Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the new Colombia

by Feiling, Tom

By British standards, it was striking how little stuff there was in Uncle Alejandro’s front room. The walls were bare and the floor was of plain ceramic tiles, which is not to say that he was poor. He was a doctor, and the Sánchez clan’s most successful member. Money had been spent on the stucco marbling on the walls, the recessed lighting and the elaborate coving. The furniture was some distant relative of Louis XV and there was a dresser that might from a distance have passed for mahogany, with a tin-dressed-as-silver platter on display inside.

  The front room was just a step up from the indoor garage, though I didn’t realize it was a garage until Alejandro backed his car into it. He didn’t stop backing up until he’d near enough hit the dining table. I thought that perhaps he’d had one too many rum and cokes, but he looked sober enough when he joined us. He explained that to get the car’s nose clear of the garage door, he had no choice but to stick its tail into the dining room.

  After I had been introduced to everyone, Ricardo’s mum asked me what I thought of Colombia. I sensed a loaded question; what Marta really wanted to know, I told myself, was whether I might make her happy by saying something nice about her country. So I did: ‘Pues, me encanta – I love it,’ I said. Everyone smiled. The ice was officially broken.

  Over a few rum and cokes, Ricardo, his mum, dad and assorted relatives settled into family gossip. The communion had gone well. Alejandro’s daughter had behaved herself. Not that it would have mattered if she hadn’t, his dad joked, since God didn’t exist anyway. The Sánchez family, I later discovered, came from a long line of anti-clerical Liberals.

  ‘And do you like the food?’ Marta asked me. Who could argue that the food was anything but delicious? Lunch certainly always got off to a good start, I told her. The plantain soup, maize soup, barley soup and fish soup I was served at the cheap restaurants I frequented were hearty and warming and the main course was always filling. But Colombian food was let down by its chefs’ aversion to herbs and spices. The Spanish seem to have a similar lack of interest in seasoning, I added, so as she wouldn’t feel too put out, though the truth of the matter is that at least the Spanish use garlic.

  In fact, given the huge variety of foods that can be grown in Colombia, the gamut of flavours on a typical plate was depressingly small. Potatoes, rice, cassava and plantain were the staples. Meat was grilled, fried or sometimes boiled, generally without adornment. I might be lucky enough to get a thick slice of avocado or a token salad, but oil and vinegar didn’t often make it onto the table and there seemed to be a nationwide ban on green vegetables. They weren’t much good at bread or cheese either.

  ‘Yes, we like our food natural,’ Marta said with some pride. Perhaps it’s something about the enduring myth of Latin passion, but the British always imagine that Latin food is hot and spicy. It isn’t, at least not in this corner of the continent, perhaps because the traders who brought eastern spices like cardamom, cloves and cumin to Europe never made it to the Andes.

  Or perhaps a legend I once heard better explains the Colombians’ suspicion of spice. In colonial times, the witches of the Caribbean towns would pray to a god called Fot to give them the power of flight. At night, they could be seen on their broomsticks, flying to Jamaica to bring back the green chillies they used in their potions. One day, some local men decided to cut down the tree where the witches used to rest mid-flight. After felling the tree, the men took a break. Sitting on the stump of the tree to sip some rum, they felt something land on their heads. It was human excrement. Looking up, they saw the witches cackling as they flew away on their broomsticks.

  To finish my meal, I was often given a slick of figs with a dollop of sweet arequipe toffee, but more often a cube of jelly. I’d seen no custard, but all the same a Colombian lunch often felt like a school dinner. Both spurned sensual delight for stodge, as if culinary pleasure were affected, or even intoxicating. Whatever the origin of the naturist streak in Colombian cuisine, there was no Colombian Jamie Oliver.

  The good news was that there were plenty of juices to choose from. Some, like strawberry, raspberry, passion fruit and mango, were familiar. Others were novel. Lulo was a delicious combination of apple and pear flavours, while feijoa, a personal favourite, looked like cut grass, and borojo was a muddy aphrodisiac with a game-like aftertaste. Away from Bogotá, there would be yet more juices to try: zapote (sapodilla plum), curuba (a variant of the passion fruit) and nispero (medlar, or Japanese plum). Everything, it seemed, except apple, orange and grapefruit juice.

  ‘And what do British people think of Colombia?’ Marta wanted to know.

  ‘Well, being so far away, most people don’t even have a conception of the place,’ I said, not wanting to confirm her worst imaginings by telling her that most of my British friends still thought of Colombia as a gangster- and terrorist-infested war-zone.

  ‘And what do Colombians think of the UK?’ I asked, and Marta started talking about Margaret Thatcher and Lady Di – ‘who the whole world loved, of course’ – and King Juan Carlos, who she wasn’t so fond of. Her picture of Britain, like ours of Colombia, was stuck in the eighties (and Juan Carlos is the king of Spain). Perhaps she, like me, was just trying to be polite. When I’d asked Ricardo the same question, he’d said that he was a little frightened of the British. His picture of us was still coloured by the Falklands War and football hooligans.

  Ricardo told his mum that I was planning to write a book about Colombia, and the smile on her face faded somewhat. ‘Many foreign journalists come here and tell lies about how bad the place is,’ Marta said. I sympathized, even though the badness of the place was inescapable – it was no lie that Colombia was the world’s biggest producer of cocaine. Nor was it untrue that in the 1980s Pablo Escobar had gone to war with the Colombian government on a scale that dwarfed the worst excesses of the Mexican drugs cartels today. That Colombia once had the highest homicide rate in the world, and still exported more prostitutes, printed more fake euros and planted more landmines than any other country in the world was all true too.

  But Marta wouldn’t have denied any of that. What she wanted to say was that the international cocaine business was none of her doing. It had no impact on her, nor she on it. What she wanted to say was that she and millions of other Colombians felt demonized by the outside world. No passport raises more suspicion at international airports than a Colombian one.

  ‘It is important to tell the truth about this country,’ Marta told me. ‘Most people here are good. They are hard workers’ (which isn’t quite the same thing, but still, much of the developed world depends on Colombia for cheap labour as well as cocaine). ‘And Colombia has made big contributions to literature, medicine, art and music,’ she added. Well, enough talk of truth and lies, I thought. The point is that this is still the New World. Ricardo’s ancestors, willingly or not, had come here to build a nation. Colombia, like the United States, is a project, not an inheritance. The current generation wanted the outside world to acknowledge their achievements, as well as the beauty that surrounded them.

  When I had first met Ricardo, he told me that his dad’s side of the family had come to Colombia from Scotland. But Mr Sánchez Snr. said that the McCormick brothers had in fact been Irish. Julio’s could well have been an Irish face: it was lean, with a long bony nose and a prominent forehead that hung over keen, deep-set eyes. The McCormicks had arrived in 1812, he told me, to fight with the British Legion. ‘Without British soldiers, armaments and finance, Simón Bolívar’s campaign to free South America from Spanish rule would have been doomed to failure,’ he said.

  This was news to me. In fact, as I found out from later forays at the National Library, Simón Bolívar had been such an Anglophile that after declaring independence in 1819, he considered making Colombia an English-speaking country and was only dissuaded from doing so by his second-in-command, General Francisco de Paula Santander.

  After the defeat of the Spanish forces, Julio told me, the McCormicks set out to make their fortunes in the newly independent
republic. They built Colombia’s first iron bridge, which still spans the river at Sube, a village in the department of Santander. Later, they built and ran the country’s first radio station, which they called Radio McCormick. But after an auspicious start, the family’s fortunes took a turn for the worse. At the turn of the twentieth century, they lost several members in the War of a Thousand Days, the last and bloodiest of the civil wars that convulsed the country for most of the nineteenth century. In the early 1960s, all of their male descendants joined the guerrillas of the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) – the National Liberation Army, inspired by the Cuban revolution that swept Fidel Castro to power in 1959. Shortly after, they were killed in fighting with the Army, their bodies only identified by the red roses that they wore in their berets. The family name died with them.

  While some of the McCormick brothers had sought their fortunes in Colombia, others had gone to the United States. Julio told me that the North American branch of the family had met with better luck. They gave their name to McCormick Spices of Chicago, as well as the McCormick truck company, which produces the famous Mac trucks.

