Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the new Colombia

by Feiling, Tom

  Since I’d not been able to find a book about Bogotá, I’d started reading a novel by Héctor Abad Faciolince, one of Colombia’s best-known newspaper columnists. Angosta is a dystopian vision of a not-too-distant future Medellín. The city is governed by Los Siete Sabios – the Seven Wise Men – a shadowy clique of businessmen, landowners and senior police officers who monitor and eliminate all possible sources of dissent. The poor of Angosta are confined to the ravines at the bottom of the city by a high wall that is guarded by gun-toting Chinese guards. Transit to the upper slopes is strictly controlled. There, both the temperature and the mood are more congenial: people can walk the leafy streets without fear of being robbed. The gully dwellers are kept out of sight, at once ever-present and easily forgotten.

  Angosta, which is the Spanish word for narrow, is a gripping depiction of the constraints of life in a paranoid city, something like a tropical version of George Orwell’s 1984. But the author hadn’t had to stray far from the reality of modern Colombia to create what outsiders might regard as a fantasy. The Seven Wise Men were based on the Twelve Apostles, a group of wealthy landowners from Antioquia, the department of which Medellín is capital, who had been prominent cocaine traffickers and paramilitaries in the late 1990s. Santiago Uribe, brother of former president Álvaro Uribe, was alleged to have been among their number, a charge that he has always denied.

  While Angosta’s Seven Wise Men might have been inspired by the recent history of Medellín, the walls they raised and policed aren’t specific to any one nation. Internal barriers, no less real for being invisible, divide American cities from São Paolo to Los Angeles to Kingston. Across North and South America, the public realm is being gradually suffocated; those who find themselves unable to pay for private services are left outside the city walls.

  Colombia is the single most unequal country in Latin America, which is, in turn, the most unequal continent in the world. Only in Haiti, Sierra Leone, Namibia and South Africa is the gap between rich and poor wider.* It’s not that Colombia is poor: its GDP has doubled over the last twenty years, as has public spending. Plenty of countries are poorer and enjoy less economic growth than Colombia. But in spite of (or because of) the accumulation of wealth and power in so few hands, the Colombian government has done less than any other in Latin America to reduce the poverty in which 20 million of its citizens – almost half the population – live from day to day.

  Winston Smith, the anti-hero of 1984, is rooted out by the state and ends his days contemplating ‘a boot stamping on a human face – for ever’. After years of devising his own subtle forms of resistance, he finds that any organized challenge to the tyranny of Big Brother is impossible. Like George Orwell, Héctor Abad Faciolince didn’t seem to think that revolution was a realistic prospect. The malcontents of Angosta only find something like peace when they are driven into exile.

  What then of those Colombians who have decided that the only way to effect meaningful change is by force of arms? Most of their countrymen regard the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia as dinosaurs: antiquated and all the more dangerous for being on their last legs. Yet as seen from the uninhabited hills overlooking Bogotá, the wrangling of rich and poor, and left and right, seemed overshadowed by a more elemental conflict, between the known and the unknown. The geography of this country throws up obstacles to all human endeavour, whatever its inspiration or purpose.

  I thought again of what David Hutchinson had told me about the ten months he spent as a captive of the FARC. A few weeks after arriving at their camp in Sumapaz, he was taken on a long march towards the southeast, over the easternmost range of the Andes and down onto the llanos, the huge plains that run towards the border with Venezuela. They spent months on foot. Although they travelled by day, they didn’t come across a single soldier or policeman. ‘No satellite saw us. Nobody came and killed us. Nothing at all,’ David told me. ‘Colombia is a very big country with a very small state. It’s a one-way mirror. Behind the one-way mirror is over half the territory of Colombia, where the state can’t see anything.’

  I’d flown over the eastern plains myself, and had marvelled at the unbroken tropical savannah rolling out towards the horizon. In Britain, people often complain about the omnipresence of the state and its incessant surveillance of daily life. If there is a one-way mirror in Britain, it is obvious who is doing the watching and who is being watched. But in Colombia, people complain about the absence of the state. Away from the big cities, the state is not so much a nanny as an absent father.

