¿Guerra?
When the peace conversations where about to start, back in 98, when Tirofijo left our beloved (?) president, Mr Patraña standing like the moron he was, alone, one of his messenger boys (I think it was Raul Reyes) read his speech.
In it he justified thirty five years of blood, thirty five years of fighting because back in the beginning of the sixties the army went and stole his chickens. (I'm not lying, his speech did talk about stolen chickens).
No terrorist organization ever has defeated an stablished government, if that government has the support of the people it rules over. We are one of the best examples of that. I still remember with fear those days back in 88-89 or 92-93, when bombs exploded all over. It was bad, but we survived, even Pablo Escobar, with his endless amount of money, wasn't able to defeat the country.
There are two ways of handling this thing: Win the war and then bring the opportunities and development to the rural regions the war started on or, kill the war at it's source, at the lack of opportunities for the poor, and then expect it to end from it's own weight.
I think #2 might have been feasible fifteen years ago, but now it is not. You can not bring progress if you can't get there, and you can get there if armed men control rivers and roads.
So it is war. It is war that has no winners tough. The people that will die will be colombians, every way you look at it. Most of the time it will be 16 or 17 year old boys who had no other choice. I think that a "kill them all" strategy is not only bloodier than any possible bomb threat (we kill more than the people that die on the Twin Towers every year, without a declared war), but futile. We have to attack the means of financing and of obtaining weapons. If they have no money, they can't fight, and soldiers don't have to die.
Tehre is only one business that produces more money than drug traffic: weapon sale. However, this is not as punished and as prosecuted as narcotics for a simple reason: It brings money from third world countries into first world ones, from third world pockets into first world banks. Acting on rage one could say that with just the sheer desire of "killing them all" it would be as good as done (with a little bit of pain and suffering in the middle, but a done deal). It is not true. Angola has been devastating itself on a civil war, even bloodier than ours for 25 years, and it wasn't until the leader of the rebel party, Jonas Savimbi died that the two parts could start discusing the end of the bloodshed. However, such a long bloodshed was only possible because the governement financed itself by exporting petroleum and the rebels did so with diamonds, both had money to throw on russian, european and american weapons to kill each other.
The point is: It is war, but the way of defeating it is not by creating a half a million men army. We have to attack the visible heads, those sons of bitches that appear on the news informing us that "the rich are going to pay" or that "nos vemos el siete a las seis". I think it is time to play it fair: to throw this sons of bithces rights down the drain, like they have thrown ours and to hit them, but hit them on the head, because the rest of the body can reproduce, but headless they are just a group of kids that happen to have a gun.
