text:
When North Korea Falls
The furor over Kim Jong Il's missile tests and nuclear brinksmanship obscures the real threat: the prospect of North Korea's catastrophic collapse. How the regime ends could determine the balance of power in Asia for decades. The likely winner? China
|North Korean soldiers in a training exercise, staged in response to a joint military display by the United States and South Korea
The abbreviation for North Korea used by American military officers says it all: KFR, the Kim Family Regime. It is a regime whose demonization by the American media and policy makers has obscured some vital facts. North Korea's founder, Kim Il Sung, was not merely a dreary Stalinist tyrant. As defectors from his country will tell you, he was also a popular anti-Japanese guerrilla leader in the mold of Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist tyrant of Albania who led his countrymen in a successful insurgency against the Nazis. Nor is his son Kim Jong Il anything like the childish psychopath parodied in the film Team America: World Police. It's true that Kim Jong Il was once a playboy. But he has evolved into a canny operator. Andrei Lankov, a professor of history at South Korea's Kookmin University, in Seoul, says that under different circumstances Kim might have actually become the successful Hollywood film producer that regime propaganda claims he already is.
Kim Jong Il's succession was aided by the link that his father had established in the North Korean mind between the Kim Family Regime and the Choson Dynasty, which ruled the Korean peninsula for 500 years, starting in the late fourteenth century. Expertly tutored by his father, Kim consolidated power and manipulated the Chinese, the Americans, and the South Koreans into subsidizing him throughout the 1990s. And Kim is hardly impulsive: he has the equivalent of think tanks studying how best to respond to potential attacks from the United States and South Korea—attacks that themselves would be reactions to crises cleverly instigated by the North Korean government in Pyongyang. "The regime constitutes an extremely rational bunch of killers," Lankov says.
Yet for all Kim's canniness, there is evidence that he may be losing his edge. And that may be reason to worry: totalitarian regimes close to demise are apt to get panicky and do rash things. The weaker North Korea gets, the more dangerous it becomes. The question that should be of greatest concern to the U.S. military in the Pacific—and the question that will likely determine the global balance of power in Asia for generations—is, What happens when North Korea collapses?
On the Korean peninsula, the Cold War has never ended. On the somber, seaweed-toned border dividing the two Koreas, amid the cries of egrets and Manchurian cranes, I observed South Korean soldiers standing frozen in tae kwon do ready positions, their fists clenched and forearms tightened, staring into the faces of their North Korean counterparts. Each side picks its tallest, most intimidating soldiers for the task (they are still short by American standards).
In the immediate aftermath of the Korean War, the South raised a 328-foot flagpole; the North responded with a 525-foot pole, then put a flag on it whose dry weight is 595 pounds. The North built a two-story building in the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom; the South built a three-story one. The North then added another story to its building. "The land of one-upmanship," is how one U.S. Army sergeant describes the DMZ, or demilitarized zone. The two sides once held a meeting in Panmunjom that went on for eleven hours. Because there was no formal agreement about when to take a bathroom break, neither side budged. The meeting became known as the "Battle of the Bladders."
In other divided countries of the twentieth century—Vietnam, Germany, Yemen—the forces of unity ultimately triumphed. But history suggests that unification does not happen through a calibrated political process in which the interests of all sides are respected. Rather, it tends to happen through a cataclysm of events that, piles of white papers and war-gaming exercises notwithstanding, catches experts by surprise.
Given that North Korea's army of 1.2 million soldiers has been increasingly deployed toward the South Korean border, the Korean peninsula looms as potentially the next American military nightmare. In 1980, 40 percent of North Korean combat forces were deployed south of Pyongyang near the DMZ; by 2003, more than 70 percent were. As the saying goes among American soldiers, "There is no peacetime in the ROK." (ROK, pronounced "rock," is militaryspeak for the Republic of Korea.) One has merely to observe the Patriot missile batteries, the reinforced concrete hangars, and the blast barriers at the U.S. Air Force bases at Osan and Kunsan, south of Seoul—which are as heavily fortified as any bases in Iraq—to be aware of this. A marine in Okinawa told me, "North Korea is not some third-rate, Middle Eastern conventional army. These brainwashed Asians—as he crudely put it—"will stand and fight." American soldiers in Korea refer to the fighting on the peninsula between 1950 and 1953 as "the first Korean War." The implicit assumption is that there will be a second.
This helps explain why Korea may be the most dismal place in the world for U.S. troops to be deployed—worse, in some ways, than Iraq. While I traveled on the peninsula, numerous members of the combat-arms community, both air and infantry, told me that they would rather be in Iraq or Afghanistan than in Korea, which constitutes the worst of all military worlds. Soldiers and airmen often live on a grueling wartime schedule, with constant drills, and yet they also have to put up with the official folderol that is part of all peacetime bases—the saluting and inspections that fall by the wayside in war zones, where the only thing that matters is how well you fight. The weather on the peninsula is lousy, too: the winds charging down from Siberia make the winters unbearably frigid, and the monsoons coming off the Pacific Ocean make the summers hot and humid. The dust blowing in from the Gobi Desert doesn't help.
The threat from north of the DMZ is formidable. North Korea boasts 100,000 well-trained special-operations forces and one of the world's largest biological and chemical arsenals. It has stockpiles of anthrax, cholera, and plague, as well as eight industrial facilities for producing chemical agents—any of which could be launched at Seoul by the army's conventional artillery. If the governing infrastructure in Pyongyang were to unravel, the result could be widespread lawlessness (compounded by the guerrilla mentality of the Kim Family Regime's armed forces), as well as mass migration out of and within North Korea. In short, North Korea's potential for anarchy is equal to that of Iraq, and the potential for the deployment of weapons of mass destruction—either during or after pre-collapse fighting—is far greater.
For a harbinger of the kind of chaos that looms on the peninsula consider Albania, which was for some years the most anarchic country in post-Communist Eastern Europe, save for war-torn Yugoslavia. On a visit to Albania before the Stalinist regime there finally collapsed, I saw vicious gangs of boys as young as eight harassing people. North Korea is reportedly plagued by the same phenomenon outside of its showcase capital. That may be an indication of what lies ahead. In fact, what terrifies South Koreans more than North Korean missiles is North Korean refugees pouring south. The Chinese, for their part, have nightmare visions of millions of North Korean refugees heading north over the Yalu River into Manchuria.
Obviously, it would be reckless not to worry about North Korea's missile and WMD technologies. In August, there were reports yet again that Kim Jong Il was preparing an underground nuclear test. And the North test fired seven missiles in July. According to U.S. data, three of the missiles were Scud-Cs, and three were No-dong-As with ranges of 300 to 1,000 miles; all were capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. (Whether North Korea has such warheads is not definitively known, but it is widely believed to have in the neighborhood of ten—and the KFR certainly has the materials and technological know-how to build them.) The third type of missile, a Taep'o-dong-2, has a range of 2,300 to 9,300 miles, which means it could conceivably hit the continental United States. Though the Taep'o-dong-2 failed after takeoff during the recent testing, it did so at the point of maximum dynamic pressure—the same point where the space shuttle Challenger exploded, and the moment when things are most likely to go wrong. So this is likely not an insoluble problem for the KFR.
