“Everybody Wants to Rule the World”

Tears For Fears - R.Orzabal, I.Stanley, C.Hughes

“It happened this way,” she was told in response to her question while they stopped for a rest, food and water, “I was in downtown Bogotá to buy some hardware,” Carbonell told her,  “it doesn’t matter what that hardware was. What does matter is that I was passing through a crowd in the vicinity of some sort of political rally or meeting. 

“There were three shots. A man went down. They were all headshots.  

“That’s all I can tell you. Nobody knows who planned it or if the man who did it, Juan Roa Sierra, planned it all by himself. No one thinks so, though. The man who was killed, Jorge Gaitán, was maybe not a Communist, but he was a sympathizer with ties to the Soviet Union. Do you know what the Soviet Union  is?”

“No,” replied Pip.

“How about Russia?”

“Si, I’ve heard of Russia. They’re the bad guys, huh?”

“Not necessarily. There are always two sides to any story, so you have to keep an open mind and decide for yourself what you want to believe. I’m just going to tell you about what happened and why we are here in the jungle instead of working our farms and other businesses. And when I say working our farms and other businesses, by that I mean, convincing them to part with food, clothing and other necessities we need. It’s not usually a friendly occasion. I’ll explain why you’re here too, and how you can help. Does that sound fair?”

“So far,” she conceded. 

 “Okay then. That man’s death must have alarmed Americans as well as Capitalist Colombians. You don’t know what a Capitalist is, do you Pip?”

“No, never heard of it.”

“A Capitalist is someone who buys a product as cheaply as he can and then turns around and sells it for as much as he can get for it to someone else who doesn’t have access otherwise to the product. Nothing wrong with that, right? Here, the people who produce the products live in remote areas and depend on others to get them the best prices possible for their goods. They have to have money to live. The Capitalists living in or with connections to cities pay the farmers as little as possible, turning them into slaves. Then the government comes along and charges taxes, money they don’t have, for the land they’ve owned for generations. That sort of thing eventually means the farmers lose their land through no fault of their own to Capitalists who are, in a sense, pirates. The taxes are increased to the point where the peasants can no longer afford to stay on their own land. The peasants become homeless drifters. Their land seized by the government and sold to wealthy landowners who control the government. They don’t need pirate ships for this kind of robbery. Those of us here in the jungle are living here because we have nowhere else to go. If we don’t fight for what is right, we die for nothing. Well, we don’t want to die. We don’t want to fight either, but if we want to live, we have no choice but to fight.”

“So, who do you fight?”

“We fight the National Army of Colombia. The government is controlled. We are organized as a result of what happened to Gaitán. He was going to fix all of this. His stated interest was in undoing past crimes against farmers who are mostly the native population of Colombia. His goal was to return ownership of our lands to us. You can imagine how unpopular that would have been for the current landowners who were given our land by the government. As far as the Capitalists who now own our land were concerned, one way or another Jorge had to go. 

When Jorge Gaitán was killed, he had a meeting scheduled. He was supposed to meet with Fidel Castro, the famous leader in Cuba. Have you ever heard of Cuba? Do you know where it is?”

“Oh yes, I’ve heard of Cuba. That’s where sugar comes from.”

“Right, but Castro is a friend of the Russians, and America is at war with Russia. The threat of that meeting was probably the last straw for Americans. They felt they had to kill Jorge. When Jorge fell, everyone knew the Americans were to blame.

"When I thought it was safe to sneak a peek, I saw another man making a run for it. The crowd started after him. I didn’t see who it was that had been shot at first, but I knew all the same. There was only one man there that day who would be considered important enough to risk being hung for killing. That was Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, our next, now never-to-be President of Colombia. I was stunned. Jorge. Jorge Gaitán. I couldn’t believe it! Who’d want to shoot him? He was being attended to by a couple of men I’m acquainted with. They might have been doctors, I don’t remember, but it didn’t take a doctor to see that he was dead. I ran after the mob to find out who the man was who did it. When I caught up, he was cornered. He was a terrified man, beset by a crowd that had lost its mind.  The enraged mob overwhelmed him. He was beaten to a pulp and torn apart. But it wasn’t enough. You don't know how passionate people still are about Jorge. The mob went frenzy-wild. The mob took on a life of its own. I had to get out of it, but that was no easy thing. 

“I tried to take cover, but as an early spectator, I was quickly assimilated and absorbed by the mob. There was no escape. People were screaming and yelling. As more people heard what had happened, they joined the mob, and the mob became a city-wide riot. It happened so fast. Anything that looked like a Capitalist building was torn down. Razed, we call it. 

“After Sierra was destroyed, the crowd turned its attention to the headquarters of the huge Pan-American Conference building. The building was incinerated. Nearly the entire capital city of Colombia was reduced to rubble - a pile of broken concrete blocks.

