conflict over cartoon

Colombian coffee growers are planning to sue a US cartoonist for millions of dollars over a cartoon they say damages the reputation of Colombian coffee.

The cartoon is by Mike Peters, whose work is published in the US and abroad.

In it, one character refers to crime in Colombia and then to Juan Valdez, the fictional coffee grower used for years to advertise Colombian coffee.

Coffee growers say the cartoon links their industry with violence. Mr Peters has said he intended no offence.

The cartoon strip which appeared on 2 January is part of the Mother Goose and Grimm series that Mr Peters draws.

In it, Mother Goose is sighing over a cup of fresh Colombian coffee. Another character comments: "Y'know, there's a big crime syndicate in Colombia. So when they say there's a little bit of Juan Valdez in every can, maybe they're not kidding." This plays on a former slogan used to advertise Colombian coffee. The comic strip finishes with Mother Goose drinking tea.

National dignity Colombia's National Coffee Growers' Federation, Fedecafe, said they had instructed their lawyers in the US to begin proceedings against Mr Peters and the agency which distributes his work, for "damage and harm, detriment to intellectual property and defamation".

In a statement, Fedecafe said the cartoon "associated organised crime and the atrocities committed by violent groups with the hard, delicate and honest work of more than 500,000 coffee growers and their families".

The cartoon also affected the reputation of Juan Valdez, the "icon and symbol" of Colombian coffee, by suggesting that there was a connection between coffee tins and the victims of violence, Fedecafe said.

The iconic coffee grower, accompanied by his faithful mule, was created in 1959, and has appeared in countless TV advertisements, in the US and elsewhere. The federation said they would expect coffee growers to be adequately compensated for damage caused.

Humorous subject Gabriel Silva Lujan, Fedecafe's general manager, told reporters in Bogota that the cartoon "was an attack on national dignity and the reputation of Colombian coffee." He said he expected the lawsuit to be filed by the end of the week and would be for at least $20m (£13m).

Mr Peters has said that he loves Colombia, drinks Colombian coffee and did not intend any offence. "The cartoon is meant to be read along with the rest of the week as a series of which the theme is based on the fact that the inventor of the Pringles can had his ashes buried in one," Mr Peters said in a statement, reported by the Associated Press.

"I thought this was a humorous subject and all my Mother Goose and Grimm cartoons are meant to make people laugh. I truly intended no insult."

President Uribe: Third term?

Álvaro Uribe was 7 years old when he announced to his family that he intended to become president of Colombia. Fifty years later, in the eyes of many, he is the man who rescued his beleaguered nation from collapse.

When he was inaugurated in 2002, Latin America's oldest and largest Communist insurgency, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, was strong enough to lob mortars at the presidential palace during the ceremony. Right-wing paramilitary groups were rampaging through the countryside killing suspected rebel supporters. Mr. Uribe soon put the FARC on the run, and consequently persuaded the paramilitaries to disarm. The dividend for his countrymen: an economic boom.

But lately Mr. Uribe's political narrative is taking some complex twists. He has refused to rule out running for a third term, which isn't allowed under Colombian law. He and his supporters are working to change the law. Critics claim he is morphing into a familiar figure in Latin American politics -- the caudillo, or strongman.

Halfway through his second term, scandals are piling up. Nearly a fifth of Colombia's Congress -- nearly all supporters of the president and including his cousin -- are under investigation or in jail for allegedly receiving campaign money and other support from illegal paramilitary groups. In the past month, a dozen military brass were implicated in a scheme to murder civilians and dress up them up as rebel combatants to pump up body counts, presumably to please their hard-charging commander in chief.

Many in Bogotá and Washington say a third term could risk Mr. Uribe's legacy.
"If he had quit at the end of his first term, he would have been a national hero with no questions asked," says Guillermo Perry, a Colombian who was the former chief economist for Latin America and the Caribbean at the World Bank. "If he quits at the end of his second term, he'll still be a national hero, but with some questions. If he keeps going, he risks not being seen as a national hero."

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, an anti-American crusader, recently announced that he wants to stay in power indefinitely. The prospect that Mr. Uribe is moving in a similar direction could emerge as a foreign-policy headache for President-elect Barack Obama. Mr. Uribe, who can recite the Gettysburg Address by heart, has been the most steadfast U.S. ally in Latin America, and has received considerable U.S. backing. A conservative, he has preached democratic values and offers a regional counterweight to the man in Caracas.

