For the poor in Colombia’s biggest cities, home is sometimes located beneath the earth, in the tunnels through which the green, murky waters of man-made sewage systems run their course. This silent homeless population, many of whom are children, are in turn chased and hunted down by police forces and heavily armed death squads, in attempts to “clean the streets.” Social cleansings are still a part of life in Colombia. Few object to them, and even fewer challenge them. They are an accepted way of society. There is a history, however—dating to the 1960s—behind the lives of the homeless and Columbia’s killing squads. It is a history of civil war, of drugs, of violence, and of displacement. Yet Columbia has the potential, now, to change course, and make the present, simply the end to a dark period.

 

Between 1948 and 1958, a civil war broke out in Colombia between the nation’s liberals, conservatives, and newly established communists. After more than two hundred thousand deaths, this period, known as “La Violencia,” finally came to an end, with the liberals and the conservatives striking a political agreement. Through their “National Front,” the liberals and the conservatives agreed to exchange presidential power through 1974. Angered by their exclusion, the communists gathered strength and decided to form new groups, most prominently, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the National Liberation Army (ELN), and the non-Marxist 19th of April Movement (M-19). Most of these leftist guerilla groups established themselves in the southern regions of the country, becoming the targets of the new Colombian government while at the same time giving the United States a reason to enter into a relationship with Colombia.

 

The new Colombian government, energized by its newly formed alliance with the United States, began to confront the communist challengers in the south using a new system of “self defense forces.” These groups, comprised of civilians trained and led by military officials, were recommended by the American military to execute “paramilitary, sabotage, and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents.” And in this way, the paramilitary system was born, set to fight the communist guerillas of the south, not knowing how soon the face of the conflict would change.

 

At the same time, a new social trend, the counterculture, was rising in the United States throughout the 1960s. With that trend came an increased demand for illegal drugs. Thus, as demand for illegal drugs in the United States rose, the need to increase the supply of those drugs did too. Mexico originally provided most of America’s marijuana, while the majority of coca was grown in Peru and Bolivia, arriving to the United States through Cuban channels. In the 1970s, however, these trade patterns began to shift to a different country—Colombia.

 

In the early 1970s, the United States government tightened its grip on the Mexican-American marijuana trade. As a result, Colombian farmers took advantage of the supply vacuum and began growing the lucrative plant themselves. It is estimated that between thirty and fifty thousand farmers along Colombia’s Atlantic coast engaged in the cultivation of marijuana while another fifty thousand Colombians engaged in its picking and distribution. In this way, many Colombians began to taste the piquancy of money, using it to bribe off local officials and higher ranking judiciaries, expanding the culture of corruption in Colombia.

 

Even though the marijuana trade was profitable, a few individuals realized the potential in trading cocaine. Coca cultivation had long existed legally in Colombia where the plant’s leaves had traditionally been used as an herbal remedy. Thus, the foundation already existed as to how and where coca should be grown. In the late 1970s, a lust for money and power sparked the ingenuity of several Colombians, particularly Carlos Lehder, a minor criminal who from his jail cell devised a new way to transport cocaine to the United States: airplanes, using the Caribbean islands as rest stops along the way. Released from jail in 1976, Lehder joined forces with the cocaine exporters in Medellin, Colombia. With the help of Jorge Luis Ochoa, Lehder’s aerial exportation became a reality, setting the Colombian cocaine trade onto new, untraveled paths of profitability.

 

With increased profitability, however, came increased danger. On November 12, 1981, the M-19 kidnapped Jorge Luis Ochoa’s daughter, holding her for the ransom of one million dollars. Infuriated, Ochoa called together the other cocaine leaders at his restaurant, La Margarita, in Medellin. There, they decided to form an armed organization, “Muerte a los Secuestradores” (MAS)—Death to All Kidnappers. This step would serve to evolve the conflict between the government, the guerillas, and the narcotraficantes. What was once a war against the guerillas became a war powered by drugs against anyone who dared challenge the prosperous status quo.

 

The United States, facing increased demand for drugs at home, launched a war on the supply-side of drugs. The Reagan Administration began pressuring the Colombian government to challenge the drug lords. Again, empowering paramilitary groups that had been established to fight against communism, the Colombian government attempted to dismantle the wildly profitable cocaine trade that was spreading in Colombia. It also attempted to increase judicial action against the drug traffickers, even signing a treaty with the United States for the extradition of traffickers to America. However, severely underpaid, the police and law enforcers were susceptible to bribes. Furthermore, anyone who seemed to be working toward extradition, was killed. Between 1981 and 1986, more than fifty judges were murdered. The violence in Colombia had no end.

