Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the new Colombia

by Feiling, Tom

  The Nukaks’ fragility is compounded by the fact that they have done nothing to resist what has happened to them. In the face of systematic violence and injustice, Colombia’s other indigenous groups have organized and educated themselves, but the Nukak seem content to live off the paternalistic concern of outsiders. Community leaders from bigger indigenous groups in Cauca and the Sierra Nevada have come to San José to explain how to put coherent proposals to the bureaucrats in Bogotá, but it is a steep learning curve for all concerned. The Nukaks’ lack of organization also means that the £600,000 that the government has assigned to them is still being held on their behalf by the mayor in San José.

  ‘Ultimately, there needs to be a regional dialogue between the Army, the FARC and the paramilitaries to facilitate the Nukaks’ return,’ Jhon Henry said with a sigh. ‘But the Army isn’t interested in regional peace processes. Even if the Nukak do go back, who can assure them that they won’t run into the FARC’s landmines? And who can assure the FARC that the Nukak won’t tell the Army where they are? At the end of the day, the problem is the cocaine business and the economic under-development of the llanos. There’s always a steady stream of peasant farmers who come down here from all over the country to grow coca. Wherever they go, the FARC follow.’

  I thought of my London friend, the cheeky wink and the tap of the nose he had given me when I told him I was going back to Colombia. Somewhere, in a land far from this one, members of an advanced civilization were stuffing their noses with cocaine, inadvertently hastening the demise of some of their most distant relatives. Rarely can the clash between old and new have seemed so stark or so intractable.

  It was dark by the time I left Jhon Henry. I planned to catch a bus back to Bogotá the next morning, but I had one more appointment to keep before turning in for the day. Albeiro had told me about Lina and Johan Aguillón, two evangelical missionaries who have spent the past sixteen years living with the Nukak. This was my last chance to speak to them.

  I found them in a large, apparently empty house opposite the town’s football pitch. The solitary lantern and the cooking stove on the kitchen counter suggested that they were camping indoors, as if still unaccustomed to life out of the jungle. They both seemed to harbour some mistrust of my intentions, and spoke in a dry, matter-of-fact way that suggested they had endured more than enough barbs from secular urbanites like me.

  They told me that they’d lived with the missionaries from Nuevas Tribus until they abandoned their settlement in 1996. Then they’d moved to a Nukak settlement at Chekamo, two days away from San José by boat and dirt track (the Nukak chose to walk, which took them eight days). Once there, they converted the Nukak to Christianity. They would have stayed in Chekamo, but in 2008, the Army ordered them out, shortly before they went into Nukak territory to spring the Franco-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt from the clutches of the FARC. The Nukak chose to stay in the jungle, but Lina and Johan were worried for the safety of their two teenage daughters, so they came back to San José. Like their parents, the girls both spoke fluent Nukak.

  I was surprised to hear Lina say that the threat posed to the Nukak by the FARC had been exaggerated. ‘The guerrillas are much less of a threat to the future of the Nukak than the colonos of San José,’ she insisted. ‘The Nukak should return to the jungle. It is their only chance of a sustainable future.’ Lina and Johan were glad that the converts they left behind in Chekamo still lived as jungle nomads.

  ‘Some people complain about the work that we do, but in fact, Christianity has saved the Nukak from the degradation they face living alongside the colonos,’ Johan told me. The Nukak of Chekamo still paint their faces when they feel happy. They still cut their hair square, using the jawbone of a river fish, and burn off their eyebrows with the gum they tap from a jungle tree.

  The displaced community at Aguabonita, however, was another story. They seemed to have no interest in the Christian message. ‘They’ve been reduced to beggary and slavish imitation by their interaction with colono society. They’re losing all sense of their cultural identity. They enjoy being “poor little Indians” and surviving on handouts. There are plenty of NGOs that would have no reason to be there if it weren’t for the parasitical relationship that the Nukak have fallen into. Most doctors just don’t want to go into the jungle to help them. And most of the young Nukak don’t want to go back. They just want scooters and mobile phones.’

  Before meeting Lina and Johan, I had had misgivings about their work, but I had to admit that they had challenged not just me, but the whole state-sponsored response to the Nukak’s plight. I walked back to the Hotel Colombia slowly, enjoying the night air, along sandy streets lit only by the occasional passing car. Despite its reputation as a frontier town founded by cocaine traffickers and run – until recently, at least – by the FARC, I felt a calm in San José del Guaviare that I hadn’t experienced since getting back to Colombia. In the few days I’d been there, I’d got used to the faces around town: the kid with the woven straw boltiao cap; the driver of the tiny Hyundai taxi with lights in the door handles and a strip of LEDs running along both flanks who paraded, customerless, up and down the main street every night; the smiling apple road signs, telling people to slow down and not to drink and drive. I’d even grown fond of the only Chinese restaurant in town, despite the awful spaghetti with sweet-and-sour pork I had eaten there.

  Maybe the young Nukak felt the same way. Pedro had told me that while some of his friends wanted to go back to the jungle, most of them just wanted to live like the colonos. If that meant growing cassava and plantain, driving a taxi or selling ice cream in the park, all well and good. But Albeiro had told me that he’d seen Nukak boys playing games of ‘guerrillas versus paramilitaries’. How long would it be before they ran into the real thing, and learned how to use real guns?

  By the following evening, I’d be back in Bogotá. There, the Nukak have become the public face of the ‘pristine’ indigenous people of Colombia. Nukak models have been photographed donning bows and arrows in fashion pieces for the Sunday papers. They made for better photos than the country’s other tribes, many of whom have been assimilated into creole culture to some degree. ‘Nukak’ has even become a brand of camping gear, used by urbanites wanting a taste of the ‘real’ Colombia.

  The young Nukak refugees of Aguabonita have effectively been born in a cage. But they have been quick to wise up to their own value in a country that still prizes racial distinctions between black, white and indigenous people, over the mestizaje to which most Colombians owe their heritage. Some of them have started charging press photographers £10 a time to pose for pictures. As and when the tourists make it this far south, I am sure that they will make a killing.

  4. An Imaginary Place between Macondo and Medellín

  After polishing off Angosta on my way back from San José del Guaviare, I had spent the days since getting back to Bogotá drifting in and out of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Before Pablo Escobar came along, Colombia was synonymous with Macondo, the isolated Caribbean village that Gabriel García Márquez conjured into life in his novel. Since publication in 1967 it has been translated into thirty-seven languages, sold more than 20 million copies and won its author the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  One Hundred Years of Solitude is the story not of one man, but an entire community, and covers hundreds of years, from the foundation of Macondo to its maturity and eventual decay. Even in 1920, its inhabitants recall the days when ‘the English pirate’ Sir Francis Drake harried the Caribbean coast as if it were yesterday. In the village’s earliest days, Colombia was little more than a series of remote settlements, a name pretending to be a nation. The people of Macondo receive all kinds of exotic visitors, who bring them oddities, inventions and theories from the distant lands of Europe and the United States, which they re-fashion according to their fancy.

  The western world loved the ‘magic realism’ that García Márquez pioneered in his novel. It is his – and Colombia’s –
gift to the world. It seems to express something essential not just about Colombia, but about all the villages built by the travelling bands that ventured into the New World. But One Hundred Years of Solitude wasn’t doing it for me. It didn’t chime with anything I knew of modern Colombia. It was certainly a world removed from the dystopian vision that Héctor Abad Faciolince conjured up in Angosta. Although both books were fantasies that purported to convey something inimitably Colombian, Faciolince’s novel also served as a warning. Angosta was a divided city, not a village of extended families. Its cocaine traffickers had corrupted the traditional elite not just financially, but morally. The Seven Wise Men that ruled the city made no claim to represent the people of Angosta. Their city was modern, but closed. Unlike Macondo, no visitors came to Angosta and those who left went feet first, and for good.

  I liked the idea that these imaginary places might teach me something about the real Colombia I was travelling, and was wondering where I might track down other depictions of the elusive country, when I had a call from my friend Carlos Gómez. When I had first met him, ten years before, Carlos had been working for ONIC,* the same organization for indigenous peoples that had sent Dr Albeiro Riano out to San José to treat the Nukak Maku. Carlos was not indigenous himself; he was one of many Colombians, especially those radicalized by their time at one of the national universities, who had taken to indigenous culture as a respite from, and antidote to, the colonial inheritance. I knew that Carlos always had a book on the go, so I asked him if he knew of any other novels set in imaginary Colombian towns. He told me that he had just the book I was looking for. He suggested that we meet for lunch; there was a Pacific restaurant in La Candelaria that he liked and hadn’t been to for a while.

  The restaurant was at the top of a steep, narrow staircase that led off the street to a low-ceilinged room with walls that had been blackened by greasy smoke from the grill. I left the ordering to Carlos; the list of fish that the waiter reeled off meant nothing to me and besides, he dropped his consonants, which left me mentally stumbling to put them back again. The waiter was from Chocó, the isolated department on the Pacific coast where African customs have been preserved, as if in aspic, since colonial days. I’m tempted to compare its villages to Macondo, but I know that would be a mistake: although it has long been home to similarly hot and sleepy settlements, in recent years, Chocó’s mangrove swamps have become battlegrounds for guerrillas and paramilitaries struggling for control of the cocaine business.

  Carlos had many of the characteristics I liked in Colombians. He exuded physical and mental health. He was thoughtful, told a good story and his idealism was tempered by a hard-won measure of pragmatism. He also had a healthy appetite. As we tucked into a big slab of smoked fish, he told me that since leaving ONIC, he’d been wandering Colombia, first to an isolated country school on the north coast, where he had spent a year teaching indigenous Sinu children to read and write, and later to the eastern plains, where he had helped ten indigenous tribes to establish the institutions they’d need to appeal to the government for help, now that the coca farmers had reached their lands. All the while he’d been wondering, like García Márquez and Faciolince, about the essence of his country.

  The waiter cleared our plates and we eased back into our seats to digest over a cup of hot panela sugar water with lemon. Carlos reached into his bag and handed me a novel called Desde Aquellos Días (From Those Days). He had written it a couple of years ago, he said. It was the first from his own publishing venture, which he had called Editoriales Pirata. It cost nothing, but all takers were obliged to pass it on when they’d finished reading it.

  ‘Look, I’m going back to Bucaramanga tomorrow. Why don’t you meet me there? There’s a wonderful canyon nearby that we can go hiking in.’ Bucaramanga is the departmental capital of Santander. It lies in the easternmost range of the Andes, the Cordillera Oriental, about 180 miles north of Bogotá. The mountains and valleys of Santander were the setting for many of the key moments that had determined Colombia’s peculiar fate. The villages around Bucaramanga were the birthplace of the ELN guerrillas. Further east was the Magdalena Medio, where paramilitary armies had first mobilized to fight the guerrillas. And the weather had to be better than it was in Bogotá. It hadn’t stopped raining in the week I’d been there since getting back from San José.

  I’d have liked to take a train to Bucaramanga, but as in most Latin American countries, Colombia’s rail network had been abandoned to the elements long ago. So too had the bridges and tunnels, many built by pioneering Britons in the nineteenth century, that once carried the railways over and under the crumpled Andean landscape. Luckily, the country is well served by its airlines. Avianca is the second oldest airline in the world and even the smaller cities have airports.

  The flight from Bogotá’s El Dorado airport headed north over the rugged green mountains of the department of Boyacá. I settled down to make a start on Carlos’ book, but was soon distracted by the girl sitting next to me, who also had her nose in a book. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the line ‘I was obsessed by …’ before she closed the book to look out of the window. I tilted my head to read the back cover. ‘At the age of ninety, I decided that I wanted to make love to an adolescent virgin,’ it read. ‘I went to see Clementina, the owner of the local brothel, who had always laughed at my oh-so-pure principles. “Morality,” she said to me, “like everything else, is just a question of time.” ’

  I turned back to Desde Aquellos Días. The story started with a terrible, inexplicable event: a woman walks into the town, her clothes in tatters, her breasts exposed, and blood running from her nose. Yet she remains a woman accustomed to being admired and aware of her own allure. Her father sees his neighbours lean out of their windows to watch her, but only recognizes her when she swaggers past his office. He grabs the nearest material to hand, which happens to be the national flag, and rushes into the street to cover her. ‘It was the first time they had ever had any physical contact,’ Carlos wrote. And that was just chapter one.