  I knew from past conversations that Ricardo wanted to visit Scotland and/or Ireland, to see whichever land it was that his forefathers had sailed from. But he struggled with mixed feelings. He had long borne the McCormicks a grudge for the way they’d treated his mum’s side of the family, who were black and from Cali. The only protest Ricardo could make was by his refusal to learn his European ancestors’ language. English, he told me, was the language of Empire. That was true, I admitted, but it was also the language of globalization. Facebook and the worldwide web had brought the world to Bogotá; together they had rescued Ricardo from the straitjacket imposed by the Andes, his lack of money, the end of socialism and his country’s never-ending war on terror.

  Hearing that I was curious to find out more about the British contribution to Colombia’s story, Marta – who was an avid and refreshingly non-partisan football supporter – had mentioned a Señor Greenfell, an Englishman who had been one of the first managers of Santa Fe, the more likeable of the two big bogotano football teams. Even their most ardent fans admitted that Santa Fe had had a terrible season, some of which I’d witnessed for myself, but I was intrigued when Marta said that Mr Greenfell was buried in the British cemetery.

  The following day, Ricardo and I walked to the cemetery. If Marta hadn’t mentioned it, it would have been easy to overlook. Although it occupied an annex of the city’s Cementerio Central, it was surrounded by high walls, there was no sign, and the front gate didn’t even offer peeping room. The groundsman opened the gate warily, as if accustomed to turning people away.

  ‘Is this the British cemetery?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied.

  ‘Is it open to the public?’

  ‘No, it’s private. You have to get authorization from the British embassy,’ he said, and made to close the gate.

  ‘Even if you’re English?’ I asked.

  He ushered us in. Ricardo got in too: clearly, Colombians were allowed in if accompanied by a Briton. I was chuffed that my nationality was opening doors for me, if only to a graveyard, and chuffed too that the groundsman had, at least at first, taken me for a Colombian. He made a quick call to the British embassy, explaining that a fellow countryman wanted to have a look around. He gave my name as ‘Thomas UK Passport Office’. The ‘coronel’ must have given him the go-ahead, because the groundsman, who introduced himself as Edgar, gestured for us to follow him, before turning on the heel of his rubber boot and trudging up the brick path that led through a short avenue of yews to the cemetery.

  ‘This is officially British soil,’ Edgar said, pointing to the British and Colombian flags, wet from the rain, that were hanging limply from their poles. ‘Though it’s strange that the British put their flag on the left.’ I asked why that was strange, but neither of us understood his reply. What I did understand was that the plot of land occupied by the cemetery had been a gift to Britain, by way of thanks for the contribution made by British volunteers to the wars of independence fought between 1810 and 1820.

  When the first revolts against Spanish rule were heralded on the Caribbean coast in 1810, Madrid rushed reinforcements across the Atlantic and they were quickly put down. In 1815 the colony was up in arms once more, the rebels in Cartagena only capitulating to the Spanish after a 108-day siege of the city in which a third of its 18,000 people died of starvation and many of those who survived were reduced to eating rats. In desperation, the city even proclaimed itself to be part of the British Empire, a suggestion that the British government politely rebuffed.

  Britain was a beacon of freedom to many of the natives of Gran Colombia, the huge colony that covered modern-day Colombia, Venezuela, Panama and Ecuador. The British government wanted to help the rebels who were seeking to wrest themselves free of the Spanish yoke. London had not forgotten the support that Spain lent to the rebels of the Thirteen Colonies in North America. But as long as the British government was at war with Napoleon Bonaparte in Europe, it could not afford to offend the Spanish crown, which was a key partner in the anti-French alliance.

  Even after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, the British were unwilling to openly defy the Spanish. So they reverted to the policy first devised by Elizabeth I, when English traders and pirates had harried the north coast of Colombia, and Colombians had bought contraband English goods in defiance of the Spanish monopoly. They formally banned trade with Spain’s colonies, while informally allowing it to go ahead. By a proclamation of 1817 the British decreed that ‘no subject of His Majesty may take part in the disputes between the King of Spain and those who govern or attempt to govern his American colonies.’ Meanwhile, they turned a blind eye to the Latin Americans who came to London to foment support for Simón Bolívar’s liberation army.