 

Although in 1984, with the help of the American Drug Enforcement Administration, the Colombian government, under President Betancur, uncovered a drug operation worth more than one billion dollars near the Yari River, the drug traffickers continued to expand their operations, buying more and more land throughout Colombia. This led to greater contact between the narcotraficantes and the farmers and ranchers who owned the land. Increased contact in turn led to integration between the drug lords and poor landowners, increasing the drug traffickers’ political power in many rural regions. In this way, original “self defense groups” became empowered by the drug trade, and the confusion as to who was who in Colombia grew.

 

It was not until the 1990s that the largest drug organizations in Colombia began to fall apart. Having expanding so broadly, the Medellin drug trade became too unwieldy for its leaders. Pablo Escobar, the most violent of the drug leaders, was killed in 1993, leading the other kings of cocaine to turn themselves in to the authorities, hopeful that they would be given short prison terms. Leaders of the Cali drug organization were also captured in the mid-1990s. In this way, the large-scale drug organizations of the 1980s came to an end. The trade of cocaine, however, did not. It simply evolved into an organization that was made up of smaller, more specialized groups that were difficult to detect.

 

The death of big cocaine did not mean the end to coca production. In turn, paramilitary groups, having gained increased access to American funds and training throughout the 1990s, became self-proclaimed vigilantes against the cultivators of coca. In July 1997, the United Self-Defense Units of Colombia (AUC) landed in Mapiripan, a small coca-growing town in southeastern Colombia. With the help of Colombian military officials, specifically Colonel Lino Sanchez of Colombia’s 12th brigade, the AUC landed with protection near the town and was able to launch its attack on the unsuspecting local farmers. Townspeople were hacked apart by the paramilitary’s machete wielding members and then dumped into the nearby Guaviare River. The Mapiripan Massacre was an attack on locals by those supposed to protect the Colombian people.

 

In 2000, President Clinton was making a journey to Colombia in preparation for the launching of his billion-dollar package labeled “Plan Colombia.” Some questioned the plan’s viability: after all, it was reported that half of Colombia’s eighteen military brigades had connections with paramilitary groups that engaged in similar abuses of human rights as the AUC. Plan Colombia was originally devised by the Clinton Administration as a way to further combat the Colombian drug issue. However, in 2002 the United States Congress agreed with President Uribe’s government that “terrorism and the illicit narcotics trade in Colombia are inextricably linked,” and thus granted the President greater flexibility with what he could do with the financial package. Fears became reality as the Colombian President began granting greater power to his military—sometimes through paramilitary means—against the leftist guerilla groups like the FARC that wreaked havoc in the country.

 

As a result, under President Uribe, fighting the atrocities of the FARC often took the form of atrocities by the paramilitaries. For example, between the years 2000 and 2006, a paramilitary group under Ernesto Baez and Julian Bolivar, took over a school in Charala, abusing the boys and girls who attended while using the school to launch assassinations. Massacre, murder, forced displacement, rape, and extortion were among the abuses of many paramilitary groups. In contrast with his hard-line against the FARC and other leftist groups, however, President Uribe offered a re-integration proposal to paramilitary groups in 2005. This program saw thirty-two thousand paramilitary members lay down their weapons in exchange for the promise of shorter prison terms and lesser punishments. However, the rest of Uribe’s term, ending in 2010, saw a resurgence in paramilitary groups. Several leaders of the paramilitaries continued to organize forces from within their prison cells, and many ex-members of paramilitaries, disillusioned by the peace process, returned to their involvements with the armed groups.

 

Clinton’s Plan Colombia, with its original emphasis on coca plant eradication, has worked to lower the amount of cocaine exported from Colombia. In 2000, Colombia produced seventy-four percent of the world’s coca leaves. In 2011, the level was down to forty-five percent of the world’s coca. Furthermore, Peru and Bolivia have surpassed Colombia as the world’s leaders in cocaine production. However, what has been the cost to Colombia’s decrease in cocaine exports? Colombia’s usage of dangerous chemicals to rid regions of coca caused harm to many farmers’ other crops and animals, leading many to leave behind their farms. Furthermore, Colombia’s investment in anti-terrorism against the FARC led to the strengthening of the same paramilitary groups that overwhelmed Uribe’s government in 2005. Thus, although coca and cocaine production decreased, human rights problems have emerged in the process, violations that continue into this decade.

 

Through the apparent success of Plan Colombia, the United States has continued its friendship with the Colombian government that is still linked with violent paramilitary groups. In 2011, the United States and Colombia agreed to the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, a deal that will see an increase of trade through Colombia’s port towns. Thus, paramilitary groups have ventured to claim the ports, engaging in brutal tactics along the way. One of these ports is the coastal village of Buenaventura. There, paramilitary groups operate alongside state army officials, taking over streets and neighborhoods by “disappearing” their residents. These “disappearances” have taken the ghastly form of “chop-up-houses” in which residents are taken and hacked apart while still alive. Like Uribe’s failure to convict any major paramilitary leaders in the supposed “demilitarization” of 2005, Colombia’s prosecutors have failed to convict anyone in the two thousand cases brought to them from Buenaventura.