Kim Jong Il's compulsion to demonstrate his missile prowess is a sign of his weakness. Contrary to popular perception in the United States, Kim doesn't stay up at night worrying about what the Americans might do to him; it's not North Korea's weakness relative to the United States that preoccupies him. Rather, if he does stay up late worrying, it's about China. He knows the Chinese have always had a greater interest in North Korea's geography—with its additional outlets to the sea close to Russia—than they have in the long-term survival of his regime. (Like us, even as they want the regime to survive, the Chinese have plans for the northern half of the Korean peninsula that do not include the "Dear Leader.") One of Kim's main goals in so aggressively displaying North Korea's missile capacity is to compel the United States to deal directly with him, thereby making his otherwise weakening state seem stronger. And the stronger Pyongyang appears to be, the better off it is in its crucial dealings with Beijing, which are what really matter to Kim.
To Kim's sure dismay, the American response to his recent missile tests was a shrug. President George W. Bush dispatched Christopher Hill, his assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, to the region rather than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. I was in South Korea during the missile firings, and there were few signs of alert on any of the U.S. bases in Korea. Pilots in several fighter squadrons were told not to drink too much on their days off, in case they had to be called in, but that was about the extent of it.
What should concentrate the minds of American strategists is not Kim's missiles per se but rather what his decision to launch them says about the stability of his regime. Middle- and upper-middle-level U.S. officers based in South Korea and Japan are planning for a meltdown of North Korea that, within days or even hours of its occurrence, could present the world—meaning, really, the American military—with the greatest stabilization operation since the end of World War II. "It could be the mother of all humanitarian relief operations," Army Special Forces Colonel David Maxwell told me. On one day, a semi-starving population of 23 million people would be Kim Jong Il's responsibility; on the next, it would be the U.S. military's, which would have to work out an arrangement with the Chinese People's Liberation Army (among others) about how to manage the crisis.
Fortunately, the demise of North Korea is more likely to be drawn out. Robert Collins, a retired Army master sergeant and now a civilian area expert for the American military in South Korea, outlined for me seven phases of collapse in the North:
Phase One: resource depletion;
Phase Two: the failure to maintain infrastructure around the country because of resource depletion;
Phase Three: the rise of independent fiefs informally controlled by local party apparatchiks or warlords, along with widespread corruption to circumvent a failing central government;
Phase Four: the attempted suppression of these fiefs by the KFR once it feels that they have become powerful enough;
Phase Five: active resistance against the central government;
Phase Six: the fracture of the regime; and
Phase Seven: the formation of new national leadership.
North Korea probably reached Phase Four in the mid-1990s, but was saved by subsidies from China and South Korea, as well as by famine aid from the United States. It has now gone back to Phase Three.
Kim Jong Il learned a powerful lesson by watching the fall of the Ceausescu Family Regime, in Romania: Take utter and complete control of the military. And so he has. The KFR now rules through the army. There have been only individual defections of North Korean soldiers to the South. Even small, unit-level defections—which would indicate that soldiers are talking to one another and are no longer afraid of exposure by comrades—have not yet occurred. One defector from the North's special-operations forces told me that soldiers in the ranks are afraid to discuss politics with one another.
The North Korean People's Army is simply too big to be kept happy and well fed, so the regime concentrates on keeping the elite units comfortable. The defector I spoke to—a scout swimmer—told me that while the special-operations forces live well, the extreme poverty of conventional soldiers would make their loyalty to Kim Jong Il in a difficult war questionable. Would they fight to defend the KFR if there were an unforeseen rebellion? The Romanian example suggests that it depends on the circumstances: when workers revolted in 1987 in Brasov, the Romanian military crushed them; when ethnic Hungarians did so two years later in Timisoara, the military deserted the regime.
Stephen Bradner, a civilian expert on the region and an adviser to the military in South Korea, has thought a lot about the tactical and operational problems an unraveling North Korean state would present. So has Colonel Maxwell, the chief of staff of U.S. Special Operations in South Korea. "The regime in Pyongyang could collapse without necessarily its army corps and brigades collapsing," Maxwell says. "So we might have to mount a relief operation at the same time that we'd be conducting combat ops. If there is anybody in the UN who thinks it will just be a matter of feeding people, they're smoking dope."
Maxwell has conducted similar operations before: he was the commander of a U.S. Army Special Forces battalion that landed on Basilan Island, in the southern Philippines, in early 2002, part of a mission that combined humanitarian assistance with counterinsurgency operations against Jemaah Islamiyah and the Abu Sayyaf Group, two terrorist organizations. But the Korean peninsula presents a far vaster and more difficult challenge. "The situation in the North could become so messy and ambiguous," Maxwell says, "that the collapse of the chain of command of the KFR could be more dangerous than the preservation of it, particularly when one considers control over WMD."
In order to prevent a debacle of the sort that occurred in Iraq—but with potentially deadlier consequences, because of the free-floating WMD—a successful relief operation would require making contacts with KFR generals and various factions of the former North Korean military, who would be vying for control in different regions. If the generals were not absorbed into the operational command structure of the occupying force, Maxwell says, they might form the basis of an insurgency. The Chinese, who have connections inside the North Korean military, would be best positioned to make these contacts—but the role of U.S. Army Special Forces in this effort might be substantial. Green Berets and the CIA would be among the first in, much like in Afghanistan in 2001.
Obviously, the United States could not unilaterally insert troops into a dissolved North Korea. It would likely be a four-power intervention force—the United States, China, South Korea, and Russia—officially sanctioned by the United Nations. Japan would be kept out (though all parties would gladly accept Japanese money for the endeavor).
Although Japan's proximity to the peninsula gives it the most to fear from reunification, Korean hatred of the Japanese makes participation of Japanese troops in an intervention force unlikely. Between 1910 and 1945, Japan brutally occupied not only Korea but parts of China too, and it defeated Russia on land and at sea in the early twentieth century. Tokyo may have more reason than any other government for wanting to put boots on the ground in a collapsed North Korea, but it won't be able to, because both China and South Korea would fight tooth and nail to prevent it from doing so.
Whereas Japan's strategic position would be dramatically weakened by a collapsed North Korean state, China would eventually benefit. A post-KFR Korean peninsula could be more or less under Seoul's control—and China is now South Korea's biggest trading partner. Driving along the coast, all I saw at South Korean ports were Chinese ships.
Other factors also work in Beijing's favor. China harbors thousands of North Korean defectors that it would send back after a collapse, in order to build a favorable political base for China's gradual economic takeover of the Tumen River region—the northeast Asian river valley where China, Russia, and North Korea intersect, with good port facilities on the Pacific. De facto control of a future Tumen Prosperity Sphere would bolster China's fiscal strength, helping it to do economic battle with the United States and Japan. If China's troops could carve out a buffer zone in the part of North Korea near Manchuria—where China is now developing massive infrastructure projects, such as roads and ports—Beijing might then sanction the installation of an international coalition elsewhere in the North.
Russia's weakness in the Far East is demonstrated by its failure to prevent the creeping demographic conquest of its eastern territories by ethnic Chinese. It will be truculent in guarding its interests on the Korean peninsula. And Russia does have a historical legacy here: North Korea was originally a Soviet creation and client state. Keeping Russian troops out of Korea would probably be more trouble for the other powers than letting some in.
