COLOMBIA: Bob Geldof performs in Cartagena and accepts an "escopetarra" - a gun-guitar

Irish rocker Bob Geldof, organizer of Live Aid concerts to help Africa, said on Thursday (January 25) that Colombia's cocaine-fueled conflict should be tackled by offering alternatives to farmers who grow the coca used to make the drug. Some experts say Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe, popular for his U.S.-backed crackdown on drug-running leftist rebels, needs to do more to provide basic government services and development to rural areas to counter narcotics trafficking. Geldof, who went from rock star to celebrity activist after organizing Live Aid in 1985 for African famine relief, has recently joined with U2's Bono to pressure rich-nation governments to do more to help poorer countries. On Thursday, Geldof performed before a crowd of fans in Cartagena. The rocker was also presented with a gun-guitar, also known as a "guntar" or escopaterra - a cross between a gun and guitar. Colombian musician Cesar Lopez invented the hybrid in a bid to send a message of peace in a nation riven by violence. "It's a very powerful tool to transform the attitudes of the people. Also, I want to remind him that anywhere he goes with this instrument, it will remind of the victims of violence in Colombia and of the hundreds and thousands of people struggling for a lasting peace," said Lopez. Geldof welcomed the gift, saying the transformation from gun to guitar sent a powerful message. "But children can fire them because they are very light. They're almost the perfect gun. They always work. Nothing stops them and if you get in the way of one of the bullets, it certainly stops you. It's an extraordinary thing. It's like, do you remember the biblical quotation about turning swords into ploughshares? This person has just turned a gun into a guitar," he said. Colombia's conflict started in the 1960s with the birth of peasant armies that believed only violence could break the hold that wealthy estate owners had on the country's farmland. Landowners formed paramilitary militias in the 1980s to combat the rebels and by the 1990s both armed groups were involved in Colombia's multibillion-dollar cocaine trade. Helped by millions of dollars in U.S. aid, Uribe has reduced urban violence by pushing Marxist rebels back into the jungles and negotiating the disarming of more than 31,000 paramilitaries. Rights groups say the paramilitary peace deal, in which militias turned in the guns in exchange for benefits including reduced jail terms, has not forced them to dismantle their criminal organizations. The conflict kills thousands and forces thousands more to flee their homes each year to escape violence between armed groups vying for control of lucrative cocaine-producing territory.

ITN Source | January 31, 2007

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