The Fiscalía's New Museum

Inside Bogotá's newest museum - the Fiscalia's.

Add to Bogotá's memorable museums its newest one: The Fiscalía's.

Carlos Lehder.

Yep, seriously. The Fiscalia, or Attorney General, the agency charged with accusing and prosecuting criminals, has played a key role in the biggest dramas in Colombia's recent decades, many of which are on display in the new museum. Most impressively, the museum also includes the government's own sins.

The museum is also unintentionally a testament to the violence, corruption and general mayhem which drug prohibitionism has inflicted on Colombia. Not surprisingly, one subject the museum does not touch is decriminalization - despite its demonstrated success - because it would take away the Fiscalia's business.

Everybody's heard of Pablo Escobar, but many fewer know the name Carlos Lehder - even tho he was crazier and perhaps even richer than Escobar. Lehder admired both John Lennon and Adolf Hitler. He tried starting his own populist political party. And he even bought a Caribbean island, kicked off the inhabitants and used it to party and stockpile cocaine. But he was so unstable that Escobar supposedly betrayed him to the DEA. Lehder is still rotting away in a U.S. federal prison.

Model of an early drug-smuggling sub.

Supposedly, Escobar bought a used Soviet submarine to smuggle cocaine north, but never actually used it. Today, drug cartels build home-made diesel submarines and even aquatic drones, load them with cocaine and send the drug north.

Martyred Justice Minister
Rodrigo Lara Bonillo.

Another less-remembered character of the era was the crusading Minister of Justice Rodrigo Lara Bonillo, who prosecuted members of the Medellin cartel and was gunned down for it in Bogotá in 1984. His killing triggered the war between the government and Esocbar.

In the end, the leaders of the less-famous Cali cartel were captured and extradited to U.S. prisons, where some still remain. In contrast, many Medellin cartel leaders gave themselves up and received short sentences in Colombia - despite being much more murderous.

A jet ski which supposedly
belonged to Pablo Escobar.

Both the Medellin and Cali cartels were destroyed during the 1990s, and the paramilitaries and most guerrillas have also since disbanded. Yet, today Colombia probably exports record amounts of cocaine.

Bloque de Busqueda members looking at Esocbar's corpse
on a Medellin rooftop in 1993.

However, foreigners, particularly those recently arrived in Colombia, may not recognize other episodes - such as the Proceso 8000.

In the Proceso 8000, Liberal Party Pres. Ernesto Samper's (1994-98) presidential campaign was discovered to have received money from the Cali cocaine cartel.

The investigation brought the conviction of other government officials, but Samper himself was found 'neither guilty nor innocent' by a Congress - altho today few doubt he knew about the dirty money. It led to Washington canceling Samper's U.S. Visa - a huge embarrasment for a close ally - and the U.S. The episode was named after a folder containing key documents - altho I did not see that folder in the museum.

Cali cartel leaders on their
way to prison in the U.S.

One might trace Colombia's rejection of its traditional political parties and the eventual election of Pres. Uribe partially to the Proceso 8000 scandal. After Samper, came Pastrana's failed negotiation with the FARC, and then Uribe's U.S.-backed military offensive against the FARC, which many believe forced them to the bargaining table - albeit at a huge cost in human rights. The hard-right Uribe did not come from either of the two traditional political parties.

Display about the FARC guerrillas.

After the end of the Cali and Medellin cartels, the violence and narcotrafficking didn't let up. Colombia still had to deal with the socialist FARC and ELN guerrillas, which were born in the 1960s, and their right-wing paramilitary enemies.

A captured FARC document listing weapons,
including gun cartridges and explosives.

The government didn't defeat any of these groups. The paramilitaries demobilized during the mid-2000s, receiving up to 8-year terms, despite horrific crimes. The government also negotiated a controversial demobilization deal with the FARC and is now talking to the ELN.

FARC propaganda.

A laptop belonging to FARC leader 'Mono Jojoy' recovered
after he was killed in a government bombardment in 2010.

Probably the darkest chapter in recent Colombia history was paramilitarism - the right-wing death squads organized by landowners with government and military collaboration, which carried out many massacres, often of campesinos, including women and children, based only on suspicion of sympathy for the guerrillas.

The jeep driven by police investigating crimes in
1989 in Santander Department. 