Mr. Uribe hasn't gutted democratic institutions as Mr. Chávez has. But he hasn't groomed any successor, and his administration is largely a one-man show. He micromanages the country to such an extent that he even checks the bathroom stalls of provincial airports when he arrives on state business. Critics say he cannot tolerate dissent. "He represents an old feature of Latin America, but something new to Colombia -- an authoritarian, a caudillo," says César Gaviria, a former president.

Latin America has suffered greatly from strongmen since its independence from Spain -- from Argentina's Juan Perón to Chile's Augusto Pinochet to Cuba's Fidel Castro. Over the past two decades, democracy has spread throughout the region. But lingering poverty, corruption and crime have spurred voters in some countries to elect authoritarian figures who promise to end problems forcefully, threatening democratic institutions in the process.

"A third term doesn't set a good precedent, particularly when you have neighbors like Chávez trying to do the same thing," says a U.S. administration official.

In a local radio interview in March, Mr. Uribe played coy about his re-election intentions. "We seek to assure the re-election of [our security policies] and investor confidence," he said.
Mr. Uribe's advisers compare the situation to the U.S. during the Depression and World War II, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected four times. The FARC still has 9,000 men under arms. "Our country is still at war, and we need to finish the job," says Vice President Francisco Santos.
Mr. Uribe is a trim, bookish lawyer who wears spectacles and is said to look like an older Harry Potter. He begins his day well before 5 a.m. and often doesn't end it until after midnight, leaving a trail of exhausted aides in his wake. To maintain his energy, he exercises regularly, practices qigong, a Chinese breathing exercise, yoga and homeopathic medicine. "His energy comes from the purity of his desire to serve his country," says Elsa Arango, his homeopathic doctor.

There are two sides to Mr. Uribe. He is a technocrat who studied at Harvard and Oxford and works on his English by watching the BBC every morning as he rides his stationary bike. In 2005, Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive officer of General Electric Co., visited Colombia after hearing about its turnaround under Mr. Uribe. After a two-hour meeting with the president, Mr. Immelt told associates: "Now that is a chief executive."

The other side comes from being raised in a rural culture of powerful landowners, horses and guns. Mr. Uribe sometimes views the world in black and white, such as in his treatment of Carlos Lozano, who edits the weekly Communist Party newspaper La Voz. On several occasions, Mr. Uribe has publicly attacked the editor as a FARC supporter -- dangerous words in a nation where right-wing death squads have killed thousands of leftists. After each outburst, says Mr. Lozano, Vice President Santos "calls to say the president lost his temper, is sorry about what he said, and is increasing my bodyguards and the strength of the bulletproofing on my car." Mr. Santos confirmed that account.

The first of five children born to a wealthy cattle rancher, Mr. Uribe grew up on a ranch in rural Antioquia state. His father was a lively man who worked and played hard. Mr. Uribe was more taciturn, taking after his mother, a pioneer in Colombia's suffrage movement and a political junkie.

Antioquia's state capital, Medellin, earned world-wide notoriety as the hub of a cocaine cartel and for its capo, Pablo Escobar. As a child, Mr. Uribe competed in horseback-riding contests with three distant relatives, the Ochoa brothers, who grew up to become drug lords. Mr. Uribe's associations with such figures, however fleeting, have dogged him throughout his career, despite a lack of evidence tying him or his campaigns to traffickers. A 1991 report on Colombian drug traffickers by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, the intelligence arm of the Pentagon, listed Mr. Uribe as a "close personal friend" of Mr. Escobar. U.S. officials have since discounted the report, as have most experts on the drug trade.

At the University of Antioquia in the late 1970s, he stood out in a politically charged atmosphere dominated by Communists. "I remember the first year of studying law, all our materials were Marxist," he said in an interview in June on the presidential plane. "One day the professor walked in and said he was giving up the classics, and that day he forgot about Socrates, Aristotle, St. Augustine....That kind of thing led many young Colombians to join the guerrillas."

At student assemblies, Mr. Uribe would challenge the leftists' dogma, according to several people who knew him then. The ensuing mockery only seemed to make him more confident of his views, these people say. "Only two weeks after I had met him, I remember thinking, 'That boy is going to be president of Colombia,'" says Carlos Gaviria, then his university professor and currently an opposition politician.

