MONDAY, APRIL 19, 2010

Colombia struggles to reduce

poverty

Gap between rich, poor continues as wealthy get much of U.S. aid

by Juan Forero

algarrobo, colombia —

Eight years after President Álvaro Uribe took office and began har- nessing billions in U.S. aid dollars to pummel Marxist guerrillas, Co- lombia is safer for this country’s 45 million people and for the for- eign investors who have flocked here.

But stubbornly high levels of

poverty expose a harsh reality: Despite better security and strong economic growth, Colom- bia has been unable to signifi- cantly alleviate the misery that helps fuel a 46-year-old conflict and the drug trafficking behind it.

What social scientists here call lackluster results in fighting pov- erty have become a campaign is- sue ahead of May elections, in which Colombian voters will elect a president to succeed Uribe, Washington’s closest ally on the continent. Unless a 43 percent poverty rate can be steadily re- duced, experts on the conflict contend, Colombia could regress even as the United States contin- ues to provide military assis- tance. “There is not only significant

poverty, but some of the poverty is stunning in its extreme,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), who has traveled extensively in Colombia since 2001. “It really is at the root of so much of the un- rest that occurs.” That poverty, and Colombia’s big gap between rich and poor, is particularly evident in towns along the Caribbean coast, such as this community of dirt roads and forlorn farms. Here in Algar- robo (population 12,000), a wealthy and influential family, the Dávilas, received $1 million in grants through an Agriculture Ministry program that provided tens of millions of dollars to afflu- ent farmers nationwide. Critics here say it made no difference that the Davilas own one of the most productive and lucrative oil- producing palm groves for miles. The subsistence farmers in the surrounding countryside, mean- while, have remained desperately poor, among the millions of rural Colombians left behind even as Latin America has grown richer in the last decade’s commodities boom. Those farmers, scratching out a living in a stretch of north- ern savannah that fired the imagination of the Nobel Prize- winning author Gabriel García Márquez, said they received noth- ing from the state. “To the contrary, they charged me taxes,” said Beatriz Mesa, 44, who recently gave up farming. The disclosures about subsi-

JUAN FORERO/THE WASHINGTON POST

Dario Ospino works on a lucrative plantation whose owner receives subsidies from the state.

Desperately poor

Despite Colombia’s strong economic growth, neighboring Latin American countries have a lower poverty rate.

Colombia’s

2008 POVERTY RATE Extreme poverty

Paraguay

Dominican Republic

Colombia

Ecuador Peru

Mexico Panama

Venezuela Brazil

Costa Rica Uruguay

6 7

16

4 14

SOURCE: United Nations’ Social Panorama of Latin America report

dies to the Davilas and other fam- ilies, first revealed by Cambio magazine in October, have touched off a sometimes-bitter debate over whether the Uribe administration has governed for the rich or for the poor. Federal prosecutors are investigating whether wealthy landowners de- frauded the subsidy program. To its supporters in Washing- ton, and to investors the world over, the Colombian government touts its success in delivering blows to a guerrilla movement that once seemed invincible, an effort carried out with $7.3 billion in U.S. aid since 2000. The econo- my has since flourished, more than doubling output since 2002, when Uribe took office. Foreign investment in Colombia is the fourth-highest in Latin America. The other Colombia is one of rising inequality, the only major country in Latin America in which the gap between rich and poor has increased in recent years, according to a report by the U.N. Economic Commission on Latin America. The percentage of Colombians who are indigent also rose, from 20.2 percent in 2007 to nearly 23 percent in 2008, nearly double the region’s aver- age. The guerrilla conflict, mean- while, has uprooted 5 million people in 25 years and has helped

goal for 2015: 28%

31%

23 23

14 13 11 14 10

28 28

26

NOTE: 2008 poverty rates for Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua were not available.

THE WASHINGTON POST

ensure that more than 60 percent of rural Colombians remain poor, according to Ricardo Bonilla, an expert on poverty at Bogota’s Na- tional University. The number of Colombians in

poverty did fall from 51 percent in 2002 to nearly 43 percent in 2008, according to the Economic Commission, but the contrast with big Latin neighbors is sharp. In Brazil, more than 32 million have joined the middle class since 2003, and in Peru poverty fell from 55 percent in 2002 to 36.2 percent six years later. The Colombian government

says that under Uribe, per-capita social spending has doubled, mil- lions more children attend public schools, and a cash-transfer pro- gram went from covering 220,000 families to nearly 3 mil- lion. “Now we are reaching millions of people that are under a well- structured and maintained social protection network,” said Diego Molano, the government’s top an- ti-poverty official. Marcelo Giugale, the World

Bank’s director for poverty reduc- tion in Latin America, agreed, saying that reducing poverty by more than 1 percentage point per year, as Colombia has done, “is re- spectable.” But even government officials acknowledge that poverty re-

35 39 36 44 43 58%

mains widespread in the country- side. Indigent sharecroppers are relegated to the poorest soil, working land without title, while a swath the size of Virginia is in the hands of drug traffickers and corrupt politicians, said Alejan- dro Reyes, an expert on land and author of a recent book, “War- riors and Peasants: The Plunder- ing of Land in Colombia.” Reyes said the Uribe adminis-

tration places a priority on fun- neling aid to the biggest farms be- cause the government thinks they are best suited to revive the rural economy.

