Fear, Courage Mark Bogota in Drug War

BOGOTA, Colombia —  This is a story about fifth graders drilling in school to avoid assassination. It is about a 10-year-old girl pleading with her father to take her out of the country. It is a story about fear.

This is also a story about judges who go to work every day despite death threats, often taking city buses because they cannot afford a taxi ride, let alone an armored car. So this is a story about courage, too.

But mostly this is a story about coping--about people striving to live normally in a society where madmen threaten to kill children, routinely bomb restaurants, shoot randomly into crowds and menace the country’s very political fabric--all in the name of satisfying the American demand for narcotic euphoria.

Wherever you go, wherever you look, there is no escaping the fear that has gripped Bogota.

Colombia’s narcotics bosses, who call themselves “the Extraditables,” have declared “total war” on the government in response to its effort to dismantle the multibillion-dollar cocaine business and punish the bosses for killing dozens of judges, policemen, journalists and politicians, including Luis Carlos Galan, a presidential candidate who was shot to death Aug. 18.

The bosses have promised to kill at least 10 people for every drug trafficker extradited to the United States, a promise that many fear is about to be kept since the government sent accused trafficking figure Eduardo Martinez Romero to Atlanta this week for trial on money-laundering charges.

Families Affected

The fear goes beyond the people involved in the anti-drug drive--the police, the military, government officials, judges--to their families.

“We will not respect the families of those” who are fighting the drug cartels, the traffickers said in a statement distributed last month.

And the fear takes many forms. “Don’t use my name” is an expression heard from nearly everyone who will agree to be interviewed, from Supreme Court judges to Cabinet ministers to police officers.

Even Gen. Miguel A. Maza Marquez, head of the Department of Administrative Security, Colombia’s equivalent of the FBI, asked that he not be mentioned “too much” in a recent story about the use of mercenaries to train the drug traffickers’ paramilitary forces.

“It’s not that they don’t know who we are,” an official in the Ministry of Economics said, asking not to be identified by name. “It’s just that we want to avoid the public prominence that might tempt the narcotics leaders to make us an example.”

But it is more fundamental than that, this near-panic, this stomach churning that comes from fear and makes people alter their behavior and their way of life.

It causes local journalists to refuse to eat in restaurants or to be seen in any public place.

It has some foreign journalists holing up in the Hotel Tequendama in the hope that its fortress-like bulk and military ownership will somehow protect them against the traffickers’ bombs.

It has led other foreign journalists to leave the Tequendama, afraid that its military ownership and prominence as headquarters for reporters makes it a likely target for violence.

Fear has almost emptied Bogota of foreigners, from the tourists who were the first to go to the families of American diplomats and businessmen, to three Americans playing for Colombian semi-professional basketball teams.

It tears at family life. “I can’t be seen with my family,” one Planning Ministry official said. “I can’t even drive my little girl to school.”

Nearly Empty Restaurant

Recently a prominent financial planner sat in the candlelight at one of Bogota’s best restaurants, empty but for three diners, and talked about his daughter’s day at school.

“Can you imagine?” he said. “For the first time they had drills--in the fifth grade--in case of bombs or people trying to shoot them. They are supposed to get under their desks. You know what she said to me when she got home? ‘Daddy, let’s move somewhere else. Let’s go to the United States.’

“What can I say to her? I can’t leave Colombia. My work is here. My life is here. But she is afraid.”

Beyond this enveloping fear--the extra police, the roadblocks, the constant din of news about the drug war--life goes on. People shop at the supermarkets, and the Sunday promenade goes on down Seventh Avenue and into the Parque Nacional.

There are people drinking espresso, talking about literature and flirting at the Oma, a leading Bogota literary bookstore and coffee house. The jazz and rock clubs on 82nd Street still draw young people who are enthusiastic about the music.

And the Texaco station at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 69th Street has a steady flow of cars pulling up to its gas pumps and automated car wash, even though city officials have warned people against gathering in groups that could be targets for drive-by shooters or bomb throwers.

Still, this is really only the appearance of normalcy. The doorman in striped pants greeting guests at the elegant, small hotel across from the Texaco station is wearing a revolver under his coat. Military policemen lurk behind bushes at the side.

The Hotel Tequendama, seemingly busy with people scurrying about its massive lobby, is in reality nearly empty, its only guests the frightened foreign reporters.

The fear touches even that most determined of businesses, prostitution. Consider Monica, a tall and tawny-skinned stripper at Le Palace, for years one of Bogota’s favorite nightclubs. She had finished her act and was sitting at a table in the nearly empty club the other night, waiting to see if one of the few customers might want a private show.

“Normally we get a lot of American businessmen and tourists,” she said, her hands brushing nervously at her thin silk blouse. “But since Aug. 18 (the day candidate Galan was shot) no one comes here. Even when we get some customers, they leave right away. I go home early myself, and alone. I guess they are afraid.”