“The Bogotazo, it was called - The Sack of Bogotá. I hope you never see anything like it. Over 500 people died. Most were caught in the crush. It was a seething mass of humanity ruled by emotion. It has never really ended. Bogotá was mostly destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of Colombians have died since. The aftermath between then and what became our never-ending civil war has been called the Violencia. You don’t need a translation for that.

“All of Colombia knows that Jorge’s death changed the future of Colombia. There has been no peace from that day to this, and there’s none coming. Peace and progress in Colombia were ended for all time with three bullets fired by an uneducated, disadvantaged man who, until then, was of no consequence. The bullets fired that day changed not only the course of Colombia’s future, but they also changed the course of history for the entire civilized world. 

“Without Jorge Gaitán, who was a lawyer, politician and Minister of Education, Colombia has slid into a right-wing charade pretending to be a democracy but devoid of the human compassion integral to a real democracy. Do you know what a democracy is? Pip shook her head. “No? Well, a democracy is where people mark a piece of paper that says who they want to represent their interests in the government and put that in what is called a ballot box. A box with a slot in the top of it. Everyone’s slip of paper, they are called ballots, goes into the box. After everyone has voted, the ballots are counted, and whoever gets the most votes wins. Then that person gets to say what the people want. There are lots of people elected, and they belong to one of two parties. One party thinks one way, the other a different way. Here in Colombia, we need three parties because neither of the two parties is thinking about us. The two parties are all Capitalists. We need socialists who will stand up for our rights and our interests. We supply their food yet get practically nothing for doing it. That’s not right, is it?”

“It doesn’t seem so. No” 

“Our country is now run by competing financial interests, both legal and illegal, thanks to drugs that are grown and manufactured in the jungle. It’s often hard to tell the difference between legal and illegal interests. The real loser is the land itself. It only has protection from industry when it suits industrial interests. The people who live by subsistence from the land are the visible record of our failure to learn from our mistakes. No one, in all these years, has been able to replace Jorge because when they emerge as his ideological heirs, they are gunned down just as he was. 

“Our Civil War officially started with the creation of two paramilitary groups known as FARC and the ELN back on May 27th, 1964. We are FARC. However, this was merely the formalization of hostilities that started with Jorge Gaitán’s assassination. By 1964, it was known that Gaitán’s murder had been due to the American CIA in collusion with Colombia’s sitting government and the great man’s own party. His own party betrayed him. During this period, more than 200,000 mostly peasant farmers were killed by government forces. Years before that, the dominant political parties called a ceasefire in 1958. These parties were dominated by the wealthy landowning elite. They did this by agreeing to exclude the possibility of any other party holding office. That meant war was inevitable. They literally legislated the continuation of hostilities. 

“Operation Marquetalia in 1964 launched against the Department of the same name, forced us, now known as rebels and insurrectionists, into a new form of opposition: guerrilla warfare. In response, we hit back and attacked Simacota. We left leaflets behind describing our Manifesto and asking for help to defeat both ruling parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives. From there, tensions escalated as both sides became more sophisticated, splintered and grew to include the drug cartels.

“The root cause of the conflict is glaringly obvious. 65% of the rural population live below the poverty line. 30% of the urban population lives below the poverty line. This disparity has and will continue to fuel until it is resolved.

“A couple of years ago or so, we heard big things were going on in parliament. It seemed our institutions of justice were starting to learn the truth about crimes committed by the military. The Supreme Court was investigating members of our Congress for collaborating with splinter groups to ensure the war cannot end. I think they said that more than 60 members of President Uribe's coalition were being investigated. The Attorney General’s prosecutors were supposedly offering reduced sentences to get confessions. Some Commanders have started to betray their comrades with details of atrocities and naming accomplices.

“Uribe was too smart for them.  His henchmen somehow sabotaged the investigations. Some prosecutors were murdered. The wrong-doers lied their way out of it. Then Uribe’s secret administration tried to get a series of constitutional amendments passed that would have removed what were known as the "parapolitics" investigations from the Supreme Court's jurisdiction. They had to withdraw the amendment or risk further investigation. It was killed just this last November. They also blocked an "empty chair" bill, which would have allowed  Congress to identify politicians linked to paramilitaries.”

“And you’re telling me I’m about to be fighting in the war where no one is right, everyone is wrong? Where’s the sense in that?”

“There is no sense to it, Pip. It just is. You either fight while you’re here or you die. The one possible light at the end of the tunnel is that Uribe was booted out of office last year and Santos is in. Big things are expected of him, but it’s still too early to tell. It’s only two months since he was elected. That was on June 20th of this year. Do you know what year this is?”

“No. Not really. What year is it?”