One of the more notorious of the massacres carried out by paramilitaries with collaboration from the regular military was that of La Riochela, in 1989 in Santander Department. Fifteen judicial investigators had traveled to a remote area to investigate killings. Paramilitary fighters stopped them and cold bloodedly murdered twelve of them under orders from a Medellin cartel leader and with support from the regular military. After the killings, the 'paras' hid their weapons in a military base.

Victims of the La Rochela massacre.

Yet another dark chapter involving the regular military were the 'false positives' killings during the

Uribe government. At that time, the military gave military units rewards of bonuses and time off for killing guerrillas. Some units responded by kidnapping poor young men, killing them and disguising them as guerrillas in order to collect the rewards. The killings received national attention when a group of young men were kidnapped from Soacha, in south Bogotá, and later found dead near the Venezuelan border, labeled as guerrillas.

An exhumation kit for buried corpses.

Running thru the museum's displays, of course, is the subject of drug trafficking, which has helped finance nearly all of Colombia's violent groups (and some non-violent ones).

A cocaine.making lab. Lots of chemicals involved. Cocaine is niether green nor organic.

And cocaine can and has been smuggled inside nearly everything.

Coffee beans with cocaine inside.

'Candies' used for smuggling cocaine.

Colombian clock used for smuggling cocaine.

Pool balls, used for smuggling cocaine.

A car tire used for smuggling cocaine.

Unsurprisingly, the museum does not touch the subject of decriminilizing drugs, a policy which has produced lots of benefits when tried in Portugal. That doesn't surprise, because such a policy would reduce the Fiscalia's business.

The Museo de la Fiscalia is located in this building on Carrera 13 just south of Calle 19, in central Bogotá.

You can leave your bike in the parking lot across the street. Admission is free. 

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Enough Already!

Relatives displace 'proof of life' photographs of their sons, brothers and husbands kidnapped by the FARC guerrillas. The FARC recently promised to give up kidnapping.

The Claustro San Agustin has this haunting and horrifying exhibition, entitled 'Enough Already!' (¡Basta Ya!), about the horrors of Colombia's more than half century of internal armed conflicts. A dead, nameless man, seemingly crucified on a pole; corpses laid out on the ground in front of grieving townspeople; funeral after funeral; torched homes; columns of guerrillas...Such scenes have been repeated innumerable times in Colombia's recent history.

A victim of fighting between police/military
and paramilitary militias in the
Communa 13 of Medellin, 2002.

However, with the ongoing government-FARC negotiations in Havana, Cuba, that long nightmare may be near an end - or at least a new chapter. (The FARC added yet another episode yesterday by firing a homemade mortar into a police-military base in the town of Inza, Cauca Department, killing five soldiers, a police officer and two civilians, and wounding dozens more people.)

But, even if a peace deal results, many of the forces which have caused Colombia's violence will remain: poverty, large ungoverned regions and huge sources of illicit money, mostly from the drug trade.

'They killed my wife.'

Union Patriotica party members mourn assassinated presidential candidate Jaime Pardo Leal, on Plaza Bolívar in 1987.

Five people were massacred by the military and rightist paramilitaries in 2005 in San Jose de Apartado.

The ELN guerrillas staged their first attack in 1965, on the town of Simacota, Santander.

Enough Already!

Enough Already!

In 2002, residents mourn some 119 civilians were killed when a home-made FARC mortar landed on the roof of the church, where townspeople had taken refuge during a battle between guerillas and paramilitaries. 

'El Cristo Campesino', 'The Campesino Christ', an emblematic photo of a victim of  El Violencia,1946-53.

Paramilitaies murdered 15 residents and burned their homes in El Aro, Antioquia, 1997.

'A Thousand Proposals for No-Repetition.'

FARC guerrilla leaders in Caguan, at the start of failed peace negotiations in El Caguan. 

Funeral of a city councilman murdered by the FARC in Huila, 2006.

Leftist politician leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, who was shot on a central Bogotá street in 1948,  triggering the Bogotazo riots.

Arhuaco indigenous people contemplate the body of one of their people, apparently killed by right-wing paramilitaries (2004). 

In 1990, the M19 guerrillas demobilize, hand over their weapons and become a political party. (Bogotá's current mayor, Gustavo Petro, is an ex-M19 leader.)