Of course, South Korea would bear the brunt of the economic and social disruption in returning the peninsula to normalcy. No official will say this out loud, but South Korea—along with every other country in the region—has little interest in reunification, unless it were to happen gradually over years or decades. The best outcome would be a South Korean protectorate in much of the North, officially under an international trusteeship, that would keep the two Koreas functionally separate for a significant period of time. This would allow each country time to prepare for a unified Korean state, without the attendant chaos.
Following the Communist regime's collapse, the early stabilization of the North could fall unofficially to the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM) and U.S. Forces Korea (which is a semiautonomous subcommand of PACOM), also wearing blue UN helmets. But while the U.S. military would have operational responsibility, it would not have sole control. It would have to lead an unwieldy regional coalition that would need to deploy rapidly in order to stabilize the North and deliver humanitarian assistance. A successful relief operation in North Korea in the weeks following the regime's collapse could mean the difference between anarchy and prosperity on the peninsula for years to come.
But what if rather than simply unraveling, the North launched a surprise attack on the South? This is probably less likely to happen now than it was, say, two decades ago, when Kim Il Sung commanded a stronger state and the South Korean armed forces were less mature. But Colonel Maxwell and others are preparing for this possibility.
Simply driving through Seoul, one of the world's great and congested megacities, makes it clear that a conventional infantry attack on South Korea's capital is something that not even a fool would contemplate. So if the North were to attack, it would likely resort instead to a low-grade demonstration of "shock and awe," using its 13,000 artillery pieces and multiple-rocket launchers to fire more than 300,000 shells per hour on the South Korean capital, where close to half the nation's 49 million people live. The widespread havoc this would cause would be amplified by North Korean special-operations forces, which would infiltrate the South to sabotage water plants and train and bus terminals. Meanwhile, the North Korean People's Army would march on the city of Uijongbu, north of Seoul, from which it could cross over the Han River and bypass Seoul from the east.
But this strategy would fail. While American A-10 Warthogs, F-16 Vipers, and other aircraft would destroy enemy missile batteries and kill many North Korean troops inside South Korea, submarine-launched missiles and B-2 Spirit bombers sent from Guam and Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri would take out strategic assets inside North Korea. In the meantime, the South Korean army would quickly occupy the transport hubs, while unleashing its own divisions and special-operations forces on the marauding People's Army. The KFR knows this; thus any such invasion would have to be the act of a regime in the latter phases of disintegration. North Korea's lone hope would be that the hourly carnage it could produce—in the time between the first artillery barrage on Seoul and the beginning of a robust military response by South Korea and the United States—would lead the South Korean left, abetted by the United Nations and elements of the global media, to cry out for diplomacy and a negotiated settlement as an alternative to violence.
And there is no question: the violence would be horrific. Iraq and Afghanistan would look clean by comparison. A South Korea filled with North Korean troops would be (in military parlance) a "target-rich environment," in which the good guys and the bad guys would always be close to each other. "Gnarly chaos," is how one F-16 Viper pilot described it to me. "The ultimate fog of war." The battlefield would be made more confusing by the serious language barrier that exists between American pilots and South Korean JTACs, or Joint Tactical Air Controllers, who would have to guide the Americans to many of their targets. A-10 and F-16 pilots in South Korea have complained to me that this weak link in the bilateral military relationship would drive up the instances of friendly-fire and collateral civilian deaths—on which the media undoubtedly would then concentrate. As part of a deal to halt the bloodbath, members of the KFR might be able to negotiate their own post-regime survival.
But middle and upper-middle levels of the American military worry less about an indiscriminate artillery attack on the South than about a very discriminate one. My sources feared that in the aftermath of the KFR's missile launches in July, the Bush administration might actually have been foolish enough to react militarily—which might have been exactly what Kim Jong Il was hoping for, since it would have allowed him to achieve a primary strategic goal: splitting the alliance between South Korea and the United States. How would that happen? After the United States responded in a targeted fashion to the missile launches or some other future outrage, the North would initiate an intensive five- or ten- minute-long artillery barrage on Seoul, killing some Americans and South Koreans near Yongsan Garrison ("Dragon Mountain"), the American military's Green Zone in the heart of the city. Then the North would simply stop. And after the shell fire halted, the proverbial question among American officers in a quandary would arise: What now, Lieutenant?
Politically speaking, we would be trumped. The South Korean left—which has been made powerful by an intrusively large American troop presence and by decades of manipulation by the North—would blame the United States for the carnage in Seoul, pointing out that it had been provoked by the Americans' targeted strike against North Korea. The United Nations and the global media would subtly blame Washington for the crisis—and call not so subtly for peace talks. With that, the KFR would get a new lease on life, with more aid forthcoming from the international community to keep it afloat.
Which is why some of the military and civilian experts I spoke with argue for economic warfare against the North. Stop helping the regime with humanitarian aid, they say. The North Korean population has been on the brink of starvation for decades. The forests are denuded. People are eating tree bark. Stop prolonging the agony. Help the KFR collapse.
Of course, one problem with this strategy is that it could end up making North Korea's direst military options more likely; as noted, regimes like this one, in the latter stages of collapse, are apt to behave irresponsibly, possibly resorting to WMD. Another problem is that we can't do much to squeeze the North Koreans economically; it's China, not the United States, that is really keeping the regime alive. The Chinese are already in the process of gaining operational control over anything in North Korea that has strategic economic and military value: mines, railways, and so on. Thus, any soft landing for the KFR would more likely be orchestrated by Beijing than by Washington, even though the Chinese might not mind saddling the Americans with the short-term military responsibility of stabilizing a collapsed North Korea.
If the peninsula could be stabilized after the fall of the KFR, this Greater Korea would have an instant, undisputed enemy: Japan. Any Korean politician would be able to stand up in parliament and get political mileage out of an anti-Japanese tirade. The Japanese know this, and it's helping fuel their remilitarization. (The Japanese navy, in particular, has been emphasizing the latest diesel submarines and Aegis destroyers.) In July, there was a saber-rattling contest between Tokyo and Seoul over disputed islets that South Koreans call Tokdo and the Japanese Takeshima, in what the Koreans refer to as the East Sea and the Japanese the Sea of Japan. Harsh words were exchanged after South Korea sent a survey ship to the area. The United States has a history of underestimating historical-ethnic disputes: in the 1980s, it paid insufficient attention to ethnic tensions in Yugoslavia; more recently, it mistakenly downplayed Sunni-Shiite tensions in Iraq. It should not make the same mistake in Asia.
Here it is useful to review Korean history. In the medieval era, the Koreans fought wars against Chinese dynasties like the Sui and the Tang. But later on, following the rise to power of Korea's own Choson Dynasty, in 1392, Japan gradually caught up with China as Korea's principal adversary. There was a brutal Japanese violation of the peninsula at the end of the sixteenth century, culminating in an orgy of rape and murder, and a savage occupation at the beginning of the twentieth, which ended only with the Soviet and American conquests. (The Japanese effect on the peninsula has not been all negative: South Koreans may have trouble admitting it, but Japanese colonialism in the early twentieth century nearly doubled the life expectancy of the average Korean.)
