Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the new Colombia

by Feiling, Tom

  By 1999, 65 per cent of Colombians were in favour of intervention by the international community, even if it meant sending in US troops.* The Americans were well aware of the danger facing their friends in Bogotá. The FARC were alarmingly close to the capital. Seen through American eyes, the need to stem the growing power of Colombia’s guerrillas was part and parcel of the ‘war on drugs’. Although the country’s insurgents and its cocaine traffickers were quite distinct entities – indeed, they had spent much of the past ten years at war with one another – President Pastrana was happy to go along with the notion that ‘narco-guerrillas’ were responsible for the crack cocaine epidemic ravaging North American cities.

  Shortly after coming to office in 1998, Pastrana had gone to Washington with a rough sketch of what he called ‘Plan Colombia’, an ambitious proposal to address both coca cultivation and the under-development of the countryside that fuelled it. Bill Clinton’s government had taken Pastrana’s pitch and rewritten it, with much more stick and much less carrot. Rather than tackle rural poverty, the Americans would fumigate the coca fields from the air and supply the training and funds needed to put the Colombian police and Army on a firmer footing. The document that President Pastrana took back to Bogotá was a done deal – it had even been written in English, and had to be translated into Spanish before Colombia’s Congress could approve it.

  Since stepping down as president, Pastrana has often been derided for allowing the FARC to stall him in fatuous talk of peace. Manuel Marulanda never intended to lay down his arms, argue his critics. The wily old guerrilla was just biding his time, waiting to deliver a decisive blow to the Army.

  But Pastrana was no fool himself. The plan he agreed with Washington ensured that there would be no need for more peace talks, at least not until the FARC were in a much weaker bargaining position. Over the next eight years, the Colombian government – or at least, its Army – would receive little short of 1 billion a year from Washington. Unfortunately for Pastrana, his term of office came to a close before the funding came on stream, so the plaudits for the fight back would go to his successor.

  After the collapse of negotiations with the FARC, peace became a dirty word among many Colombians, used only by those who failed to appreciate the enormity of the struggle that lay ahead. An American author’s analysis was prescient: ‘The fact that the government changes its policy under pressure gives the terrorists hope that their objectives can be met and encourages more terrorism. The only way to escape this cycle is to find an effective leader capable of withstanding the pressure long enough to develop a coherent and stable policy and then demonstrate the strength to implement it.’* In his campaign for the presidency, Álvaro Uribe made it clear that he was that leader. He had no interest in talking to the FARC. Instead, he promised ‘a big heart and a hard hand’. Over the next eight years, most Colombians were to see a lot more of the latter than the former.

  Uribe’s election campaign benefited from the near disappearance of the two traditional parties. The Conservative Party supported him in return for the posts that allowed them to buy and control votes and keep their party machine ticking over. The Liberals splintered, with much of the right wing of the party falling in behind him. With the backing of the bulk of the political and business class and the media, Uribe was confident of carrying the urban vote.

  In the countryside, the paramilitaries regarded Álvaro Uribe as their man. Uribe was himself a landowner and friend of many of the biggest landowners in Antioquia. As governor of the department in the late 1990s, he had created an association of ‘private rural security agencies’, known as Convivir, to counter the rising threat of kidnap by the FARC. The Convivir were widely regarded as forerunners of the paramilitary armies that had gone on to over-run the northern departments. In villages across the country, the paramilitaries set about mobilizing the rural vote, pressuring rival candidates to stand down and buying lunch and aguardiente for those who voted for el patrón.

  The abstention rate in the presidential elections of 2002 ran at 54 per cent, but still Álvaro Uribe’s victory was greeted as a landslide. The White House backed Uribe throughout his term of office, despite their being all too aware of his background. CIA reports going back as far as 1994 recognized that the White House’s Colombian allies ‘employ death squad tactics in their counter-insurgency campaign’ and have ‘a history of assassinating leftwing civilians in guerrilla areas, cooperating with narcotics-related paramilitary groups in attacks against suspected guerrilla sympathizers, and killing captured combatants’.*

  But the Americans needed Uribe to counter the rising influence of left-wing leaders like Lula da Silva in Brazil and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Not that there was much prospect of Colombia following the continent’s swing to the left. Thanks to the paramilitaries, the FARC had been pushed out of regions they had held for decades. After the extermination of the UP, the unarmed left was articulated through victims’ groups, indigenous organizations and rural community groups, but they too had been practically annihilated by the paramilitaries. Colombians had learnt to keep their heads down.

  This put the FARC in a tight spot: President Uribe had the support of wide swathes of the electorate, a huge budget for his army and no intention of negotiating. For the FARC’s hardliners, the situation confirmed what they had been saying since the early 1980s: that only armed struggle would secure peace and social justice in Colombia.

  ‘In the 1990s, the leadership was only thinking about how to build an army,’ James told me. ‘Drug traffickers would often move their merchandise through areas controlled by the FARC. It used to be that the FARC just charged the gramaje levy. They didn’t like the drugs trade, but they also knew that to spurn it entirely would only give the paramilitaries more clout. “OK, let’s negotiate something here,” they said. “Bring us this many guns, and we’ll let you through.” Eventually they became partners with the traffickers and now the FARC have their own cocaine-producing laboratories in the south of Bolívar.’

  ‘With the drugs came a lot more money,’ said Nicolás. ‘But the drugs business has no sense of ethics or politics, and that business permeated the FARC. The comandantes used to be happy to have a watch. Now they wanted one with a hundred and fifty memories, and a calendar for I don’t know what.’

  ‘I’d spent a lot of time fighting corruption in the municipalities,’ said James, ‘making sure that money destined for such-and-such little village got there and wasn’t siphoned off into someone’s pocket. But now some of the comandantes were making deals with mayors, saying, “Let’s send ten per cent of what was allotted to the job and split the rest between us.” That corruption was our greatest enemy. It was a bigger threat to the FARC than the Army or the police ever were. But by the time we realized the extent of the rot, the organization was completely riddled with it.’

  ‘The FARC’s strength depends on its relation to the people,’ said Nicolás. ‘It has to be laudable, altruistic and noble. Before, we had no money, so we focused on loving the people so that they would support us, feed us and provide us with the intelligence that we needed. But now we bought everything.’

  ‘The lads slowly lost interest in their political education,’ said James. ‘The sacrifices that inspire people, the idea of organizing the peasants to build the roads and the schools that they needed – all that went out the window.’ Of course, the FARC still had committed socialists in its ranks, many of whom had been fighting their revolutionary war since they were teenagers. But the unwavering focus on building an army, combined with high unemployment and biting poverty in the countryside, meant that they were soon outnumbered by jobless farmhands who were just looking for a steady wage.

  ‘Imagine a peasant, growing up in a little village, living the life of a mule,’ James went on. ‘He’s eighteen and can barely read or write. He joins the FARC without being able to explain why, just because that’s what his friends are doing. When he joins the FARC, he gains people’s respect. He becomes relevant.
But when he runs up against the reality of life in a guerrilla army, he soon starts thinking about how he can escape. By then, he’s surrounded by enemies. The organization regards him as a traitor. The Army and police just see him as a member of an illegal armed group, so there’s no way he can join either of them. So he ends up joining the self-defence groups, who are always on the lookout for recruits with combat experience. This war is not about political convictions. It’s about military interests.’

  The FARC’s militarism also explains their longstanding reliance on kidnapping wealthy businessmen and politicians for ransom. But kidnapping has become a public relations disaster. In the eyes of the public, it turned faceless, corrupt politicians into prisoners of war. For the first time, Colombia’s oligarchs were regarded as victims, like so many others. And as soon as Uribe declared that he would not negotiate with the FARC, whatever purpose the hostages might have served as bargaining counters evaporated.

