The New York Times - USA (2020-10-25)

16 0 N THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONALSUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2020

Protesters descended by the
thousands on Colombia’s capital,
Bogotá, this past week, horrified
by a brutal wave of violence
sweeping the country, one so in-
tense that mass killings have tak-
en place every other day on aver-
age.
Most traveled hundreds of
miles, from the rural Indigenous
communities that have been par-
ticularly ravaged by the violence,
which they trace to government
failures to protect them under the
country’s halting peace process.
They call their movement the
“minga Indígena.”
Minga is an Indigenous word,
one used long before the Spanish
arrived in South America, to refer
to an act of communal work, an

agreement between neighbors to
build something together: a
bridge, a road, a government.
But minga has also come to
mean a collective act of protest, a
call to recover what a community
believes it has lost: territory,
peace, lives.
And the protests, which lasted
all week, punctuated by a large
march on Wednesday, have
amounted to an extended, cooper-
ative howl.
“If we don’t stand before the
world and say, ‘This is happen-
ing,’ ” said Ermes Pete, 38, an In-
digenous leader from the coun-
try’s southwest, “we will be exter-
minated.”
The demonstrations are an-
other sign of public frustration
and anger over the pace of peace
in Colombia.
Four years ago, the govern-
ment signed a historic peace deal
with the country’s largest rebel
group, the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia, ending the
longest-running conflict in the
Americas. The accord called for
the Colombian government to pro-
vide basic services — education,
health care and safety — in areas
battered by the long civil war.
But many protesters said that
when the FARC moved out of their
communities, the government
never moved in. Instead, new
criminal groups arrived.
“We fear for our lives,” said one
protester, Samay Sacha, 61, “and
that is why we are here.”
Protesters — many of them
farmers, teachers and community
organizers from small towns — ar-
rived by bus, pooling their sala-

ries to rent colorful vehicles called “chivas,” and leaving children and jobs back home. They camped in a sports arena provided by the city, or on the grass outside, and gathered around fires to cook, plan and share stories. As new criminal groups have moved into former FARC territory, Indigenous communities, of- ten located on drug routes and in areas rich with minerals and tim-

ber, have been among the most vulnerable. The criminal groups have used deadly violence to stifle dissent and discourage people from working with rivals. Community leaders who speak out against the brutality have become targets. This year alone, at least 233 civic leaders have been killed, according to the human rights group Indepaz. More than 1,000 have died since the peace accord was signed.

Mass killings, defined as three or more deaths, have shot up as well. Indepaz has counted 68 this year, with a marked uptick between July and September. The killings come after decades of strife in which communities were squeezed between the FARC and the military in a war that left well over 200,000 dead and dis- placed an estimated six million. Many thought they would find relief after the peace accord. But

that has not always been the case. “After the peace deal, the war worsened,” said Aida Quilcue, a leader in the Organización Nacio- nal Indígena de Colombia, a union of the country’s Indigenous groups. Protesters demanded a meet- ing with President Iván Duque, a conservative elected after the adoption of the 2016 peace accord, which his party had opposed on grounds it was too lenient on the

FARC. Mr. Duque’s critics have accused him of not doing enough to carry out the deal, pointing out, for example, that only a limited number of families have been able to participate in a program that would help them switch from growing coca — the plant used to make cocaine — to legal products. Many have continued growing coca, and drug trafficking and as- sociated violence have prolifer- ated around them. Mr. Duque did not meet with the minga in Bogotá, instead sending a delegation to meet with people in the country’s southwest, which has been hard hit by the violence. His office said that it was spend- ing millions of dollars to address the problem. In an interview earlier this year, his high commissioner for peace, Miguel Ceballos, urged Co- lombians to be patient with the peace process. “Give the man a chance,” he said, speaking of Mr. Duque, who took office in 2018. “We cannot undo 56 years of war in just two years.” Mr. Pete, one of the protest leaders, recalled growing up with war in his home in the department of Cauca, the FARC sleeping on his doorstep. At the time, the military accused his family of collaborating with the guerrillas — and the guerrillas accused them of collaborating with the military. Some days, he would watch helicopters fly overhead. Occasionally, bullets would rain down. The violence pushed Mr. Pete to run for a leadership position in his community, and when the FARC left, he urged his neighbors to abandon coca cultivation. He thought the state would move in to protect them. “The state,” he said, “never arrived.” He soon became a target him- self. In 2017, as he left his home, two men began to shoot at him. He hit the ground, and survived. Another protester, Bertha Ri- vera, 53, came to Bogotá from an Indigenous territory nearly 400 miles away. She slept in a tent overnight at the arena. The following day, she marched with the minga through the streets of the capital. “We had so many dreams,” she said of the peace process. “It was, ‘Now we won’t hear the dead, we won’t hear the bombs, we won’t hear the threats.’ ” She went on: “When we were just beginning ‘peace,’ we thought it was the best thing, and though we had heard from other nations that the post-conflict era was of- ten more difficult than the conflict itself, we didn’t believe it.” “Today,” she said, “we understand that they were right.”

