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REDONDO BEACH, CALIFORNIA "Why don't you write about our beaches?" the well-dressed man from the Colombian Trade Commission asked me. The dark-haired gentleman was sitting politely across from me because his boss from the Colombian embassy wanted to know why I had just rated their country among the top five most dangerous places in the world. I made it simple, "If you focus just on the Americas, Colombia is the most dangerous place." He gave me a pained smile. I couldn't fault him for looking a little hurt. Colombia is a place whose two most enduring symbols seem to be the ever-smiling peon Juan Valdes and his coffee-laden burro and the chainsaw/bathroom scene from Scarface. Coffee and cheap Miami motels have never been the same since. Colombia's problems have displaced over two million people. Its neighbors are gearing up for rebel incursions and, once in a while, you will even hear locals complain about the vast deforestation caused by coca production. The Department of Administrative Security in Colombia estimates that nearly 29 percent of the 800,000 Colombians who traveled abroad in 1999 have not returned to the country. With the locals fleeing, it's easy to understand how travelers might be scared off. Colombia is the only country that has run full-page ads in Miami papers telling Americans that they are at war. But if you start using the "W" word in Colombia, some officials will insist that they are only having internal problems. This is not unusual for a country that has struggled from autocratic tyranny to hard-won democracy and slipped back to chaos many times. To be fair, Colombia is actual ly an elegant, democratic place that has had more experience as a free country than any other in Latin America. It's not surprising they take their rights seriously. Citizens enjoy more rights and protections than citizens of the United States do. The police are required to read arrested people ten rights instead of America's two and the apprehended then fill out a document that asks them how they were treated by the police during their arrest. Nothing like building customer satisfaction among criminals and urban terrorists. The measure of true freedom is not how constitutional rights are applied to the most privileged but to the most vil ified. Despite this legacy, Colombia has the longest running insurgency in the Western Hemisphere. War in Colombia has raged ever since the land that is Cristobal Colon's namesake was created. The wars used to be simple. The poor against the privileged. The innocent against the evil. The desperate against the dastardly. But that is history. In Colombia today the war is anything but simple. And I have upset the Colombians by not wanting to write about their beaches. I really didn't need to defend too hard my reason for ranking Colombia as the most dangerous place in the Western Hemisphere. The government did it for me. Its own numbers-while far lower than estimates made by international observers-still First, there are the drugs. Not just the mildly stimulating coca leaf, the high margin cocaine or the less profitable but high volume marijuana. Like all good businessmen, the Colombian drug lords keep adding new products; the latest is heroin so pure that it knocks junkies dead. But the big easy is cocaine. About 90 percent of the cocaine in the USA comes from Colombia. According to the military, neither the rebel groups nor the reactionary paramilitaries manage the production of cocaine. They simply provide seed money and protection so that the campesinos (peasants) can survive the time it takes to plant and harvest their first crop. They also provide money to buy the chemicals and materials required to build crude chagras (coca refining kitchens) on small plots of land. The plots are kept small which makes them difficult and time-consuming to identify, spray and raid. The rebels also provide protection and transportation for the larger cocaine processing labs and work with an international consortium of customers during the final export stage. This is the ultimate small business program, encouraging landless refugees to plant, harvest and refine the coca leaves down to easily transportable coca paste. Into th is volati le region comes the American "War on Drugs" and the first wave of a billion-plus US dollars. Uncle Sam is pouring enough money into military equipment, support and tra ining to make Colombia our third largest recipient (after Egypt and Israel) of military aid and what the American media now likes to ca ll "the Next Vietnam." The latest incarnation of aid is going toward Plan Colombia, now known as the Andean Counterdrug Initiative, a US$7.5 billion (US$4 billion from Colombia, US$1.3 bil lion from the US and the balance expected from the international community) "fix it" plan for all the drug-related problems that ail this Latin American hot spot and its neighbors (see sidebar, page 38). The logic for the US contribution is that battling the drug trade will keep drugs off American streets and disrupt the cash flow that is vita l to the rebel groups' survival . Of course, the war on drugs is a war the US can never win because we are our own enemy. We provide the consumption and the cash that keep the drugs flowing north. Without demand, there would be no supply. Then there is the corruption. It is not too difficult to see why corruption occurs in a place where a police capta in makes US$600 a month, the price of one kilo of coca paste. When I bump into the Colombian Minister of Defense Luis Fernando Ramirez on a drug raid, he tells me the old Pablo Escobar joke, "Police are offered two choices: si lver or lead." A bribe or a bullet. And the kidnappings. There are more kidnappings in Colombia than anywhere else in the world. Kidnapping is a relatively new industry with a low overhead and an appealing cash flow. The biggest rebel group, the Marxist-Leninist Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejercitos Popular (FARC-EP), has created a "tax" that simply requires every Colombian with assets over one million US dollars to send in 10 percent, or be "reta ined" until they do. In Colombia, the leading cause of death for young males is lead poisoning: the bullet kind. And while the rebels are notorious for killings, many of the deaths are not at the hands of the rebels or the military but the autodefensas, private paramilitary organizations who "cleanse" regions of rebel sympathizers and crimina ls. These paramilitaries (many are former military) are funded by wealthy landowners and have become protectors of the cocaine business. Evidence indicates that the paramilitaries work hand-in-hand with the Colombian military, doing the dirty work that the military can't, due to the human rights demands that come with American aid. Human rights groups blame the shadowy paramilitaries for most of the killings. Only 21 percent of murders are attributed to the rebel factions. And, finally, the rebels. Colombia has four major, often warring, rebel say that over 40,000 people have been killed in the last three decades, over half of them civilians. Roughly a third of the country is under the control of rebel groups. Drugs, extortion and kidnapping are all major industries. Corru ption runs rampant. I didn't know where to begin detailing the woes that affect Colombia. All things considered, I figured I wasn't going to have a problem booking a room in Bogota. BOGOTA, COLOMBIA You can fear a place and imagine things, or you can keep an open mind and form an opinion based on what is real. When the first people I meet are two military officers who quickly whisk me into an unmarked car with tinted windows, I can't help thinking, "Damn, this is going to be dicey." On the way to the hotel they rattle off the latest areas of fighting and warn me politely of the dangers in Bogota. There is much to learn about the dangers in Colombia. 34 groups. The FARC is the country's oldest, best-armed and most established rebel group. They tell me they have over 15,000 fighters on about 60 battlefronts. There is also the Ejercito Popular de Liberaci6n (EPl) and the Ejercito de Liberaci6n Nacional (ELN) and even a new splinter group called the Ejercito Revolucionario Popular (ERP). The latter are smaller but more audacious groups. The ELN has no problem kidnapping entire planeloads of Colombians or church congregations. It even kidnapped the young boy who appeared on a poster for the children's antiviolence movement. When you look at a map showing rebel-held areas in Colombia, it looks like somebody blasted the entire country, including major urban areas, with multicolored shotgun pellets. There are no front lines, no safe havens and no expectations of a reasonable solution. There is only fear and violence. When the "reception committee" leaves me at my hotel, I notice there isn't a single security guard and the lobby door is unlocked. No shots ring out during the night and there isn't a single bomb explosion at my hotel. Is this the calm before the storm? I walk around the city and it seems suspiciously normal. Pedestrians smile at me, cars wait for red lights, people drive in a civilized fashion and put money in parking meters. Even when they crash into each other during Bogota's strange transitions from one-way to two-way traffic, the drivers politely get out their insurance card s, put their