Reunification would provide at least one benefit to Japan. As Park Syung Je, an analyst at the Asia Strategy Institute in Seoul, explained to me, a unified Greater Korea might serve to balance against an even more significant threat to Japan: a rising China. But this Greater Korea would still be a linchpin of China's twenty-first-century Asian economic-prosperity sphere, a more benign version of Imperial Japan's Co- Prosperity Sphere of the 1940s. America could be pushed to the margins. Although Korean businessmen would resist economic domination by China, lingering anti-Americanism in South Korea might outweigh that resistance—especially once the generation that still remembers the sacrifices of American servicemen during the 1950s disappears entirely. America's large troop presence will have granted Korea a free society, just as a similar American presence helped to make Germany a free society. But younger generations of South Koreans may remember U.S. troops only negatively—and what is more indelibly inscribed in the Korean national memory is America's support for the Japanese occupation of Korea following the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905. (This was in exchange for Imperial Japan's support of America's occupation of the Philippines a few years earlier.)
Greater Korea's troubled relationship with China may ultimately be determined by what America does, and specifically by the degree to which the United States can get Japan to recognize its war guilt. If Washington continues to maintain a military alliance with Tokyo without Japan's publicly coming to terms with its past, Greater Korea will move psychologically toward China. President Bush's recent love fest with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi at Graceland may have played well in the United States, but it was seen as an insult in South Korea because of Koizumi's earlier visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors the Japanese war dead—including war criminals. If the United States continues to treat Japan as a golden stepchild, then China and its implicit ally, Greater Korea, will have a tense relationship with Japan and its implicit allies, the United States and India. But because of its own manifold business interests in China, America could only balance against China very delicately.
With so many complex and subtle interests to weigh here, what should the American strategy be over the long term? South Korean army Colonel Chung Kyung Yung, a professor at Seoul's National Defense University, says that after the KFR collapses and the North is stabilized, the wisest thing for the United States to do would be to keep 10,000 troops or so on the peninsula. Such a contingent, he told me, would serve as a statement that the United States is not abandoning Korea to a militarily resurgent Japan. The best way to stabilize Asia, Chung emphasizes, would be to prevent Greater Korea—which would be fragile in the period after the North's collapse—from becoming a source of contention between China and Japan. Peter Beck, the director of the International Crisis Group's North East Asia Project, agrees. "Because the United States is the furthest away of all these powers," he told me, "it should be perceived as the least dangerous—the one power without territorial ambitions."
Unfortunately, South Korean politics might make it more difficult to keep American troops on the peninsula long term. Yes, it's true that of the few prominent statues of foreigners in the country, two are of Americans (General Douglas MacArthur and General James Van Fleet, the father of the South Korean armed forces). And it is also true that, because of late-nineteenth-century missionary activity, American-style Protestantism is practically the dominant religion in South Korea. (If North Korea collapses, expect Christian evangelism to quickly replace the Communist regime's Juche ethos of self-reliance: Pyongyang was once the "Jerusalem of Asia" for missionaries.) And yet despite all this, the South Koreans have largely convinced themselves that they need to be as worried about the Americans as they are about the Chinese—just as they have convinced themselves that they should be as afraid of the Japanese as they are of the North Koreans. The fact is that South Koreans may not want any American troops in their country.
Already the American air and ground troops who would defend the South if the KFR were to attack are facing increasing restrictions on their training, because of South Korean political pressures. The A-10 squadron that would be flying nonstop sorties near the DMZ in the event of a war had to train in Thailand this past winter, because of limitations Seoul placed on its flight patterns. This is all part of yet another frustration that U.S. troops in South Korea must endure: having to be on a war footing in order to defend a government that wants to be defended but publicly pretends otherwise.
The truth is, many South Koreans have an interest in the perpetuation of the Kim Family Regime, or something like it, since the KFR's demise would usher in a period of economic sacrifice that nobody in South Korea is prepared for. A long-standing commitment by the American military has allowed the country to evolve into a materialistic society. Few South Koreans have any interest in the disruption the collapse of the KFR would produce.
Meanwhile, China's infrastructure investments are already laying the groundwork for a Tibet-like buffer state in much of North Korea, to be ruled indirectly through Beijing's Korean cronies once the KFR unravels. This buffer state will be less oppressive than the morbid, crushing tyranny it will replace. So from the point of view of the average South Korean, the Chinese look to be offering a better deal than the Americans, whose plan for a free and democratic unified peninsula would require South Korean taxpayers to pay much of the cost. The more that Washington thinks narrowly in terms of a democratic Korean peninsula, the more Beijing has the potential to lock the United States out of it. For there is a yawning distance between the Stalinist KFR tyranny and a stable, Western-style democracy: in between these extremes lie several categories of mixed regimes and benign dictatorships, any of which might offer the North Koreans far more stability as a transition mechanism than anything the United States might be able to provide. No one should forget that South Korea's prosperity and state cohesion were achieved not under a purely democratic government but under Park Chung Hee's benign dictatorship of the 1960s and '70s. Furthermore, North Koreans, who were never ruled by the British, have even less historical experience with democracy than Iraqis. Ultimately, victory on the Korean peninsula will go to the side with the most indirect and nuanced strategy.
The long-term success of America's basic policy on the peninsula hinges on the willingness of South Koreans to make a significant sacrifice, at some point, for the sake of freedom in the North. But sacrifice is not a word that voters in free and prosperous societies tend to like. If voters in Western-style democracies are good at anything, it's rationalizing their own selfishness—and it may turn out that the authoritarian Chinese understand the voters of South Korea's free and democratic society better than we do. If that's the case, there may never actually be a Greater Korea in the way that we imagine it. Rather, the North's demise will be carefully managed by Beijing in such a way that the country will go from being a rogue nation to a de facto satellite of the Middle Kingdom—but one with sufficient contact with the South that the Korean yearning for a measure of reunification will be satisfied.
Keep in mind that Asia—largely because it is so economically dynamic—is politically and militarily volatile. Its alliance structures are not nearly as developed as those in Europe, which has NATO and the European Union. Conflicting nationalisms are expressed in Asia through more than just soccer games. Thus, the question of whether it's to be the American or the Chinese vision of North Korea's future that gets realized may hinge on political-military decisions made in the midst of an opaque and confusing crisis.
Before I left Seoul, I met with a local military legend. Retired General Paik Sun Yup, now eighty-six years old, was the 1st Infantry Division commander during the Korean War and worked hand in hand with General MacArthur. When we spoke, Paik insisted that crisis-driven political-military decisions here will ultimately determine the balance of power throughout Asia, the most important region for the world's economy. "This peninsula is the pivot," he said.
When I reflected on Paik's words later, it occurred to me that while the United States is in its fourth year of a war in Iraq, it has been on a war footing in Korea for fifty-six years now. More than ten times as many Americans have been killed on the Korean peninsula as in Mesopotamia. Most Americans hope and expect that we will withdraw from Iraq within a few years—yet we still have 32,000 troops in South Korea, more than half a century after the armistice. Korea provides a sense of America's daunting, imperial-like burdens.
But South Korea also provides a lesson in what can be accomplished with patience and dogged persistence. The drive from the airport at Inchon to downtown Seoul goes through the heart of a former urban war zone. South Korea's capital was taken and retaken four times in some of the most intense fighting of the Korean War. Korean men and women who lived through that time will always be grateful for what retired U.S. Army Colonel Robert Killebrew has called American "stick-to-itiveness," without which we would have little hope of remaining a great power.
