody struggle with the 
guerrillas to secure access to the Pacific Coast--a key to maintaining the 
coca trade. "In the past few years the Colombian military has gotten out of 
directly waging the dirty war, and at the same time there has been a 
commensurate rise of the size and ferocity of the paramilitaries," says 
Andrew Miller of Amnesty International. "And it is amply documented that 
even if independently financed, the paramilitaries work hand in hand with 
the government forces." Even the US government, at some level or another, 
will concede that last point.

In February Pastrana managed to get the stalled peace talks restarted by 
making a commitment to crack down on the paramilitaries. But the FARC also 
bears responsibility for the situation: Its behavior has been so outrageous 
that it has allowed the paramilitaries to pose as heroes to an ever more 
frightened and disillusioned urban population.

Fumigating the Poor

Sensitive to charges that Plan Colombia will only stoke the fires of this 
internal conflict, the Colombian government's point man on the issue, 
National Security Adviser Gonzalo de Francisco, strains to emphasize the 
least bellicose aspects of the operation.

During an extended interview in the elegant Narino Presidential Palace, the 
soft-spoken 40-year-old political scientist makes his best case. "Coca has 
feet, it moves around," he says. So, yes, he says, there is a military 
component to eradication. But aerial fumigation is not to be 
"indiscriminate," he says. "Forced eradication is like chemotherapy," he 
says. "If we continue forced eradication for five more years we will kill 
the patient." So while forcible fumigation will be escalated against the 
big-time growers, for the first time in a serious way, de Francisco says, 
the Colombian government will strive to negotiate contracts with 
impoverished coca farmers under which they will agree to manually destroy 
their crops.

In return, the government will give each family up to $2,000 in subsidies 
and technical assistance to grow substitute crops like rice, corn and 
fruit. (De Francisco says that Washington is providing $16 million 
specifically for these purposes--about 1 percent of its Colombian aid 
package.) The average coca farmer makes about $1,000 a month, but de 
Francisco argues that while a campesino might make less growing corn or 
rice, he has a moral and legal obligation to stop growing coca. "Coca will 
be leaving Putumayo," he affirms, while agreeing that as many as 10,000 
rural residents might be "displaced."

But de Francisco's critics contend that as much as 75 percent of the 
illicit crops are on tiny plots owned by poor farmers who have little other 
chance of economic survival.

Only a minority are large "industrial" sites. "Plan Colombia is absurd and 
dangerous because it believes it can fumigate poverty," says political 
science professor Jose Cuesta. Cuesta, a former M-19 guerrilla, is now a 
leader of the Citizens' Network for Peace in Colombia. "The coca crops are 
nothing but a concrete response to the ravages caused by unrestrained 
free-market economic policies." Even the coca pickers, he says, are 
increasingly the urban poor looking to survive. "If the government were 
serious about drugs, it would forget about the campesinos and attack the 
industrial and financial centers that most profit from trafficking," says 
Cuesta. "This wouldn't be called Plan Colombia. It would be called Plan 
United States."

De Roux fears the current actions could drive the farmers deeper into the 
arms of the FARC. "Until now the farmers have not supported the guerrillas 
but merely accommodated them," he says. "This military push might cement 
the bond. Worse, it could push the FARC and the coca growers deeper into 
the jungle, and it could encourage the FARC to become a full-blown cartel." 
Already Ecuadorean farmers living near the southern Colombian border are 
reporting that they have been offered money by Colombian drug traffickers 
to begin coca production.

Meanwhile, the indigenous population of the targeted southern region is 
already paying an elevated price.

Right-wing paramilitaries have recently expanded in that area and are 
challenging the FARC not only for territorial control but also for 
collection of the coca "tax." The Indian communities have been caught in 
the crossfire and have lost much of their traditional leadership in the 
bloodshed.

The FARC has also escalated its forced recruitment of teenagers from 
indigenous families.

Add to that the stepped-up government spraying, and "for the indigenous 
this is a catastrophe," says a government anthropologist who requested 
anonymity. "Much of the land there is unfit for anything but coca. And the 
government is wiping out the traditional and even the nontraditional 
crops." The national human rights ombudsman's office has highlighted 
several cases involving Cofan Indians who had their food crops, medicinal 
plants, fish harvesting tanks and grazing fields sprayed with herbicides. 
An Associated Press correspondent who traveled to Putumayo reported that 
most of the fumigation he saw had hit the smallest of crops, many an acre 
or less. This directly contradicts the government claim to be targeting the 
"industrial" crops.

None of this has deterred the Colombian Army from claiming at least partial 
victory in mid-February. An official army press release said that 
eradication efforts were running ahead of schedule and had been "carried 
out without any incident to date with any farmers or settlers." This 
bluster might be just that--face-saving public relations.

A few weeks after the push began, six regional governors protested the 
forced eradication and military approach of Plan Colombia, doubtlessly 
contributing to the otherwise unexplained decision to halt the spraying 
temporarily.

Echoes Of Vietnam

Perhaps after the meeting between Pastrana and Bush, we'll have a better 
idea of what the new Administration's Colombia policy will be. Someone in 
Washington is going to have to decide how much more it wants to invest in 
Colombia, how much of that aid should continue to be military and just how 
much, if at all, Pastrana's parallel peace efforts will be supported.

Or, on the contrary, what kind of appetite Washington has for being more 
explicitly entwined not so much in a drug war as in counterinsurgency. The 
line between the two is already considerably blurred by Plan Colombia. 
"It's ambiguous," says a US Embassy official. "Anyone involved in any phase 
of drug production no matter what hat he is wearing is now a legitimate 
target."

