Everybody with money who does not pay for protection is a target, and nearly every family of means has at least one member who has been held hostage. Criminal gangs also engage in kidnappings, as on occasion the drug traffickers themselves have done. Amazingly, until recently this degree of violence has not prevented political, social and economic progress in Colombia. Its literacy rate is one of the highest in Latin America, while its forty universities are full. An impressive number of women are enrolled in higher education and serve in public office.
Colombian businessmen are entrepreneurial and competitive.
Colombia has the fourth-largest economy in Latin America and is the only country in the region never to have defaulted on its debt. Cloaking efforts to reverse a deteriorating security situation in Colombia with talk about combating the drug trade is, presumably, a way of engaging an apathetic American public. But such political chicanery blurs our objectives and muddles our thinking. It is not surprising that, among Americans, there persists an appalling ignorance of Colombia s hellishly complicated realities. The vicious mix of guerrilla armies, private militias, drug traffic, deep-rooted corruption and endemic violence bewilders and dismays even many Colombians themselves.