The young lawyer shot up the ranks of the Liberal Party, one of Colombia's two traditional parties, becoming senator at age 32 and governor of Antioquia in 1995. As governor, he earned a reputation as a capable administrator. More controversially, he supported armed neighborhood-watch groups that were later accused of massacring suspected leftist guerrillas. Mr. Uribe has said the groups were disbanded as soon as their illegal actions were uncovered.

His rural roots gave him a fresh perspective on Colombia's troubles. For decades, the country was ruled by an elite clique, mostly from Bogotá, that sometimes seemed indifferent to the violence raging in the countryside and unsure how to solve it. "The guerrillas weren't challenged by society the way they should have been," Mr. Uribe said in the June interview. "And that let them think they could simply take power through violent means."

Mr. Uribe knew firsthand of the suffering caused by such violence. In 1983, the FARC killed his father in a kidnapping attempt at the family ranch. Mr. Uribe himself found the body. Colombian officials say that over the course of Mr. Uribe's political career, he has survived at least 19 assassination attempts.

Following a FARC death threat in 1997, Mr. Uribe won a British Council scholarship to study for a year at St. Anthony's College at Oxford. "He was the only guy at Oxford -- the only guy -- who wore his backpack with both straps across his back," says Jaime Bermudez, who met Mr. Uribe at Oxford and is now Colombia's foreign minister. "He is definitely a nerd."

That same year, conservative Andres Pastrana won the presidency on a platform of making peace with the FARC, and promptly handed over an area the size of Switzerland to the rebels to use as a base to conduct peace talks. The rebels instead used it as a base to carry out kidnappings and attacks. Mr. Uribe, convinced that neither major political party would end the conflict, returned to Colombia and announced a third-party candidacy based on waging war against the rebels. Early polls gave him just 2% of the vote.

But the FARC lost support from ordinary Colombians as it sabotaged electricity pylons, bombed a Bogotá restaurant, killing a 5-year-old girl, and tried to blow up the main reservoir supplying water to the capital. The group kidnapped female presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt. With each incident, Mr. Uribe's poll numbers climbed. On May 26, 2002, he won 53% of the vote in a crowded field -- a landslide.

"He recognized early on that Colombia's basic need was security and authority," says Malcolm Deas, Mr. Uribe's professor at Oxford and a staunch supporter.

The new president wasted no time going after the guerrillas. He persuaded Congress to pass an emergency tax hike on businesses to boost military spending. Andres Peñate, then deputy defense minister, recalls that Mr. Uribe called him one day and asked how many people had been kidnapped in Colombia the previous week. Mr. Peñate said he didn't know. Mr. Uribe told him seven. "Do you want to know their names?" the president asked. Mr. Peñate says he made sure he knew the answer from then on.

Critics say Mr. Uribe's fixation on eliminating the FARC has caused him to neglect longstanding problems of inequality, land distribution and poor infrastructure. Colombia's highways, for instance, remain in terrible shape. Many Colombians blamed the president for not keeping a closer eye on financial pyramid schemes that collapsed last month and have left tens of thousands of Colombians in the lurch.

His intervention in the economy has also drawn criticism. He has given tax breaks to encourage certain industries, and has raised various tariffs to offer trade protection. "He is very sure of himself, which is a great thing for battling the guerrillas, but is not so good if you have some unorthodox ideas about the economy," says Mr. Perry, the former World Bank economist.
When the central bank raised interest rates earlier this year in an effort to control inflation, Mr. Uribe blasted the move as unnecessary. Many career bureaucrats in areas such as the Finance Ministry have left because they feel they have no voice, according to former ministry officials.

"He's got the technocrats on the run," says Rudolf Hommes, a finance minister under Mr. Uribe who quit in 2003.

Government officials say Colombia's rapid economic growth rates are evidence that Mr. Uribe's policies work.

This year, Mr. Uribe's biggest confrontation has been with the Supreme Court, which has been investigating the so-called para-politics scandal. In 2002, paramilitary gangs funded the campaigns of many of Mr. Uribe's supporters and used violence to eliminate rivals and intimidate voters, according to court documents and testimony. Many right-wing militias were involved in drug trafficking and were designated "terrorist" organizations by the U.S. for the killing of civilians.

The president's office tried to strip the Supreme Court of its power to investigate crimes by lawmakers. It dropped the initiative under pressure in October.

