=================================================
"It's finally dawned on many Colombians that
the
country's future is in the balance, and when
they
don't see any light they say, 'Oh, I'm leaving.'" ______________
================================================= CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
MONITOR
Thursday, 22 July
1999
One-way tickets to better
lives
-------------------------------
By Howard LaFranchi
The lines that once formed outside the trendiest
restaurants and night clubs here are all gone now - replaced by lines in
front of the United States, Canadian, and Spanish embassies.
A sense
of crisis here is fueling this exodus of Colombians (many are purchasing
one-way airline tickets for places like New York or Miami). And the flight is
indicative of problems that could have repercussions throughout the
hemisphere.
The Colombian economy is at its worst in 50 years. There is
deep pessimism, too, over recent mass kidnappings and the prospects for
peace in the country's 40-year civil war.
The government announced
Tuesday that it's imposing economic austerity measures - slashing the budget
and streamlining the state bureaucracy. And it hopes to start talks with
guerrillas in the south next week.
But in the first four months of this
year, 65,000 Colombians left the country, officials say. They estimate that
nearly 1 percent of the population - some 300,000 - could legally leave the
country this year, not to mention those settling in new countries
illegally.
"It's not exaggerating to say we are in the deepest and most
complex crisis of this century," says Juan Manuel Ospina, a senator from
the Conservative Party.
The US Embassy in Bogota has registered a 27
percent increase in visa requests over last year. And the potential for mass
departures into neighboring countries is even more worrisome to some
analysts. "The war has created a huge population of 1 million internal
migrants," says Alvaro Tirado, a diplomatic expert and political
analyst.
Neighbors Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama have already confronted
the Colombian government about guerrilla incursions and
cross-border refugees.
Last month several groups of hundreds of
Colombians fled into Venezuela, causing "serious" concerns, a diplomat here
says. With Venezuela and Ecuador especially in economic turmoil, an upsurge
in economic or war refugees would lead to new tensions that would echo across
the region.
"What is happening in Colombia certainly could bring serious
consequences for all Latin America," says Roberto Teixeira da Costa,
president in Brasil of the Council of Latin American Business Leaders. "Our
concern is for South America as a whole, because as we might like to claim
that the situation in Colombia is an isolated case. The fact is that [it]
sends out negative signals about regional stability."
A year ago, when
Andres Pastrana was elected president of Colombia, this country was brimming
with optimism.
After years of apathy at election time, Mr. Pastrana had
won a heated three-way race in which voter turnout jumped 20 points from the
usual 40 percent level. Taking their cue from a president-elect who made
peace after 40 years of war his first priority, Colombians held huge
peace demonstrations across the country. There was also a sense of relief
that international treatment of Colombia as a pariah state, based on
strong evidence that the former President Ernesto Samper had links to
the country's cocaine cartels, was over.
But today much of that
optimism has vanished. Reasons are varied. First, the idea that Mr. Samper
was the bad guy who would take many of the country's problems with him when
he left office was destined to lead to disappointment, some observers say.
Then despite some recent signs to the contrary, the Army has over the last
year has not been able to check the country's two main guerrilla groups'
advance.
"A year ago I would have said an eventual military victory by
the guerrillas was highly unlikely, but today I see how it might
happen," says Bogota political analyst Sergio Uribe. "It's not because they
have the military power to do it, but the military will."
A recent
poll by the Colombian television network RCN, highlights this lack of faith.
It found that 66 percent of Colombians support a US military intervention to
curb its problems.
In a country where the strong-arm, take-no-prisoners
tactics of Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori receive frequent accolades,
Pastrana's more conciliatory political style is also faulted. Some media
analysts have taken to calling the government "gobierno light," while even
the president's political allies are not without criticism. "The country
has been at a point where we were ready for a popular mobilization
against war and violence," says Mr. Ospina. "But developing that
predisposition requires political leadership, and the president came up
short."
Yet all of those factors probably wouldn't be enough to explain
such a crisis - in a country that has basically been at civil war for
four decades - if it weren't for the soured economy. Even through the worst
of Latin America's economic turbulence in the 1980s, Colombia was
the exception, always achieving positive annual growth rates.
But in
the first quarter of this year, the economy shrank nearly 6 percent, with
prospects for the rest of the year hardly better. Unemployment surged into
double digits. As one US official says, Colombia's mood plunge has several
sources including too-high expectations after Pastrana's election, but the
basic reason is "it's the economy, stupid."
"The truth is that before,
the war and other real problems weren't affecting many people's daily life,
but adding the economy has changed that," says Ospina. "It's finally dawned
on many Colombians that the country's future is in the balance, and when they
don't see any light they say, 'Oh, I'm leaving.'"
While not
underestimating the gravity of his country's situation, Mr. Tirado says there
are reasons for Colombians to feel optimistic. Recent Army battle victories
should reassure Colombians that the guerrillas are not about to take the
country, he says. And the number of violent deaths has fallen over the past
four years, while recent mass demonstrations in several cities against
kidnappings suggest the public is engaged and hanot giving up
hope.
"Of course there's an impatience for striking results now," says
Tirado, "but there are small signs that should tell Colombians to hold on, we
are going in the right
direction."
Copyright 1999 The
Christian Science Publishing
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