Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the new Colombia

by Feiling, Tom

  Officially at least, La Violencia was over. In the nine years since the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán it had taken the lives of 200,000 Colombians. But the gentlemen’s agreement did nothing to resolve the simmering land disputes and general lawlessness that had fuelled the fighting. In the absence of reconciliation or reparation, much less any attempt to address the underlying causes of the conflict, the two parties simply chose to forget what had happened. Theirs was, as one historian put it, ‘a merciless, enforced forgetting, based on historical myth and fantasies of total dominance’.*

  In Colombia’s cities, the rising prosperity of the post-war world was bringing real signs of progress to a people that had grown accustomed to living much as their grandparents had. But most city dwellers still had close connections to their home villages and couldn’t help but brood over the savagery they had been witness to. In 1962 Alejandro Obregón won that year’s national painting prize for a canvas entitled Violencia, which depicted a pregnant woman lying dead, with her breast and womb cut open. Sociologists at the National University in Bogotá embarked on an entirely new field of study, which they termed ‘violontology’. Gonzalo Sánchez Gómez highlighted the ‘ceremonial display of murder, which is expressed in an almost studied perversion, like cutting out the tongues (the words of others), goring pregnant women (eliminating the possibility of the other reproducing), crucifixion, castration and many other things that are directed not only at eliminating 200,000 people … but at leaving an indelible mark on the millions of Colombians who remained’.†

  What was this ‘indelible mark’? Clearly, the upshot of the violence was a terrible and inescapable fearfulness, but to what end? First, to show that anyone who crossed local politicians could expect to be shut up for good. Second, that despite the façade of democracy, neither the police, the judges nor Congress could be relied on to do anything to defend their victims.

  The Liberal guerrillas responded by declaring their withdrawal from the conflict in 1964. From then on they considered themselves citizens of an independent Republic of Marquetalia, the village in the department of Caldas where they had their base. This wasn’t the first time that Colombia’s warring parties had taken a separatist turn. In the nineteenth century the departments of Antioquia and Santander both toyed with the idea of declaring themselves independent of Bogotá. At one point the Colombian government even made overtures to Washington, DC in the hope that Colombia might become one of the United States of America.

  But in the Cold War years an independent peasant republic, particularly one led by communists, was unconscionable. The Army attacked Marquetalia from the air and sent in 16,000 soldiers to capture their encampments. They found them abandoned. Forty-three guerrillas fled to seek refuge in the mountains of Cauca in the southwest, and later that year founded the FARC.

  The FARC were not alone in committing themselves to an armed overthrow of the state. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution of 1959, a generation of young Colombians headed into the mountains to take up arms. In 1963 a strike by oil workers in the river town of Barrancabermeja led to the formation of a second guerrilla force, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional – the National Liberation Army. For the next ten years, the ELN was no more than a tiny band of argumentative young men, living in great hardship in the mountain jungles of Santander and Antioquia and only occasionally making the news when they shot up some back-of-beyond police station. The organization was dominated by the Vásquez brothers. Like Manuel Marulanda of the FARC, they were largely driven by a desire to avenge the death of their father, who had been killed by Conservative hit squads. Gradually, they built an irregular army of campesino volunteers, who they ruled over with messianic brutality.

  Over the course of the 1960s the Liberal Party tried to address the concerns of the poor peasants, all too aware that to ignore them would only add to the guerrillas’ appeal. In 1970 President Carlos Lleras Restrepo created the Asociación Nacional de Usuarios Campesinos (ANUC) – the National Association of Peasant Farmers – to mobilize for land reform. Although plenty of high-ranking politicians backed ANUC, the president’s land-reform policies proved to be ill-conceived, partial and half-hearted. Besides, the politicians in Bogotá didn’t have enough sway to impose land reform on the powerful cliques that governed village life. Perhaps the factory owners and industrialists did, but they dropped their backing for reform when they realized that a steady stream of campesinos fleeing the countryside kept wages down in the cities. Ten years after the laws promising land reform were passed, only 1 per cent of the lands earmarked had been appropriated, let alone distributed.