In September, two representatives of a feared paramilitary leader met with Mr. Uribe's main judicial adviser in the presidential palace. The paramilitary men had promised to bring audiotapes that showed that the Supreme Court was carrying out the investigation as a vendetta against Mr. Uribe. But the tapes weren't incriminating.

Mr. Uribe said his government was obligated to pursue any complaints of wrongdoing by any Colombian institution, and that the paramilitary men had no arrest warrants out against them. Critics disagree. "You cross the line when you start conspiring with criminals to discredit the court," says Adam Isaacson, a Colombia expert at the Center for International Policy in Washington.

In October, the New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch issued a report criticizing the Uribe administration for hampering the Supreme Court's investigation into the para-politics scandal. Mr. Uribe responded by calling José Miguel Vivanco, the group's director for the Americas, an "accomplice" and "defender" of the FARC.

After a similar incident last year, Mr. Uribe received a letter from 11 U.S. senators upbraiding him for his record of "inappropriate statements" against human-rights defenders, journalists, judges and others. Among the senators who signed: Mr. Obama.

Ultimately, whether Mr. Uribe runs again may not be up to him. Polls in the past month have shown a marked dip in his popularity. Two weeks ago, Colombia's lower house passed a bill barring Mr. Uribe from a third term. His supporters immediately said they would try to amend it in the Senate to keep his re-election hopes alive.

The FARC will ring in 2009 with a bang: hopefully

FARC Offers to Free Six

Colombia's FARC guerrillas have offered to free a former governor, a former lawmaker and four other hostages to help jump-start talks on a prisoner swap, local news media reported Sunday.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia said in a statement that three unidentified police officers and a soldier would be freed first "as an irrefutable demonstration of our good will and as a gesture aimed at creating conditions favorable to a humanitarian exchange."

They would be followed by Alan Jara, the former governor of southern Meta state, who was kidnapped in July 2001; and Valle del Cauca regional lawmaker Sigifredo Lopez, held since April 2002.

The FARC did not give a date for the releases, Radio Caracol reported. The guerrillas released six politicians in January and February. In July, a military operation freed 15 high-profile hostages, including three U.S. contractors and former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt.

santa marta: must see

Violence in Colombian culture: very much in fashion

People that mattered: 2008, Time.com

She was held for six years by her captives, the rebels who call themselves the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The 47-year-old Colombian-French citizen had been campaigning for president of Colombia when FARC soldiers took her in 2002. Her imprisonment eventually became a cause célèbre in Europe, and after a Colombian government operation freed her and 14 other hostages in July, Paris rejoiced. Later in the year, Betancourt toured South America to call attention to the plight of the 700-plus hostages that FARC still holds. It remains to be seen whether she can convert her own celebrity into freedom for others held victim to Colombia's dysfunctional politics.

Pablo Escobar refuses to go away

Painting by Fernando Botero of Pablo Escobar.

Fifteen years have passed since Pablo Escobar’s death on the rooftop of a house in Los Pinos, a neighborhood in the west of Medellín. Yet nobody agrees about the true breadth of his legacy - nor about the impact of his image - now mythicized because of a death that is increasingly distant and blurry.

It’s not easy to define a person’s true legacy. Escobar came to be (and in some countries still is) an immediate reference when mentioning Colombia: a reference for terror and violence. How present is that brand in a country that has witnessed successive waves of violence following Escobar’s death? How much has he made a mark on the country’s ethics and esthetics?

To begin with, the name Escobar holds a powerful appeal on people, whether they hate or love him. The artist Fernando Botero expressed in oils the moment in which the mafia capo fell in defeat to his pursuers. On the silver screen, the list of documentary films and dramas revolving around the character or his legend is endless. At the moment, Hollywood is preparing the mega production “Killing Pablo.” Examples of successful television productions include documentaries based on a book by that name, or on Pablo Escobar’s family archives. Books about his life are still coming out. Last year Virginia Vallejo, Escobar’s former lover, generated controversy with her work “Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar,” a well narrated apology of the mafia head.

In addition, one of the greatest successes of Colombian television in recent years (since “Ugly Betty”) has been “El Cartel,” a series based on the confessions of the drug trafficker Andrés López, alias “Florecita.” In this series, Colombians could see, in one way or another, the point of view of drug traffickers following the death of Pablo Escobar. It was also proof that the world of drug trafficking and the stories of people who are born in the gutter but reach the peak of mafia power continue to fascinate the public.

