Silvana Paternostro, “My Colombian War”

Award-winning Colombian-born journalist Silvana Paternostro visits Zócalo to give us an intimate portrait of Colombia’s forty-year-old war between a left wing rebel army that kidnaps, a right-wing paramilitary that massacres, a drug-fueled economy that permeates both armed movements and a government that receives the third largest U.S. military aid package. Paternostro grew up in Colombia as a member of the landed elite before moving to the United States in the late seventies. In the years she was away, the country of her privileged childhood has become the world’s biggest producer of cocaine, harboring the most violent, the most protracted and the most misunderstood civil conflict in Latin America, one in which the U.S. plays a vital role. Paternostro will share her journey back to the place where her family and her closest friends still live to bring alive this country’s critical situation. Her story reveals a Colombia stuck in the threshold of feudalism and modernity, the rule of the rifle over the rule of law.

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