“The government

thinks that the peasantry are not good producers, that they don’t know how to save, how to assimi- late technologies,” Reyes said. That philosophy was crystal- lized through the Insured Agro Income program, which provided most of a $250 million annual fund to sugar, palm oil and other large agricultural sectors. In this desperately poor state of

Magdalena, four families received most of the $10 million provided in 2007 and 2008, records show. Among those that benefited were various branches of the politically influential Vives family, which re- ceived $6.5 million.

Alfonso Vives Caballero, whose farm received about $200,000 and who is among those under in- vestigation, said in an interview that he played by the rules in ap- plying for the subsidy and that there was no prior deal with the government. On a visit to his 500- acre palm plantation, a manager showed how the money was used to put in a modern irrigation sys- tem. Here in Algarrobo, Juan Manu- el Dávila was one of the biggest beneficiaries. Investigators are trying to determine whether he evaded limits on the amount a farmer could receive by parceling out his 3,600 acres to family members and a Colombian model who dates his son. The Dávila family did not return phone calls or respond to a visit to their head- quarters in Santa Marta. The poor farmers who live here, though, did not begrudge the assistance. They simply asked why the state had not provided them with grants. “The small farmers also need

help,” said Elimeleth Rodriguez, member of one farming family.

foreroj@washpost.com

ANTONIO CALANNI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Pope Benedict XVI arrives to celebrate a Mass near Valletta, Malta. Afterward, he prayed and cried with eight victims of sexual abuse.

Some join Taliban to settle old scores

taliban from A1

cousin, Raheel Khan, can find them here. Still, Yar Dad Khan, a genial man with a graying beard, eyed the door warily as he spoke, and he kept his weapon close at hand. “There are some good people in

the Taliban, who actually want to bring an Islamic system to Paki- stan. But very few,” said Khan, 35. “Most of them are bad people, like my cousin.” Before joining the Taliban, his

GRIFF WITTE/THE WASHINGTON POST

A bodyguard walks behind Yar Dad Khan, a tribal leader in Mohmand. Khan’s cousin is a local Taliban commander.

relatives said, Khan’s cousin was fond of Johnnie Walker Black La- bel Scotch whisky and was hardly a model of Islamic piety. His trig- ger for becoming an insurgent was not a religious awakening, relatives and friends say, but his father’s decision to cut him out of the family inheritance. That choice has had conse- quences: One family member has been killed, others have narrowly escaped death, and everyone in the family who has not joined the Taliban knows there is special reason to fear. The conversion of Raheel Khan was surprising, because the fami- ly descends from a long line of maliks — Pashtun tribal leaders who traditionally call the shots in the poverty-stricken Federally Administered Tribal Areas, which line Pakistan’s northwestern bor- der with Afghanistan. The maliks own much of the land, get the best education and, crucially, decide matters of war and peace on be- half of their fellow tribesmen. The

government has long had only a token presence in the tribal areas; the maliks filled the void. When the Taliban emerged as a force in the FATA in 2005 and 2006, members initially por- trayed themselves as crusaders for Islamic justice. They patrolled the streets, punished criminals and enforced edicts against per- ceived vices, such as dancing and playing music. In the conserva- tive but relatively lawless tribal areas, many welcomed the group’s presence as benign, if oc- casionally brutal. But the Taliban soon revealed its true ambitions with an assassi- nation campaign directed against the maliks. The Taliban intended not just to enforce Islamic law. It also hoped to overturn the tribal order. Maliks could spare themselves by vowing fealty to the Taliban but were otherwise marked men. Hundreds were shot to death or beheaded. Their personal neme- ses — every malik has them — were all too willing to serve as ex- ecutioners. Criminals, members of weaker clans and family out- casts were especially enticed by the Taliban’s charms. “All you had to do was grow a long beard, and you could settle all your scores or do any nasty thing you please,” said Muham- mad, the retired general. The Taliban’s campaign ap- pealed to Raheel Khan, friends and relatives say, because his fa- ther was a malik. The family owned large tracts of land in the

sweeping, irrigated valleys of the Mohmand tribal agency, one of seven that make up the FATA. There they farmed wheat, corn, watermelon and honeydew. Unlike his cousins and siblings, Raheel Khan had dropped out of school early, by the seventh grade. He was a regular at parties and of- ten drank heavily. In an attempt to change his

ways, Khan’s father handed him the family trucking business. Within two years, he had run it into the ground and had accumu- lated huge debt. Under tribal custom, Raheel