  But ANUC kept on growing. By 1972 it had 750,000 members, far in excess of any of the country’s trade unions. Inevitably, it soon split into pro- and anti-government factions. The latter had had enough of waiting on vacillating, ultimately treacherous politicians. On the Atlantic Coast, ANUC members invaded the large haciendas and began distributing the land among themselves. The landowners, backed by the region’s political bosses, responded with public and private force. They succeeded in recovering much of their land, but their belligerence only fed the ranks of the armed insurgency in the mountains.

  In 1970 the country went to the polls to elect a new president. Victory looked certain to be won by ANAPO, the party of the former dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, who had borrowed some of the populist rhetoric of the martyred Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. But the National Front wasn’t prepared to cede power to an outsider. Television coverage of the returning ballots was suspended that night. The following morning, Colombians woke to find that the National Front had orchestrated a fraudulent victory for the Conservative Party candidate, Misael Pastrana.

  The stolen election of 19 May spawned yet another guerrilla army, which called itself the M-19. Unlike the FARC and the ELN, the M-19 drew its support from the growing numbers of students, teachers and factory workers in the cities. Their rhetoric was vague – nationalistic, revolutionary, anti-US and anti-National Front – but effective. The M-19 became the focal point for a generation of young patriots inspired by the myth of Simón Bolívar, the Liberator supposedly undone by a corrupt and selfish oligarchy. The M-19’s first action was typically brazen. Their guerrillas stole Bolívar’s sword from the Quinta de Bolívar, the national museum that had once been the Liberator’s home in Bogotá, pledging to return it only when his ideals had been realized.

  The ever-smiling Misael Pastrana didn’t flinch. He pressed on with a raft of measures that aimed to sweep away all barriers to investment in the countryside. But this only led to more land passing into fewer hands. Small-scale peasant producers became still less able to compete with wealthier farmers, and many were forced to sell up. Some joined the bands of itinerant farmhands wandering the countryside in search of the next harvest. Others threw in their lot with both organized and spontaneous invasions of rural properties, which only prompted more crackdowns from local honchos.

  The poorest farmers had no choice but to move into less populated parts of the country, where they began clearing virgin land. Many of these frontier settlements lay in remote jungles and mountain valleys where the FARC constituted the only authority. They, not the government, banded the campesinos together to build the schools and roads that were needed. Between 1970 and 1978, the FARC went from being a community of 500 people to a small army of 3,000, with a centralized military hierarchy, training school and political programme. As if that weren’t enough, the government also had to contend with the guerrillas of the ELN, the M-19, the Maoist EPL* and the indigenous guerrillas of Quintin Lame, who were based in the southern mountains of Cauca. Never had so many Colombians from so many walks of life seemed so convinced that their government had to be overthrown. The stage was set for the great National Civic Strike of 1977. If ever there was a revolutionary moment in Colombian history, this was it.

  And yet, as it had in 1948, the moment came and went. Though still the oldest constitutional government in Latin America, the National Front was happ
y to ditch the less convenient aspects of democratic rule when pressed. They already had the press and television stations in their pockets, and were practised in the intimidation, coercion and repression of those who asserted their right to freedom of speech and assembly. They could also count on the millions of Colombians who regarded the government’s critics as little more than hooligans.

  In 1978 Julio Cesar Turbay was elected president, vowing to defend the established order from the rising tide of dissenters. Turbay ushered in the most drastic curtailment of civil liberties the country had seen since the days of the dictator Rojas Pinilla. Thirty-three military detention centres were built across the country, within whose confines the Army devised fifty distinct forms of torture. Selective assassinations and disappearances became routine practice. Gradually, the government wrested the initiative from their opponents and some order was imposed on the country.

  But the Colombian government’s response to the guerrilla threat has never been constant. As presidents have been voted in and out of office, it has continually shifted between fear and hope; coercion and concession; violence and appeasement. In 1982, Belisario Betancur became president. He dropped Turbay’s repressive policies and instead suggested that the FARC convert their military force into a political party. The FARC High Command welcomed his overtures. In 1984, the guerrillas renounced kidnapping, and both sides agreed to a ceasefire.