  Colombians take their one-way mirror for granted, for it has always been there. Those looking into that mirror see only familiar and reassuring reflections; but behind it, never to be seen, lies a sparsely inhabited, frequently lawless country. Few seem willing to admit just how deep the division runs; fewer still, to acknowledge the inevitable violence that division inspires. Despite the surveillance and control the Colombian government aspires to exercise, it is on the wrong side of the mirror.

  I asked David how the guerrillas had rated their chances of overthrowing the government. ‘I asked one of the commanders when it would all end for him,’ he told me. ‘He said, “When we are marching on the Avenida Séptima in Bogotá.” That’s their dream – that one day they’ll win.’

  Understandably, David didn’t like them much. ‘They know nothing about anything at all,’ he told me. ‘They can’t read or write. They’ve never heard of England. They’ve never been to the sea – they don’t even know what the sea is.’ His voice betrayed a residual disbelief at what had happened to him, as well as the fear that the guerrillas had instilled in him. ‘Well, that’s not true,’ he said after a moment’s reflection. ‘They know a lot about some things. They know a lot about birds and fish and the forest. They know natural remedies for when you get ill. So they have a sort of Indian knowledge, which is sometimes quite interesting. It’s very like reading the Odyssey. They live in a world of five thousand years ago.’

  To say that the shoppers wandering the polished marble floors of the Andean Centre and the guerrillas of the FARC are separated by 5,000 years might be an exaggeration, but it gives some indication of the obstacles faced by anyone hoping to build a nation in this corner of the continent. Most of the conflicts of the post-Cold War world have drawn on ethnic or religious divisions for fuel. The Colombian conflict, as well as being older and easier to ignore than most, is also harder to explain. It certainly isn’t religious: nearly all Colombians are Catholic. Nor is it ethnic: the Europeans who came here five hundred years ago took wives or mistresses wherever they found them, and at street level at least, no one hue dominates the others. Most black and native Colombians live in the margins, but their struggle for racial equality has been subsumed by other, broader agendas, principally grounded in region and class. Perhaps that explains the near-invisibility of Colombia’s war: it is a long-running, unchanging, old-fashioned class war.

  I pulled out my map and set to wondering about all the forgotten villages dotted along Colombia’s jungle rivers or perched in its distant mountain valleys. For the past twenty-five years, exotic-sounding places like Playboy, Putumayo; Balmoral, Casanare; and Berlín, Santander have been too dangerous to visit. But even as the guerrillas have been pushed back, the countryside remains largely unknown, even by Colombians. In the remotest departments, the only way to get around is by boat. Other regions have roads, but many of them are unpaved, so even those wanting to get to know the countryside find themselves stymied. The mountains, jungles, swamps and rivers that frustrated the conquistadores when their galleons first made land in the early years of the sixteenth century still resist those who seek to govern them.

  One of the few foreign authors to have struggled to make sense of modern Colombia has called it ‘a nation in spite of itself’.* From their mountain capital, its rulers might catch echoes of the war rumbling in the tropical lowlands. The city’s lawyers, Congressmen and political pundits might digest its causes and effects and pontificate over what
should be done, just as they have since declaring their independence from Spain two hundred years ago. But to this day, much of the rest of the country considers the bogotano elite to be overweening meddlers, inscrutable and bloodless, somehow a breed apart. I couldn’t help thinking that they were spectators in their own country, and that the confluence of indigenous, African and European peoples on which the nation was built lay elsewhere. For those seeking to govern it, Colombia is still, as one journalist called it, ‘an act of faith’.

  2. Meeting the McCormicks

  I first met Ricardo Sánchez in 2007, when he had been my research assistant for a book I was writing about the cocaine business. He’d come up with lots of stories, none of which had any relevance to my project, but they were always interesting and Ricardo soon became my talking guidebook. We spent hours walking the streets of Bogotá. One day he might point out the house where William Burroughs had once stayed; the next, the spot where Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, Colombia’s one and only populist leader, who claimed to be ‘not a man but a people’, had been gunned down in 1948. Ricardo gave the history lessons and I bought the drinks.