In the heart of Seoul lies Yongsan Garrison, a leafy, fortified Little America, guarded and surrounded by high walls. Inside these 630 acres, which closely resemble the Panama Canal Zone before the Americans gave it up, are 8,000 American military and diplomatic personnel in manicured suburban homes surrounded by neatly clipped hedges and backyard barbecue grills. I drove by a high school, baseball and football fields, a driving range, a hospital, a massive commissary, a bowling alley, and restaurants. U.S. Forces Korea and its attendant bureaucracies are located in redbrick buildings that the Americans inherited in 1945 from the Japanese occupiers. Korea is so substantial a military commitment for us that it merits its own, semiautonomous subcommand of PACOM—just as Iraq, unofficially anyway, merits its own four-star subcommand of CENTCOM.
The United States hopes to complete a troop drawdown in South Korea in 2008. Having moved into Yongsan Garrison when Korea's future seemed highly uncertain, American troops plan to give up this prime downtown real estate and relocate to Camp Humphreys, in Pyongtaek, thirty miles to the south. The number of ground troops will drop to 25,000, and will essentially comprise a skeleton of logistical support shops, which would be able to acquire muscles and tendons in the form of a large invasion force in the event of a war or a regime collapse that necessitated a military intervention.
Patience and dogged persistence are heroic attributes. But while military units can be expected to be heroic, one should not expect a home front to be forever so. And while in the fullness of time patience and dogged persistence can breed success, it is the kind of success that does not necessarily reward the victor but, rather, the player best able to take advantage of the new situation. It is far too early to tell who ultimately will benefit from a stable and prosperous Mesopotamia, if one should ever emerge. But in the case of Korea, it looks like it will be the Chinese.
Photograph by EPA/Corbis


text:
BOSTON, Feb. 28 (UPI) -- Patrice Bergeron scored with 1:22 left in overtime Thursday to give Boston its fifth straight victory, a 2-1 decision over Ottawa.
Dennis Seidenberg got off a blast from the point that was tipped by Bergeron. The deflected puck made it through the pads of goaltender Robin Lehner and trickled across the goal line.
Ottawa had won five in a row and began the night tied with Boston for second place in the Northeast Division with 26 points. The Bruins, however, have played four fewer games than has Ottawa.
Both of the regulation goals came in the second period with Boston taking the lead on a wrist shot by Nathan Horton early in the stanza. Jim O'Brien tied it on the power play with 5:22 remaining.
Tuukka Rask made 30 saves for the Bruins, who have won eight of their last 10. Lehner gave up the winning goal on the 46th shot he faced.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Disney's Shanghai theme park to reopen May 11 with precautions; what about US parks?
The Walt Disney Company didn't offer any new estimate Tuesday as to when it will reopen its U.S. theme parks, but it outlined how its park in Shanghai will be first worldwide park to welcome guests again.
In issuing its financial results for the quarter that ended March 28, Disney showed the degree to which the closures are socking its bottom line. Theme parks took a $1 billion hit on operating income over the quarter.
"Like so many other companies and industries, the pandemic has hit us hard," Executive Chairman Bob Iger said, adding, "I have absolute confidence in our ability to get through this challenging period and recover successfully."
More:Disney introduces face masks featuring Baby Yoda, Black Panther, Forky and more
The company's other theme parks in France, Japan and China are also shuttered, though CEO Bob Chapek said Shanghai Disneyland will reopen May 11 with social distancing, masks, temperature scans and other precautions. That head start may provide a blueprint for how to reopen safely while preserving the fun.
In remarks to analysts, reporters and shareholders, Chapek said that guests and workers at Shanghai will both wear masks when that park reopens. However, characters won't, so they will need to keep their distance and won't be dispensing hugs for a while.
He said Shanghai Disneyland has a capacity of 80,000, but that the Chinese government is restricting it to 30%, or 24,000. "We are going to open up far below that to have our training wheels on," he said. In a few weeks, he said the park will ramp up to the new limit.
In order to ensure the park stays below capacity, he said tickets will be good only on a particular day – but he added that he's not sure the same policy will be in effect when the U.S. parks eventually reopen.
The company's chief medical officer, Dr. Pamela Hymel called the Shanghai reopening plans "an encouraging sign for Disney parks and retail locations all over the world" and noted in a Tuesday blog post that she's been working closely with the U.S. Travel Association on a set of guidelines.
She outlined some of the tactics being explored for Walt Disney World and Disneyland, including a phased reopening that calls for opening the retail and dining locations before the parks themselves, as Shanghai has done.
Hymel also warned that the parks will likely have to implement guest capacity measures to comply with state and federal guidelines and noted that they are looking at ways to use the Play Disney Parks app and virtual queues to do so.
The parks have already added hand sanitizing and washing stations during their closures, she said. But upon reopening, they will step up their cleaning and disinfection and employee health and safety training.
Disney isn't the only theme park unwilling to commit to an opening date at this point. Six Flags is paying close attention to Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia, Missouri and Mexico as areas for reopening – with no hard date yet.
"Those would seem to be the areas right now, whereas we're watching the state or the country dynamics that would suggest, ideally, we could open at some point, hopefully in the summer," Michael Spanos, president, CEO and director of Six Flags, said in an earnings call last week. "But again, time will tell."
On March 30, Spanos announced all Six Flags theme parks across the country would suspend operations through mid-May.
As for Disney Cruise Line, Chapek had bad news for cruisers: "That will probably be the last of our travel-oriented businesses to come back online," he said on the earnings call.
But Chapek also said that he expects Disney's cruise business to come back strong, noting the loyalty of cruise enthusiasts. "They trust our business to act in a responsible way ... to protect them against some of the woes that have plagued the industry," he said.
Disney's bleak financial results – a 91% decrease in net income from continuing operations during the previous quarter – come as analysts' have issued expectations of a protracted theme-park shutdown, perhaps made worse by any resurgence of COVID-19 as states reopen.
Some don't expect the parks to reopen until 2021, including John Hodulik, managing director of investment research for global financial firm UBS, in a report to investors last month.
"We believe parks' profitability will be impaired for a longer period of time given the lingering effects of the outbreak and now assume an opening date of Jan. 1 as our base case," Hodulik wrote.
More:What Disney World and Disneyland could look like when they reopen
Though Disney's devotees are itching to get back to the parks, the company is even more eager to be able to safely reopen. But there seems to be little question about pent-up demand among consumers for vacations and escapism from the current coronavirus myopia.
Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly, in revealing last week that the carrier filled only 6% of the seats on its aircraft in April, cited Disney World as the kind of destination that could be key to a leisure travel revival.
"They need to have something to be able to do when they get there," Kelly said. "So Disney World needs to open back up. Restaurants need to open back up."
United Airlines President Scott Kirby, in a call with investors Friday, also pointed to the famed theme parks in saying the travel business won't pick up until destinations like them are open again.
"Taking my kids to Disneyland is something I do every year, and I love it ... but Disneyland needs to be open."