M19 guerrilla leaders sign a cease-fire agreement with the government in 1984.

Fonseca guerrillas during a 1953 government amnesty.

'You can be another victim of Sangre Negra (Black Blood) and his gang.' Sangre negra was a greatly feared bandolero  or highway robber of the late 1950s and early '60s.  

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Who is Tanja, the Dutch 'Girl Guerrilla'?

Tanja Nijmeijer, with her friendly AK-47.

Tanja Nijmeijer is a 34-year-old Dutchwoman who will be part of the FARC guerrillas' negotiating panel - and its sole non-Colombian.

Nijmeijer, who joined the FARC in 2002, hearkens back to an earlier period when the guerrillas still attracted idealist, well-educated young people. (The only other possible negotiatior who might fall into that category is Ricardo Palmera, aka Simon Trinidad, now 62, who abandoned his wealthy background and banking job to join the guerrillas. He is in a United States prison and may participate via video conferencing.)

Nijmeijer first visited Colombia in 2002 as a university student studying romance languages. She taught English in the city of Pereira, where she said a co-worker opened her eyes to social injustice in Colombia and government human rights violations. You can see her interviewed, AK-47 on her lap, here, declaring to journalist Jorge Enrique Botero "I am a fighter for the Colombian revolutionary forces and I will remain so until victory is achieved or until I die. There is no turning back."

Tanja and her mother in a FARC camp. 

Back home after one year, she concluded that "the revolution wouldn't take place in the Netherlands." She returned to Colombia in 2002. Ironically for this young woman who had been a squatter and Trotskyite activist back home, she taught English for a time for the Wall Street Institute in Bogotá. It was a convenient cover. Apparently, she was also an intelligence agent with the FARC's urban militia. But, she did more than just listen: According to El Tiempo, Nijmeijer also helped carry out a bomb attack on a city bus, in which a child was killed and 16 people were injured.

Later, Nijmeijer joined the guerrillas in the jungle, where she worked as a translator and interpreter. Her presence also contributed a sympathetic pretty face to the FARC's image.

In 2007, the Colombian military occupied a FARC camp and discovered Nijmeijer's diary, which was eventually published in the papers. In it, she described favoritism by guerrilla leaders, sexual exploitation of young girls by older guerrilla leaders and even what some readers interpreted as her own sexual exploitation by her guerrilla companions.

"I'm tired of the FARC," she wrote. "This would be worthwhile if one knew what one was fighting for. What kind of organization is this, in which some have money, cigarrettes and candy and the rest have to beg? An organization in which a girl with big tits and a pretty face can destabilize a unit? Where we have to work all day long, while the commanders talk shit? I don't want to have to listen to any more blah-blah-blah about being communists, honest and obedient, while seeing how the commanders are hypocrites, gossipers and traitors."

Some concluded that a disillusioned Nijmeijer was being held against her will and might try flee the guerrillas.

In Sept. 2010, the government initially thot she had died in a bombing raid which killed a guerrilla commander and about 100 other guerrillas.

However, soon after Nijmeijer reappeared in a video, more fiery and loyal to the guerrilla cause than ever.

Is Nijmeijer deliberately blind, radically ideological, or do the guerrillas keep her ignorant of their many and severe human rights violations? Today's newspaper carries a report of an attack, apparently by the FARC, on a military patrol, in which two soldiers and nine civilians were injured.

Nijmeijer's biography suggests that she could bring an ideologically hard line to the peace negotiations, while her guerrilla companions, aging and weary of risking their lives slogging thru jungles, could be tempted into concessions by offers of light punishments and political participation. (In Norway, Nijmeijer might also meet her family, who once visited her in the jungle.)

What would a post-FARC future hold for Nijmeijer? Are there specific criminal charges against her in Colombia, beyond being a FARC member? (A U.S. court has charged her in relation with the kidnapping of three U.S. citizens here, but I doubt she has travel plans to the States.) Would she be able to return to the European Union, which considers the FARC as a terrorist group? Might the Wall Street Institute rehire her? I'm sure that some NGO would rush to hire her on the strength of her unquestionable idealism, selflessness and extraordinary life experiences - not to mention the attention she'd bring with her.


By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours