by Feiling, Tom
Richard Trevithick died penniless in a rented room above a pub in Dartford in 1833, but not before he had alerted his fellow Cornishmen to the opportunities awaiting them in the mines of South America. Cornish tin miners were the first wave of what was to become a tide of informal British imperialists who crossed the Atlantic to build the roads, railways, tunnels, bridges and ports of the new republic. They were also the first to dig for gold in the mines of Antioquia. In 1857, Cornishmen founded Frontino Mines, to this day one of Colombia’s biggest gold mining companies.
The relationship between Colombia and Britain was formalized by the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation of 1825. Until the opening years of the twentieth century, Britain was Colombia’s principal trading partner. Of course, the formal equality espoused by opening each country’s ports to the other’s goods benefited the British rather more than it did the Colombians, since Colombian merchants had little worth exporting until they began growing coffee in bulk in the early years of the twentieth century. Nor did they have the means to carry what little they produced, either within or beyond their own borders. The previous year, the Colombian Navy had bought two magnificent US frigates at a cost of $1 million, but the Colombians had no money to maintain them or sailors to sail in them, so they were left to rot in the harbour at Cartagena. Still, Colombia needed official recognition, bank loans and foreign technology, and the treaty ensured it got all three.
Beyond the yews, the British Cemetery was bound by a row of spiked railings, fashioned, Edgar told me, from the bayonets of those early British volunteers. At the far end was a low adobe wall, most of which had crumbled away over the years. Beyond, a wall of breeze blocks separated the cemetery from a car park. It was a tranquil spot, and the sight of moss-covered gravestones soon had me feeling wistful. In all, more than 500 Britons were buried there. There was a Scot from Aberdeen, an Englishman from Sutton Coldfield and a Welshman whose gravestone had been carved, presumably by the stonemason next door, in English and Welsh.
The earliest grave I found went back to 1836. In the second half of the nineteenth century, as a steady trickle of foreigners ventured to Colombia to start over in the New World, the British Embassy allowed foreign Protestants to be buried in the cemetery too. There were the graves of Americans, Germans, French and Poles, as well as their offspring, signs of the intermingling they’d done on the Caribbean coast and in departments like Santander and Boyacá. There was the family plot of the Wells Castillo family, the head of which was credited with being ‘the father of the Colombian flower business’. Next to it was the grave of one Julian Velásquez Jones, who had been born in Barranquilla and died in Bogotá. A little further along was Dora Golding de Vélez, who had been born in Manchester and died at Sogamoso, Boyacá.
There was a grave shared by two English brothers, who had died just weeks apart in 1900, at Girardot, a town on the River Magdalena. I wondered whether they’d fought in the War of a Thousand Days. Perhaps they had worn niños en cruz, the cross of tiny stones that soldiers on both sides of the war used to stitch under the skin of their wrists? I’d read of several fighters who had sworn that bullets bounced off them thanks to their niño en cruz. It was a telling sign of the melange of shamanism and Catholicism that once held sway in the Colombian countryside.
Today’s soldiers, guerrillas and paramilitaries would be more likely to carry a fajada – a laminated picture of a favourite saint – but many would still have it blessed by a local witch before putting it down their pants and heading off into battle. Foreign soldiers still come to Colombia to fight, though these days most of them are American and work for private defence contractors. But the British Army contributes advisors and SAS men to the Colombian front of the so-called ‘war on drugs’. I have a photo of the then-Defence Minister Kim Howells, posing with troops from the High Mountain Battalion, one of several Colombian Army units to have received training from their British counterparts. It is hard to know just what they were doing, as the MoD is reluctant to divulge any details.