There's no question that a significant part of the American political class 
would just as soon see Pastrana shut down the peace talks. "If the FARC 
does not start showing some real good faith real soon, it is indeed time to 
pull the plug [on the peace process]," says Republican Congressman Benjamin 
Gilman. "Pastrana should then go ahead and shut down the guerrilla zone and 
send in the troops." This sort of talk rattles some Colombian analysts. 
"It's not very reassuring that we are the only regional headache for the 
US," says Roberto Pombo, editor of Garcia Marquez's Cambio. "If we have a 
couple of hundred advisers here and one day the FARC kills three of them 
and that happens on a day when the US President is in trouble on some 
domestic issue, what happens to us? Ask the Libyans under Reagan, or the 
Sudanese under Clinton." Adds Mauricio Vargas, "The US is already up to its 
ears in Colombia. Everything's already here except the troops." There are 
already American "contract" teams in Colombia, one of which was fired upon 
in late February when it went into a guerrilla zone to rescue a downed 
helicopter crew.

But is Plan Colombia really a prelude to a new Vietnam? It's unlikely that 
the Bush Administration is about to send thousands of US troops into the 
crossfire between the FARC and the paramilitaries. But there are, 
nevertheless, historical parallels beyond the obvious imagery of blanketing 
foreign jungles with defoliants. Once again, US power is being projected 
abroad to achieve its own objectives at a punishing social cost to a 
country we're "assisting." And as in Vietnam, even the US objectives are 
muddled and elusive.

All available evidence shows that drug use is never reduced by attacking 
the source but only by reducing the demand.

Plan Colombia, at best, will only disperse drug production from Colombia to 
some neighboring location, and it will do nothing to reduce drug use in the 
United States--except perhaps to spike the price of cocaine and make the 
trade that much more profitable.

One US Embassy official essentially confirms the gap between what seemed to 
be Pastrana's original vision of Plan Colombia and its reality today. "The 
US and Colombia have different priorities," the official says. "Colombia 
has peace as a priority.

We have narcotics."

Eternal War?

The US strategy has little regional support. "Panama does not want to get 
involved in the internal problems of Colombia. We've been shying away from 
that in every way," Panama's Ambassador to the United States, Guillermo 
Ford, told the press.

Nor are Europeans enamored of Plan Colombia. In early February the European 
Parliament, concerned about human rights and the rise of the 
paramilitaries, voted 474 to 1 to oppose it.

Unfortunately, there's little echo of that peace constituency in the US 
Congress. Senator Paul Wellstone has waged an unsuccessful battle to 
redirect US policy toward domestic drug treatment programs.

But, he says, "I have hope, because across the country I see people more 
engaged in this issue."

Only a comprehensive and negotiated settlement can stop the cycle of 
violence in Colombia. Such a settlement would include a program of manual 
eradication bolstered by deep reform that would incorporate and 
demilitarize the armed actors.

The peace process undertaken by Pastrana and the FARC--and recently joined 
by the ELN--is the first step in that process.

But for now, the staccato crackling of automatic weapons and the beating of 
chopper blades are still louder than the voices of dialogue and 
reconciliation. "If you pick your head up against the military, you can get 
it blown off by the paramilitaries," says a discouraged Mauricio Vargas. 
"And if you are on the left, where can you go? You are squeezed between a 
government and a guerrilla army, neither of which you can support.

All the conditions here are ripe for eternal war."

And yet at times an astounding number of Colombians--as many as 10 million 
on one occasion in 1999--have rallied for peace.

On the evening of January 25, as talks between the government and the FARC 
seemed hopelessly stalled and the pundits were preparing the peace 
movement's obituary, some 10,000 to 15,000 Colombians once again came out 
to defy the odds. Brought together by the umbrella group Paz Colombia, they 
gathered in front of the Bogota bullring to stage a lantern-lit march.

The procession snaked its way through downtown, led by a contingent of 
jugglers, leaping acrobats and costumed stilt walkers passing out candies 
and candles to onlookers.

 From human rights activists to striking trade unionists, from students to 
well-dressed middle-class professionals, the crowd was a mix not only of 
class but of ideology.

Internal refugees displaced by the death squads marched alongside those 
pushed from their homes by the guerrillas. The wives of slain and kidnapped 
policemen locked arms with the mothers of young men "disappeared" by the 
security forces.

The crowd sang out its chants, "Plan Colombia--Plan for War" and "Not one 
more body, not one more peso for war!"

No one in that demonstration better embodied the complex forces that 
underlie war--and peace--in Colombia than 45-year-old Nubia Sanchez. 
Originally from San Vicente de Caguan, Sanchez said she fled the area after 
it was ceded to guerrillas in the peace talks and the FARC began forced 
recruitment of 13- and 14-year-olds. And yet she marched that night to 
demand not only that the peace talks continue but that the government renew 
the agreement to let the guerrillas continue to control the area from where 
she fled. "My personal situation is not important," she said as she held 
the candle lantern to her chest. "Dialogue is the only way to get to peace."

At Simon Bolivar Plaza, as mounted police and a helmeted riot squad gazed 
on from the shadows cast by colonial-era lamps, the marchers swarmed around 
a statue honoring the "Liberator of the Americas." When the organizers set 
free a barrage of white helium-filled balloons, the marchers lifted their 
lanterns and cheered.

One could imagine that someone standing on one of the mountain peaks behind 
the city and peering down into the dark Andean night would discern a 
distant flicker of light--and of hope.
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MAP posted-by: Beth