  The site of their peace talks was La Casa Verde – in reality, not a house but a tiny mountain hut – which became the symbol of the tentative peace process. Unfortunately, shortly after negotiations got under way, guerrillas from the M-19 seized the Palace of Justice building in Bogotá. It was a spectacularly audacious move, as was the Army’s counter-attack, which was called ‘the 26-hour coup’. Over 100 people, including several Supreme Court judges, were killed. It was a disaster for all sides. It confirmed that President Betancur had lost control over the Army and that the military was incompetent. It also showed the guerrillas to be as inept and bloodthirsty as either of their adversaries. Although the FARC had played no part in the debacle, they were quickly tarred with the same brush.

  The peace talks continued, but in an atmosphere of mutual recrimination. And yet, in spite of the impatience of the generals, progress seemed to be made towards an end to the armed struggle. Negotiations led to the formation of the Unión Patriótica (UP) – the Patriotic Union – a new political party, affiliated to the FARC and the Colombian Communist Party, which offered the left a peaceful, legal route to power. The UP campaigned in the elections of 1986, and gained significant parliamentary representation.

  The new president was the Liberal Virgilio Barco. Barco had come to the conclusion that the power-sharing deal struck by Liberal and Conservative leaders back in 1957 had only convinced many on the left that peaceful participation in politics was a waste of time. So Barco dissolved the National Front, making his the first one-party administration Colombia had seen in almost thirty years. He offered the FARC ‘an outstretched but firm hand’. If the guerrillas turned in their weapons, the government would guarantee the safety of their allies in the Unión Patriótica.

  This was easier said than done. The generals might have been barred from fighting the guerrillas while peace talks were ongoing, but they were more than happy to provide covert support to the paramilitary forces that were massing to take on the guerrillas. At the time, these so-called ‘self-defence’ groups were legal. A law of 1968 had stipulated that the Army could arm civilians ‘when it was deemed appropriate, as in the defence of private property’.

  In the first half of the 1980s, the FARC were stepping up their extortion and kidnapping of landowners, businessmen and town councillors across the country. The Army seemed unable to defend them, so they went looking for wealthier patrons. The guerrillas had also been targeting those who had started to make serious money from smuggling cocaine into the United States. In 1981, M-19 guerrillas had kidnapped Martha Nieves Ochoa, the sister of cocaine trafficker Fabio Ochoa. In response, Ochoa and other members of the Medellín cartel set up Muerte a Secuestradores (MAS) – Death to Kidnappers.

  This nefarious alliance of landowners and newly-minted cocaine barons was determined to do what the government would not: to wipe out ‘communism’, in all its guises. MAS rarely engaged the guerrillas in armed confrontation, which they would in all likelihood have lost. Instead, they attacked the weakest link in the guerrillas’ chain of command: their supporters. In their eyes, that meant anyone in the UP, the trade unions or community organizations.

  In 1987, MAS planned and paid for a series of massacres of unionized banana workers in Urabá. MAS had no scruples about killing government employees either: when the government sent a judicial commission to investigate the rising number of massacres in the Magdalena Medio, the fertile delta region where much of the country’s best farmland is to be found, their convoy of jeeps was attacked and all twelve passengers killed. M-19 backed down. They released Don Fabio’s sister and agreed never to kidnap drug traffickers or their families again.

  By now, President Barco was at war with Pablo Escobar and the other barons of the Medellín cartel. He could see that the legal self-defence groups had morphed into private armies at the service of the traffickers and their allies, so in 1989 he banned them. But the government’s writ carried little weight in the field and the Magdalena Medio soon became the epicentre of paramilitarism in Colombia.

  As the self-defence groups became more aggressive and better organized, many in the Army felt that they deserved their backing. It was a trend that was to recur whenever the generals felt that the government was being soft on the insurgents. They had spent years playing cat and mouse with the guerrillas, who always seemed to know the terrain better than the young conscripts who made up the regular army. During the Turbay years, the Army had targeted the urban militia on which the guerrillas depended for funding and recruits, but torturing student radicals had provoked criticism from abroad. By contracting out the job of counter-insurgency to these private armies, the generals hoped that they could undermine the guerrillas, while avoiding scrutiny from foreign critics.

  Encouraged by the success of MAS and with the covert support of senior Army officers, a new generation of landowners moved from self-defence to a more offensive strategy. The Israeli mercenary Yair Klein was brought in to teach the farmers’ sons of the Magdalena Medio the rules of counter-insurgency. Ivan Roberto Duque, the head of the local ranchers and farmers association, was unapologetic: ‘If fascism implies defending private property and the family with vigour and energy, defending the state, defending democracy and shaking off the dangerous spectre of communist totalitarianism, then let them call us fascists.’

  With financial backing from Pablo Escobar, MAS began decimating the UP with impunity. Jaime Pardo Leal, the UP’s candidate for president, became the target of repeated death threats, which he did his best to make light of. ‘If they shoot me in the head, they’ll miss because of my tic. And if they shoot at my balls, that’s not a problem either, because I’m so scared that my balls are in my throat.’

  Members of the UP needed a gallows sense of humour. The Unión Patriótica was a FARC initiative, part of what Jacobo Arenas, its ideological leader, called ‘la combinacion de todas formas de lucha – the combination of all forms of struggle’ to bring Colombia to revolution, whether at the ballot box or by force of arms. It seemed a comprehensive and coherent strategy; in fact, it was a recipe for disaster for UP supporters.

  Since its foundation, the UP had encouraged the formation of community groups, known as Juntas Patrióticas. They were a great success in areas where local people had long been excluded from any say in decision-making, and within two years there were 4,000 of them. But the rise of a legal left-wing party that still enjoyed the backing of an illegal, armed insurgency unnerved traditionalists in the Liberal and Conservative parties. By 1986 the FARC had doubled in size, adding fourteen new fronts, many in UP strongholds. Rumours began circul
ating that municipal funds were being used to finance the rebels’ expansion. The FARC were accused of ‘armed campaigning’ – in other words, scaring people into voting for the UP.

  The UP began to look like an agent of, rather than an alternative to, the armed struggle. Despite their experiment in parliamentary politics, most of the FARC high command was still committed to taking power by force of arms. At their Seventh Conference in 1982, Jacobo Arenas had proposed building an army of 28,000 soldiers by 1990, which would then slowly encircle the cities. Even UP leaders knew that the high command had created the new party to serve as a façade, behind which they could build their army while using peace talks with President Barco to buy time.

  Obviously, this undermined the UP’s credibility. Alberto Rojas Puyo, representing the ‘social democrat’ wing of the UP, wrote to Jacobo Arenas with his objections. ‘What the government and virtually everyone else thinks, including me, is that you can’t campaign with guns in your hands. If you’re going to accept peace, the guns should disappear, even if you don’t hand them in.’

  Relations between the UP and the FARC grew strained. Braulio Herrera, one of the leading lights of the new party, became known for carrying a pendulum with him to judge whether his food had been poisoned. Looking back on the rise of the UP twenty years after the party was decimated by paramilitaries, its head of communications acknowledged that many UP activists had been slow to see the dangerous contradiction inherent in the ‘combinacion de todas formas de lucha’. ‘Every war needs some sacrificial lambs. Jacobo Arenas knew this. We knew this. We were the disposable ones.’*

  And yet, despite the growing unease of senior figures in the UP, their party was making great strides. Jaime Pardo Leal had won 326,000 votes in the presidential elections of 1986. It was less than a tenth of the tally polled by president Virgilio Barco, but it was still judged a triumph in a country that had never had a democratic left-wing party. Braulio Herrera and Iván Márquez became UP congressmen, making them the FARC’s first and only democratically elected representatives. Herrera called it a ‘profound “yes” to peace and the politics of the democratic opening’. Colombia finally had a popular alternative to the traditional parties – albeit one with a powerful armed wing.