A City Under Siege?

A soldier, automatic rifle in hand, stands watch on Calle 26 today.

 If Bogotá feels as tho it's under siege these days, there's a reason for that. Two small bombs, called 'petardos' exploded last week, injuring more than a dozen people. The bombings may have been intended to mark the 50th anniversary of the ELN, who are Colombia's second guerrilla group. Other small bombs set off on central Bogotá plazas injured nobody but scattered ELN literature.

In fact, today authorities arrested some 15 people suspected of participation in the explosions. Many of the arrestees turned out to be leftist activists, including some who had contracts with the city of Bogotá (whose mayor Gustavo Petro happens to be an ex-M19 Guerrilla leader). The fingering of leftists will produce accusations that a witch hunt is going on. Authorities say they identified the suspects via information in cellphones used as triggers in other petardos which did not explode. Let's hope they make the evidence public so that others, including the media, can examine its veracity.

Whenever dramatic, violent events like this one make headlines and turn out the high security, it's impossible not to observe that mundane dangers, such as air pollution, malnutrition and traffic accidents, kill and injure many more Bogotanos, but never generate such an official response or public concern.

Soldiers on guard in Teusaquillo.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Colombia's Lesson for the Middle East

A FARC guerrilla and kidnappees behind barbed wire.

In 1983, ELN guerrillas kidnapped four executives of the German oil company Mannesmann. The company didn't forget about its employees. It sent representatives who purchased the freedom of the four for a reported $8 million, half in cash and the other half to be paid in social investments in the region (which the company never fulfilled). The quadruple kidnapping may have saved the ELN, which at the time was down to just a few hundred fighters, but survives today with some 3,000.

Annual kidnappings in Colombia declined until
recently, when numbers leveled off.
(Image from Paise Libre)

That crime was far from Colombia's first kidnapping - or its last. Armed guerrilla groups began kidnapping as a business practice soon after their appearance in the 1960s. When the crime proved profitable economically and politically, the guerrillas and common criminal groups accelerated the practice thru the '90s and into the early 2000's. Numbers soared to several thousand kidnappings each year (and many kidnappings are never reported to authorities). Only in the last few years, with government military successes and the FARC guerrillas' promise to stop kidnapping, have the numbers declined.

Still, in 2014 outlaw groups kidnapped 245 during just the first eight months of the year, and probably many more unreported ones. Even if the FARC and ELN guerrillas sign peace agreements with the government and give up kidnappings forever, undoubtedly other criminal groups will kidnap more.

Repeating a pattern? A Japanese man kidnapped
by the Islamic State.

In Iraq and Syria today, the Islamic State is using kidnapping to finance itself and gain a horrific kind of attention. It works for them because many European nations pay millions of euros or dollars for their citizens' freedom. (The major exceptions are Great Britain and the United States.) But that's a devil's bargain: The ransom money only serves to strengthen the terrorists, enabling them to kidnap more Westerners and strengthen themselves further.

The nations paying terrorists for their citizens' freedom should look toward Colombia, where the practice reaped only more kidnappings, and decades of violence.



By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Fifty Years of the ELN

Looking for a rest? ELN fighters on the march. 

In July, 1964, a group of young Colombian leftist intellectuals fresh from studies in Havana, Cuba,

A pipeline blown by an ELN bomb.

founded the ELN guerrillas. During the half-century since, Cuba's revolution has entered its senescence and its patron the Soviet Union has disappeared, but the ELN has struggled on with its revolutionary attacks and manifestoes. The ELN recently 'celebrated' its 50th birthday by bombing an oil pipeline and an oil workers camp, planting 50 land mines and killing four policemen in Arauca Department.

The ELN, or National Liberation Army, will soon follow Colombia's larger guerrilla group, the FARC, into peace negotiations with the government and, by bombing and murdering, the ELN wants to assert that it still matters.

It's a strange way to throw a birthday party. But the ELN guerrillas, despite their idealistic roots and rhetoric, seem to have devolved into destructiveness and cynical self-justification.

The ELN's most famous member, guerrilla-priest
Camilo Torres painted on the wall of the
Universidad Nacional's library in Bogotá.

The ELN has always had a somewhat softer image than their big brothers, the FARC. That's in part because, being smaller, the group has committed fewer atrocities. And because the group's leaders have included several Catholic priests, who have given the ELN an image of idealism and maintained a distance from narcotrafficking - altho not always much of a distance. In recent years, the ELN has reportedly joined the FARC in protecting drug crops and taxing drug shipments, altho may not traffic cocaine and heroin itself. In contrast to the FARC, the ELN has traditionally made much of its money by extorting foreign oil companies, and kidnapping their workers and blowing up their pipelines if they didn't pay up.

I once interviewed a woman who had been a member of an ELN unit, which marched thru the countryside collecting ransom payments and extortion money. One time, in a rural region, they learned of a traveling salesman offering plumbing supplies. The ELN commander observed that the region didn't have running water, and concluded that the man must be a spy. The guerrillas captured and murdered him.

The woman had participated in one of the ELN factions' many demobilizations and lived in Bogotá.

What kind of rifle would Christ carry?
A Christ-like Camilo Torres
painted by Oscar Rostgaard, 1969.

Her commander, who had also demobilized, drove around in an armored SUV with two government-supplied bodyguards because he was considered a possible assassination target. He and other ex-guerrillas were supposed to be carrying out an agricultural development project, but it sounded as tho it was failing. He had fathered a child by the woman guerrilla, but she accused him of abandoning and betraying her - which made me doubt his idealism.

The ELN's most famous member, and one of its most idealistic, was Camilo Torres, a Catholic priest who was also chaplain of the National University. A follower of the Liberation Theology movement, in 1966 Torres gave up on society and joined the ELN. He was killed in his first battle, becoming one of the Colombian Left's many martyrs.

I wonder what the idealistic Torres would think about the ELN''s 50th-year anniversary communique, which lamented the 'high costs of these 50 years of effort in human lives of many of our companions,' but ignores the ELN's innumerable civilian victims.

The time for the ELN's violence and ideology have come and gone. Fifty years are enough.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours