THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 12, 1994 TAG: 9406080411
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHRISTOPHER LEE PHILLIPS
DATELINE: 940612 LENGTH: Medium
A Colombian Journalist's Life Inside the Cocaine Wars MARIA JIMENA DUZAN Translated from the Spanish and edited by Peter Eisner HarperCollins. 282 pp. $22.
WHEN MARIA JIMENA DUZAN inherited her father's column in the Colombian newspaper El Espectador, she established in her own right a voice of political and national conscience. She expressed strong opinions on the turbulent state of political affairs in Colombia, a country divided among a conservative party, whose feudal origins demanded close ties to the Catholic Church; a liberal party driven by urban idealists who at times embraced communism; and an illicit cocaine economy estimated by one expert to account for 4 percent of Colombia's gross national product.
Death Beat is Duzan's objective and courageous memoir of Colombia's near-destruction during the 1980s.
{REST} In 1982, Duzan faked her own kidnapping to gain access to M-19, then Colombia's most notorious urban guerrilla movement, and its leader Jamie Bateman. She staged the ruse to investigate allegations of torture of civilians by the military. M-19 had come to prominence through activities as disparate as hijacking milk trucks to distribute their contents to the poor and kidnapping members of the conservative citizenry for ransom. Duzan ended up spending a month with the guerrillas in the Colombian jungle.
Upon her return, Duzan set at once to writing her story for El Espectador. Within 24 hours of her return, she narrowly escaped a bomb blast intended for her. It was not the work of M-19. The guerrilla group had recently kidnapped the sister of a Medellin drug lord with conservative ties, and Duzan, having just spent a month in their camp, was considered a leftist sympathizer. The bomb was a message from the Columbian drug lords.
Later in 1982, the same year Colombia and the United States signed an extradition treaty in the hope of bringing drug dealers to justice in America, Pablo Escobar was elected an alternate member of the Columbian House of Representatives. Escobar had risen from the streets to a position of wealth and status. He had campaigned as a member of the Liberal Renewal organization, which espoused ``Medellin With Slums.''
Yet there were rumors of Escobar's involvement with the cocaine trade, rumors that were confirmed when El Espectador ran a front page story with an early photograph of Escobar being held in Medellin on drug charges. Liberal Renewal expelled Escobar. His brief political career over, and his facade of respectability demolished, Escobar began a campaign of terror against all who challenged him or his enterprise.
On Nov. 6, 1985, M-19 seized the Palace of Justice in Bogota. The guerrilla organization had entered a devil's agreement with the drug lords to decimate their mutual enemy, the Colombian government. Ninety-five people were killed, including 12 judges - half of the Colombian Supreme Court. The files on all pending extradition cases and all testimony regarding torture by the armed forces were destroyed in the ensuing fire.
Duzan's harrowing record of these years of terror, which included the murder of police, judges, lawyers, peasants, editors, presidential candidates, women and children, even a member of her own family, depict modern Colombia as a land hopelessly beholden to the violence of narco-politics.
Yet what makes her story so compelling is her description of how journalists banded together in the absence of competition to publish their stories anonymously so that they might continue to expose the evils taking place in their country; of how the staff of El Espectador returned to bombed-out offices to continue publishing the paper in spite of very real and visible life threats. Duzan's self-effacing account of journalistic heroism leaves one optimistic about Colombia's future, yet informed enough to know that the elements of its violent past are deeply entrenched.
by CNB