Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the new Colombia

by Feiling, Tom

  Standing in front of the Casa Amarilla to smoke a cigarette the next morning, I watched a monkey clamber from tree to telegraph wire to rooftop. For once, the only music to be heard on the street was the muffled piping of an oboe from the music teacher’s house next door. An iguana was inching its way up a rotten branch, which soon snapped, sending the lizard scuttling away into the floodwaters. I thought of the Louisiana bayou and the Mississippi emptying into its vast delta of swamps and lakes, like a reflection of the Magdalena on the far shore of the Caribbean, a thousand miles to the north.

  Although few visitors make it as far as the steamy towns of the Magdalena delta, Carmen had told me, without any indication of her own feelings, that Momposinos didn’t like foreigners. They had shown a haughty lack of interest in the foreign film crew that came to the town in 2006 to shoot Love in a Time of Cholera. Behind every sophisticated, culturally sensitive foreigner, Carmen seemed to suggest, lurked a libertino – a ‘narco-tourist’ – who was only there for the cheap cocaine.

  In colonial days Mompós had been a prosperous town, made rich by the waterborn traders who plied the Magdalena between Cartagena and Honda. But it was left a backwater when shipping was diverted onto the other branch of the river at the end of the nineteenth century. Since then, Momposinos had grown accustomed to being overlooked by more vibrant towns. This imperviousness had become the default stance from which they regarded the outside world. They had weathered their town’s decline by embracing hand-me-down memories of better days.

  I had some time to kill before I was due to meet James and Nicolás, the two demobilized FARC guerrillas who I hoped would explain the longevity of the army they had once served in, so I wandered over to the small church that ran down one side of the square. It had an unusual tower: squat and six-sided, with a wooden balcony that ran around its girth.

  ‘The church of Santa Bárbara,’ I heard a voice say. I turned to find myself face to face with the town’s only tourist guide. ‘Founded in 1633. It is the only church in Colombia to have Moorish influences. And look – the roof is in the shape of the crown of martyrdom.’ José nodded encouragingly, and carried on speaking slowly and clearly, rather as one might to a simpleton. ‘Santa Bárbara represents storms and artillery. People still mark a cross in ashes on the road when storms hit Mompós, in the hope that Santa Bárbara will lift the tempest.’* José paused and gave me a quizzical look. ‘But you Europeans don’t much like looking around churches, do you?’ he asked politely. ‘You always say, “Please, not so many churches – we’ve already seen two.” ’

  In colonial days, the church of Santa Bárbara would have been reserved for the notables of the town, but to one side they had built a chapel for their slaves. José pushed open its great wooden door and we stepped into the cool, musty interior. It was bare, except for an especially bloody figure of Christ, who was bleeding from countless lashes of the whip and the crown of thorns on his head. The iconography of Catholicism seemed to grow bloodier as I neared the Caribbean. The masochism reached its pinnacle with San Pedro de Claver, the patron saint of slaves, who was said to have bound his fingers with horsehair in an attempt to share in the suffering of his slaving parishioners.

  Mompós had been one of the first towns in Colombia to free its slaves, shortly after it rose up against the Spanish in 1810. I’d assumed that the darker skinned people of the town owed their colour to the Africans who were shipped to the New World to work its mines and plantations, but in fact the slave population left for Cartagena and Chocó soon after independence. It seemed that the mix here was of Spaniards and the Quimbay, an indigenous people from the alluvial fan of swamps and islands that lies between Mompós and the Caribbean. I thanked José for the impromptu tour and made my way back to the Casa Amarilla.

  I found James and Nicolás sipping coffee in the courtyard. James was a big, light-skinned black man, calm and taciturn, with a ready smile. Nicolás, who had the mestizo features I recognized from the hill towns around Bogotá, called him ‘negrito’. It wasn’t meant to be patronizing. Everywhere I went, people described each other by skin tone and body shape. I was the mono (white) and Nicolás was flaco (skinny).

  I started by asking them about the Constitution of 1991. For the first few months of that year, the country had been glued to news from Bogotá’s Hotel Tequendama, where the National Constituent Assembly was thrashing out the new rules of the political game. The Soviet Union had collapsed, and across Latin America guerrilla armies were handing in their weapons. Public opinion baptized it the ‘peace constitution’. It seemed a promising start, so why had the new constitution failed to bring an end to the conflict?

  ‘Some of the bricks that fell with the Berlin Wall certainly landed on Colombian heads,’ Nicolás told me with a laugh. ‘But Colombia’s guerrilla armies were offered only six of the seventy seats in the National Constituent Assembly.’ This small guerrilla representation had been the condition on which the Army’s generals agreed to the rewriting of the Constitution.

  As negotiations got under way, representatives of the country’s business associations were aghast that they should have to justify the government’s economic policies to a group of ‘gangsters’. The guerrillas had not ended their attacks on the country’s oil pipelines, nor had there been any let-up in their kidnappings, seizures of villages or attacks on police stations. With great reluctance, the capitalists explained to the communists how things stood vis-à-vis the new globalized economy, of which Colombia was but a small part. Free trade and privatization were sacrosanct, as was their alliance with the Americans. Poverty alleviation, job creation and educational reforms, they assured them, would come in time.

  The guerrillas emerged from the talks divided. The FARC and the ELN chose to play no further part in the Constituent Assembly. But other guerrilla movements – such as the M-19 and the EPL – handed in their weapons, and vowed to reinsert themselves into mainstream politics. Thanks to the presence of these demobilized guerrillas, the Constituent Assembly looked like a determined effort to include all parties. It was the first time that Conservative and Liberal party politicians had sat with former guerrillas and representatives of the indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities.

  The upshot was a document of 400 articles, to this day widely admired by foreign observers as a model of reasonability and inclusiveness. For the first time, the collective land rights of the indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities were recognized and new institutions of state were set up to ensure that those rights were respected.

  I had seen cheap photocopies of the constitution being hawked at Sunday flea markets. In a country so accustomed to the absence of law bringers, the Constitution of 1991 is precious. It is often the only defence the weak have against the strong. To know the constitution is to know the appeals you can and cannot make when the arbitrariness of raw power falls on your head. Wherever bribery, corruption and intimidation are the norm, the weak find that the constitution is the only authority they can appeal to.

  Formally, the Constitution of 1991 addressed many of the underlying problems that were driving the conflict, as the politicians tried to strike a balance between the regions and the capital, the Church and the universities, the tax authorities and income earners. But the formal face of Colombia is like a doll’s house – a pristine replica of a much larger building that has long been abandoned to the elements. As a result, despite living under laws that carry little weight on the ground, most Colombians still believe that life under siege is an exception to the norm – the norm being the stable, peaceful democracy promised by the constitution, which is always just a step away.

  ‘At the same time that the delegates to the National Constituent Assembly were sitting down, the Army was bombing the FARC’s camps,’ Nicolás told me. ‘On the one hand, they were talking about a Colombia for all, but at the same time they were trying to make sure that the armed opposition had no say in things.’ The unarmed opposition was given no say either. The Unión Patriótica was s
till suffering what the Inter-American Court of Human Rights judged to be a ‘genocidal persecution’. UP senators, congressmen, mayors and councillors were being killed off as soon as they were voted into office. ‘Some of us thought that we could build socialism in Colombia,’ said Nicolás. ‘But there was no way to organize around those kinds of politics. The only way to save our lives was to take up arms.’

  Nicolás had been an undergraduate at the National University in Bogotá in 1991. Hungry for change, he soon realized that the new constitution was not going to deliver it. ‘When I was at university, I got involved in community politics, trying to sort out the drainage, the power supply and childcare. But I soon saw that there was no way to sort out the problems of the city or the country. You might solve a lad’s hunger for a day, only for him to go hungry again the next. It was going to take a radical transformation of the power structures. And for that you need a revolution.’

  So in 1991, just as the rest of the world was celebrating the collapse of communism, Nicolás headed for Sumapaz, where he joined the 52nd front of the FARC. His comandante was Marco Aurelio Buendía, a pseudonym chosen in honour of the man who founded Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude. ‘I got to know another way of life up there. Sumapaz is actually part of the capital district, but it had been abandoned by the state. The people had been influenced by Bakunin, and had an anarchistic way of going about things.

  The highland moors that look down on the capital are the world’s largest. Their dense mists provide cover for Andean bears and tapirs, as they once did for guerrillas, who easily evaded the Army’s helicopters. ‘In the fifties, after the dictator Rojas Pinilla outlawed the Communist Party, the party held a historic conference in Sumapaz. That was when the Communist Party decided to become a guerrilla force. So it became a place very close to the hearts of the FARC. I spent four years up there and became a different kind of fighter, one that did work in the community. We took over the land and launched a land-reform programme.’

  James’s story was different. He was from a village near Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast. ‘It was – and still is – poor,’ he told me. ‘The whole region has been abandoned by the state. There are no proper roads, no health clinics and only one school. Everyone lives on cassava and a lot of the children are malnourished.’ But unlike Nicolás, as a young man James had no interest in joining the ‘army of the people’.

  ‘One day, a commission from the FARC showed up. They asked me to show them the way to San Cristóbal. I said, “Just walk straight up the path. You can’t miss it.” They said, “No, we want you to show us the way.” Once I agreed to help them, they became a lot less threatening. I spent the whole night walking with them and didn’t get home until seven in the morning. The next day, they came to find me again. By then, people knew that I’d been helping them and I was scared that they would either capture me or just kill me. It could be an Army patrol that had been tipped off about where I lived, or at an Army checkpoint the next time I went to Cartagena. I joined up because I couldn’t see a way out. That was 1987. I was eighteen years old.’

  After joining the FARC, James spent a year moving between the departments of the Caribbean coast. ‘I hadn’t joined the FARC of my own free will, but once inside, I was committed to the process. I thought that we could make real changes. There was no sign of the Army or the police in those places. We were the local authorities. In time, a lot of officials in the municipalities came round to our way of thinking,’ he told me.

  I couldn’t help but smile at his phrasing. Surely they didn’t have much choice in the matter? ‘Well, very often, they collaborated with us out of fear,’ James admitted. But in those days, he thought that the fear that the ‘army of the people’ inspired was a necessary evil. By force of arms, they were breaching the invisible walls that had kept the poor in their place for generations. Only by muscling their way into the mayors’ offices could they tackle the endemic corruption that had condemned the countryside to backwardness. ‘Once we got our hands on copies of the budgets and showed them to the people, they could see that they were being robbed. “Why should we pay taxes to a government that gives us nothing?” they would ask. The FARC seemed to be the only ones who might change anything.’

  In 1994, Colombians elected a new president. Ernesto Samper came to office with a promising programme of social reforms and rapprochement with the guerrillas. Just a few days after his inauguration, the FARC spelt out the conditions on which they were prepared to resume peace talks. They demanded that the paramilitary groups lay down their weapons, and that the Army withdraw from the FARC-dominated municipality of La Uribe in the department of Meta.

  Samper gave the order for the Army to withdraw.But just as the new president built one bridge, another seemed to collapse behind him. The previous year, Pablo Escobar had been gunned down on a Medellín rooftop, after the most intense manhunt in the country’s history. In the process of bringing down the Medellín cartel, the government had grown increasingly close to Escobar’s rivals in the Cali cartel. President Samper’s term in office was stymied by accusations that he had received campaign contributions from the capos of Cali. It dealt a terrible blow to Samper’s credibility, which his overtures to the FARC did nothing to restore. The US ambassador, retired military officers and the business associations were outraged. General Bedoya, the commander of the armed forces, threatened Samper with a military coup if he was ordered to pull out of La Uribe. The president, his room for manoeuvre already sharply limited, backed down. Peace talks were once again off the table.

  This was a huge setback for Samper, but not for the FARC. By the mid-1990s, Colombia’s revolutionaries were in the ascendency. They were making $200 million a year from kidnapping, and $180 million a year from ‘taxes’ on the cocaine business.* Flush with booty, they were confident that they could defeat the Army on the battlefield.

  ‘We had a strong programme and a bright future,’ James told me. ‘The days in which a FARC unit meant eight soldiers were gone. We were going out in units fifty strong. Between 1994 and 1999, we were getting stronger by the day.’

  President Samper was paralysed. Public trust in his government was ebbing away. The FARC made several demands as a prerequisite for more peace talks, but the president felt that he had no choice but to go on the offensive once again. The Army mounted an ambitious series of military operations that produced absolutely no results. The generals floundered, the morale of their troops sank, and the Army became ever more dependent on the paramilitaries to deliver results.

  ‘In Sucre, the local paramilitaries were led by Rodrigo Mercado Peluffo, who they called “Cadena”,’ James said. Ironically, many of Cadena’s best fighters were former guerrillas. All of Colombia’s guerrilla armies were sticklers for discipline, and there was a steady stream of deserters. ‘As fugitives, they were always in danger from the group they’d deserted from, as well as the Army and the police. So when the local cattle ranchers started organizing self-defence groups, those fugitives approached them, offering to help.’

  A casual observer of the political scene in 1998 could have been forgiven for thinking that the traditional oligarchy was still in control. Yet it was a façade, another trick of the one-way mirror dividing Colombia, and the political class knew it. The country was coming apart at the seams, under the combined pressure of drug traffickers, guerrillas and paramilitaries, none of whom had any official representation in Bogotá. The leading candidates in the presidential elections of 1998 began to court the insurgents once more. Both the Conservative Andrés Pastrana and the Liberal Horacio Serpa promised to withdraw the Army from five FARC-dominated municipalities in the department of Caquetá as a precondition for full and frank negotiations with the ageing FARC commander-in-chief, Manuel Marulanda.

  Despite furious opposition from the Army and their champions on the right, Andrés Pastrana won the presidency by a narrow margin. He kept his word and met with Marulanda. Pastrana talked about dismantling the paramilitary grou
ps; Marulanda wanted to see the decriminalization of popular protest; both men welcomed the participation of the international community. And yet ultimately, the protracted talks came to nothing. The Army had lost patience. When Pastrana announced that he was pulling out of the negotiations, it was only a matter of hours before Air Force planes were bombing the FARC’s encampment.

  Why did the peace talks fail? Perhaps because those doing the talking didn’t understand one another. It was said that President Pastrana had never been to Caquetá until he went there to meet the leader of the FARC. Manuel Marulanda had in turn never been to Bogotá. After almost forty years of prolonged guerrilla warfare, they and the parties they represented had grown up in what might as well have been different countries. The only thing they shared was their experience of post-traumatic stress, which practically seemed a requirement for anyone seeking a high-ranking post, be it in government, the insurgency or the paramilitaries. Conservative party death squads had killed Manuel Marulanda’s parents while he was still a boy. Andrés Pastrana had been kidnapped by the Medellín cartel. And the FARC had killed Jesús Castaño, father of AUC head Carlos, who had in turn gone on to kill literally thousands of innocent campesinos. The entire country seemed caught in the cogs of some nefarious machine, driven by an insatiable desire for revenge.