  Our impromptu strolls, which invariably ended up in one of the pokey student bars of La Candelaria, were a habit I was keen to pick up again. After immersing myself in the newspapers, TV news and political goings-on of Bogotá, my forays into its old neighbourhoods were a welcome relief. Ricardo walked everywhere, partly because he enjoyed it, but also because he never had any money for the bus. Although he was in his late thirties, he had only enrolled at the National University a couple of years before and still lived with his mum and dad.

  One Sunday, a week before I was due to leave Bogotá on my travels, Ricardo and I decided to climb Moguy, the highest of the hills that border the western edge of the city. It was an exhausting two-hour ascent over steep, bracken-covered slopes. Dozing at the summit, and seemingly incapable of moving a muscle, much less returning a greeting, were three young hippies who we guessed to be tripping on the local magic mushrooms. We walked a little further, beyond the TV mast that crowned the hill to the lookout that gave us a panoramic view over the deep green of the plain of Bogotá. Towards the horizon, sunbeams broke through the brownish fug and lit up the distant city. Below us, we could see a silver river running down from the hills, and beyond, the flooded fields where it had broken its banks.

  Before the arrival of the Europeans, the highland plain of what was then called Bacatá was occupied by the Muisca. Ricardo told me that the entire plain had once been a huge lake and that those who lived on its shores had called themselves ‘the frog men’. Later, the Muisca frog men had managed to dislodge a huge rock, by what combination of leverage and manpower nobody knew, which allowed the lake to drain over what is today the Salto de Tequendama waterfall. The Muisca were frog men no more. Ricardo was hoping to stumble across some of their petroglyphs, which might prove his point. As we combed the bracken for tell-tale signs on the weathered rocks, he went on to say that in modern times, the 157-metre-high falls had become a favourite spot for jilted lovers to jump to their deaths. ‘But as the city outgrew its sewage system and the River Bogotá became polluted with shit, the stink of the waterfall became so overpowering that even the suicidal stayed away,’ he said with a grin.

  Ricardo was steeped in the history of his home city, which offered him some refuge from the dispiriting present. He revelled in the stories of bar-room brawls, crooked police officers and the mayor’s shenanigans. He had a keen eye for the grotesque, as well he might, for Bogotá was a city whose patrician elite was as proud as it was sordid. Over the garb of the underdog Ricardo wore the mantel of the radical intellectual. Had he been born fifty years earlier, he might have become a follower of Che and Fidel, but this being 2011, his convictions were in limbo. The corruption and brutality of the ruling elite hadn’t changed, but Ricardo had no faith in the guerrillas’ high-flown rhetoric either.

  He told me that the first European to enter the land of the Muisca had been the Spaniard Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, who went on to found Bogotá in 1538. Jiménez de Quesada’s party spent six months trekking up the River Magdalena from the Caribbean coast. By the time they reached the plain of Bacatá there were just 170 of them left – by coincidence, Francisco Pizarro had had almost the same number of men when he conquered the Incas of Peru.

  How had such a tiny band gone on to conquer an entire civilization? Disease was to play its part in the years to come, but the conquest of the Muiscas was only possible because they, like the Incas, regarded the Europeans with reverent awe. They called them usachies, meaning ‘sun-moon’, since they regarded the sun and moon as creators of the world. According to a Spanish chronicler, ‘The Indians said to one another – as was later learned – that our men must be sons of the sun and must have been sent to punish their shortcomings and sins.’*

  In each village they came to, the Spaniards accepted the adulation of their Muisca hosts and took on board more gold. On their way south to Bogotá, the Spanish stormed and looted the palace of the Zaque of Tunja, throwing his precious objects into a pile so high that it was said to have hidden a mounted horseman. The booty amounted to 621 kilos of fine gold, 14,000 pesos of base gold and 280 emeralds.

