COLOMBIA: How will the tragedy end?

Colombia is the most tragic country in Latin America. How different from the country I knew in the 40s! The country was enjoying a period of peace. There were three Liberal presidents in succession. Eduardo Santos, president from 1938 to 1942, had returned to editing El Tiempo, one of the great newspapers of Latin America, which brought together a remarkable group of intellectuals. Having meals with them was like a French salon in the eighteenth century. featuring the kind of intellectual conversation one still associates with an Oxford common room. There was nothing quite like it elsewhere in Latin America. Eduardo Santos was succeeded in 1941 by Alfonso López (serving a second term), and in 1945 Alberto Llleras Camargo came in 1945 as a provisional president during a confused period. He served until 1946, when the election of a Conservative, Mariano Ospina Pérez led to violence and the end of the Colombia I had known.

During this golden period, Bogotá proclaimed itself the Athens of America, and Colombians boasted that they spoke the best Spanish in Latin America. Thanks to the Instituto Caro y Cuervo, it became preeminent as a center for research in the language. The weakness of the system was that the elite was very pro-French (Eduardo Santos lived much of the time in Paris), and the writers, aping French authors, were out of touch with the realities of their country and did not realize how fragile their democracy was. Colombia was soon wracked with violence, and many intellectuals fled the dictatorship of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, who seized power in 1953. At Stanford's Bolívar House, which I had founded, I gave refuge to some of them.

Colombia sank into its present intolerable situation of anarchy and guerrilla warfare. It has been amply described, and I know from Colombian students at Stanford how much personally they and their families have suffered. Some have even been kidnapped, a traumatic experience they will never forget.

How is this being portrayed in Colombian TV news programs? With a strange mixture of on-site scenes of the guerrilla warfare which is spreading beyond the borders of Colombia, and pictures of soccer-crazy crowds yelling in support of their teams.

Today's Colombia TV news program was the worst I have ever seen from any country, a truly remarkable achievement. There was the usual account of interviews with semi-literate soccer players, but most of the program was devoted to a Miss Colombia beauty contest in Cartagena. Twenty-two white girls paraded in various attires from bikinis to full swimming suits, while the crowd, which included many photographers, discussed their various physical qualities, or rather attributes

These girls clearly aspire to becoming "top models", as they now say in Spanish. TV advertisements ask girls "Do you want to become a top model and earn a fortune?" Obviously many of them do. This is of course part of the international white slave trade. In Mexico there has been a protracted and sordid case of some pathetic girls who fell into the trap. They were taken to Brazil, where the leaders of the gang included a pretty young woman with a perpetual smirk even after she was arrested and put in jail. One of her victims, a girl from northern Mexico, told her pathetic story. The long drawn out case has still not been settled.

Most people I know are struggling with the problems of life and death, and nowhere is this more true that Colombia. A historian viewing our film and TV programs will conclude that our society was crazy, and that Colombian TV was lunatic: living in the moon. Is this why we have been so eager to put a man on the moon, only to be rewarded with a few pieces of moon rock? Is our much vaunted prosperous society sliding into idiocy? It may be.

Ronald Hilton - 11/09/00