A hero at home, a villain abroad

Jul 12th 2007 BOGOTÁ
Source: The Economist
AFP

Colombians reckon that Álvaro Uribe saved their country. It's a pity for them that so many outsiders don't see their president that way

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WHEN hundreds of thousands of Colombians poured into the streets on July 5th to protest at the killing of 11 hostages who had been held by the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), President Álvaro Uribe chose to read this as support for his tough security policies. “This demonstration is notice to the international community that we cannot, in this hour of pain, give in to the criminals,” he said. But much of the “international community” no longer sees events in Colombia in the way most Colombians do.
At home Mr Uribe is seen as the saviour of a country that was in danger of being turned into a failed state by the rampaging violence of drug-traffickers, left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries. Since he took office in 2002, violence has fallen sharply. As confidence returns, the economy is growing at 8% a year. According to Invamer-Gallup, a pollster, Mr Uribe's approval rating has remained steady at between 70% and 80% over the past year.
That is despite recent scandals in which a dozen legislators who support him, as well as a former intelligence chief, have been arrested on suspicion of having ties to the murderous paramilitaries; the latest to face investigation is Mario Uribe, a senator and the president's cousin. In the United States and Europe, on the other hand, Mr Uribe's reputation has suffered—so much so that in April Al Gore, America's former vice-president, refused to appear at the same conference as Mr Uribe in Miami.
Reactions to the killing of the hostages highlighted the widening gulf between the perceptions of Colombians and those of the outside world. The hostages were regional legislators who had been held by the FARC for five years. According to the guerrillas they died when an “unidentified military group” attacked the jungle camp where they were being held. Mr Uribe said that there were no government operations on the day in question in the area where officials believe the hostages were held.
The governments of France, Spain and Switzerland have been trying to broker an agreement under which the FARC would swap its well-known hostages, who include three American contractors and Ingrid Betancourt, a politician who holds dual French and Colombian nationality (hundreds more hostages are being held for ransom). Mr Uribe freed scores of guerrilla prisoners. But the FARC insists on the creation of a “demilitarised zone” in which talks should take place. For Colombians, that brings back bad memories of failed peace talks from 1999-2002 in which the FARC used a similar zone for recruitment and criminal activity. Mr Uribe refuses to go down that route again.
After the killing of the 11 hostages, the three European governments condemned hostage-taking. But they also called for an international inquiry into the deaths and urged the government not to use force to rescue captives. Boosted by the demonstrations, Mr Uribe said he could not accept “statements...that measure the FARC and the government by the same yardstick”. Few things rile him more than having his democratic and human-rights credentials questioned internationally.
Yet that is happening more and more. At the end of June the Democratic leadership in America's House of Representatives announced that it would oppose ratification of a free-trade agreement with Colombia until it could see “concrete evidence of sustained results” on reducing violence, on punishing the killings of trade unionists and on prosecuting politicians with links to paramilitaries.
The Democrats did not set any precise benchmarks. But Mr Uribe is in no position to ignore such views. Since 1999 Colombia has received some $5 billion in mainly military aid from America under a plan to fight drug-trafficking and rebel groups of left and right. Until recently, this enjoyed bipartisan support in Washington. Last month, however, the House of Representatives cut the aid by $60m (to $530m) and earmarked more of the money for social and justice programmes (some of these changes may be reversed by the Senate).
All this exasperates Colombia. Mr Uribe points out that when his country was suffering its worst violence, America was unwavering in its support. That policy has now paid dividends: under Mr Uribe the guerrillas have been pushed back to remote areas and some 30,000 paramilitaries have demobilised. In the eyes of Colombian officials, the aid cut and trade snub in Washington therefore look like a case of punishing success. As for the revelations about paramilitary infiltration of politics, the officials argue that these have come to light only because of the climate of greater security in the country. And although some of the president's supporters have been found to have had links with the paramilitaries, there is no evidence that Mr Uribe himself knew of them.
José Obdulio Gaviria, an adviser to Mr Uribe, says Colombia's government will have to keep repeating its message over and over until it gets through, just as if it were dealing with “slow students”. To some degree, however, the problem is not so much the message as the messenger. In Washington Mr Uribe is paying the price for his high-handed manner, seemingly dodgy friendships and, above all, for having been an enthusiastic ally of George Bush. And even if Colombia's message does at last get through to Washington's “slow students”, the trade agreement may still fall victim to the Democrats' general lack of enthusiasm for free trade.
Mr Uribe says he cannot allow Colombia to be treated as a “servant” of the United States. But he has little choice. Outsiders might treat him with more respect if he threatened to legalise cocaine or cosy up to Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's oil-rich anti-American leader. But the latter, at least, might irritate Colombians too.

The World’s Most Extreme Emerging Market (Business Week's cover story)

Extreme Investing: Inside Colombia
An improbable journey from crime capital to investment hot spot. Can this boom last?
Date: 28th may 2007
Source: Business Week

By Roben Farzad

COVER STORY PODCAST "You going there to get some kilos?" asks the driver as he drops me off at Newark's international airport for my six-hour flight to Bogotá. He grins at me in the rear-view mirror as if he has cracked the most original one-liner in history. "Like Scarface," he continues, shifting to his Pakistani/Latino gangster accent: "Say hello to my little friend! Pow! Pow!" He hands me my bags and reminds me to call my mom and make peace with the Almighty before I embark for certain death. "You are crazy, my friend."

Slide Show >>Traveling to Colombia to chronicle the investment miracle unfolding there seemed perfectly reasonable a few weeks earlier. The stats all scream "Go! Go! Go!": Colombia's stock market has soared fourteenfold since October, 2001. Foreign direct investment and capital inflows have more than doubled, while real estate prices have tripled in many areas. Citigroup (C ) CEO Chuck Prince even kicked off his February "world tour" in Bogotá, where the bank is building branches and a Latin American call center. But when most Americans hear the name Colombia they think about the late Medellín drug lord, Pablo Escobar. And roving paramilitary death squads. And speedboat-loads of cocaine headed for Miami.

Slide Show >>I've been assured by bankers that things are getting much better in this nation of 42 million. But it isn't until I step onto the packed 737 to Bogotá that I get my first real sense of the intense interest in Colombian investments. I spy at least 20 business suits, including the laptop-toting Swede sitting next to me who's building a boutique hotel in the beautiful 16th century city of Cartagena on the north coast.Investors like these have visited many exotic ports in recent years. Colombia's surprising rise has been fueled by two larger trends: the enormous amount of money sluicing through global markets and investors' increasing risk tolerance. First, cash poured into the so-called BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Next it flooded riskier secondary destinations such as Turkey and Poland, and last year, with ferocity, Vietnam. Now money is gushing into third-tier hinterlands fraught with political and economic problems, where even the rule of law isn't a given.THE CONFIANZA INDEXCall them extreme emerging markets. The Standard & Poor's/IFCG Frontier Index of 22 such destinations, which includes investing curiosities like Lebanon, Côte d'Ivoire, and Bangladesh, has gained nearly 400% in the past five years. The question is whether these nascent markets have what it takes to parlay the fickle enthusiasm of hedge-fund traders and other investors into long-term economic development.Yet Colombia is so extreme that it hasn't even made the Frontier Index. Its stock market has an aggregate capitalization of just $59 billion. In this parallel investing universe, price-earnings ratios take a backseat to fuzzy measures such as confianza, which translates into confidence and trust but is more accurately described as the general sense that people can safely transact business and get through everyday life unharmed. The handful of Wall Street analysts who cover Colombia supply their clients with charts of murder rates and kidnappings.President Alvaro Uribe, who took office in 2002, nearly five decades into a civil war that has pitted Marxist guerrillas against right-wing death squads, has made confianza his overarching goal. Killings and abductions are down sharply in the big cities, and that has been a boon for all manner of investments, from stocks to real estate. "I guarantee that if you graph the decline in kidnappings to investment gains, the correlation would be one-to-one," says Ben M. Laidler, head of Andean research for UBS Pactual.On a continent whose economic history is the stuff of a blooper reel, Colombia's strong fundamentals stand out. Its $130 billion economy, a world leader in the production of coffee, petroleum, textiles, and flowers, is growing at 6.8% a year, two full points faster than the Latin American average. In the past 10 years, Colombia has slashed its inflation rate from 18% to 5%, and since Uribe was elected, unemployment has dipped from 16% to 13%. The nation has never defaulted on its debt or experienced hyperinflation. And entrepreneurial thinking is spreading. Run a Google (GOOG ) geographical-hit query, and you'll see that, per capita, nowhere in the world are there more searches for the words "Peter Drucker," the late management guru, than in Bogotá. No. 2? Medellín.Yes, Medellín. Once the murder capital of the world, this city of 2.4 million is regaining its status as a commercial hub, hosting regional offices for a growing roster of multinationals including Philip Morris (MO ), Toyota (TM ), and Renault, as well as globally minded Colombian companies that make up 70% of the country's stock market value. More high-rises are under construction here than in Manhattan and Los Angeles combined.But all of it—the stock market gains, the development, the rising living standards—rests on confianza. Foreigners' view of Colombia as a lawless, violent, riven land won't change quickly. As Commerce Minister Luis Guillermo Plata acknowledges, "Why would I invest in a country if I can't go there?"As I get into the cramped cab that's taking me to my hotel, I can't help thinking about the fabled "millionaire's tour of Bogotá," a stretch of road where colluding cabbies and thieves once drove passengers from ATM to ATM to drain their bank accounts. And then there's the drugs. Colombia still produces the majority of the world's cocaine, an ongoing crisis that draws a steady supply of U.S. military and financial aid. Even corporate crime here takes on deadly overtones: Cincinnati-based banana giant Chiquita Brands International (CQB ) was in the news recently for admitting to having paid $1.7 million in protection money to a Colombian paramilitary group on Washington's list of foreign terrorist organizations.I'm here to find out whether Colombia's fledgling stock market can keep surging, whether its financial and physical infrastructures can accommodate the flood of investment, and whether an equity culture can take hold.At the center of everything is President Uribe. "We need to rescue international confidence in our country," he tells me in his heavily guarded compound in Bogotá's historic center full of Spanish colonial architecture. Access to Uribe is preceded by an hour of security checks and chilling looks from guards holding bayonet-tipped machine guns.The 54-year-old Uribe is a rarity in increasingly leftist Latin America. A center-right ruler with an approval rating of more than 60%, he won a landslide second term in 2006 after having amended the constitution to allow him to run again. Uribe knows Colombia's history of violence firsthand: A decade ago he was governor of Medellín's province, and in 1983 his father was murdered by kidnappers. The sometimes dour leader has driven most of the drug traffickers and leftist guerrillas out of urban centers, though they still reign in remote regions.But allegations have surfaced in Colombia that the President himself has links to right-wing paramilitaries who murdered hundreds, including labor-union activists. On May 14, 20 Colombian lawmakers and businessmen were arrested on charges in connection with the scandal. Colombia's police chief and head of police intelligence, meanwhile, were ousted amid allegations of illegal wiretapping of opposition politicians and journalists. Uribe vehemently denies any personal connection to the affair. (See Alvaro Uribe: The Change Agent).Despite his obsession with law and order, the economy is never far from his mind. "The state is the most important private enterprise," he says, "and the public is like a universe of shareholders." Javier Vargas, a Colombian banker with Credit Suisse (CS ), has heard Uribe sound that theme many times. "He talks like a person who is selling and marketing his country," he says. "Investor confidence is key for him." In May, Uribe visited Washington to meet with supporters in the Bush Administration and lobby congressional Democrats on a free-trade pact between the two countries. Democrats have been uneasy with Uribe since the recent allegations surfaced. But Colombia is a vital strategic ally in an increasingly hostile continent, bordered by Hugo Chávez' Venezuela and left-leaning Ecuador. Washington has sent Colombia $5 billion in aid since 2000, including $650 million last year; only Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Israel receive more.For Uribe, a deal is crucial both for the tangible economic benefits and the perceptual ones. He has invested much political capital already, visiting the U.S. at least 25 times since taking office. Winning full free-trade benefits with the U.S. would do much to bolster the fragile investor confidence he has been nurturing, while a loss would damage his prestige. Uribe's challenge is one that everyone, from business leaders to taxi drivers, acknowledges. "Investing here is rooted in improving physical safety and lowering the risk of doing business," says Alexander P. Kazan, a Latin American strategist at Bear Stearns & Co. (BSC ) "You really cannot overstate the importance."SLEEPY EXCHANGEOn a cool April morning, I make my way to Bogotá's bustling financial district. Amid the roar of motorcycle engines and a haze of bus exhaust, the district brims with young professionals sipping tintos—tiny cups of dark coffee—while chatting on newfangled cell phones. At every crosswalk and on street medians, the less fortunate hawk snacks, cigarettes, and telephone calling cards from salvaged baby carriages, stark reminders of the gaping disparities in this poor nation.Halfway up a glassy office building is an ultramodern floor containing Colombia's stock exchange, the Bolsa de Valores. It's high-tech, but no one would confuse it with the NASDAQ. Just 12 people sit around a circular table staring at their flat-panel displays in a space no bigger than a conference room at a Best Western hotel. It's so quiet you might think you showed up to take the GMAT. I jokingly ask if we're at the right place. Our photographer wonders aloud if he should bother unpacking his equipment."This is it," says Jaime Sarmiento, the exchange's 34-year-old communications director, sensing the anticlimax of the moment. He points up at the ticker, a circular LCD sign. "Does anyone know how to turn this thing on?" The specialists on the floor arrange a photo op, choosing a mustachioed elder to sit on the elevated chair in the center of the ring and motion as if he is directing order flow. Truth be told, everyone is just waiting for 1 p.m., when the market closes and the power lunch scene takes hold. When I ask if the early close is a vestige of the Spanish siesta, I'm curtly told that it's purely a result of how little business there is to transact. Sarmiento takes us downstairs to tour the café, a swank lounge that was conceived as a high-energy, high-buzz meeting place for stock junkies. On this day, two or three guys sit around reading the paper, blissfully unaware of the handful of digits flickering on the wall-mounted display above.Such sleepiness belies the market's breathtaking volatility. This is the central paradox of extreme emerging markets: With so few buyers and sellers, small upticks can quickly turn into major surges, while the faintest of downticks can lead to painful routs. After posting a 128% gain for 2005, second best in the world, the Bolsa nosedived 45% in two months during last year's late-spring emerging-markets swoon, the second-worst showing on the globe. It has since jumped 75%; on June 15, 2006, alone, the index gained 16%. It's down 5% in 2007.All the choppiness merely confirms the suspicions of most of the locals, who eschew stocks for government bonds, even though they yield just 6% now, a third of what they did eight years ago. "The general public just isn't all that accustomed to stocks," says Rodrigo Jaramillo, CEO of Interbolsa, the country's largest brokerage, and former chairman of the stock exchange. He notes that fewer than 70,000 Colombians bought local shares in 2006.Even people who invest for a living are reluctant to buy Colombian stocks with their own money. "I like to invest in young cows," admits a 26-year-old private investment adviser in a British-spread collar and Hermès tie between bites of an empanada in a breakfast joint near the exchange. His eyes light up as he explains that his uncle has given him dibs on investing in heifers, an inside opportunity that has lately scored him 20% to 30% annual returns. Why dabble in risky stocks, he asks, when he can collect steady returns on the family ranch? "I sponsor the cows until—how do you say?