The High Mountain Battalion, however, is an easier book to read: in May 2006, troops from the battalion were ordered by their commanding officer to ambush and kill ten counter-narcotics police officers near the town of Jamundí. The police had been preparing to seize 200 kilos of cocaine that reportedly belonged to Diego Montoya, one of Colombia’s leading drug barons. Subsequent investigations showed the commander of the High Mountain Battalion to be in the pay of Montoya.*
I couldn’t find the grave of Señor Greenfell, the Englishman who had valiantly tried to save Santa Fe from ignominy. On my way out, Edgar asked me to write the name down for him, just in case he spotted it while he was cutting the grass. Back in the traffic on Avenida El Dorado, Ricardo and I negotiated our way around the roadworks and watched the diggers for a while. A skinny young engineer in a fluorescent jacket was supervising what might have been another, shorter and stockier race of men who were shovelling mud from a huge hole in the ground. Just short of the bridge that carried the Transmilenio buses over Calle 26, they’d excavated a small round mud-brick hut, which they’d been careful not to demolish. I hadn’t expected to see layers of Bogotá’s history unearthed, as I might the remains of London or Rome. Had it been built by the Muiscas? Nobody could tell. As Lucho had said on the day Mono Jojoy was killed, Colombians have short memories. The present, it seems, demands their undivided attention.
3. The Last Nomads
Back in the 1980s, when Pablo Escobar first started making his – and his country’s – name for all-round nastiness, nobody gave much thought to bio-diversity. Now that they do, and with Escobar long gone, environmentalists are paying more attention to Colombia. Per square foot, it is the most bio-diverse country in the world. It has more species of birds and frogs than any other country, and were it not for the conflict botanists would doubtless have found many more. Colombia’s mountains, and its location just north of the equator, make it supremely wet and verdant. Its rivers and lakes contain more freshwater than those of the United States and Canada combined.
I was keen to see some of this natural wealth, after so many years in which the best bits were reserved for the country’s guerrillas and cocaine traffickers. I particularly wanted to visit the Caño Cristales. I’d seen the photos, of a river flowing over red jasper and blooms of blue and yellow algae, and heard more than a few people call it ‘the river that ran away from paradise’ and ‘the most beautiful river in the world’. The Caño Cristales runs through the national park of La Macarena, a 60-mile-long loaf-shaped range of hills. It is one of the world’s oldest geological features, a stranded relative of the Guyanese plate, which sprouts as tepuis, or table-top mountains, on the border between Brazil and Venezuela, hundreds of miles further east. The park is home to hundreds of species of animals and plants to be found nowhere else on the planet.
Until recently, many of the farmers around La Macarena made their living from growing coca. Now they had set up an eco-tourist venture to lure visitors to the river. Such a thing would have been unimaginable when I last lived in Colombia, but it illustrated just how far the country had come, as well as the natural bounty the country had to offer. A trip to La Macarena wasn’t without its problems: the northern half of the park was still host to FARC guerrillas, as well as plenty of coca growers who had yet to ‘get’ eco-tourism. All the same, I booked a flight in a biplane that would give me a bird’s-eye view of the park and had my bag packed, when I was told that since the death of Mono Jojoy, the whole region was once again off-limits. The FARC commander had been killed in the national park only a week before, and the guerrillas were even warier than usual of potential spies and informers. I thought it best to leave the Caño Cristales for another time.
Beyond La Macarena, however, lies San José del Guaviare, a small town on the open plains about 170 miles southeast of Bogotá. It is the last outpost before the roadless Amazon basin. In the past three years both the guerrillas and the coca farmers have been forced out of San
José del Guaviare and into the dense rainforests to the south and east. Many jungle dwellers have had to make way for them, among them the Nukak Maku, the last nomadic tribe in South America. I had heard about a refugee camp on the outskirts of San José, where several Nukak clans were living. A visit offered a good introduction to the tangle of cause and effect that had made Colombia’s conflict so long and intractable. I headed for the bus station.
Leaving Bogotá for San José, the road follows one of the many rivers that flow down from the eastern Andes on to the plains, or llanos. In the latter stages of the descent from the highlands, the valley sides become steeper and the road is forced through a series of tunnels and bridges. By the time we left the last tunnel and emerged onto the open expanse of the llanos, the light was fading from the sky, leaving clouds of amber, pink and violet. The heat of the plains and the smell of dry grass seeped into the bus as the street lights of Villavicencio came into view. From there to the Atlantic, thousands of miles to the east, was a flat expanse of savannah, jungle and isolated colono settlements.
Known as the ‘Gateway to the Plains’, until the 1950s Villavicencio was no more than a village. Only in the years that followed did migrants from other parts of Colombia begin to colonize the virgin land in large numbers. Sixty years of unstinting toil later, those colonos had made the city’s cattle ranchers rich.
I’d decided to break my journey here. I found a cheap hotel, took a room and channel surfed for the hour before dinner. Most of the channels offered familiar transnational fare: CNN, Discovery and BBC World. On the Latin version of MTV, a Mexican ranchera singer with a silver moustache and a velvet jacket covered in gold sequins was crooning from the saddle. He was singing about the women of his life, ‘… unas buenas, otras peligrosas … some good, others dangerous’. It was a sad song, which he wrapped up with the line ‘mi caballito es mi mejor compañero – my little horse is my best friend.’
On channel 35, I found one of the ubiquitous telenovelas. A woman was crying her eyes out; her husband had been having an affair with her best friend. The camera lingered on the tears streaming down her face for a mawkishly long time. There was another telenovela, with yet another tear-soaked protagonist on channel 36. On 38, I found a discussion programme, in which one of the guests was criticizing the president for riding roughshod over the wishes of Congress. This was a novelty: I’d never heard such open dissent on Colombian television before; sure enough, it turned out that I’d picked up a Venezuelan channel.
I settled for the evening news, which began with a report from the southern department of Nariño, where the Army was fighting running battles with the guerrillas. Next, the cameras turned to the presidential palace, where the recently inaugurated president Juan Manuel Santos was introducing his cabinet to the press. Judging by their complexions, I could have been in Spain. Plenty of Colombians had told me that the mix of black, white and indigenous people was the essence of their country, but you’d never have guessed that this was a mestizo nation from watching television.
The news was interrupted by an ad break. The men and women in white coats were extolling their latest marvel. As they explained the benefits of using their new and improved painkiller, a microscopic graphic of a neural transmitter throbbing in the background, I couldn’t help but notice a parallel with the news. Sometimes the threat was internal, at others external, but whatever form it took, Colombians could rely on white people to warn and protect them.
The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges was once asked on a trip abroad if he was Spanish. ‘I’m sorry,’ he replied, ‘but I made the decision fifty years ago to stop being Spanish.’ It seemed that the more Colombia struggled with New World problems, the more tightly its leaders clung to Old World solutions. They might have fought a war to free themselves from rule from Madrid, but they were far from reconciled to the mixed-race nation they governed. For loyal defenders of this outpost of European civilization, there had only ever been one language, religion and culture worthy of the names. Even their war of independence had been whitewashed. All the accounts I’d read had Spanish tyrants pitted against their American-born descendants. The struggles of black Colombians, let alone the country’s indigenous people, barely got a look in.
The conflict between the native peoples of South America and the descendants of those who conquered them is less noticeable in Colombia than in countries like Bolivia or Peru because indigenous people make up just 2 per cent of the population. Most of their forefathers were either massacred, worked to an early death or fell victim to the various illnesses that the Europeans brought with them. But many indigenous women survived, to be kept as wives by the conquistadores. As a result, five hundred years later most Colombians are mestizo. In Antioquia – after Bogotá, the most powerful and influential of Colombia’s thirty-two departments – nine out of every ten people can trace their descent to a Spanish father and an indigenous mother.* Perhaps this explains the frequency with which I heard Colombians say, ‘One’s mother is a saint, but one’s father is any old son of a bitch.’
I ventured out to have a look around Villavicencio. The city centre was orderly and neat, with an abundance of shops selling trainers – in fact, the whole town seemed to be wearing new trainers. I found a table on the terrace of a pizza restaurant and settled down with a cold beer to watch the world go by.
