Backlands Bolshevism

By horseback and on foot, 300 Colombian peasants in ponchos and floppy felt hats trekked through the jungles and coffee fincas to a settlement in the Andean backlands 25 miles outside Bogota. The men carried leaflets: "Viva the organized masses!" A Red caudillo, Victor Julio Merchan, delivered a welcoming harangue, and the stubble-bearded troop responded with a clenched-fist salute. From an equally isolated redoubt not far to the east, a second Red band, commanded by Juan de la Cruz Varela, peddled at gunpoint 1 peso coupons bearing Lenin's picture and the appeal: "For a great Communist Party."

Lords of Upheaval. Called Viota and Sumapaz, the two Red enclaves of backlands Bolshevism in Colombia have been in existence for years, making trouble for democracy in Latin America long before anyone heard of Fidel Castro. The rugged, roadless terrain offers little hindrance to guerrilla movements, while effectively blunting any military reprisal or concerted government program of building and social reform that might dilute Communist influence on the peasantry.

The two Red bosses, Merchan in Viota, Varela in Sumapaz, are as much masters of their lands as any feudal lord. They fly a hammer-and-sickle flag, liquidate or banish dissenters, brainwash the populace with dinning P.A. systems, maintain their own efficient militia backed by arsenals that include machine guns and mortars. They even collect their own taxes, currently set at 10% of harvests.

Fortunes & Murder. From his headquarters hamlet of Brasil, pudgy Victor Merchan, 52, wields power in a 5-sq.-mi. area, on the fringes of which anti-Communist coffeemen patrol their land with rifles. Born of coffee-bean pluckers but now enjoying a fortune from his tax rake-off, Merchan studied two years in Moscow, returned to indoctrinate Colombians and, around 1930, incited peasants to overrun most of the area's coffee plantations.

More powerful still is wily, slit-eyed Juan de la Cruz Varela, 57, who bosses a 3,300 sq.mi. state-within-a-state, polices Sumapaz with a 150-man cavalry. Anyone, even high central government officials, who wishes to cross Sumapaz must get Varela's safe-conduct pass. Varela calls himself agrarian reformer and has even got himself elected to Colombia's Congress on the votes of poverty-ridden peasants (3,741 Colombians died of starvation and malnutrition in 1958; 1,300,000 are landless today). But Varela's real job is keeping Communism's flag flying, no matter the cost. Last September a gang massacred four of Varela's brothers, all antiCommunists. Witnesses say the men who did the job looked very much like Varela's militiamen.

Symptom of Ills. Colombia's President Alberto Lleras Camargo, who wants to eradicate the Communist enclaves and push through roads and reform, has had little success so far. Neither the Colombian army, which fought well in Korea but has little taste for guerrilla warfare, nor the bureaucrats show much initiative.

Viota and Sumapaz are symptomatic of Colombia's growing political ills. On the rise is an extreme left movement led by a fuzzy-minded, wealthy maverick from Lleras' own Liberal Party, Alfonso Lopez Michelsen, who naively joined hands with the Communists in a popular front that won an alarming 307,215 votes in the last election. In Cali, one of several Communist pressure points, a Red mob yelling vivas for Castro burned a paper U.S. flag last week and danced on the ashes. Overriding all is the savage, never-ending backlands banditry and feuding that has killed an estimated 300,000 Colombians since 1948. Latest horror: marauders descended on a hamlet called El Hoyo, near La Victoria, a fortnight ago, lined up men and boys on a patio, shot 16 and chopped the heads off half a dozen.

What prevents necessary reforms in land, labor, taxes and the courts is petty politics-for-politics'-sake squabbling among the Liberal and Conservative parties. As a coalition President, Lleras, one of democracy's ablest exponents in Latin America, must spend 80% of his time placating politicos.

Last week, shuffling his Cabinet for the fourth time in two years to meet partisan demands for influential posts and watching a vital agrarian reform bill bog down in Congress, Lleras hinted that he might quit unless his pull-apart coalition starts pulling together. "The responsibility is not mine," said he wearily, "if partisan interests make impossible the constitutional mandate of governing with the two parties."

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