A war that goes on for 46 years -- some would say over 60 years -- gets tucked into all the most obscure tissues and corners and stories of a people. Its toxins surprise with surreal grotesquerie and impossible reasons. So in Colombia, our country's "closest ally" in South America, where capitalism and competition have extended so far that purchasing and sale of kidnap victims and electoral votes have become signatures of a ruthless business sense. Where politics is a business.

I just returned from a two-week trip to Colombia as part of an international pre-electoral observation mission, in advance of March 14 Congressional elections, which will be followed by a presidential election on May 30. Just three months before Colombians elect a president, the incumbent front-runner -- Álvaro Uribe Velez -- has not yet declared whether he will run for a third term, which would require a constitutional amendment and a national referendum. The nation's highest court is deliberating on whether the petitions and financing for such a referendum are legal. The uncertainty around Uribe's candidacy has led the media to focus intensely on re-election, and neglect issues of debate for the Congressional campaign.

Our group of 22 people from seven countries fanned out in four groups to diverse regions, but we found remarkably similar practices. We talked with a range of political parties, election officials, social movement groups, organizations of people displaced by violence, journalists, and government officials, both elected and those from oversight agencies. Many people were able to tell us exactly how vote-buying and -selling works. If you are a community leader of a thousand people, a party may buy your votes, and the more votes you have to sell, the more you're paid, per vote. The bigger the crime, the bigger the reward.

In many places our group visited, there is fear, and a wide distance between what ordinary people say and the discourse of government officials. The fear is located deep in the country's emotional life, product of violence that has affected people throughout society. The city of Medellin, for example, had become the model for Uribe and Bush to bring U.S. Congressmen to show how far Colombia had come since the days of narco-capo Pablo Escobar murdering judges and setting off car bombs. But last year Medellin saw its homicide rate more than double, to some 2100 murders.

Medellin was also the site this month of the trial of soldiers for the 2005 massacre in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó. A human rights attorney from the Judicial Freedom Corporation, CJL, with whom we work, and who has worked on cases involving the former Army commander, received credible information last week that a local armed group has been paid to kill him.

The generalized fear that we witnessed is a structural deterrent to the free debate necessary for democratic elections. If you are afraid what you say may offend an armed group, you'll never touch a controversial issue. And if you can't enter into substantive debate, why not buy and sell your political decisions? Political debate becomes a function of not only fear, but commerce.

We also heard people tell us that the national social aid agency, responsible for benefits for everyone from retired persons, to food for children, to those who are poor, to the country's nearly five people displaced by violence, was telling residents in Medellin that if President Uribe is not re-elected, they would lose their benefits. Lately, as the prospects for changing the constitution to permit re-election have looked dimmer, agency officials have said that if Uribe's protégé, ex-Defense Minister Juan Manual Santos, is not elected, they would lose their benefits.

It was our announcement on Monday of this alleged crime, known in Colombian legalese as "constrainment of the voter," that detonated a mini-scandal. The media attention so far is limited to Colombia. Maybe international media will pick up on the questions raised by these electoral issues, or maybe they'll respond like a U.S. military officer with experience in Colombia to whom I commented that the process is corrupt. "What country in Latin America isn't?" he asked me, as if to say, "So what?"

We did not go to Colombia to tell people that our system is better than theirs. Several Colombians commented on the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to allow unlimited corporate contributions in political campaigns, something that is not legal in Colombia and that those who commented on it found offensive.

Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of an army-paramilitary massacre in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó that took the lives of two families -- including community co-founder Luis Eduardo Guerra, and three children aged 2, 6 and 11. They were killed with machetes, and dismembered. At the Fellowship of Reconciliation's National Council meeting in Nyack, NY, we remembered the events as our team recounted them. Many are still seeking justice for the crimes committed. Memory of what happened supports that pursuit, and values the living community in San José that continues to work the land and advocate protection of campesinos in the area.

The Colombian military and police have, by far, the worst record of human rights abuses in the Western Hemisphere. Over the last 7 years, more than 2,000 innocent civilians have bee killed by the Colombian army and then presented as guerrilla or paramilitary killed in combat to bump up the body count numbers and qualify for bonuses, vacation time and promotions.  The Army has also been involved in the execution of horrific massacres of innocent civilians, including children such as Santiago and Natalia Bolivar and Deiner Guerra (18 months old, 5 and 11), chopped up with machetes in February 2005 along with their parents, all San Jose de Apartado Peace Community members.

The record of the Colombian Police is not brighter.  Human Rights Watch, in recently released report, describes on going links between the police and the “heirs of paramilitaries”, bands that, although have undergone slight changes such as leadership, names and areas of influence, continue working as death squads, threatening, killing and raping union leaders, human rights defenders and community leaders, particularly those working to defend the rights of the victims of paramilitary abuses and restitution of forcebly grabbed land .

Ironically those tainted institutions are being hailed as models delivering training to the armed forces of countries in Latin America, Africa and Europe. Colombian daily El Espectador unveiled the existence of military cooperation agreements signed by Colombia with Cape Verde, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Sierra Leone and Togo. The text of such agreements is unknown.  Military personnel from the United Kingdom, Chile, Spain and Ecuador would have also received training by Colombian armed forces, as well as the police from Panama, Haiti, El Salvador, Argentina and Trinidad and Tobago.

The United States has a key role in the rise of the Colombian armed forces in the military education ranking.  Outsourcing training has been a key component of the October 2009 US Colombia Military Cooperation agreement –the same agreement that opened all Colombian military bases and locations to US use.

Colombia has also gotten in the business of providing assistance to Afghanistan military and police forces. Its record has been extolled as the reason for their involvement in Afghanistan.  In a July 27, 2009 CBS piece, Lara Logan excitedly reported Colombian participation in the Afghanistan war, noting that “with the help of America’s best warriors, Colombian Special Forces have become some of the finest soldiers in the world”.  Logan backed  her claims on Col assertions of Colonel Greg Wilson’s  assertion that "I would rank it as one of the top special operations in modern day history" and finished her piece with the statement of an unnamed top US official saying "The more Afghanistan can look like Colombia, the better."

The US military incursion in Afghanistan has had devastating in terms of collateral damage.  It took over 2,400 civilian casualties in 2009 alone according to a  UN report released in past January.  A pretty grim picture that would only worsen if started to resemble Colombia.

November 25th, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, marks the anniversary of the brutal assassination in 1960, of the three Mirabal sisters, political activists in the Dominican Republic, ordered by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.

In Colombia, violence against women continues to be not just an issue of domestic or sexual violence, but of women bearing the greatest burden of the armed conflict. To that end, a coalition of women’s organizations from all over Colombia gathered in Bogota today to call for a negotiated end to country’s the six-decade war.

As the group’s handout explained, all of the armed actors in Colombia’s conflict rape, displace, torture, kidnap and kill women. Children are forcibly recruited for the war. Four million people have been displaced, half of whom are women.

A woman from Bucaramanga in the east of the country explained to me, “we are here to support negotiation, for peace. As women we are very badly treated, by the war, by the paramilitaries, by all of this.”