  The need to guard their captives also reduced the guerrillas’ mobility. As the Army gradually learned more about the jungle, they became adept at breaking the guerrillas’ lines of communication. Increasingly, the generals could count on the support of country shopkeepers and small business owners who regarded the ‘war tax’ the FARC demanded of them as little more than extortion. And as the cash nexus corrupted the guerrillas’ ranks, the Army found no shortage of deserters ready to collaborate in counter-insurgency operations in return for a cash reward. The guided missile that had killed Mono Jojoy in his bunker shortly after I arrived in Bogotá was the last move in an operation that began when an ordinary guerrillero accepted a bribe and agreed to betray his comandante.*

  As the Army closed in, FARC comandantes spent ever more time trying to root out suspected informers, collaborators and spies. ‘Now everything in the village had to go through the FARC for approval,’ James told me. ‘No one was allowed to be neutral. “You’re either with us or against us,” they’d say.’

  Yet most campesinos had little choice in which army they ended up fighting for. The conflict was effectively being fought by forced conscripts. ‘The guerrillas and the government’s soldiers are all the children of poor people,’ James said. The conflict was coming to resemble the interminable wars of the nineteenth century. Beset by deserters and heavy losses sustained in combat with the Army, by 2005 the FARC’s comandantes were pulling complete novices into their ranks. Villagers watched helplessly as they frogmarched their children into the mountains. With both guerrillas and paramilitaries hellbent on draining the pond of the other side’s fish, campesinos found themselves caught in a vice. ‘You can’t stay here. You’ve got twenty-four hours to get out,’ the comandantes would say. ‘So a family that has spent all their lives working their little plot, loses everything overnight.’ Those who tried to reason with or resist the FARC were often shot.

  Trafficking in drugs, kidnapping business owners, extorting money from shopkeepers, shooting innocent villagers, recruiting children and forcing campesinos to grow coca was no way to run an ‘army of the people’. The FARC high command had become no less venal than those they professed to fight. ‘It was absurd and I didn’t agree with it,’ said James. ‘So I took my concerns to my comandante. “Whose side are you on?” he asked me. “The side of reality, or the side of the dreamers?” In the end I had to leave just to save my own skin.’

  Nicolás nodded forlornly. ‘It’s hard to leave your family. That’s what the FARC had become for me. In the twelve years I was in the organization, I lost all of my best friends in combat. My only enemies were armed. For the rest I felt only deep love – political and ideological love – between people fighting for a better country.’

  The FARC might have been born of the most high-minded ideals, but they seem not to have noticed the tide of public opinion turning against them. They still believe that some day their cadres will be marching down Avenida Séptima in Bogotá. Such a precious ideal demands ever more vigilant protection the further it slips from reality. ‘I’m still in danger,’ James told me. ‘The organization never forgets and it never forgives. If I were ever sent to jail, the FARC would get someone on the inside to kill me.

  ‘It’s not easy being a former combatant. After spending fourteen years in the guerrillas, you don’t have much work experience to speak of. And if an employer finds out you’ve spent time with the FARC, they worry that you’re sizing them up to be kidnapped.’

  I asked Nicolás how his political views had changed since leaving the organization. ‘I still think that socialism is the hope of the poor. But everything changes – you can’t put your foot in the same river twice, right? When I joined the FARC, if you bought the Communist Party newspaper, you were marked out for assassination. If you were campaigning for the UP, you had to go out in disguise. But these days you can go out campaigning anywhere in the city. The mayor of Bogotá, the second most powerful man in the country, is from the left and he came to power without firing a single shot. We don’t have to go the painful way – of armed struggle – any more.

  ‘When I was up in Sumapaz, I used to look south and think about the new governments of Latin America. Many of the FARC’s ideals are being put into practice by Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Christina Rouloff in Brazil.’ The grim irony is that after almost fifty years of guerrilla warfare, whether the cause is public healthcare, the right to a free education or slapping taxes on multinational companies, no country is further from realizing the cherished ideals of the Latin American left than Colombia. This might appear to be the inevitable result of centuries of rule by an oligarchy, but in the process of building an ‘army of the people’, the FARC has only succeeded in consolidating their country’s less than democratic political traditions.

