Making Sense of Colombia’s Drug Wars

The cocaine trade has twisted much of inner-city America into a bizarre battlefield. But anyone who thinks the brutal reality shared by cops and gang members is as nightmarish as things get should take a look at the other end of the cocaine continuum.

In Los Angeles, more than 600 people reportedly were killed in gang-related violence last year. In the hillside comunas of Colombia’s Medellin area, more than 300 police officers were killed last year, along with about 3,000 people between the ages of 14 and 25. Killings and kidnapings have become so common in Colombia that a new breed of researcher called violentologos has emerged to try to make sense of the violence.

Alma Guillermoprieto is a journalist, not a violentologos. In Colombia, the two terms are almost synonymous. In the April 15 New Yorker, Guillermoprieto does an admirable job of making sense of Colombia’s violent lunacy.

In her understated “Letter From Medellin,” she explores the impoverished hillside communities. She also probes the minds of the young people who become assassins for the country’s all-powerful drug lords or who join small bands of vigilantes and commit cold-hearted executions of the young criminals who plague the streets.

The situation in Colombia, Guillermoprieto reports, only worsened after the joint war on drugs by the United States and Colombia. And the future looks all but hopeless in her unflinching portrayal.

Policy-makers may want to take a look at the streets of Colombia and ponder what they presage for the United States.

Here, as there, people of all backgrounds are bombarded with the same visions of wealth and taught the same values of conspicuous consumption.

Here, as there, it’s obvious that hard work alone is seldom a realistic way to achieve the riches society glorifies.

Here, as there, a “democratization of wealth” now allows “working-class people suddenly in the possession of drug money to rub it in the faces of the rich.”

Here, as there, “an awful lot of teen-agers have weapons.”

But, here unlike there, we still may have time to do something about the growing dilemma of the cocaine economy.

REQUIRED READING

The banking industry, as we know it, is dying. That’s the matter-of-fact assessment in the April / May Investment Vision and the April 22 BusinessWeek.

BusinessWeek’s “Special Report” is the more comprehensive analysis of the problem, examining the myriad reasons for banking’s ill health, from increased competition by such once unexpected sources as AT&T; and Sears to the standard business scapegoat: excessive regulation. The report also discusses various merger possibilities within the industry--Bank of America and First Interstate? Wells Fargo and Security Pacific?--and strategies banks are using to survive the building financial shake-up. Included is a double centerfold “score card” of 100 banks that includes such information as return on assets and return on income.

Investment Vision’s examination of banking’s woes by L. J. Davis is more acerbic and more readable. His conclusions are also more conservative than BusinessWeek’s. While BusinessWeek applauds bankers’ innovative efforts to diversify, Davis sniffs: “There is nothing the matter with the banking business if it is sensibly pursued. None of this would have happened if bankers had simply stuck to their knitting.”

SHREDDER FODDER

Responsible journalists and publishers want to make one thing clear: They are above the sort of sleazy dirt-dishing to which author Kitty Kelley stoops in her staggeringly successful biography “Nancy Reagan.”

So concerned are Time and Newsweek with exposing Kelley’s professional shortcomings that both swallow their pride this week and--for the greater public good, no doubt--publish some of the most titillating gossip and cheap innuendo in Kelley’s book. Duty also demands that both magazines reprint plenty of juicy quotes from suspect sources, like the woman who says of Nancy: “Leona Helmsley was nicer.”

Bristling with indignation over Kelley’s journalistic sloppiness, the news magazines set out to pick apart Kelley’s reportage. But except in a few places where Kelley makes herself a terribly easy target, neither publication wastes much time documenting the accusations against the biographer. And, often, these paragons of professionalism can’t get their stories straight.

Both Time and Newsweek, for example, are eager to pooh-pooh Kelley’s suggestion that Nancy and Frank Sinatra had noontime trysts in the White House, during which Nancy refused all calls. Time’s reporters glibly dismiss the story with this: “Never mind that Nancy Reagan always had her calls held when she was lunching with a guest, male or female.”

Newsweek, meanwhile, quotes a White House aide who says, “It’s just not true that she refused calls when (Sinatra) was there.”

In the end, both magazines are ambivalent in their assessments of Kelley. So both resort to the oh-so-clever tactic of turning the tables and publishing unauthorized mini-bios of the biographer. All of which is so spectacularly trivial, it might lead some exceptionally naive fourth-grader in Omaha to wonder just why both magazines shoved aside the tragedy of the Kurds and devoted their covers to this controversial book.

The real question: Why is this silly book selling better than any book in history?

Newsweek almost redeems itself by publishing an answer from respected biographer Justin Kaplan.

Kaplan says the public’s lust for this sort of biography is a sign of these times, in which what we know about public figures comes mainly “through the work of spin doctors, damage controllers, speech writers and stage managers of pseudo-events and photo ops.

“I guess that the more we are presented with public-relations figments, the more likely we are to get into a feeding frenzy over inside stories that contradict such things as Nancy Reagan’s official version of her birth, social springboard, childhood years, family life, exercise of power and so forth.”

ESOTERICA

In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

That was also the year in which the Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain, marking one of the most important events in Jewish history. Echoes of Sepharad is dedicated to the exploration of topics of interest to Sephardic Jewry and is published quarterly by Project Rediscovery, an educational project of the Sephardic Hebrew Academy in Los Angeles.

(Subscriptions are $12 a year. Call (213) 659-2456 for information).