—graduation," he says, grinning diabolically, of the day when they're auctioned off and he reaps his windfall.But in fits and starts local investors are coming around. I'm struck by how many twenty- and thirtysomethings in Bogotá are at the leading edge of business and civic life: chief executives, money managers, restaurateurs, even cabinet ministers. Young and educated, Colombia's new elite could ply their trade anywhere in the hemisphere. A decade ago there would have been no question that they would end up abroad. Just four years ago, Bogotá's Club El Nogal, a hot night spot, was car-bombed by a leftist rebel group, resulting in 36 deaths. But El Nogal has come back stronger than ever. Even with all the bomb-sniffing dogs, the place is nearly impossible to get into on a weeknight. Bogotáns consider it a metaphor of their resilience.I meet some young professionals for dinner at Balzac, a restaurant modeled after Manhattan's trendy Balthazar. José María de Valenzuela, a recently minted MBA at INSEAD in France, lights a cigarette and reflects on his accomplishments. "There was just a small possibility I'd end up back here," he says. All of 32, Valenzuela, who did his undergraduate work at Brown University a decade ago, used to specialize in what you might call distressed investing. "People were afraid to leave the city," he recalls of the siege mentality of seven or eight years back, when terrified families sought escapism at his miniature golf course in Bogotá. "You could buy real estate just for the cost of the taxes." Which is what Valenzuela did, before selling into a property boom and plowing his winnings into what he and a former finance professor correctly thought would be the start of a roaring bull market for stocks. Last summer, Valenzuela rolled those profits into a partnership with HenCorp Futures, a U.S.-based trading firm, to offer currency strategies to foreign investors—a critical building block to outside participation in the Colombian market. The only way to buy Bolsa-listed stocks directly is in pesos, and there are no pure-play Colombian mutual funds available to foreigners.The next afternoon, on Valenzuela's recommendation, I head to Harry's Bar, in a tony Bogotá neighborhood that resembles San Francisco's Russian Hill. Amid the din of clinking wine glasses, blond-streaked women and sharply dressed men pick at plates of seared tuna and Argentinian steak. In the evenings the place is often overrun by actors, soccer stars, and diplomats. The owner, spotting my reporter's notebook, stops by. "Please tell America we're not a bunch of drug dealers shooting at each other from trees," he says.COFFEE BUZZIn walks my lunch guest, Felipe Gaviria, the boyish money manager whose name is on the lips of everyone in the smart-money set. In 1997, at 23, Gaviria was promoted to head of currency trading at a small bank in Cali. Two years later he left for business school in Barcelona. He returned to Colombia when Uribe was elected in 2002, sensing the moment was right to buy Colombian property and bet that the peso would strengthen against the dollar. Now he oversees $3 billion in pension assets for Spain's Grupo Santander. It's common knowledge that Gaviria is being wooed by bulge-bracket investment banks and hedge funds. "I receive everybody," he says coyly.With more money pouring in as the economy grows, Gaviria says he's impatient for more local investment options. Fortunately for him, some big ones are just around the corner. In an audacious move, Procafecol, of the fast-growing Juan Valdez coffee shop fame, is floating its shares on the Bolsa. The unlikely beneficiaries: thousands of rural caficultores, or coffee growers, who make up Colombia's national coffee alliance. They've recently been swarmed by an army of financial advisers dispatched to the countryside. "Your preferred shares give you dividend priority over ordinary investors," reads the glossy offering letter, as if to poke fun at the more cosmopolitan Class B shareholders.The real game changer could be the $4 billion initial public offering of state oil concern Ecopetrol, one of South America's four largest. In short order, it could become the most widely held stock on the exchange. And with U.S. bankers circling, a New York Stock Exchange (NYX ) listing could be in the offing. The only other Colombian stock listed in the U.S. is Medellín-based Bancolombia (CIB ), whose shares have jumped twentyfold in the past five years.Indeed, Wall Street is doing its best to ride the Colombia wave. In 2005, SABMiller (SAB.L ) PLC took over Colombia's biggest brewery, Bavaria, for a record $7.8 billion, with Merrill Lynch (MER ), JPMorgan Chase (JPM ), Lehman Brothers (LEH ), Morgan Stanley (MS ), and Citigroup (C ) advising on the acquisition. Last year ABN Amro advised on the sale of a controlling $657 million stake in a key oil refinery to Switzerland's Glencore International. "You're having more and more investment banks going into Colombia," says Eric Newman, a Bogotá native who was recently poached from Lehman Brothers by Morgan Stanley to cover the country for its Miami-based Latin American private banking arm. He shuttles to Colombia 20 times a year.Not only are Colombia's top companies doing better at home, they're also branching out to the rest of Latin America and beyond. A company called Chocolates, essentially Colombia's Kraft Foods (KFT ), now ships to Los Angeles and the Southwest, while Argos, the country's foremost cement producer, has been buying operations in Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas. Bancolombia recently acquired El Salvador's largest bank.One sign of the rising fortunes in Colombia is the sudden misfortune of the self-proclaimed Bulletproof Tailor. Miguel Caballero makes suits and other apparel tough enough to withstand gunshots. His garment factory, located in a seedy neighborhood of Bogotá, features a picture gallery of famous customers, including action film star Steven Seagal and President Uribe, as well as glossies of Caballero discharging his handgun into the bulletproofed torsos of employees. Ten years ago, he says, his company sold 70% of its wares in Colombia. Now, thanks to the ebbing violence, that figure is just 20%. Caballero is dispatching salesmen to Russia, Venezuela, even Iraq. "The idea is to save the business," he says. "You can say we're globalizing."The growing confidence in Colombia brings a new set of challenges. The streets are safer, and citizens are road tripping again. Export-import activity is steadily growing. Tourism has nearly tripled in five years, and beach-lined, historic Cartagena is among South America's most expensive real estate markets. But with all of that happening, Colombia's highways, roads, ports, and other industrial backbones are becoming increasingly overburdened. "We're really behind on infrastructure," says Juliana Ocampo, a recent MBA from Massachusetts Institute of Technology who returned to Bogotá to work for Mexican cement giant Cemex. "If you ask everyone here, that's where the investment needs to flow next." Says Gaviria, the young money manager: "Our north port is terrible. If we had a world-class port project, I would invest right then and there." Bear Stearns warned in a recent report that growth could halt if tens of billions worth of infrastructure isn't soon built, noting that Colombian pension funds are clamoring to invest. If the buildout stalls, it will undermine Uribe's reforms.STOCK OPTIONI take up the issue with Vice-President Francisco Santos. Schooled in Texas and Kansas and formerly the editor of Colombia's largest daily newspaper, Santos was once kidnapped by Pablo Escobar's men and surely draws satisfaction from the fact that the cartel's late-'80s vehicles sit rusting in a pound adjacent to his office. "The roads are getting so clogged," he concedes. "But who will pay for all the infrastructure?"Financiers argue that the money is there for the taking, if only the government would change its thinking. Historically, Bogotá has issued bonds to fund such projects, but investors were hungrier for them when they yielded 20%. It also takes time to rouse all the layers of bureaucracy in the way. Bankers want the government to sell equity in the projects instead, following the privatization trend sweeping Europe and the U.S. "We can build roads without a penny of government money," insists Pedro Nel Ospina, the head of Corficolombiana, one of the country's top investment and merchant banks. "Let us do it already. Give us equity."The government isn't ready to make that leap just yet. But the fact that a vigorous debate about how best to become an ownership society is heating up—complete with business page editorials and regional free-trade zones—shows how far this rugged stretch of the Andes Mountains has come.Medellín, in particular, is undergoing one of the most extraordinary urban makeovers in modern times. "Our trucks, drivers, and distributors were attacked at least once a day," recalls Carlos Enrique Piedrahita, president of Chocolates, of the scene seven years ago. "Now it just doesn't happen."The 45-minute ride to town from Medellín's main airport winds through lush forests and fragrant flower farms. The city is shaped like a bowl, with commerce and wealth concentrated at the center as poverty stares down from the rim. It all descended into chaos with the decline of Medellín's textile industry in the 1970s and the simultaneous rise of the drug trade. In 1991, two years before Escobar met his end in a rooftop gunfight with police, he was recruiting cocaine-addicted teens in the hillside slums, paying them $750 for every police officer they murdered. Gang shootouts continued into emergency rooms. "One can have the impression that Medellín is about to drown in its own blood," The New Yorker magazine's Alma Guillermoprieto wrote in 1991, when the city's homicide rate was 381 per 100,000, the highest in the world.But exploding revenue from Medellín's resurgent corporate tax base is funding a rapid metamorphosis. Now those very same shanties are connected to the city center by a sky-lift gondola of the sort you might find at EPCOT Center. New libraries and schools court students from other parts of Colombia. "Imagination Park" stands where murdered bodies were once dumped. The business assistance office in the heart of the slum is helping tiny food stores and Internet cafés flourish where there used to be only crumbling cinder block and exposed sewer pipes. Today, Medellín's murder rate is 28 per 100,000, lower than those of Baltimore and Washington, D.C.Statistics alone don't capture the sense of rebirth here. Atop the slum, in the shadow of ascending gondolas and a new computer lab, the city's poorest children think they're kings of the hill. They chase after me, tugging at my jacket, 30 or 40 at once. It's not my money that they want, it's pictures of themselves and their friends. As I sit down to catch my breath, a runty seven-year-old boy with a precocious understanding of digital photography suddenly climbs out from under the bench. "I don't have e-mail yet," he says. "So print it for me for when you come back, O.K.?"With Cristina Lindblad in New York