After Mass Killings, a Loud Plea to Protect Indigenous Colombians

Top, a march last week in Bogotá calling on Colombia’s government to combat attacks by criminal groups that have ravaged Indige- nous communities. Above right, cooking for the demonstrators, many of whom traveled hundreds of miles in rented buses, above left.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY FEDERICO RIOS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By JULIE TURKEWITZ and SOFÍA VILLAMIL

Many feel leaders

haven’t lived up

to a peace deal.

Lee Kun-hee, who built Sam-
sung into a global giant of smart-
phones, televisions and computer
chips but was twice convicted —
and, in a pattern that has become
typical in South Korea, twice par-
doned — for white-collar crimes
committed along the way, died on
Sunday in Seoul, the South Korean
capital. He was 78.
Samsung announced the death
but did not specify the cause. Mr.
Lee had been incapacitated since
a heart attack in 2014.
When Mr. Lee took the helm at
Samsung Group in 1987, after the
death of his father and the con-
glomerate’s founder, Lee Byung-
chul, many in the West knew the
group’s electronics unit only as a
maker of cheap televisions and
unreliable microwaves sold in dis-
count stores.
Lee Kun-hee pushed the com-
pany relentlessly up the techno-
logical ladder. By the early 1990s,
Samsung had surpassed Japa-
nese and American rivals to be-
come a pacesetter in memory
chips. It came to dominate flat-
panel displays as screens lost
their bulk. And it conquered the
middle-to-high end of the mobile
market as cellphones became
powerhouse computing devices in
the 2000s.
Samsung Electronics today is a
cornerstone of South Korea’s
economy and one of the world’s
top corporate spenders on re-
search and development. Mr. Lee
— who was chairman of Samsung
Group from 1987 to 1998, chair-
man and chief executive of Sam-
sung Electronics from 1998 to
2008, then Samsung Electronics
chairman from 2010 until his
death — was South Korea’s richest
man.
He and his family members
used a web of ownership arrange-
ments to exert influence over the
other companies under the Sam-
sung umbrella. Over the course of
his tenure, even as professional
managers came to have more re-
sponsibility at the group, Mr. Lee
remained Samsung’s big thinker,
the provider of grand strategic di-

rection. But his reign also showcased the sometimes dubious ways in which South Korea’s family business empires, known as chaebol, safeguard their influence. South Korea’s corporate dynasties are such a major source of economic vitality that some South Koreans wonder whether the chaebol are holding their country hostage. In 1996, Mr. Lee was convicted of bribing the country’s president, then pardoned. More than a dec- ade later, he was found guilty of tax evasion but given another re- prieve, this time so he could re- sume lobbying to bring the Winter Olympics to the mountain town of Pyeongchang in 2018. Soon after the Pyeongchang Games, Lee Myung-bak, South Korea’s president from 2008 to 2013 and no relation, was sen- tenced to 15 years in prison for ac- cepting $5.4 million in bribes from