  ‘But I’m pretty optimistic that this country can find a political solution to the war,’ said Nicolás. ‘I don’t think that the Colombian people are capable of putting up with fifty years of war. Some people say that if the government could kill ten thousand guerrillas on the battlefield, it would put an end to Colombia’s problems. But I don’t think so. We have to negotiate – not tactical negotiations, in which both sides are trying to get the best deal. We have to sit down at the table and build a Colombia in which there is room for all of us.’

  After five nights in Mompós, the flood waters had receded. The streets that had been under water when I arrived were now dry, the mud already baked hard by the sun and sandbags outside the Casa Amarilla had been broken up. I was ready to get the taxi, boat and bus that would take me out of the Magdalena Medio.

  By now I was the only guest left at the Casa Amarilla. On my last night I sat in my room watching the leader of the ELN guerrillas address his public via YouTube. I could hear the cicadas whirring from the bushes of whatever mountain camp he was speaking from. Reading down the line of his nose, through the glasses perched at its end, Comandante Nicolás ‘Gambino’ Rodríguez had the fastidious manner you might expect of a schoolteacher trying to talk over a class of rowdy children; of a man determined to be resolute but inclined to shrillness.

  Comandante Nicolás joined the Ejército de Liberación Nacional at its inception in 1964. He was fourteen then, and has led the clandestine, persecuted life of a Colombian guerrilla for the past forty-six years. Twenty years ago, the ELN made some headway in the slums of Medellín, but the city’s paramilitaries pushed their urban militia out of the comunas. Today their fighters have little presence beyond the sparsely inhabited mountains in the south of the department of Bolívar. Brutality and isolation are only to be expected, but the lack of interest in what the armed left has to say is unprecedented. The guerrillas are unable to get their message off the internet and onto the streets, much less organize or agitate. They have even lost credibility on campus. Despite their claim to be ‘armies of the people’, neither the FARC nor the ELN represents anybody but themselves.

  The intransigence of the elite might have provided the spark, but the conflagration that has raged for the
past fifty years has done nothing to resolve the contradictions of Colombian society. Some have gone further, imagining that the war is, by some diabolical pact, the very thing that both sides wanted all along. It has become both the bread and the circus for a poor and frustrated nation and the raison d’être for many of its institutions. It has made the Colombian Army richer and more powerful than ever, while the chaos of war provides perfect cover for drug traffickers. The arms manufacturers that supply all sides with their weapons aren’t exactly lobbying for peace either.

  The FARC and the ELN still talk of taking power by force of arms, but that is a fantasy. The Colombian Army currently has 336,000 military personnel.* The FARC has about 10,000; the ELN, less than half that number. As the prospect of seizing power recedes, the guerrillas have gone back to raiding the coffers of isolated backcountry mayoralties, launching lightning attacks on Army patrols and engaging in what one writer has called ‘armed lobbying for pet causes’.† The causes are often worthwhile. The guerrillas have long argued for job-creation programmes and investment in the machinery, storage facilities and roads that might create viable farming economies in remote departments like Casanare and Arauca. Under threat of kidnap and sabotage, companies such as British Petroleum have ceded some ground and funded schools and local farming projects.*

  But armed campaigning has borne bitter fruit. The oilmen were among the chief backers of Plan Colombia, and by 2005 Casanare and Arauca were swarming with soldiers, trained and equipped by the US military. The guerrillas got the government to spend money on the countryside in the end. They’d wanted bridges and roads; what they got was Black Hawks and fumigation planes.

  The eternal guerrilla threat conjured up by the Army’s press releases and propagated by El Tiempo flatters the insurgents. Perhaps the reality of this war is the opposite of the words and images used to describe it. Perhaps the guerrillas know that their moment has been and gone. Perhaps they know that from now on, their priority will be to survive the selective assassinations that await them as and when they lay down their arms. Perhaps they are scared.