Ireland's links with Colombia

Letters to the Editor (THE IRISH TIMES).
Monday, February 5, 2007

IRELAND'S LINKS WITH COLOMBIA

Source: http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/letters/2007/0205/index.html

A chara,

I welcome your report of January 19th that the Government of Colombia has rescinded its requirement that Irish passport holders obtain a visa in order to visit that country. This measure was discriminatory and unfair, since it singled out Irish citizens from all others of the European Union.

Since there is no Colombian embassy in Dublin, often Irish citizens were compelled to travel to attend at a Colombian embassy in a foreign country (the United Kingdom) in order to process their visa application. The Colombian authorities made no effort to justify the requirement, or even publicise it, so that in the early years there were cases of Irish citizens travelling to Colombia unaware of the need to hold a visa, only to be detained and deported once they landed in Bogotá.

The repeal of the visa measure now gives us an opportunity to look to better relations between Ireland and Colombia. As a frequent visitor to that country, I commend it to the increasing numbers of Irish people who travel to long-haul destinations.

Colombia is one of the largest countries in Latin America, stretching from the Caribbean to the Andes and offering a benign climate and rich culture. The landscape is beautiful and varied - soaring mountain ranges, fertile plains, rain forest, uncrowded beaches. The capital, Bogotá, has much to offer, be it the renowned Museo del Oro (Gold Museum) or the Catedral de Sal (Cathedral of Salt) a few miles outside the city.

On the coast, Cartagena de Indias, the old centre of the Spanish silver and gold trade, preserves a charming colonial environment. Medellín, "city of orchids and eternal spring", now hosts one of Latin America's greatest technological achievements, the truly spectacular Metrocable, a cable-car system which for less than a euro provides panoramic vistas of the city.

The political and security situation has improved. Even minimal prudence will ensure a trouble-free trip, a fact already recognised by the many thousands of European tourists - Spaniards, Dutch and Germans in the main - who enjoy Colombia each year.
Ireland's links with Colombia are largely forgotten in this country but deserve to be recalled.

Most prominent among the Irish who rode with Simon Bolivar in the campaign for Colombian independence from Spain was Cork's Daniel Florence O'Leary, who rose to become Bolivar's right-hand man. Wexford's John Devereux, a veteran of the 1798 Rebellion, formed and led (from the distant rear, it must be said) an Irish Legion that made up part of Bolivar's army.
Clonmel's William Duane produced the first travel book on Colombia, A Visit to Colombia in the Years 1822 & 1823. Irishmen were especially well represented as physicians in the revolutionary forces, and after independence many stayed on to become eminent doctors and surgeons.

When individuals such as myself complained to the Colombian authorities about their visa requirement, it was often pointed out to us that Ireland operates an equally stringent policy in the case of Colombian citizens who wish to visit this country. Indeed, since we have no embassy in Bogotá, Colombians have to undertake the complicated and costly process of applying for an Irish visa through Mexico City, a place some 2,000 miles from Bogotá.

Ireland is guilty of a double standard in maintaining this country's barriers to travel from Colombia. We require no visa for citizens of most of Latin America, for countries such as Bolivia, Paraquay, Nicaragua and Venezuela, yet we single out Colombians. To reciprocate the Colombian government's visa decision and in an effort to boost travel, cultural exchanges and commercial relationships between our two countries, I call on Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern to abolish the visa requirement for short-stay Colombian visitors to Ireland.

- Is mise,

Dr DAVID BARNWELL, Roinn na Spáinnise, Ollscoil na hÉireann, Má Nuad.

Come to sunny Colombia

Jun 29th 2006 CIUDAD PERDIDA, COLOMBIA
From The Economist print edition
http://www.economist.com/world/la/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7121789


Seriously, it's almost safe

MENTION Colombia, and most people think of cocaine, kidnappings and guerrilla violence. These have served to keep all but the most danger-loving tourists away for decades. But under Álvaro Uribe, Colombia's president since 2002, violence has fallen steadily and many parts of the country have become safe. Now the government is trying to replace conventional images of Colombia with different ones: white-sand beaches, colonial cities, jungle-clad mountains and placid coffee farms.


The tourism campaign has begun at home. This month, during the mid-year school holidays, thousands of Colombians have enjoyed the newly-recovered freedom to travel, using specially policed routes from major cities to favourite holiday spots. The aim now is to convince foreigners. With a promotional budget of just $4m this year, the tourism agency is concentrating its efforts on tour operators and cruise and airline executives. This spring, it invited 130 of them to see the country's beaches, its coffee farms and the Amazon region.

Mr Uribe has himself lobbied bosses of cruise-ship firms. This seems to have paid off. In May, Royal Caribbean announced that from next year some of its ships would call at Cartagena, a colonial walled port on the north coast. The Florida Caribbean Cruise Association held its annual meeting in the city last week.

Tourism officials expect 1.5m foreign visitors this year, more than 50% up from the 925,000 in 2005. (Mexico, Latin America's top tourist destination, attracts 20m foreigners a year.) Lonely Planet, a travel publisher, has chosen Colombia as one of its top ten travel hotspots for 2006, in large part because of the improvement in safety.
But care is still needed. Lonely Planet advises tourists to steer clear of Chocó on the Pacific coast, Putumayo in the far south and "anywhere east of the Andes", where there are still guerrillas. America's State Department and the British Foreign Office also warn travellers against wandering into rural areas.

Even so, groups of foreign hikers have recently taken to visiting Ciudad Perdida, one of the largest and oldest pre-Columbian settlements in the Americas, in the jungles of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The area is still home to leftist guerrillas and remnants of their arch-enemies, the right-wing paramilitary militias. But the fact that many other parts of what is a large and physically beautiful country are now safe to visit amounts to progress.

Perceptions of Latin America in the FARC-IRA Affair

Explosive Journey
Perceptions of Latin America in the FARC-IRA Affair
(2001-2005)

By Edmundo Murray





Free the Colombia 3. Tried by the media. No possible chance of a fair trial. Tabhair abhaile iad! Their lives are in mortal danger. Bring Them Home
Mural at A1/Clonti Road, south of Newry, South Armagh (Northern Ireland)
(Artist unknown, May 2003, © Dr. Jonathan McCormick)

The IRA's alleged connections with FARC, which surfaced in 2001 and continue to appear in the Irish and Colombian media, are an ideal opportunity to analyse perceptions of Latin America in Ireland. Newspaper articles, personal interviews, and the judgement of the Appeals Court in Bogotá have been used to study different attitudes in this puzzling affair, which can be viewed as one of the lowest points in Irish relations with Colombia - and perhaps with Latin America as a whole.

When the songwriter Renaud launched 'Dans la jungle' in December 2005 to support Ingrid Betancourt and other hostages abducted in Colombia, some were surprised to hear in the lyrics certain echoes of the war on terror currently being waged by the United States and other governments. Betancourt, a Colombian politician who adopted French citizenship and founded the Oxígeno Verde green party, was kidnapped on 23 February 2003 by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The song itself is a continuation of Renaud's long career as a writer of protest songs. He highlighted the double standards of Colombian guerrillas who claimed to wish to improve society and yet became a criminal army. However one could perceive in the French songwriter's most recent work a common worldview in which Latin America is depicted as a 'jungle', or a place steeped in corruption, chaos and turmoil, in contrast to the supposed honesty and civilisation of life and politics in Europe.

The Irish Republican Army's (IRA) alleged connections with FARC surfaced in 2001 and continue to appear in the Irish and Colombian media. I consider the ongoing affair an ideal opportunity to analyse perceptions of Latin America in Ireland. For the purposes of this article I used the limited number of relevant documents available to the public, together with online newspaper articles and interviews conducted by email. Rather than unveiling new information or undertaking a definitive account, the object of this article is to examine opinions that reveal values and beliefs regarding Latin America and its cultures.

Gangs of Colombia

Among Colombian rebel groups, according to the US Department of State, FARC 'is the oldest, largest, most capable, and best-equipped insurgency of Marxist origin' (US Navy NPS 2005). 'Foreign citizens are often targets of FARC kidnapping for ransom. The FARC has well-documented ties to the full range of narcotics trafficking activities, including taxation, cultivation, and distribution.' It comprises 'approximately 9,000 to 12,000 armed combatants and several thousand more supporters, mostly in rural areas' (US Navy NPS 2005). Several of the recruits are under eighteen years old and a third are women.

FARC has proclaimed itself a political-military Marxist-Leninist organisation inspired by Bolivarian ideals. [1] It claims to represent the rural poor in opposition to Colombia's wealthy classes, and opposes US influence in the region and neo-liberal policies. FARC was created on 27 May 1964 during Operation Marquetalia, when the Colombian Army overran this enclave held by peasant guerrillas, with key leaders such as Manuel Marulanda Vélez and Jacobo Arenas. The first conference was organised in 1965 and was attended by 100 guerrillas. Internal feuds resulted in a lack of unified strategies until 1974, when a metamorphosis was implemented from a guerrilla force into a revolutionary army. After the sixth conference in 1978, FARC operated in the Guayabero area. In 1982 the official name was changed to Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People's Army (FARC-EP), and the political-military Bolivarian Campaign was launched. A cease fire was negotiated with the Colombian government in late 1984, and FARC supported the parliamentarian candidates of the Patriotic Union party. Murders by the regular armed forces and paramilitary groups provoked a violation of the armistice and FARC resumed fighting in 1987. A new peace process began in 1991 but lasted only until 1992. Intensive military campaigns led by FARC resulted in another round of negotiations with the government. In the hope of negotiating a peace settlement, on 7 November 1998 president Andrés Pastrana granted FARC a 42,000 sq. km safe haven at San Vicente del Caguán in Caquetá department. This was the condition which FARC dictated for the initiation of peace talks. The peace process came to a halt in February 2002 after a series of high-profile actions, among them the kidnapping of political figures. FARC's international connections include links with Cuba and with radical groups in Latin America, most notably in Peru and more recently in Paraguay.

One of the paramilitary groups combating FARC, the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC) is portrayed as an armed organisation that protects local economic, social and political interests by fighting Marxist insurgents, citing the excuse that the Colombian government has historically failed to do so. Its forces are estimated at between 10,000 and 20,000 militants, and it is considered to be a terrorist organisation by most countries, including the US. In 2000, former AUC leader Carlos Castaño Gil claimed that 70 per cent of the AUC's operation costs were financed through drug-related activities. Both FARC and AUC are accused of being key players in contraband drug production and distribution, and are therefore targets of the internationally-sponsored Plan Colombia.

With the primary aims of bolstering Colombia's social and economic development, combating the drug production and trade, strengthening government institutions, and ending armed conflict with insurgent groups, Plan Colombia was launched by the administration of president Andrés Pastrana in October 1999. Over one third of the original budget of US$7.5 billion was pledged by the international community. The Clinton administration in the US donated US$1.3 billion, and assigned military personnel to train local forces, and experts to assist in the eradication of coca plantations. These contributions to the plan made Colombia the third largest recipient of foreign aid from the US at that time. Further funding from the Bush administration was approved under the provisions of the Andean Counterdrug Initiative. Support from the European Union and some countries outside the EU met with little co-operation amid severe criticism, in particular of the procedure of aerial fumigation to eradicate coca. This activity allegedly damages legal crops and has adverse effects on the health of those exposed to the herbicides. Critics of the initiative also claim that elements within the Colombian security forces who receive aid and training from the Plan may be involved in supporting the AUC paramilitary forces. Moreover, recent research has shown that Colombia's economic problems are more related to political violence than to the drug trade in itself. [2]



FARC training at San Vicente del Caguán
(Donna de Cesare, 2001)



Los Tres Monos [3]


On 11 August 2001, John Joseph Kelly, Edward Joseph Campbell and David Bracken were detained in Bogotá's El Dorado airport while attempting to leave Colombia (Appeals Court sentence, p. 2). [4] On the basis of intelligence from former guerrillas, the three men were suspected of being IRA explosives experts hired by FARC to provide military training to their fighters. The three admitted that their real names were Martin John McCauley, James William Monaghan and Niall Connolly, respectively, and that they had arrived from San Vicente del Caguán, an area under rebel control that had previously been liberated and demilitarised for the peace negotiations. The military police officer Captain Wber Pulido arrested the trio and handed them over to the Colombian courts (18).

After the preliminary investigation, the public prosecutor charged them of conducting training for illegal activities and travelling on false passports, charges that were denied by the defendants in their pre-trial depositions of 14 and 15 August 2001. The three men added that they were visiting the liberated area as tourists and later as observers of the peace process. The Interpol local branch identified McCauley and Monaghan as IRA members and explosives experts, and confirmed that the three men were travelling on passports obtained through fraudulent methods. Tests on explosive substances were performed by the US Embassy expert Anthony M. Hall on the possessions of the three men using General Electric Itemiser technology. The samples tested positive for traces of nitro, tetril, HMX (high melting explosive), TNT, and ammonium nitrate, among other substances (98). On 21 August 2001 the judge remanded the men in custody and on 15 February 2002 they were officially charged by the prosecution.

Niall Connolly, Martin McCauley and James Monaghan portrayed in a mural at Levin Road, Killwilke,
Lurgan, Co. Armagh
(Artist unknown, May 2003, © Dr. Jonathan McCormick)

Monaghan, McCauley and Connolly (or Los Tres Monos, as they were styled in Colombia) had been seen by witnesses in the FARC-controlled area since 1998 (83-95). Marcos Trujillo Celada saw one of them in August 1998 at Donde Robert with many other persons, among them a FARC commanding officer known as Julián. Giovanni Escobar Polania declared that they had shown FARC combatants a video about explosives in Ireland. John Alexander Rodríguez had seen them carrying out explosives training in late 1998, mid-1999, late 2000 and 2001. Rodríguez added that during their second visit they carried missile launchers with them. Furthermore, the men's passports recorded visits to Venezuela, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama from July 1999 to April 2001, while their real passports - those issued on their real names - were used to leave Ireland, stopping at Paris and Madrid.

According to Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC, now PSNI) officers Garry Ian Clark and Christopher Kenneth Johnson, James Monaghan had been arrested in Ireland for use of explosives and for IRA membership. He had escaped from a Dublin courtroom using an explosive. He was re-arrested, sentenced to ten years, and freed in 1985. Martin McCauley had been arrested in 1994 and sentenced to two years for possession of arms and rocket attacks. He was wounded during the arrest. He was allegedly involved in a murder, though his participation has never been proven. Niall Connolly was Sinn Féin's representative in Cuba. In 2001 he had tried to obtain a false passport in Northern Ireland (55). Captain Pulido and other Colombian officers further stated that as a result of IRA training provided to FARC guerrillas, there had been an increase in terrorist activities, including mortar launching from 1999 to 2004, a technique pioneered in Europe by IRA explosives experts (118).

James William Monaghan [Edward Joseph Campbell] declared that he had been born in Ireland on 9 August 1945 and had worked with the railway as a metallurgic technician. In 1999 he was granted a position with an organisation called Coiste na n-Iarchimí (Ex-Prisoners' Committee), whose primary aim was to help former Republican prisoners to reintegrate into society and to enable them to use their abilities to shape the new society that would emerge from the Irish Peace Process. In 1972 he was arrested in London and given a prison sentence for the use of military equipment. He confirmed that he was also sentenced for placing explosives in a courtroom (73-75). Martin John McCauley [John Joseph Kelly] said he had been born on 1 December 1962 in County Armagh. He admitted that he had been convicted of the use of arms in Ireland and wounded in a fight. He arrived in Bogotá from Paris, in the company of Monaghan, on an Air France flight (75-76). Niall Connolly [David Bracken], born on 5 December 1964, stated that he had worked as a translator and lived in Havana with his partner, a Cuban national, and two children (76-77). He arrived in Bogotá via Madrid and Caracas.

The British explosives expert Keith Borer was called in as a witness for the defence. Although he acknowledged that he was not familiar with FARC techniques, Borer declared that the methods in use by the IRA and FARC were not similar. He analysed the results of the first explosive traces tests and though he recognised that the Itemiser was a very accurate instrument, he added that further tests were negative because the first samples may have been contaminated (107-117).

Other witnesses testified for the defence, including Ross O'Sullivan, Seán Ciarán Ó Domhnaill, Laurence Patrick McKeown, Síle Maguire and Michael McLaren. The testimony of the latter witness ultimately worked in favour of the prosecution as he presented electronically-manipulated videos in an attempt to prove that Monaghan had not been in Colombia at the time that he was charged with training guerrillas in San Vicente del Caguán (126). Further documents included tax payment certificates but there were no records for the periods during which Monaghan had been seen in Colombia. Ultimately, the defence failed to present evidence in the form of notes, interviews or recordings to establish that the three men had been conducting social research on, or studying, the peace process (79).

On 26 April 2004, Bogotá's First Penal Court Judge Jairo Acosta acquitted the three Irishmen of the most serious charge of training for illegal activities which carried a 15-20 year sentence, but sentenced Monaghan to three and half years, McCauley to three years and Connolly to two years for travelling on false passports. They were released on probation while the prosecution appealed the sentence. The appeal was successful at the Appeals Court on 16 December 2004. This court also reversed the acquittal on the charge of training guerrillas, sentencing Niall Connolly and James W. Monaghan to seventeen and a half years each, and ordering them to pay a fine of approximately US$280,000. The Court sentenced John McCauley to seventeen years with a fine of approximately US$217,000. The three men were to be deported from Colombia after they had completed their prison sentences.

However, at the time of the sentencing they were no longer in Colombia as they had jumped bail. In spite of the international arrest warrant issued for Monaghan, McCauley and Connolly, they managed to flee the country and on 15 September 2005 were safely back in Ireland, just eight days after the IRA's historic announcement of its cessation of illegal activity. Shortly after arrival, the three reported to An Garda Síochána, the Irish police force, of their presence in the country. To date, extradition requests from the Colombian government have been unsuccessful and the three men remain at large in Ireland. [5]

It is not the purpose of this article to unearth the actual facts in the history of FARC-IRA relations. Rather I propose to analyse the different discourses which can be read between the lines of relevant documents, interviews and media articles.


