Rich, Poor Reflect on Bishop's Slaying

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service

BOGOTA, Colombia, March 17 -- Ignacio Choachi, a construction worker old enough to remember the day in 1948 when Bogota was burned in a spasm of
political violence that has yet to end, attended Mass at the fading colonial Santa Barbara Church this morning in search of answers.

Why had gunmen killed the archbishop of Cali on Saturday night? Why has Choachi's country known constant killing -- from peasants to political leaders -- in his 65
years? How would it end?

"It's sad that we have gotten so used to these kinds of crimes. Nothing really surprises me anymore," said Choachi, who had just heard the archbishop of Bogota call
on Colombians to "stop this river of blood." "I suppose it is because there are no jobs and too many poor people that can't make a living."

About 10 miles north of the church, a different segment of Colombian society was also preoccupied with the violence. At a private club, set among the high plains
and grazing cattle, a 37-year-old banker watched the finals of the Jet-Set Cup polo tournament. Onlookers in Gucci loafers sipped free Chivas Regal as the players
concluded a week of fashion shows and society events here in the well-guarded capital.

But the game was poorly attended, and while the chatter ranged over the usual topics of movies, parties and trips to Miami, it also dwelt darkly on the not-so-usual
subject of the murder of Archbishop Isaias Duarte Cancino.

"There is one reason we are in the position we are -- drug money," said the banker, who asked not to be identified. "Our social problems are no different than those
in Argentina or Brazil, except for the drug money. If it disappeared, so would the incentive for these armed groups to fight."

These starkly different scenes illustrate the diverging ways Colombians understand their ageless war, now worsening in the wake of a collapsed peace process.
Stubbornly held interpretations of the conflict, shaped by class, geography and the unequal way Colombia's violence is felt by its people, are perhaps the single
largest obstacle to the country's search for a solution to a conflict that claimed 3,500 lives last year.

By turns, Colombians understand their war as a fight over the drug profits enriching various armed groups. Or a political crusade to correct the prevailing economic
imbalance in a land of plenty. Or the result of lost morals. Or as simple terrorism flourishing because of the broad impunity enjoyed by those who commit the worst
crimes. Each viewpoint has its own solution, be it more military force or investment in the welfare of an impoverished rural population.

For the most part, the wealthy ascribe the war to the drug trade, while the poor tend to believe it is driven by political factors.

The variety of armed groups and the relentless momentum of a conflict that officially began as a 1960s-era struggle for social justice have generated deep apathy
among Colombians of all classes, except perhaps among the 35,000 or so soldiers of the three irregular armies fighting it.

Today, one rising and one fading Marxist guerrilla group battle the government and a growing paramilitary force that fights by its side. Among this cast of characters,
only the Colombian military is not defined as a terrorist organization by the Bush administration, which now hopes to loosen restrictions on $1.3 billion in
counter-narcotics aid so that the package's mostly military component can be used directly against the guerrillas.

"Let's all work for a better society until those who act this way know they can't continue killing, kidnapping and torturing a whole society as if they were savage
beasts," Cardinal Pedro Rubiano, the archbishop of Bogota, said in his sermon today.

After years of disagreement, however, a new consensus about what the war is about may be coalescing around the presidential candidacy of Alvaro Uribe Velez, a
former governor of war-ravaged Antioquia province who describes the war primarily as a terrorist campaign carried out by a guerrilla group that benefits from a
weak Colombian state. Opinion polls suggest that support for his tougher line against the guerrillas spans geographic and class lines.

Uribe's view is also shared by Colombia's top generals and the leader of an irregular army that emerged in response to the guerrilla insurgency.

"The worst thing that happened to Colombia is the guerrillas' corruption by drug money," said Carlos Castano, head of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia,
a 15,000-member paramilitary group that itself profits enormously from the drug trade and from donations by Colombia's ranchers and other private business
interests. "For years, the guerrillas seemed like they might be the solution to our problems . . . until they allied themselves with the drug traffickers," he said in an
interview.

But the current public clamor for a military solution has yet to yield a consensus on how to wage that war since President Andres Pastrana's peace efforts with the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC as the largest guerrilla group is known, collapsed last month.

Last week, Colombia's finance minister, Juan Manuel Santos, proposed that Colombians donate a day's pay to the country's meager military budget. Among the
wealthy, the idea was welcomed. Low-wage workers and union leaders said they would donate a day's pay, but only to needy hospitals and schools.

The disagreement among classes also applies to operations of the military, in which mandatory service is easily avoided with money. Those who have not finished high
school find themselves in the counter-guerrilla patrols, while the college-bound serve behind a desk.

Usually, though, families that are able to scrape together $1,000 to buy a son's way out of "mandatory" service do so -- leaving only the very poor and those with a
social conscience to do the fighting. Gen. Fernando Tapias, head of the armed forces, wants to close that loophole to distribute the burden of the war more equitably
and to extend the length of mandatory service to two years from 18 months.

Rodrigo Lozano, a 30-year-old corporate lawyer from a well-to-do Bogota family, said he still believes that his mostly office-bound assignment was unfair to the
less-educated inductees who landed in combat units.

"War in Colombia has become a way of life for so many people -- there is a lack of education, a lack of opportunity and a lack of morals," Lozano said.

If given $1 billion to spend on solving the war, Lozano said, he would invest it in the education system. But ultimately, he said, the economic motivations driving the
war will make it hard to stop.

"The war allows for narco-trafficking, sales of weapons and the huge commissions that result," he said. "In any country, war benefits somebody. The military has an
interest and so do the elite, who profit from the economy around the war. And, of course, so do the guerrillas."

Colombians were forced again today to consider what they had become in light of Duarte's murder.

The archbishop had been a sharp critic of the guerrillas, and his murder underlines how few institutions are exempted from Colombia's war. Universities, unions, the
media -- all have become fair game for political assassinations. Now so has the church in this deeply Catholic country; last week, the head of the Colombia bishops'
conference, Alberto Giraldo, called his country "morally sick."

"There is no respect even for those who make God visible to others," said Marina Guzman, a 37-year-old dressmaker from Bogota who attended Mass this morning.
"This violence is being passed from parents to children, and the young are getting used to taking the easiest way -- like killing people for money."

                                               © 2002