 

In Buenaventura, the activities of paramilitary groups have placed it at the top of all Colombian municipalities in the number of displaced persons since 2011. In 2013 alone, nineteen thousand citizens were forced from their homes. These recent trends of displacement combined with the last fifty years of violence between leftist guerillas and the rightist paramilitaries and later between the leftist guerillas and the powerful drug traffickers of the 1980s, have led more than five million Colombians to leave their homes. Ports, rural villages, and mining towns alike have all been plagued by bloody conflicts that have forced their residents away. It is estimated that six million hectares of land have been left behind by the Colombian people—which in turn the guerilla groups and paramilitaries have come to occupy.

 

The displaced citizens have moved to Colombia’s largest cities, places of unemployment, of poverty, of drugs, and of stress. In 2000, it was estimated that between twelve and thirteen thousand homeless lived on the streets of Bogota, forty percent of whom were adolescents. With a culture of violence seemingly engrained in the society around them, many children feel that living on the streets allows them to escape, perhaps to find the warmth and family-feel missing in abusive homes. On the streets and in the sewers, the homeless of Colombia’s cities exist as the personified hopelessness of their country’s history. Fifty years have passed, full of violence and abuse, and very little has been done towards peace and reparation. In a video by Thomas Morton of VICE, an independent media company and Web site, based in Brooklyn, New York, Morton ventures into the sewers of Bogota to explore the conditions of those who live there. Talking to past and current residents alike, Morton introduces Alberto, a man in his mid-twenties who fifteen years ago used to be one of los gamines, the street children, roaming the realms of Bogota beneath the ground. Speaking about the darkness that surrounds a person in the tunnels, Alberto says, “In the sewers you lose all sense of time . . . one doesn’t know if it’s day or night, Monday or Saturday. It’s a life without meaning. You don’t only lose the sense of time but also the desire to live, to dream, to feel.”

 

Such environments of hopelessness have made the children of Colombia’s streets susceptible to the leftist guerilla groups and rightist paramilitaries alike. The FARC, as well as many national defense groups, have been discovered to use children in their ranks. Since 1999, more than five thousand youths have been separated from armed groups. Many others, however, have not been so lucky.

 

In 2011, the President Juan Manuel Santos established the National Center of Historical Memory. The Center went on to investigate the violence of the past in order to more fully bring comfort to the victims of the conflicts themselves. The final report showed that between 1980 and 2012, there were 1,982 massacres of which 1,166 are attributed to paramilitaries, 343 to rebels, and 295 to government security forces. Furthermore, with laws such as the Victims Law of 2011, the Colombian government shows its people that reparations are due. However, it is not enough simply to investigate the past or to establish laws. In order to be the protector of its citizens, the Colombian government needs to follow through with what it is saying. As of 2013, more than forty thousand claims to land had been received by the government, but only one household has actually been given back its land. The government needs to act.

 

As the Colombian government works to establish peace with the leftist FARC, it must treat the peace not as an end, but rather as a beginning. And it must continue to recognize that the FARC has not been the sole violator of human rights in Colombia. As President Santos’ National Center of Historical Memory showed, the paramilitaries are equally responsible for the deaths, damages, and displacements that have occurred. The President, therefore, must not only work toward peace with the FARC, but also broker peace within his own government: a government in which seventy out of two hundred sixty eight representatives were found to have some connection with paramilitary groups. Both the FARC and the paramilitaries must have their weapons taken away. Only then will the Colombian government truly be able to grant reparations to those who have been victimized by the conflicts of the past.

 

Therefore, the story of the homeless in Bogota and the death squads that chase them, is a story much deeper than at first glance. In those sewers of Bogota, the homeless represent their nation’s history of senseless loss. In the darkness of the underground tunnels, the homeless float in time and space, spinning in the cycle of solitude that has plagued Colombia since the mid-1900s. But just as Alberto was able to escape the cycle, rising above his homelessness to marry his wife and to start a family, Colombia too can rise above its violent past to write a future of progress, prosperity, and peace. As President Santos begins his second term, he must help Colombia to grasp the golden opportunity it has at hand. No part of the past must be allowed to be forgotten. The past must strengthen Colombia’s present resolve in order to ensure that the atrocities of the past will not happen again. A divided Colombia will not be able to stand. But a Colombia united by peace, by forgiveness, and by a resolve to love, will not only be able to stand strongly, but also to lead valiantly, to lead in the revolution of recapturing the beauty of that country.

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