Samsung in exchange for pardon- ing Mr. Lee. Lee Kun-hee was born in Daegu, in Japanese-occupied Ko- rea, on Jan. 9, 1942, to Park Doo- eul and Lee Byung-chul, who had founded Samsung a few years earlier as an exporter of fruit and dried fish. The younger Lee was a wrestler in high school. Samsung first grew by domi- nating the consumer staples, like sugar and textiles, that war-torn Korea needed. It later expanded into insurance, shipbuilding, construction, semiconductors and more. Lee Kun-hee graduated from Waseda University in Tokyo in 1965. He then studied in a mas- ter’s program at George Washing- ton University but did not receive a degree. He started his career at Tongyang Broadcasting Com- pany, a Samsung affiliate at the time, in 1966. He worked at Sam-

sung C&T, the conglomerate’s construction and trading firm, before being named vice chairman of Samsung Group in 1979. When he became chairman in 1987, he took from his father a fixa- tion on planning for the far future, even when times seemed good. But he added an overlay of exist- ential fear and ever-present crisis that persists among Samsung brass to this day. “We are in a very important transition,” Mr. Lee said shortly after taking charge, in an interview with Forbes. “If we don’t move into more capital- and tech- nology-intensive industries, our very survival may be at stake.” The radicalness of the transition he had mind was made clear when he summoned scores of Samsung Electronics managers to a luxury hotel in Frankfurt in

For days, he lectured the ex-
ecutives, urging them to bury old

ways of working and thinking. “Change everything,” he said, “ex- cept your wife and children.” Samsung, he decreed, would fo- cus on improving product quality instead of increasing market share. It would bring in talent from overseas, and it would re- quire that senior executives inti- mately understand foreign mar- kets and how to compete in them. At the time, all of this was anathema in corporate South Ko- rea. “It was very much like Mao Ze- dong trying to change the mind- set of the Chinese people,” said Chang Sea-jin, a professor at the National University of Singapore. In 1995, as part of the emphasis on quality, he visited a Samsung plant in the town of Gumi after a batch of cellphones was found to be defective. What happened next became legend. According to “Samsung Electronics and the Struggle for Leadership of the Electronics In- dustry,” a 2010 book on the company by Tony Michell, the Gumi factory’s 2,000 workers gathered in a courtyard and were made to wear headbands labeled “Quality First.” Mr. Lee and his board of di- rectors sat under a banner that read “Quality Is My Pride.” Together they watched as $ million worth of phones, fax ma- chines and other inventory was smashed to bits and set ablaze. The employees wept. Mr. Lee’s business record was not unblemished. Believing that electronics would become integral to cars, he started an automobile unit in the mid-1990s. Samsung Motors was sold off in 2000. A dalliance with Hollywood was similarly short lived. In 1995, Steven Spielberg sounded Mr. Lee out over dinner about investing in a movie studio. Despite being a movie buff, the chairman and other Samsung executives ended up talking mostly about micro- chips. “I thought to myself, ‘How are they going to know anything about the film business when they’re so obsessed with semiconductors?’ ” Mr. Spielberg later re-

called. “It was another one of those evenings that turned out to be a complete waste of time.” Samsung entered a phase of global conquest in the 2000s, us- ing flashy devices and sleek mar- keting to implant its name firmly into the minds of Western con- sumers. Mr. Lee, however, was rarely seen in public. He was a de- voted collector of sports cars and fine art. By 2007, he had identified the next looming crisis for Samsung. China was ascendant in low-end manufacturing, while Japan and

the West still led in advanced tech- nologies. South Korean companies — Samsung included — were sandwiched in between. But as he got started on his next overhaul of the Samsung way, ac- cusations surfaced that he had dodged taxes on billions of dollars supposedly stashed in secret ac- counts. Instead of fighting the charges, he stunned South Korea by announcing his resignation on live television. “I promised 20 years ago that the day when Samsung was rec- ognized as a first-class business, the glory and fruition would all be yours,” he said in 2008, addressing employees, his voice a near whis- per. “I truly apologize for not hav- ing been able to keep that prom- ise.” He was pardoned the following year, and was made Samsung’s chairman again in 2010. After a heart attack in 2014, his son and vice chairman of Sam- sung Electronics, Lee Jae-yong, became the company’s de facto public face.

Lee Kun-hee, 78, Who Transformed Samsung Into an Electronics Titan, Dies

By RAYMOND ZHONG

Lee Kun-hee, the chairman of Samsung, in 2008. He was convicted — and pardoned — twice for white-collar crimes, in a sign of the ills in South Korea’s relationship with its business dynasties.

BAE JONG-HWA/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK

A leader who drilled

his ‘quality first’ ethos

into employees from

the bottom to the top.

More obituaries appear on Pages 32 and 33.

.

The New York Times - USA (2020-10-25)

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