Study In Death

In Colombia, the rugged Andean land perched on South America's northwest shoulder, more than 200,000 men, women and children in the past 14 years have died in a senseless and uncoordinated fury that no one seems able to end. The butchery is so much a part of national life that many Colombians have learned to ignore it. Last week a powerful new book, La Violencia en Colombia, was creating a stir in Bogota. It attempts to understand the killing, measure its costs, and bring Colombians face-to-face with the bloody, bitter consequences.

Remembering the Slogan. Written by Monsignor German Guzman Campos, 50, who has spent almost all his life among the backlands peasantry, the book traces the slaughter back to 1948, when 18 years of sporadic fighting between the bitterly antagonistic Liberal and Conservative parties was climaxed by the murder of Liberal Leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. "His voice," says Guzman, "was the cry of the rural people, who upon hearing of his death, remembered his historic slogan:

"If I betray you, kill me;

If I die, avenge me."

From that point on, murder and revenge occupied much of Colombia's population, and Guzman recapitulates the story in convincing detail. The government sent troops to pacify the warring peasants; the soldiers' own killings and tortures only inflamed the peasants even more. An amnesty and rehabilitation program was proclaimed, and failed for lack of funds. Guzman divides the back-country killers into categories: "displaced communities" whose villages have been destroyed, adolescent thrill killers, and hired murderers. The original guerrillas have been infiltrated by Communists, who seek to profit from disorder.

The brutality beggars description. A bus is halted on a lonely road and all passengers are machine-gunned; entire villages are massacred. Some groups seem to enjoy beheading their victims; others specialize in cutting a man to ribbons so that he slowly bleeds to death. "Sometimes," says Guzman, "children are put in charge of this exercise in sadism." In "leave no seed" killings, children in a family are murdered, pregnant women are chopped open, and men are emasculated.

Too Late for Help. "These are elemental men," says Guzman, "primitive, with minimum education." They are no longer part of their nation, have lost all faith in law and in many of their priests. Guzman cites the case of one Teofilo Rojas, 27, nicknamed "Sparks," whose home was burned by soldiers when he was 13. Sparks fled into the hills and grew up a killer--with 592 deaths on his record. Guzman once asked him: "What do you want?" Answered Sparks: "To be left alone to work. I want to learn to read. But they only want to kill me."

"There are thousands like him," writes Guzman. The solution is not to kill them. "No! The human, the Colombian, the Christian thing to do is to try to rehabilitate them." But for Sparks last week, rehabilitation came much too late. As he and two companions emerged from the forest near a small town 100 miles west of Bogota, an army patrol, lying in ambush, shot him dead. The worldly possessions on his body: a rifle, a pistol, two hand grenades and a picture of Cuba's Communist Che Guevara.

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