Khan and his brothers were each entitled to a share of their father’s estate, which family members said was worth roughly $2.5 mil- lion. But when Raheel Khan turned 25 in spring 2008, his fa- ther told him he would not re- ceive any land. Raheel Khan took his grievance to the tribal council, but his father used his influence to squelch the case. So Raheel Khan turned to an alternative justice system — the Taliban’s. They agreed to help. Raheel Khan disappeared for

40 days and when he returned, he was a changed man. “Soon, everyone knew he was with the Taliban. We saw him with their patrols,” said Safdar Khan, a family friend. Meanwhile, the Taliban had broadened its ambitions. In sum- mer 2007, army commandos stormed the Red Mosque in Is- lamabad, which had become a fo- rum for radical defiance of the

government. In Mohmand, the Taliban seized a local shrine, re- named it the Red Mosque in hon- or of the dead and declared war on Pakistan. A wave of suicide bombings followed, as Taliban factions united against the gov- ernment. The army fought back with an

offensive in Mohmand and arrest- ed both Yar Dad Khan’s father and his uncle, the father of Raheel Khan. As their tribe’s maliks, they were culpable if any member be- came involved in the insurgency. Through intermediaries, the

two men reached out to Raheel Khan and sought to persuade him to abandon the Taliban. One night last April, he gave his answer. At a family wedding, he and a band of 25 Taliban fighters kidnapped the groom. When the groom’s father tried to negotiate for his son’s re- lease, Raheel Khan shot the man dead. Jahanzeb Khan, also a cousin of Raheel’s, was 40. Eventually, the maliks were re- leased, but Mohmand is still not safe for them. They were too weak to raise a militia to battle the Tali- ban, and their vulnerabilities are clear.

Raheel Khan has not been heard from in months. He may have been killed in the army’s of- fensive or by one of the missiles that periodically rain from a pass- ing U.S. drone. But Yar Dad Khan said his neighbors have their own theory, one that dates from a failed attack last month by men who ambushed his father in an apple orchard. “They have told us, ‘One of those masked men, he looked like your cousin.’ ”

witteg@washpost.com

KLMNO

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The World

A9

Pope meets with 8 who were abused by priests

A spokesman said the pope

by Philip Pullella

valletta, malta — Pope Ben-

edict XVI prayed and cried with eight victims of sexual abuse by priests on Sunday and promised that the church is doing “all in its power” to bring the guilty to jus- tice and protect the young. “It was emotional. Everybody

cried,” Lawrence Grech, 37, who was victimized as a child, said af- ter the private meeting following the pope’s Mass on the second and last day of his visit to Malta. The meeting, announced only

after it had finished, was Ben- edict’s first such gesture since a new wave of sexual abuse scan- dals swept over Roman Catholi- cism in recent months. He had previously met victims in the United States and Australia. “He prayed with them and as- sured them that the Church is do- ing, and will continue to do, all in its power to investigate allega- tions, to bring to justice those re- sponsible for abuse and to imple- ment effective measures de- signed to safeguard young people in the future,” a Vatican state- ment on the meeting said. It was one of the clearest state- ments yet from the Vatican that it wants local bishops to cooperate with civil authorities in prosecut- ing priests who abused children. “He was deeply moved by their stories and expressed his shame and sorrow over what victims and their families have suffered,” it said, adding that the pontiff hopes their pain will heal.

met with them as a group and then spoke to each individually before they prayed together. “I lost my faith in the last 20

years,” Grech, 37, said after the meeting. “I told him, ‘You can fill up the emptiness, fill up what the priests took from me when I was young.’ ” “This experience is going to

change my life. Now I can go to my daughter and say, ‘I believe,’ ” he said, breaking into tears. The U.S.-based support group

SNAP — Survivors’ Network of Those Abused by Priests — crit- icized the Vatican for saying it is doing all in its power against sex- ual abuse. “It’s easy to promise; it’s hard to deliver, especially in a rigid, ancient, secretive all-male mon- archy,” said spokesman Peter Ise- ly. “Not a single adult should feel relieved until strong steps are ac- tually taken, not promised, that will prevent future child sex crimes and coverups.” The pope’s trip to Malta has been overshadowed by the global church sex-abuse crisis. Earlier, at an open-air Mass, he heard the island’s leading bishop say the Catholic Church had to be hum- ble enough to recognize its fail- ures.

So far on this trip, Benedict has made no direct public reference to the worldwide crisis.

— Reuters

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