  At Guachetá, sixty miles northeast of Bogotá, the invaders found that the residents had retreated to a fortress on a crag above the town. Wandering the abandoned buildings, they came across an old man who was sitting in front of a cooking fire. Jiménez de Quesada concluded that he must have been left as an offering. The townspeople had supposed that the invaders, being gods, were sure to enjoy human flesh. Sure enough, when the Spaniards passed the old man by, the locals sent down younger, fresher meat. The Christians made signs to them to indicate that this was not their kind of food and moved on.

  Their kind of food proved impossible to find. The land of the Muisca was certainly intensively farmed. Being higher than the tropical forests but lower than the treeless páramo, the cool and misty highlands were perfect for growing maize, potatoes and quinoa. The Muisca were great traders and every village would have centred on a busy marketplace. In an area no bigger than Belgium, the Muisca’s villages supported a population of at least a million. Since the natives had no pack animals and no wheeled vehicles, they had no need of roads. Instead, a web of stone paths linked the many villages dotted across the plain of Bacatá.

  With the single exception of cotton, everything on offer would have been strange to the Europeans: tomatoes, runner beans and squashes; sweet peppers, pineapples and avocados. There were none of the cattle, pigs, sheep or chickens that sustained a Spanish diet in the sixteenth century. The only meat the conquistadores found was guinea pig; according to one observer, they got through 1,000 of them a day.

  But the single greatest discovery made by those first explorers was undoubtedly the potato. To this day, the value of the world’s annual potato harvest far exceeds that of all the gold, silver and precious stones ever exported from South America. Yet many of the plants that the conquistadores encountered – protein-rich quinoa, arracacha, and camote sweet potatoes – are still little known outside the Andes. These unknown highland crops and the clean mountain air soon restored Jiménez de Quesada’s band of emaciated, half-naked men to good health.

  As Jiménez de Quesada and his men moved south, word of this party of strangers was sent to the Muisca’s supreme ruler, the Zipa of Bacatá. Unlike the villagers they’d encountered up to that point, the Zipa harboured no illusions about the newcomers’ intentions. In full battle array, with the mummified bodies of all the previous zipas at their head, his soldiers rushed into battle against the Spanish. They were quickly repulsed, overwhelmed by a combination of Toledan steel swords, battle-hardened soldiers and mounted horsemen (which the Muisca initially took to be a single, terrifying creature).

  A few days after their defeat of the Zipa of Bacatá, the Spanish came within sight of his city. ‘They began to see beautiful and magnificent buildings, houses and palaces of wood
more ornate and better than all they had seen before.’* Many of these buildings had high, conical thatched roofs that were topped by a central mast, dyed red with annatto and adorned with sail-like vanes. As Jiménez de Quesada gazed across the broad plain of Bacatá, he gave it the name Valle de los Alcazares – the Valley of Castles. He said that it reminded him of the tiered battlements of Spain’s Moorish castles.

  On 21 April 1537 his party reached the Zipa’s palace at Muequetá. They found it empty; before meeting the invaders in battle, the Zipa had hidden his treasure in the mountains. The Spaniards asked the remaining Muisca where they might find more gold, but the locals couldn’t help. Although they traded salt and cotton cloth with neighbouring tribes in exchange for raw gold, which their smiths worked with great skill and artistry, they had no source of gold of their own.

  So the Spanish set out to interrogate the Muisca’s neighbours, but they remained obstinately tight-lipped about the location of their mines. According to a report from 1560, ‘if they see that one of them is about to reveal where the mines are, the others kill him with poison. For they say that if the mines are revealed they will all perish by being forced to work in them, just as all Indians are finished in any places where mines exist.’*

  On our way back down from Moguy, Ricardo suggested that we pay a visit to his Uncle Alejandro, who had invited the Sánchez clan over to celebrate his daughter’s first communion. After a half-hour ride on one of the gleaming buses of the Transmilenio, we came to a quiet residential neighbourhood. I could have been on a British housing estate. The semi-detached houses looked to have been built in the sixties. In a cul-de-sac, a dad was teaching his baby daughter how to walk. Teenagers on Choppers were pulling wheelies. Even the rich green grass and the silver grey clouds drifting overhead looked familiar.