  Carlos had set his book in Empalá, a typically hot and claustrophobic village where not much happened. There were none of the fond descriptions of García Márquez’s novel. Instead, the author’s voice was cool and remote. It struck a chord, in a way that One Hundred Years of Solitude never could – partly because there were far fewer unknown words to look up, but also because Empalá seemed to be full of corrupt politicians and soldiers.

  As I pushed into the second chapter, the story unfolded of a tyrannical mayor, Don Roque Monteeiro, who is obsessed with the terrorists that are supposedly menacing his town. Although the reader never gets to see or hear anything from the ‘terrr-orrr-ists’ – a word that rolls off Don Roque’s tongue like machine-gun fire – they supply the pretext for a murderous campaign against the landowners and businessmen who are Don Roque’s opponents on the town council.

  Only when the pilot announced our descent into Bucaramanga did I look up from my book. The plane came down out of the clouds into a landscape quite like the one we’d left in Bogotá an hour earlier. Green hills rolled into deep valleys, patches of which were lit by the morning sun. I was expecting to land in a few minutes’ time, but the runway came up out of nowhere and suddenly the wheels were skidding on tarmac. We had landed on top of a mountain.

  I’d arranged to meet Carlos at a bus-stop-cum-store called Papi Quiero Piña – Daddy I Want Pineapple. ‘All the taxi drivers are sure to know it,’ Carlos had told me, and sure enough, mine did. It was a half-hour drive across town from the airport, past hillsides that had given way under the winter rains and the various bulldozers and diggers that were putting them back again.

  I wondered if Carlos’ imaginary town of Empalá was based on a real town in Santander. At one point in the novel the tyrannical Don Roque hires a band from a town called Aratoca to play at a party to celebrate the birth of his daughter. Spreading my map out in the back of the taxi, I found Aratoca on the road between Bucaramanga and Socorro. I
had another clue to go on: midway through the story, two of the main characters are driving back to Empalá in their truck, delivering beer and soft drinks to the local shopkeepers. They try to find some music to listen to on the radio, but the mountains turn the signal to fuzz. Finally they’re able to tune in to Radio Chicamocha, and listen to the news, which warns them of roadblocks that the terrorists have mounted up ahead. Carlos had arranged for us to go hiking in the canyon at Chicamocha, just north of Aratoca.

  I’d made an early start that morning and yawned my way through the short wait for Carlos. He showed up in a white poncho, a woven straw boltiao hat and army-issue boots. We boarded a bus bound for the village of Los Santos, which soon left the city behind us and began climbing into the dry chalk hills. It threw up white dust from the unpaved road as it trundled between fields of pineapple, maize, tomatoes and beans.

  At the first stop, a man got onto the bus and walked down the aisle, putting a laminated card on the lap of each passenger. It was a fajada of the Virgin of Carmen. Swaying with the movement of the bus and shouting over the roar of the engine, he announced that he was a demobilized paramilitary. ‘I really don’t want to commit any more crimes,’ he said; ‘I want to make a legal living, so if you could help out a bit, I’d be ever so grateful’. A few people gave him a few coins for a lucky card and he jumped off at the next stop.

  Despite former President Uribe’s success in bringing down the once-horrific number of murders committed in Colombia, since my return the newspapers had been talking of crime rates creeping back up. Carlos explained that as more paramilitaries demobilized, handed in their weapons and passed through the process of ‘re-insertion’ into civilian life, many of them found themselves jobless. So they pitched up in the bigger cities, far from their villages, qualified only in dispensing violence. Most were absorbed by the government’s programme for demobilized paramilitaries, and went on to find legal work selling fajadas and similar trinkets; but more than a few started making their living from the many criminal opportunities on offer.