More:Man arrested after camping on Disney World's Discovery Island during coronavirus pandemic
Contributing: David Oliver, Dawn Gilbertson


text:
CHICAGO – A groom whose bride had sought to keep their impending wedding secret from most of her family is wanted on a murder charge after his new wife was found stabbed to death in a bathtub in her suburban Chicago home just hours after the ceremony, still dressed in silver sequins. A manhunt is under way for 30-year-old Arnoldo Jimenez, who is accused of first-degree murder in the slaying of Estrella Carrera, 26, shortly after they celebrated their marriage on Friday with friends, said police in the Chicago suburb of Burbank. "It was a very brutal killing," Capt. Joseph Ford of the Burbank Police Department told The Associated Press Tuesday. "We do our jobs every day, of course. But something like this really motivates you to work even harder." Carrera's body was found in a bathtub in a silver sequin cocktail dress that she wore at the wedding reception. Ford said it was possible she was also wed in the short shimmering dress. After the Friday afternoon marriage at Chicago's City Hall, the couple had dinner with friends at a restaurant, then headed to a nightclub in a party limousine. They were last seen at 4 a.m. Saturday, and Carrera's body was found in her Burbank apartment Sunday. The 6-foot, 220-pound Jimenez was last known to be driving a 2006 black Maserati. Since the killing likely took place just hours after the couple went to her Burbank apartment, the suspect had a day to flee the metropolitan area or even the state, Ford said. Carrera, the mother of a 2-year-old boy and a 9-year-old daughter, told nearly no one in advance about her plans to marry, inviting a few friends out Friday without saying what she was celebrating, her relatives said. Her body was found after family members became worried they had not heard from her and called police. Some of those familiar with the couple said there had been incidents of violence during their two years dating, Ford said. But he added that authorities hadn't found any records indicating Carrera ever filed a complaint against Jimenez. "And we have no indications the two were arguing at any time during the (Friday and early Saturday) celebration," Ford said. Carrera's family and acquaintances were struggling to comprehend how such a tragedy could happen during what should have been a time of celebration. "You see this sort of thing in the movies. You never expect it to happen next door," one of her neighbors, David Raska, said before police named Jimenez as a suspect. Carrera's cousins also were shocked. "We never thought this would happen," said 27-year-old Jaime Lopez. "Reality still hasn't hit me." Carerra called another cousin, Sandy Lopez, inviting her to the party but said nothing about a wedding. "She didn't want to tell me she had gotten married," she said. "She didn't tell anybody besides her father the day before." She told NBC 5 Chicago news that Carrera and her new husband had an on-again, off-again relationship. The cousins, neither of whom could make it to the Friday party, said Carrera worked as a Spanish-language translator, and they described her as a fiercely independent woman who adored her kids. "She was a beautiful mother, person, sister," Sandy Lopez said. Relatives became concerned when Carrera didn't pick up her children on Saturday at her father's, who had been watching his grandchildren while his daughter was celebrating. Police found her body Sunday afternoon during a well-being check. Another neighbor in Burbank, Jason Tokarczyk, said Carrera had lived in her apartment for the past several months and would greet him but otherwise said little. "She was quiet as a mouse," he said. Neighbor Jim Olinger said he had seen Jimenez at his wife-to-be's apartment last week and that he "seemed like a really nice guy."
Manhunt under way for groom of slain bride in Ill.
Start the conversation


text:
Superior medical malpractice protection, as well as extensive risk management and practice management benefits, at no extra cost.
Over 12,000 California physicians trust CAP for full-service malpractice protection.
Expert risk management support and resources to help you keep you and your medical practice safe and successful.
CAP keeps us ahead of changes in law, technology and risk. They help doctors stay focused on being doctors.In addition to superior medical malpractice protection, CAP's value-added resources help pediatricians like Dr. Salimpour keep up with rapid change.
CAP offers incredible value and support. They help my practice succeed in rapidly changing times.Physicians like Dr. Iacampo know the value of CAP. That's why nearly 12,000 Californian physicians choose CAP for their malpractice protection.
I felt protected having CAP by our side when we started our medical practice. It's a secure feeling.CAP's Mutual Protection trust has been rated A+ for 10 straight years.
CAP provides excellent rates for medical malpractice coverage, as well as for business and personal insurance.Physicians like Dr. Thai thrive with CAP's medical malpractice coverage and other products designed to protect a physician's practice.
I joined CAP for the low rates. I stayed for the outstanding array of service, support, and protectionCAP's practice management resources help Dr. Ellner plan for the future.
As a physician-owned and operated company, we built CAP because we saw a need for something better than traditional medical malpractice insurance.
From our 24/7 CAP Cares Hotline to our human resources program, our number one goal is to take care of the risk so that you can focus on the practice.
CAP Supports Solo Practices
CAP is committed to the success of independent practice physicians. That's why we provide our 12,000 California physician members with valuable practice and risk management resources.


text:
This recipe comes straight from one of my favorite places to eat in Chicago, Birrieria Zaragoza. All they serve is birria, a Mexican goat stew served with fresh thick tortillas, and it's impeccable, moan-worthy. But on my last pilgrimage, chef Jonathan Zaragoza offered me this dessert, the best panna cotta I've ever eaten.
When vanilla is used in a recipe, it's usually either as a star role, like in ice cream and crème brûlée, or shoved as far to the background as possible. This recipe offers a rare in-between. The vanilla is assertive, but it shares equal billing with Mexican cinnamon and lime. There's a little flourish of toasted almonds here if you'd like it, but this recipe is really about the complex interplay of spice in a creamier-than-creamy, not-too-sweet dessert.
This panna cotta is best eaten the day it is made, when it isn't too firmly set.
Recipe Facts
- 1 cup whole milk, divided
- 2 envelopes unflavored gelatin
- 2 1/2 cups heavy cream
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
- 1 vanilla bean (either Mexican or Tahitian), split and scraped
- 1 5-inch stick Celyon or Mexican cinnamon
- Zest of one lime
- Slivered almonds, toasted, for garnish if desired
In a small bowl, combine half cup of milk with gelatin. Stir to combine and let sit while heating remaining milk, cream, sugar, and salt to a simmer. Add vanilla, cinnamon, and lime zest, and cook at a bare simmer for 10 to 12 minutes.
Remove from heat and stir in milk-gelatin mixture until fully combined. Pour through a fine-mesh strainer into 8 or 6 6- or 8-ounce (respectively) ramekins. Chill for two to three hours, or until set.
To serve, run a thin knife along sides of ramekins to loosen panna cotta. Flip ramekin upside down onto serving plate and tap several times until panna cotta is dislodged. Garnish, if desired, with toasted slivered almonds.


text:
Aristotle said " True wealth lies not in the ownership of property but in the right to use it."
Why buy when you can use it for a fraction of the cost? Once this name is leased, it's gone.
No need to buy now!
Try with our extremely low lease starting at just $100 per month. What's more, you can cancel anytime.
How you can use this domain to increase your business....
- You can forward this domain to your existing site, and all visitors to this website will directly land at our existing site.
- Don't have a website yet ? No worries! You can get this site built how you imagine it to be.
Still have any queries ? Feel free to reach out to us using the Contact Owner button
Your company's name is critically important to its success - generally easy to spell and certainly unique. Great entrepreneurs tackle and solve challenging issues like naming their company well, and if you can't name your company well, you're simply not worth investing in it. I know it's a harsh statement, but it is true. Better you hear it now while you still have a chance to hit a homerun.
If you go into a VC or angel meeting with a crappy name, they will look at it the same way they look at you unshaven with a stain on your shirt and a deck full of misspellings: that you lack focus and attention to detail. A stunning domain name paired with a world-class logo makes you look like a killer. That is what you want when you're in a meeting asking people to give you money: credibility."