Bring Them Home


The three men in question repeatedly denied the charges made against them. James Monaghan stated that 'the charge of training the FARC is a false charge, based on false evidence. The training never happened, and I and my friends are therefore not guilty' (Ruane 2003: 11). Defence lawyer Peter Madden affirmed that 'there was no real evidence against them' (6). Furthermore, according to the chairperson of the Bring Them Home campaign, Sinn Féin Member of the Local Assembly, Caitríona Ruane, during their imprisonment Monaghan, McCauley and Connolly had 'been subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, threats to their lives, fears that their food was being poisoned, worry about dangers to their families and friends visiting them' (7). She characterised Colombia as 'a country where abuse of human rights is routine, systematic and relentless' and went further to say that 'the Colombian military and prosecutor have fabricated a case against these three men' (7).

Although it was published before the ruling by the Appeals Court, a document edited by Ruane, Colombia: Judge for Yourself, refers to the same facts and represents a counterbalance to the statements contained in the charges. It includes the declarations of the three accused men to the court in Bogotá, summaries of the process, documents supporting the cause and, of particular interest, statements by the observers. Observers were selected among renowned solicitors and barristers, specialists in international law, human rights experts, legislators, social workers and trade union leaders. The observer reports are in general comprehensive, clear and appear to be technically-sound, though I cannot claim any judicial experience or knowledge of criminal law and procedures. In particular, the reports by Ronan Munro, Natalie Kabasakalian and Shaun Kerrigan are very helpful in understanding the defendants' plea against the charges.

The observers are collectively described in Ruane's document as an 'International Delegation' (9, 19, 67) or 'brave people from three continents (Australia, Europe, and North America)' (7). Nevertheless, in the context of this article, it is important to remark that they are exclusively from Ireland, the US and Australia. There is a significant lack of observers from other parts of the world, particularly from Spanish-speaking countries, and of observers with experience of the criminal law system in Latin American countries.

Moreover, some of the observers' comments reveal their ignorance of the Colombian situation, and others may be perceived as patronising in relation to local practices. Commenting on the prosecutor's harsh question to a witness for the defence, Seán Crowe, TD for Dublin South West and Sinn Féin's spokesperson on Science and Education and Community Affairs, remarked that 'as an Irish Parliamentarian I don't believe that anywhere in the civilised world would this type of insulting behaviour be allowed' (21). Indeed, the civilised world mentioned by Seán Crowe does not seem to include Colombia. Finian McGrath, Independent TD in Ireland, rightly alluded to the violent methods of the paramilitary groups that oppose FARC guerrillas, but he demonstrated a particular ideological bias when he asserted that 'this is Colombia and anyone left or centre is an "extremist" or a "legitimate target" for the death squads' (24). Notwithstanding its clear structure and argumentation, Irish Senator Mary White's report maintained that 'political ex-prisoners in such a situation [trying to enter a country without a waiver visa] often consider their lives are in danger from subversive groups in many countries, particularly military and paramilitary groups in South and Central America' (28). In his concluding remarks, Barry McElduff MLA, member of Sinn Féin's Six County Executive and Chairperson of Sinn Féin in County Tyrone, stated that he had no 'real hope that these men could ever receive a fair hearing or any kind of justice in Colombia' (31).

Certain remarks from the observers Patrick Daly, Paul Hill and Pat Fowler are regrettable and do not help to objectively evaluate the defendants' stand. The Irish solicitor Patrick Daly makes comparisons with Ireland, where 'justice must be done but also must be seen to be done.' This statement seems to be irrelevant in the context of the Colombian judicial system. In this respect, Daly observed that 'things often move slowly in Colombia' (36), without any consideration to the different meanings that time may have to diverse cultures. He went on with assessments 'by way of comparison' with Ireland or 'by international standards' (38), which are in fact limited to Daly's experience in English-speaking countries. Paul Hill, one of the Guildford Four, [6] echoed the other observers in stating that 'as one who has observed trials in the North of Ireland, England, Scotland, Holland, America (north and south) Australia, I can honestly say I know of no other country where this case would be allowed to proceed.' He reinforced his views by pointing to the sequence of witness declarations dictated by the judge, and commented that it 'was in my view bizarre and would not be acceptable in any normal jurisdiction' (39). By normal he was certainly referring to the courts of which he had experience, reducing in this way the context of his judgement to a few legal systems in the world. The same can be observed in Pat Fowler's report, which is based on what is customary 'in most courts' or what is judged by 'most people in world' (63); vague statements that are not substantiated.


The issue of language and its cultural consequences is relevant to this analysis. Steve McCabe, a US-based lawyer and member of the Brehon Law Society, complained that 'no translation services were provided during the first day of the trial' and he regarded this as 'a case of passing the buck and perhaps an effort to preclude the [observers'] Delegation from understanding the nature of the testimony and the proceedings' (41). For his part, in his comprehensive and well-structured report, the Australian lawyer Shaun Kerrigan stated that 'after the first real public hearings in December 2002 the Presiding Judge adopted the philosophy that a translator would only be provided by the Colombian Government or was only required to be provided by the Colombian Government when the accused were actually present in Court or the persons giving evidence to the Court's first language was English' (67). Therefore, the observers' delegation had to obtain a translation themselves. Their complaint about the lack of translation services could be seen as a confirmation of their prejudiced attitudes towards a different culture in which the first language is not English. However, taking into account their qualifications, one would think that it is just one of their conditions in providing an accurate and impartial report. Subsidiary to the issue of language is the manner in which some observers spelled the name of the country. This is not a trivial issue given that they wrote their report subsequent to their visit. They should therefore have shown at least a minimum of respect for the country's name, which is misspelled by Des Bonass ('the Columbian military', 32) and Ronan Munro ('the Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs of Columbia', 79, my italics). Frequently in the English-speaking world Colombia is incorrectly written as Columbia. Yet one would expect that international observers selected on the basis of their objectivity to report on this trial would be aware of the difference between the Republic of Colombia and Canada's British Columbia or the District of Columbia in the US.

Ireland in Colombia - Latin America in Ireland

In order to obtain first-hand opinions from people interested in the trial of the three Irishmen, I conducted interviews by email with people in Colombia and in Ireland.

Johanna Cortés Conde is a young barrister at the courts of Bogotá. She was not involved in any stage of the judiciary process in relation to the accused Irishmen, though she is acquainted with the opinions prevalent in Colombia concerning the affair. Cortés Conde understands that FARC is connected to other international guerrilla groups, including Sendero Luminoso in Peru, and that they may have links with president Hugo Chávez of neighbouring Venezuela. She expressed the wish that Colombia and Ireland would improve co-operation, and suggested that the peace process in Northern Ireland could serve as a model for Colombia. In Colombia, people know very little about Ireland, and probably for this reason the trial of the three Irish prisoners has been underrepresented in the local media. Therefore she does not believe that this incident has damaged Ireland's reputation in Colombia. FARC has managed to garner some support in European countries, and is sometimes viewed as an organisation which protects the poor, though in reality - she says - they are mercenaries acting in collusion with drug-trafficking cartels. Corruption in Colombia's judiciary system is more rampant than in most European countries. However in recent times standards have improved significantly. Since the adoption of the new constitution of 1991, recourse to protection may be called upon in any context by any person, including foreigners. Basic rights like due process are constitutionally guaranteed. In addition, regulatory bodies are accessible to anyone and therefore transparency during the trial is guaranteed.


Explosive Journey


IV



Alejandra Gonzalez was born in Medellín, a city north-west of Bogotá, and is a PhD student at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where she is involved in research and lecturing at the Centre for Innovation & Structural Change (CISC). [7] She comments that in many countries in Latin America the presence of Irish people was extremely valuable. The Irish Republicans' struggle for a united Ireland has been a source of inspiration for the organisations involved in the often suppressed socialist movements in Latin America. With regard to alleged connections between FARC and the IRA, Gonzalez believes that the image of Colombia in Ireland was negatively affected by the affair. She considers the 'Bring Them Back' [sic] campaign to have emphasised Colombia's most serious problems in the eyes of the general public in order to build a strong case for their campaign and to enhance their arguments. Nonetheless, she does not think the reputation of Latin America in general has been damaged by the event.

Caitríona Ruane is Sinn Féin's spokesperson on Equality, Human Rights and Women. She is an elected member of the Northern Ireland Assembly for the South Down constituency. She has experience of working in Latin America since 1983 and has chaired the Bring Them Home campaign since 2001. Ruane confirms that Sinn Féin has extensive links with political parties and social movements in Latin America, and points to the relationship between Britain and Ireland, historically that of coloniser and colonised, suggesting that it is therefore qualitatively different to that between Ireland and Latin America. In reference to immigration, Ruane recognises some institutionalised resistance to immigrants expressed in new Irish legislation. However she claims that Ireland has traditionally been a place which welcomes and assists new arrivals. Regarding the trial of the three Irishmen accused in Colombia, she asserts that only the reputation of the Colombian government, army, police and prison service, along with elements of the judiciary, has been damaged by this episode. From her own experience she has a positive view of the people and the cultures of Colombia, but criticises the abuse of authority by the rich and powerful.

