Beating guns into guitars

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — The last chord is hit and smoke floods the stage. The spotlights go crazy, the crowds go crazy, and the rocker thrusts his electric "escopetarra" into the air.

"This is about transformation," Cesar Lopez will explain later, backstage, strumming the strange-looking instrument. "It's about turning something bad into good. ... It's about possibilities."

More than 100,000 Colombians have been killed here during 40 years of conflict and a civil war continues to rack the country, pitting leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary forces against both each other and the government.

The past four years under newly reelected President Alvaro Uribe have not ended the bloodshed, but they have seen some advances. After negotiations with the paramilitaries and initial talks with some of the guerrillas, 39,580 illegal combatants have demobilized, laying down approximately 17,000 weapons, according to President Uribe's office.

Some of the weapons will eventually be melted down. Others will be reissued to the police and army. And a small number will become guitars.

An escopetarra is part shotgun (escopeta) and part guitar (guitarra) — with the barrel running through the neck of a guitar, strings mounted near the butt of the rifle and an amplifier hooked into where the trigger might be.

"We grew up with conflict, but we are sick of it," says Lopez, the musician who invented the first escopetarra. Lopez's older sister, a guerrilla, was captured in the 1970s and, he says, tortured. "That made a big impression on me. It made me want to figure out how this country would ever be OK."

The idea for the escopetarra came to him several years ago. Together with a group of musician friends, Lopez had established an artistic "rapid response battalion" that would show up at scenes of attacks in Bogotá to play free concerts for the victims.

In February 2003 Lopez was racing to the scene of a bombing at a social club — an attack that killed 30 people — when his way was blocked by a young soldier holding a rifle.

"I was standing there with my guitar, across from the soldier, and I looked at our stances and realized they were identical," Lopez recalls. "I thought about it, and then went to the military to explain my vision and try and get them to give me guns to turn them into guitars. They thought I was a wimp and a hippie and said no."

The mayor of Bogotá, who was running his own local disarmament program at the time, was more amenable, and gave the musician five heavy Winchesters that had been handed in by leftist rebels.

It was an immediate hit, with Colombian rock stars lining up to use it and youngsters adopting it as an antiwar symbol. So far, only five such instruments exist because, explains Lopez, of the difficulty in procuring the arms.

Lopez, meanwhile, has just been made a U.N. goodwill ambassador and in January he received two AK-47s that will be turned into escopetarras for the musician Shakira and Mexican pop artist Juliet Venegas.