Benefits of a Great Domain Name
Unique - This is the only domain of its kind
Intuitive, memorable and easy to say and type
Better search engine optimization
Better Brand recognition and authority


text:
KNOXVILLE, Tennessee — Six more walk-on players have apparently moved on as Tennessee's roster undergoes a typical post-spring evolution.
The following walk-ons are no longer listed on the official roster: Offensive lineman John Simcox, a third-year sophomore from Kingsport; punter/kicker Ryan Ault, a third-year sophomore from Brentwood; linebacker Logan Cavendar, a Tennessee Tech transfer from Fairview; running back Chris Beck, a native of Austell, Ga., and transfer from Dean College in Franklin, Mass; defensive back Devin Williams, a redshirt freshman from Austin-East in Knoxville; and tight end Greg Tisho, a redshirt freshman from Cherokee, N.C.
Of the six, only Simcox had played in a game for the Vols. He entered as a reserve in 2013. Two other players were deleted from the roster earlier this week.
The roster above reflects the changes. You can see the full spreadsheet here.
We've made a few other minor changes.
Sophomore Jason Carr is now listed as an offensive tackle, giving the Vols a projected 11 scholarship offensive linemen in 2014 and a projected 17 scholarship defensive linemen.
We've also deleted JaRon Toney from the scholarship roster. Unofficially, UT has 82 players on scholarship, although that number is impossible to verify. If all goes as planned, expect one, two or three current walk-ons to be placed on scholarship by August.
Finally, the changes have shifted the geographic midpoint of the Vols' scholarship roster to Calhoun, Ga. Why does that sound familiar? It's the hometown of former Vol receiver Da'Rick Rogers.


text:
Colombia's Invisible War
In the country's most violent city, crime statistics get better even as the situation gets worse
BUENAVENTURA, Colombia—When you walk down the streets of Colombia's largest port city—just four years ago the most violent urban area in the country—you need not worry much about crime. Taxi drivers leave their doors unlocked and their windows down, not fearing carjacking or theft. Women walk with their purses carelessly thrown behind their shoulders, out of sight. Hotel doors get by with only shoddy doorknob locks. There is an air of safety in the seaside park, where families enjoy humid evenings scattered between cotton candy venders and live comedians. The only apparent conflict to be found is between neighboring coastal bars, blasting competing beats of Colombian rap for their patrons.
By all outward appearances, Buenaventura has been rehabilitated from its darkest hour, when it was essentially an urban combat zone. Since 2007, when the city claimed the country's highest murder rate, homicides have come down more than six-fold. Then, the primary cause of death here was gun violence. Now, residents say that street confrontations are rare.
Yet behind the calm that seems to reign, Buenaventura is still at war. This city and the neighboring towns and countryside on the Pacific coast have become a new epicenter of Colombia's four-decades-long conflict. And here in the city's countless neighborhoods, armed groups are still fighting block by block for control. "If you ask the authorities, they will tell you [the city] is better -- that the homicide rates are way down," says Victor Hugo Vidal, a leader of the local chapter of the Process of Black Communities in Colombia, which monitors community security. "But for us [living here], during the last 10 years, there has been no change."
That contradiction--between the statistics and the perception of safety on the ground--puts Buenaventura at the center of a national debate ongoing in Colombia today about whether security is getting worse again, after a decade of improvement. Citizens across the country have raised concerns about a rise in crime and armed gangs. But the government believes that the country's security on the whole continues to improve; and indeed, many criminal indicators support that case. On May 14, for example, President Juan Manuel Santos cited Buenaventura as a city where homicide rates had been spectacularly lowered.
But in Buenaventura, something terrible is happening that might explain why, even though the statistics look good, life on the ground is awful. What's changed in this small coastal town is one thing: "the modality of the violence," says Vidal. Aware of the government's push to lower homicide rates, armed groups here have turned their fight into an invisible war. "Where they used to assassinate, now they disappear," Vidal continues. According to PCN's count, at least 378 people have gone missing in the last four years--probably taken to the sea and killed. Those presumed deaths won't show up in the official numbers, allowing both the authorities and the criminal gangs to claim victory in the latest stage of this dark war.
Along the unpaved streets of neighborhoods touching the coast, stories abound of young men who simply never came home. Some were fishermen; others hustled from one construction job to another to bring home food. Maybe they heard something they weren't supposed to. Maybe they ventured unannounced into another gang's neighborhood. No one knows where or why they've been taken.
What they do know, however, is why Buenaventura is embroiled in a constant, grinding war. This city of 350,000 isn't just Colombia's most important port town; it's also the hub of narcotics trafficking. Precarious communities built on the water's edge--where the majority of the city's mostly Afro-Colombian population lives--make the perfect exit points for drugs leaving Colombia for the Pacific Ocean. In a war where every armed actor is funded by cocaine, Buenaventura's mere geography is enough to set the stage for a fight.
This war isn't new. Throughout Colombia's four decades of conflict, in fact, Buenaventura has been both a target of and a refuge from violence. First came the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC, who fought their way through the jungles and toward the country's city centers, displacing, massacring, and kidnapping along the way. Initially because of ideological claims--and then increasingly for the control of the lucrative cocaine market--the rebels infiltrated Buenaventura's neighborhoods and turned the neighboring rural areas into an insurgent stronghold.
But the guerrillas didn't have the upper hand in this port town for long. Paramilitary groups, united under as the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), banded together in the late 1990's to fight back against FARC, sending violent deaths skyrocketing.. During the last decade of fighting, the more than 60,000 displaced refugees have fled for their lives, some leaving the city and some trading one troubled barrio of Buenaventura for another. Those who remain in Buenaventura today are crammed into makeshift houses so close to the coast that they flood whenever the tide rages.
Responding to the murder rate, the national government sent in troops to restore calm. Ostensibly, the paramilitaries and the government had the same goal: to rid the town of guerrillas. And so for a time, a precarious détente reigned: the barrios grew quieter, the guerrillas were pushed back to the countryside, and the streets were run under the gun of the AUC. But as the truce wore on, the armed bands grew as dependent upon -- and organized around -- the narcotics trade as the guerrillas they hoped to cleanse.
Until something happened: the paramilitaries splintered. Between 2003 and 2006, under a government organized peace process meant to take place over the subsequent six years, more than 30,000 self-professed paramilitaries gave up fighting in exchange for the promise of lighter sentences. Yet despite the thousands of demobilizations, the process left many of the criminal networks intact. A new generation of paramilitary-like criminal bands, known here as bacrim, have become the new terror of Colombia. According to estimates by the independent research center Indepaz, approximately 7,100 armed combatants are today members of various bacrim groups in 360 municipalities. (The national police put the number of fights at just below 4,000 in 159 municipalities.)
"[The paramilitaries] made a symbolic gesture [through demobilization], and it was only symbolic because they continue to operate in the same zones," says Donnelly Estupiñon, a community leader at PCN. "One day, a person demobilizes from the paramilitaries, and the next day they work for another armed group. All they did was change teams."
Now devoid of their political goals, the criminal bands have become militarized gangs interested only in illicit trafficking. "The criminal bands have taken what they learned from fighting the guerrillas and turned it into a way of living," explains Rolando Caicedo Arroyo, a city councilman in Buenaventura. Worse, because the armed groups are no longer united under one, paramilitary banner, they are fighting street-by-street for the control of Buenaventura's neighborhoods. "This is a monster with 1,000 heads," Caicedo explains. "Before, narco-trafficking was very hierarchically structured in Colombia--there were just a few organizations. Today, there are tons of small bands." So prolific are their ranks that he doesn't even know the names of the groups operating in the barrios.