It seems to me that the FARC-IRA affair represents one of the lowest points in the Irish relations with Colombia - and perhaps with Latin America - since the massive enrollment of Irish mercenaries almost two centuries ago to fight against Spanish colonial forces in Simón Bolívar's independence armies. In the present-day situation, the immigration controls in place for any visitor to Ireland are far more rigorous in the case of Colombian citizens than those of most other countries. The FARC-IRA affair did not help to ease those measures and did not contribute to facilitating free travel for Colombians. At the Colombian embassy in London I was informed by a spokesperson that owing to this affair the reputation of their country in Ireland has been negatively affected. [8] Conversely, since October 2001, the Irish are the only Europeans who are required to obtain a visa to enter Colombia.

News, Facts and Perceptions

Media reporting of the alleged FARC-IRA connection frequently comes across as a dichotomous discourse in which every player or episode is invariably consigned to one or the other side of a right-wrong divide. As a result of this, an astonishing number of print media and their online pages seem to have opted for one or the other position without further consideration of the numerous complexities of the situation.
Mural at Southway, Brandywell, Derry
(Artist unknown, December 2002. Copyright © Dr. Jonathan McCormick

One example is in the headlines, which are important in providing a brief summary of the news that follows, and indeed in attracting the audience's attention. The latter aim is often attained by paraphrasing literary texts or works of art - the subtitle of the first section of this article, 'Gangs of Colombia', is symptomatic of this trend, playing on the title of the film Gangs of New York - or by making an association with a popular historic event. News items relating to the FARC-IRA affair frequently include the title 'Colombia Three', thereby establishing an immediate association for Irish, and to a lesser extent UK audiences and readers, with the 'Birmingham Six' and the above mentioned 'Guildford Four'. All of these prisoners were proven to be innocent people framed by various members of the police force in the UK and imprisoned for offences and crimes which they did not commit. I could not access information on how the headline 'Colombia Three' originated and became popular among journalists and others writing about this matter, but it is clear that it is not a neutral heading. [9] Another rather clumsy headline used by some print media is 'The Colombia Connection' which recalls William Friedkin's film The French Connection (1971), inherently linking violence and drug trafficking with the South American country. Likewise the campaign name 'Bring Them Home' mirrors a number of anti-war crusades in the US.

Elaborating on the information available relating to alleged links between FARC and the IRA would be misleading given the difficulties in locating reliable sources. In my analysis of newspaper sources, I covered the period from August 2001 to January 2006 inclusive, and a variety of national newspapers in Colombia, Ireland and the United Kingdom which offer online websites. Very few of the features published on this matter that I was able to study can be characterised as providing neutral information, the balance being unambiguously against the accused men in the case of the majority of Colombian and British media, and vaguely in favour among their Irish colleagues. Ostensibly, journalists writing these articles did not have recourse to the trial documents and rulings, most notably absent were references to the text of the charges.



Simplify and exaggerate is often the mantra when information is scarce and contradictory, when the subject is difficult to explain to a broad audience, and when prejudices are widely rooted in public opinions. Used by management counsellors, pseudo-scientific strategists, and self-improvement book authors, this recipe is also a favourite among the press and politicians to reduce complex information to simplistic statements that are difficult to dispute. News items on the FARC-IRA affair tend to pigeonhole the three accused men, their lawyers, Sinn Féin and even their country of origin together with the Marxist FARC rebels, Cuban and Venezuelan governments, international terrorist networks, drug-traffickers, warlords and arms dealers in Colombian jungles. Prevalent on the other side of the divide are the US, British, Irish and European governments, in co-operation with the regular Colombian forces, law enforcement organisations combating drug and arms trafficking, the international war on terror, and even paramilitary groups such as AUC. [10]

Another over-simplified taxonomy divides the players in this affair between those belonging to the supposedly civilised world of North America and Europe and representatives of the perceived untamed societies of Latin America. This opposition, redolent of Oliver Goldsmith's The Traveller's prejudiced depictions of continental European peoples, is given further contours by the reality of Latin America's Europeanised elites who regard native cultures as backward and barbarous. An appalling example is Mario Vargas Llosa's recent article about successful political movements in Bolivia, Peru and Venezuela, in which the aspirations of the indigenous people are seen by the Peruvian-Spanish author as racist, nationalist and militarist. [11] Even more outdated and entirely useless are 'left' and 'right' categorisations, which, even acknowledging the use of 'centre' and the more nuanced 'centre-left' and 'centre-right', should be limited to their French Revolution context. Nevertheless they are employed with staggering frequency to classify people, political movements, media and even entire countries and continents.

How should one approach the analysis of the FARC-IRA affair? In view of these prejudiced categories and descriptions, the likelihood of the publication in our lifetimes of a complete, accurate and candid account is doubtful to say the least. If the objective is to achieve a simple elucidation of the affair without falling into the trap of creating a new conspiracy theory, perhaps it is only our children, or even grandchildren, who will benefit from the neutrality more easily afforded by a historical perspective. Writing the history of current events is never an easy ride, and it is a task most reviled by historians. Reliable documents are in short supply or difficult to obtain. Factual or in-depth research is often resisted by the actors in the affair, most of whom have a vested interest in the story. When 'good' and 'evil' are identified, people tend to justify themselves, and their susceptibility is intense.

With these potential pitfalls in mind, instead of trying to ascertain the real facts of the story of the three Irish men in Colombia, I endeavoured to expose some prevalent perceptions that are deeply rooted in the mentalities of the people of Colombia and Ireland. As a rule, according to Tzvetan Todorov, we tend to think in a binary mode, liberal/conservative, idealist/realist, left/right, active/passive, and so on. [12] It is not necessary to reject one or the other term in these oppositions, but rather this very way of conceptualising the problem.

There may be other ways to classify the behaviour of all the players in this puzzling affair. Human beings are morally undefined, good and bad at the same time. Instead of the many manifestations of the opposition between 'us' and 'them', I propose to use Todorov's qualifying categories - democratic and totalitarian - to regard the events in a different manner. We are all democratic and totalitarian, Latin American and European (and African and Asian), left- and right-wing, moral and wicked. But when we preach as high-priests of morality we do little to ameliorate sectarian divisions. As Renaud says in his other song 'La ballade Nord-Irlandaise': Ce sont les hommes pas le curés / qui font pousser les orangers. [13]



Edmundo Murray



Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Johanna Cortés Nieto, Maria Alejandra Gonzalez-Perez, Claire Healy, Catherine Jennings, Fergal McAuliffe, Jorge Restrepo, Caitríona Ruane and Edward Walsh, for sharing with me their valuable information and views. I am also thankful to Jonathan McCormick and the CAIN Web Service (Conflict Archive on the Internet) for their authorisation to reproduce the mural photographs.

References

- Apelación sentencia absolutoria y condenatoria, James W. Monaghan, Martin J. McCauley y Niall Connolly por Entrenamiento para actividades ilícitas y Uso de documento público falso. Bogotá: Tribunal Superior de Distrito Judicial, Sala Penal (Judges Martha Lucía Tamayo Vélez, Jorge Enrique Torres Romero, Juan Iván Almaza Latorre), 16 December 2004, 144 pp.

- Colombia Libre - Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC). Available online , accessed 18 January 2005.

- Email interviews with Johanna Cortés Conde (20 September 2005), Caitríona Ruane (21 October 2005), and Maria Alejandra Gonzalez Perez (19 January 2006). Telephone conversation with a spokesperson for the Colombian Embassy in London (18 January 2005).

- Freedom Institute, The Colombia Three. Last updated 9 August 2005. Available online , accessed 5 January 2005.

- Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia - Ejército del Pueblo (FARC-EP). Available online , accessed 18 January 2005.

- Online news services BBC News, BBC Mundo, Colombia Journal, El Espectador, El Tiempo, The Express News, The Irish Echo, The Irish Examiner, The Irish Times, Semana.com, The Sunday Business Post, The Guardian, from August 2001 to January 2006.

- Departamento Nacional de Planeación - República de Colombia, Balance del Plan Colombia (17 September 2003). Available online , accessed 30 January 2006.

- Ruane, Caitríona (ed.), Colombia: Judge for Yourself (Dublin: Bring Them Home Campaign, 2003). Available online , accessed 5 January 2005.

- US Navy NPS, Terrorist Group Profiles. Last updated 11 May 2005. Available online , accessed 9 January 2005.



Notes

[1] FARC-EP website.