But the ghost of Escobar also lingers in places far from journalism and the dramatization of his life. Some tourists to Medellín, almost all of them foreigners, ask about Escobar’s tomb and visit Montesacro cemetery in the south of the city, where the epitaph “here lies Pablo Escobar Gaviria, a king without a crown” is carved in the marble tombstone – similar to the pilgrimage made by thousands of tourists in Paris to the tomb of Jim Morrison, at the Père Lachaise cemetery.

Some travel agencies in Medellín have started tours that visit emblematic buildings related to Pablo Escobar (buildings such as the Mónaco, and two examples of so-called “thug architecture” or “narco-deco,” the Dallas and the Ovni), the La Catedral prison in the rural area of the neighboring Envigado municipality, where he was confined and from where he escaped; phone stalls in the city center from where, legend goes, he communicated with his family; the house where he was gunned down in Los Pinos, and of course his tomb. During the tour the operator plays music from the group Los Tigres del Norte and Bob Marley as background music, and there are always some who offer a little marijuana. Some tours also offer the option of a three hour trip to Hacienda Nápoles, Escobar’s ranch.

If there ever were an icon of “Pablo Escobar-ness” it would be Hacienda Nápoles in Doradal, a Magdalena Medio town in Antioquia, with an entrance that features the Piper Club plane that delivered Escobar’s first shipment of cocaine to the United States. There, the trafficker built a zoo and had a collection of antique cars that was a must see for those traveling between Bogotá and Medellín by car. When he died, the zoo was abandoned and, according to hearsay, just over a year ago some hippopotamuses escaped as they looked for females in the Magdalena River.

Escobar’s ghost has lived on in the lives of some fishermen in the Cimitarra area of Santander, whose unexpected meetings with hippos resembled experiences of those exploring the Zambezi River in the heart of Africa.

Escobar also endures as an esthetic icon. His image, stripped of its incalculable evil, or perhaps as a challenge to new generations, adorns t-shirts, like Che Guevara. As what happened with the symbol of the best of the Cuban Revolution; those who wear the shirts don’t profess Escobar’s ideology. People wearing Escobar t-shirts in Europe might just as well use a Homer Simpson or Rolling Stones t-shirt, for they lack knowledge of the interminable trail of blood that he left in Colombia.

Another noteworthy factor is to see how, while the real drug traffickers learned lessons from the past and now keep low profiles, wide swaths of society have been infected with the thug culture of ostentation. It is a trend that some see in decline, like the publicist Ángel Beccassino, a student of the meaning of popular images, who says that “that rabid kitsch culture has also come and gone. With the new trend of local drug traffickers to lay low, the exaggerated kitsch aspect is now seen in Mexico’s drug cartels.”

The same thuggish or “narco-deco” architecture has left a profound mark, not only in cities such as Medellin or Cali, both known for drug cartels that bear their names, but also elsewhere in the country.

Escobar has a more profound meaning among residents of Medellín. For the elites, Escobar was a stigma to be erased from the new Medellín of public libraries in parks, the metro and the Metrocable; but among the poor many continue to see him as a paisa (one from Antioquia) version of Robin Hood, who challenged the establishment, made himself rich, but unlike the traditional rich, shared some of his wealth building homes for the poor or mini-soccer fields. What they don’t see is his diabolical side, and his criminal past of placing bombs on commercial airlines or in a shopping center on Mother’s Day. At Escobar’s burial, some 25,000 people came to mourn the death of a Robin Hood who, they think, stole from the rich to give to the poor.

Different authors consider Escobar to be something like the revenge of the dispossessed. In a country where social mobility is almost nonexistent, characters such as Pablo Escobar (or singer Diomedes Díaz, soccer player Tino Asprilla and now pyramid king David Murcia) claim the resentment of those born without anything and condemned to poverty regardless of their merits.

Lastly, there are those who think that Escobar has not died – like those who think Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison are still alive. But generally speaking, how much do people still retain of Escobar’s presence? Many anthropologists and students of culture believe that Escobar’s image has become watered down in the midst of the country’s whirlpool of characters and problems.

Alive or dead, present or withering, what is certain is that Pablo Escobar, one way or another, will continue to hold his own in a country that suffered the criminal horror of his megalomania. Yet the country must recognize that the great mafia boss was a product “made in Colombia.”