The result has been the emergence of mafia-like regimes in each of Buenaventura's neighborhoods. The barriers from one fiefdom to the next are fluid and invisible to anyone who doesn't know better. Inside the communities, on the dirt streets where kids play football outside unfinished brick and wood buildings, everyone knows who's running the show.
It's not just the illicit narcotics market that the criminal bands have captured. It's countless legal goods as well. The armed groups charge "taxes" on local businesses and ask taxis entering their territory to pay a small fee. Food products--including everything from eggs to plantains--are controlled by the criminal organizations. Those fees have pushed prices up to a level that would be painful for a middle class Colombian but are crushing in a city where poverty is the overwhelming norm. It has also crushed countless nascent businesses from ever taking shape. "Imagine you are a displaced person and you've just arrived in the city, and your cousin grows plantains, so you think: why not sell them here in the city because that might be an economic opportunity for you," says Sulma Rodriguez, the head of the UNHCR office in Buenaventura. "You can't do it. They'll kill you for it."
Lucmila Gutierrez Garcia, the elected representative of Buenaventura's 60,000 displaced persons, puts it bluntly: "if you talk, they'll kill you." She has received countless threats from the groups calling for her to stop her work as an advocate for the city's most vulnerable communities. And she's not alone; she says that she's recorded 27 women murdered so far in Buenaventura this year, many of them fellow community leaders. "Why were they killed? Because they were organizing for their rights."
Imposing that level of social control requires one thing: fear. And that's why disappearances have become so key. "Before, the paramilitaries used massacres and bombs," Benildo Estupiñan Solis, lawyer for the youth organization Faces and Footprints (Rostros y Huellas), told me. "But they have changed their strategy to create a war without deaths." Victims' families live in a perpetual state of fear, knowing nothing about where their loved one has gone and whether they might be targeted next. Families rarely report the crimes to the authorities, for fear that if they did, it would mean certain death for the missing person. And in a small town where criminal networks touch every aspect of everyday life, it would be impossible to report the crime without the perpetrators knowing.
Even when reports do come in, there is often little that law enforcement can do short of finding a corpse or a kidnap victim, despite a nationwide process for registering claims of disappearances. Other than community organizations' tallies, there is no way to measure how many people are falling victim. What Estupiñan Solis says he knows for sure is that he and other activists have daily encounters with families who have lost a loved one.
And it's getting worse. In the last several weeks, reports of disappearances have skyrocketed in one of Buenaventura's most troubled neighborhoods, a strategically located area near the international port called Community #5. Men from outside the community and the city have entered the neighborhood, pushing their way through the shantytown toward the coveted coast. Some community members say they are FARC guerrillas, trying to infiltrate the city once again. Others are convinced that they're simply another bacrim group from another city. Either way, the new group is almost certainly seeking an entrance into the narcotics trade from a neighborhood that is host to the illicit traffic.
The resulting insecurity has made life once again unlivable for those in the neighborhood, to the extent that some are picking up and leaving until things calm down. Women and children sleep outside the neighborhood some nights, cramming handfuls of bodies into relatives' houses in another zone. Youth in particular are feeling the pressure, says Estupiñon Solis, a youth lawyer. Teens and young men have started going home in the mid afternoon, staying behind closed doors into the evening.
Yet like so many facets of life under the bacrim in Buenaventura, disappearances are taken for granted, a fact of daily life acknowledged even by the authorities. Caicedo, the city councilman, spoke openly about the phenomenon in a loud seaside café, not worried about who might hear. He told me that disappearances had become "generalized" and says that the police and security services are concerned by the trend. But he admits that some of the security forces have also been compromised, paid off or even operated by the bacrim. In addition to boosting intelligence, he suggests that the best way to control the situation would be to shed light on a practice that is intentionally secretive "to lift the shield that allows these groups to continue assassinating." But in many ways, that is a circular argument: social activists who denounce the disappearances are exactly the people who have been targeted and harassed.
For now, silence will reign. Buenaventura's violence won't show up in the statistics, so everyone can claim a victory. The authorities can point to low crime rates, and the criminals can continue to consolidate control.
"The local community and the city as a whole knows that we can't organize against it. It's total insecurity, [even though] to the authorities, there are no deaths at all," says Vidal of PCN. "The criminal organizations have complete dominion here."
*The headline has been corrected from Columbia to Colombia.


text:
Last May I paused for reflection. Reflecting is something I immensely enjoy once I'm doing it, but don't do often enough because I tell myself too much is happening right this very moment to spend even a few moments thinking actively about the past. We live in fear of falling behind or missing out, and so we go, go, go until something happens to bring us to our knees, and it's in that position we are finally inert long enough to notice where we've been. The peaks, the valleys, the plateaus. Some of it's black and brittle, scorched by pain and charred with brokenness, but there, just beyond and up a little ways, is growth, healing. The past is no place to buy a home and raise a family, but it is a great place to drive by once in a while, especially during milestones.
When I consider some of the things that can be achieved over the course of a decade — graduating from the fourth grade, a decent bottle of Cabernet, hundreds of books read, the sheer number of toilet-paper squares and Q-tips — I'm more than a little awed by the fact that, in that time, Michael and I have never spent a night apart. Not a single one. But the substantially better reflection-worthy truth is that every single day for roughly three thousand, six hundred and fifty days, we have said Yes to each other.
Sometimes saying yes is easy, like for example when someone asks, "Would you like another piece of cake?" Yes, the answer is always yes.
And sometimes saying yes is incredibly difficult and makes your sphincter clench. "Can I borrow your (brand spanking new, never been opened) copy of Outlander?" . . . yes; but which child will you be offering as collateral?
A great many of us are blessed and so fortunate to live in this part of the world that is constantly providing for us. Our haves largely outnumber our have nots. But it gets tricky where Love is concerned. The world gently thumps us on the back the way a mother coaxes a burp from her engorged infant, encouraging attitudes such as Mine, Me First, I Need. We look around – through windows, in magazines, at each other – and see that in order to be happy, we must always be acquiring the newest look or thing. Change is glamorized. Options are healthy. But what I'm noticing, in myself most of all, is that we are being taught to despise boredom. To fear it, even. If we are bored, if we are anything less than fully entertained, then it must be time for something new. Cut your hair, get a tattoo, buy a new outfit, purchase a new phone, renovate your kitchen, move to another state, fall in love with someone other than the one you're dating/married to. I am guilty of all of these except two.
Once you decide to make another human being your forever person, saying Yes to them becomes a little harder to do each day. Their needs – which used to be a delight and honor to fill – become a nuisance, a bother, a bore. We struggle and we strain, because right over there is something fresh and green and affordable. I wonder it feels like, tastes like?
We do not have a perfect score. Our marriage is blotted and blemished with many Nos. There have been and are still times when I choose my comfort over Michael's need. At night, when he is craving intimacy, and I am craving my body pillow and a book. Michael has put his shyness and dislike of confrontation before the protection of my heart. There is no such thing as the perfect marriage. But a happy one looks like saying Yes to each other when the world offers up alternative arrangements.
So, my darling, Michael, I dedicate this post to you, to our ten years, and to a thousand upon thousand more yeses.