[2] Holmes, Jennifer S. and Sheila Amin Gutiérrez de Piñeres, 'The Illegal Drug Industry. Violence and the Colombian Economy: A Department Level Analysis' in Bulletin of Latin American Research, 25:1 (January 2006), pp. 104-118.

[3] In Colombian Spanish, 'Los tres monos' translates as 'The three blondes' (without gender connotations).

[4] The account of the arrest and trial was taken from the Appeals Court sentence of 16 December 2004. Page numbers of the sentence are indicated between brackets.

[5] Referring to intelligence in his possession, the Irish Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, divulged that the IRA was to be paid between €20 million and €30 million by FARC for this service. The money had been raised by FARC through the organisation’s dealings in the global cocaine trade (The Irish Times, 23 January 2006).

[6] The Guildford Four (Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Patrick Armstrong and Carole Richardson) were wrongly convicted in the United Kingdom in October 1975 of the Provisional IRA's Guildford pub bombing which killed five and injured sixty-five people. They served over fifteen years in prison.

[7] Alejandra Gonzalez's account of the Colombian presence in Ireland is very interesting. The largest group of Colombians is located in Dublin, and she estimates the total number at about 300. Twice a year, Colombian gatherings are organised in Dublin, generally around Christmas and for Colombian Independence Day (July 20th). Also, there is a Colombian Catholic priest in Dublin who says mass in Spanish, and this is well attended by the Colombian community. There are several Colombian women married to Irish men, along with Colombian engineers working in the information technology industry. Gonzalez considers Irish society to be more open than that of Colombia in terms of class, race, religion and sexual orientation, but she complains about the misty, grey and rainy weather of the west of Ireland.

[8] The embassy of Colombia in London is responsible for diplomatic relations with the UK and Ireland.

[9] Two observers described the affair using the loaded appellation 'The Colombia Three', including Niall Andrews, Irish Member of the European Parliament ('the trial of the Colombia Three'), and Des Bonass, Executive of the Dublin Council of Trade Unions ('visit of Columbia [sic] Three') (Ruane 2003: 19, 32).

[10] However, the media also reported on the resolution adopted by the European Parliament on violations of human rights in Colombia, particularly the case of Fr. Brendan Forde and his community of La Unión (7 September 2000). This is but one example of official criticism from a governmental body regarding the action of paramilitary groups. In the session of 18 October 2000 of Dáil Éireann (the Irish lower house of parliament), the then Minister for Foreign Affairs Brian Cowen was questioned on this same issue (Vol. 524).

[11] Vargas Llosa, Mario, 'De la mano de la "izquierda boba". Asoma en la región un nuevo racismo: indios contra blancos' in La Nación (Buenos Aires), 20 January 2006.

[12] Todorov, Tzvetan, Mémoire du mal, tentation du bien: Enquête sur le siècle (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 2000).

[13] It is the men not the priests who grow the orange trees. Renaud Séchan, La ballade Nord-Irlandaise in 'Marchand de caillaux' (1991).
Copyright © Society for Irish Latin American Studies, 2006

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Online published: 1 March 2006
Edited: 02 March 2006 Citation:
Murray, Edmundo, 'Explosive Journey: Perceptions of Latin America in the FARC-IRA Affair (2001-2005)' in "Irish Migration Studies in Latin America" 2006. Available online (www.irlandeses.org), accessed 11 June 2006.

The Irish in Colombia

The Irish in Colombia
http://www.irlandeses.org/colombia.htm
By Edmundo Murray


Photo: Palenquera in the Caribbean coast
(Photo Mauricio Zuloaga)

The only South American country with coasts on both the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans, Colombia was part of the Spanish viceroyalty of New Granada. The United States of Colombia, which also included Panama, Venezuela and Ecuador was proclaimed in 1819 by Simón Bolívar when he crossed the Andes and defeated the royalist forces at the battle of Boyacá. In 1822 the four countries were united as Gran Colombia, which collapsed in 1830 with the separation of Venezuela and Ecuador. The republic of Colombia was established in 1886, but Panama separated in 1903, after the US-backed War of the Thousand Days (1899-1902).


Irish soldiers fought in Colombia during the War of Independence with Spain in 1816-1822. They were recruited in Dublin, London and other cities by John Devereux, James T. English, William Walton and others. The Irish Legion sailed from Liverpool in July 1819. Some of the officers were Major L'Estrange, Francis Burdett O'Connor, and William Aylmer. They arrived in the island of Margarita, where they suffered hardships, sickness and loss of life. In March 1820 the Legion sailed to Río Hacha, and after the attack to this city, their standard displaying the harp of Ireland was raised instead of the Spanish royal ensign. Weakened by lack of pay and proper food, and complaining of the native officers, some of the Irish mutinied, got drunk and began to ransack the city for booty. The mutineers were transported to Jamaica and turned over to the British authorities. O'Connor's lancers continued the campaign and reached Cartagena by the end of 1822, and effectively assisted Bolívar at the decisive battle of Boyacá. The chief responsible for the formation of the Irish Legion, John Devereux, did not arrive at South America until 1821. He never took part in a single engagement with the Legion, but he made a pretty profit in organizing it. However, Simón Bolívar absolved Devereux from any blame and in 1822 attached him to the general staff at Bogotá. In 1823 John Devereux was appointed Colombian envoy to the courts of northern Europe.

Some of the soldiers of the Irish Legion remained in Colombia after the War of Independence. After the battle of Boyacá, Daniel Florence O'Leary (1801-1854) was appointed Bolívar's aide-de-camp and served in Venezuela, Panama, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. In 1828 O'Leary married Soledad Soublette in Bogotá and lent valuable services to Colombia and Venezuela. His memoirs, published posthumously by his son Simón Bolívar O'Leary, remain a basic reference for students of the South American Wars of Independence. Beatriz O'Connell, related to the Liberator Daniel O'Connell, married Manuel Pombo in 1795 in Madrid, and in 1819 was living in Bogotá. Other Irish settlers in Colombia related to the Wars of Independence were Thomas Murray (d.1823), who married Estrada Callejas, John Hands, Francis O'Farrell (known as Francisco Puyana), Joseph Boylan, Robert Lee, James Rooke, and the physicians Dr. Hugh Blair Brown (surgeon of the Arthur Sandes' Rifles in Peru), Dr. Kennedy, Dr. Williamson, and Dr. McEwen.

Almost 150 years later, a new type of legion arrived in Colombia, though this time peacefully. In 1953 the Catholic lay movement Legion of Mary sent Seamus Grace and Alphie Lamb (1932-1959) to Bogotá to expand their mission in Colombia. From the capital, Grace and Lamb established many Legion branches (praesidia) in other parts of the country. They visited bishops and obtained their permission to set up in their dioceses. The Legion flourished around Colombia, especially among the poor, and then expanded to Ecuador, Venezuela and throughout South America.

The most recent chapter in the history of Colombian-Irish relations allegedly connects the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). On 11 August 2001, Jim Monaghan, Niall Connolly, and Martin McCauley were arrested at Bogotá's airport, accused of being IRA members providing explosives training to FARC in the demilitarised zone of San Vicente del Caguán in southern Colombia. Established in 1964 as the military wing of the Colombian Communist Party, FARC is the largest irregular army in Latin America. Washington accuses FARC and other 'narco-terrorists' of profiting from the illegal drug production and distribution business. The three Irishmen were travelling on false passports. At first they said they were bird-watching but later added they were studying the Colombia peace process. Their initial acquittal in April 2004 was overturned by a higher court, which imposed sentences of seventeen years on each of them. They escaped from Colombia and in August 2005 – a week after the IRA proclaimed the end of its military operations – they arrived safely in Ireland. The Colombian authorities have formally required their extradition.



Edmundo Murray



Adapted from: Jim Byrne, Philip Coleman and Jason King (eds.), Ireland and the Americas: Culture, Politics and History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, forthcoming 2006), with kind permission of the publisher.


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References

- Barnwell, David. William Duane and his "Visit to Colombia" of 1823, paper presented at the CAIS annual conference in Maynooth, 22-26 June 2005.

- Hasbrouck, Alfred. Foreign Legionaries in the Liberation of Spanish South America. New York: Columbia University, 1928.

- Kirby, Peadar. Ireland and Latin America: Links and Lessons. Dublin: Trócaire, 1992.


See also The Irish in Latin America and Iberia: A Bibliography (Colombia, Venezuela). [document]





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Copyright © Society for Irish Latin American Studies, 2006

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Online published: 1 March 2006
Edited: 02 March 2006 Citation:
Murray, Edmundo, 'The Irish in Colombia' in "Irish Migration Studies in Latin America" 2006 (www.irlandeses.org), accessed 11 June 2006