At a neighbouring table, a gaggle of teenagers were flirting with one another. The girls wore skin-tight jeans studded with sequins or plastic gold letters. The boys wore T-shirts emblazoned with gothic lettering. ‘Punk Rock Club’, said one; ‘Revolution: Real Attitude’, said another. I could have been anywhere, watching kids brandish their pseudo-affiliation to the political traditions of the twentieth century in clothes manufactured by the tailors of communist China. But the slogans seemed especially ironic here. In the poor neighbourhoods that ring Villavicencio, a paramilitary army known as ERPAC – Ejército Revolucionario Popular Antisubversivo de Colombia – is waging a real, albeit simmering, war on the FARC. The name – at once popular, revolutionary and anti-subversive – is a telling bundle of contradictions. Only occasionally do ERPAC’s fighters take on the guerrillas in open combat. The FARC are seasoned combatants, as well as elusive targets, so the paramilitaries spend most of their time rooting out ‘subversives’, a term which sometimes refers to community activists, but more often means young glue sniffers, thieves and prostitutes. Over the last twenty years, paramilitary groups like ERPAC have killed almost 3,000 Colombian children.
At its most savage, the paramilitaries’ campaign of violence has been sociopathic, but at times it has also seemed strangely juvenile. All too often, the perpetrators are children in uniform, killing other children for the price of a new pair of trainers. It is playground bullying, with the parents supplying the weapons. For as the rules of engagement in Colombia’s long-running conflict have been tossed aside, the recruitment of child soldiers by both guerrillas and paramilitaries has shot up. The boys are used as spies; the girls are recruited as girlfriends, sometimes raped and forced into abortions. When they leave school, many of the boys go on to learn how to handle weapons. By 2010, 14,000 Colombian children had been recruited by illegal armed groups.* The conflict that is spluttering to its gruesome, as yet undecided conclusion is being fought by armies in which one in four fighters is technically still a child.
ERPAC was led by Pedro Oliveiro Guerrero, a powerful landowner and cocaine trafficker in the llanos, whose nom de guerre was ‘Cuchillo’ (Knife). In the last days of 2010, three months after I passed through Villavicencio, the Army tracked him to a ranch downriver from San José del Guaviare, where he and his men were enjoying Christmas drinks. Cuchillo drank 21-year-old Chivas Regal; his men drank only aguardiente – the local firewater. As the Army moved in, Cuchillo fled. His body was found face down in a nearby river early the following morning. Drunk, and weighed down by the M-60 machine gun and walkie-talkie around his neck, it seemed that he had got caught in the roots of a tree and drowne
d.*
The only reason I’d decided to stop in Villavicencio was because the United Nations’ High Commission for Retugees (UNHCR)had an office there. I was hoping its director could tell me more about the Nukak Maku, so the next morning I walked out to meet him. Giovanni Lepri told me that the first mention of the Nukak made by outsiders came in 1963, when El Espectador reported that colono farmers in the department of Guaviare had killed several Nukak, after being attacked with arrows by 500 of them. Three years later, the same newspaper carried a priest’s account of a trip he had made to the confluence of the rivers Inirida and Guaviare, where he walked the Nukak’s intricate pathways and saw some evidence of plant cultivation.
In 1976, evangelical Christians from a mission called Nuevas Tribus built a settlement in the northern reaches of Nukak territory. One of the missionaries was an American, Kenneth Conduff, who became the first outsider to master the Nukak language. He found it to be far more complex than he’d first thought. It even had a subjunctive tense, like Spanish.† Conduff reported that the Nukak were very sarcastic in their use of words and that although they laughed a lot, their laughter often veiled criticism or scorn.
And yet they received the newcomers hospitably and were curious to know more about the outside world. Until the missionaries arrived, the Nukak had assumed that they were the only people on the planet. They didn’t know where or what Colombia was. When they saw planes flying overhead, they supposed that they were travelling along an invisible road in the sky and wondered who could have built such a thing. They had no concept of money or property. They didn’t even have numbers, so they had no way of measuring age or distance either.