  Their cause was trumpeted by the British press. ‘Come quick to avenge the dead, to give life to the dying, confidence to the oppressed and liberty to all!’ Simón Bolívar declared in The Times. Bolívar is remembered as a brilliant general, who led his troops up and over the Andes not once but several times. Had he not also been an idealist, his name might not inspire the devotion that it still does. ‘The freedom of the New World,’ he said, ‘is the hope of the universe.’ It was a phrase I would find myself repeating under my breath in the weeks to come.

  Bolívar’s right-hand man in London was Don Luis López Méndez. To him Bolívar entrusted responsibility for finding the volunteers and equipment they would need to defeat their colonial masters. Such was López Méndez’ importance that in later years, Bolívar would call him ‘the true liberator of Colombia’. In the early stages of the liberation campaign, López Méndez could only offer his British recruits the uniforms cast off by soldiers returning from the Napoleonic wars. But as the South Americans secured funding for their recruitment drive, the volunteers saw conditions improve. Recruits were soon provided with sabres, rifles, gunpowder and strikingly luxurious uniforms, styled on those of the Royal Artillery.

  They were paid for with short-term loans, which the London banks made to the revolutionaries with some wariness. The bankers had little confidence in the nascent government or its ability to repay the loans, so they charged extortionate rates of interest. British support came at a price and the infant republic would be saddled with huge debts for years to come.

  Initially, López Méndez recruited 1,200 soldiers to what became known as the British Legion. He enticed them into making the two-month-long journey across the Atlantic with offers of land in Colombia and 500 American dollars for any man who stayed in the Americas for more than five years. In time, more than 6,500 English, Irish, Scots and Welsh soldiers signed up, among them many unemployed soldiers, recently back from the fighting at Waterloo, as well as hundreds of former convicts keen to start over in the New World. Some enlisted for the nobility of the Colombian cause, others for the adventure, glory or gold. With the exception of a 300-stro
ng detachment of German soldiers, the soldiers of the British Legion were the only foreigners to come to the aid of Simón Bolívar’s rebel army.*

  The first contingent to reach Colombia was led by General Edward MacGregor, who arrived in Cartagena at the end of 1817 with 600 men. This time, the British were instrumental in defending the main square against the Spanish. Once on American soil, many members of the British Legion succumbed to the tropical illnesses prevalent on the coast, but as they trekked inland, the mountain air restored the survivors to good health.

  At the Battle of Pantano de Vargas, which was fought in highland Boyacá in 1819, the British Legion under the Irishman Colonel James Rook earned a reputation for valiance. Colonel Daniel Florencio O’Leary, the young Irishman who served as Simón Bolívar’s aide-de-camp, wrote that ‘in the most difficult circumstances and in the presence of the greatest danger, the English officers showed noble perseverance and loyalty to the cause that they had embraced: the liberty of Gran Colombia.’ The rebels inflicted a significant defeat on the Spanish at Pantano de Vargas, but the battle took a terrible toll on the British contingent. Colonel Rook survived, only to die a few days later, just hours before the Spanish were decisively beaten at the Battle of Boyacá. Though the British contribution to Colombia’s wars of independence has been largely forgotten in both countries, it supplied the winning blow to colonial rule. Indeed, more Britons died fighting the Spanish than did Colombians.

  One Englishman who served for a time in Bolívar’s army was ‘the Cornish Giant’ Richard Trevithick, who sailed from Penzance on the whaling ship Asp in October 1816, bound for Peru. The man who had given the world the high-pressure steam engine and the railway locomotive sailed for the New World in the hope of finding work in the silver mines at Potosí. But he was swept up by the wars of independence and eventually found himself in Cartagena, where he designed and built a gun for the rebels.

  By chance, while in the city he ran into Robert Stephenson. The last time they had met, Trevithick had bounced the baby Stephenson on his knee at his house in Camborne. Thirty years later, the two men’s prospects couldn’t have been more different. Stephenson was a world-renowned engineer who had come to Colombia to build a railway, while Trevithick was ailing and broke. When the younger man offered to lend him £50 for his passage home, Trevithick gladly accepted.