Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the new Colombia

by Feiling, Tom

  Something else occurred to me as I lay in bed in the Casa Amarilla that night, musing on the time I had spent with Nicolás and James. When all your heroes are soldiers, perhaps war is inevitable. Doesn’t Colombia’s creation myth – of the Liberator Simón Bolívar and his valiant struggle for independence – ensure that the armed defence of sacred principles will always be a favourite posture? No sooner had Bolívar declared independence from Spain than his followers were at each others’ throats. Armed struggle was practically state policy until both sides agreed to a National Front in the 1950s. Even then, the party grandees could only put an end to the strife by excluding from power anyone who wasn’t in one of the two parties. Naturally, the excluded took up arms.

  Latin American revolutionaries have been celebrating the sanctity of armed resistance to oppression for half a century. They are the lost saviours, sustained by memories of the subjugation imposed on their kind since the days of the colony, and the need to honour those memories in a wilfully forgetful country.* The FARC, the Army and the politicians all claim Bolívar as their own. Indeed, listening to their high-flown rhetoric, I was often hard pressed to tell them apart.

  7. Going Back to San Carlos

  I was standing at a bus stop at the bottom of a very high waterfall. Tropical verdure crowded overhead, parrots shrieked from the trees, and the sound of crashing water was making it hard to concentrate on the bus map. I was trying to work out how to get a bus to Camden Town.

  I woke up and tried to get my bearings. I was lying in bed in a windowless room, lit by a fluorescent strip on the ceiling. Oh yes … San Carlos, a small town tucked into one of the countless folds of the mountains of Antioquia, a few hours west of the River Magdalena. The climate was no longer steamy enough to make cold water welcome, so I got out of bed and walked onto the balcony at the front of the hotel to have a cigarette before braving the shower.

  I had felt some trepidation in coming to this town – it had been the setting for some of the most brutal violence of the conflict – but it fell away at the sight of the yellow and purple flowering trees that crowded the square and the mountains rising into the sky behind it. The warm morning air had sent the mist that enveloped the town at nightfall creeping back up the mountainside, leaving just a few stray wisps to drift around the squat tower of the church on the far side of the square. It wasn’t a beautiful church – it was new and box-shaped, like a picture of a church that a child might draw, with red bricks separated by bands of mortar that a careful hand had painted white. From a corner of the square, I could hear dogs fighting and the voices of the men who had gathered to cheer them on.

  A television was on downstairs; children’s voices were singing something familiar – ‘Look inside the eye of your mind … ’ But the words of the Oasis song had been doctored for the new Coca-Cola jingle. Travelling Colombia by bus had given me plentiful chances to listen to the radio and I already knew the words off by heart. ‘Every day, more and more people come back to Colombia, to find a country where there are more smiles than there is bad news. A country of music that you can’t help but dance to. A country with the happiest people in the world.’ It was saccharine stuff, but it was almost true. According to the Happy Planet Index, Colombia ranks as the third happiest country in the world.

  It might have been happier still if there weren’t so many towns like San Carlos. I had come here because it seemed to offer a microcosm of the countrywide effort to come to terms with the conflict, which for most Colombians was coming to an end. Somewhere between the eternal spring of the mountains of Antioquia and the harvest of terror and death that its people had reaped lay the essence of Colombia and its fratricidal feuds. Isolated from the cities, the dirty war the people of San Carlos had endured was little known by the outside world. It had once been a busy market town of 33,000, but between 1998 and 2004 sancarlinos had been pummelled by the illegal armies battling for control of Antioquia. Most of them had fled for Medellín, until only 4,000 people remained.

  In 2005, President Uribe sent a beefed-up Army and police force back into San Carlos. An incredible peace came over the town, as it did over much of the country. Journalists who had once found the countryside too dangerous to report from, now found themselves able to travel freely. They were in the enviable position of having more stories than their editors could run. Gradually, the people of San Carlos began coming back to the houses and plots they had left behind. The town now had almost 19,000 inhabitants.*

  I’d arrived on a Saturday afternoon after a four-hour bus ride from Medellín. The journey had taken us along the autopista for two hours, before we turned off towards Granada. From there, the asphalt road turned to gravel, and we wound our way along the contours of meandering valleys, many so narrow that you could have thrown a stone from the wooded crest of one side to the other. Trees, laden with flowers of two distinct shades of pink, lined the road. Then we would pass over a hill into the next valley, where the same tree produced only purple flowers.

  The land on the lush valley floor had been given over to cattle raising, though there never seemed to be many cows in the fields. The local farmers could be seen further up the steep sides of the valleys, hoeing their carefully tended fields of coffee bushes, plantain and cassava. The bonsai landscape they had fashioned was dotted with one-storey adobe farmhouses that reclined in the shade cast by towering groves of bamboo. Their verandas were decorated with still more flowers that cascaded from old vegetable-oil cans. On the balcony of one of the older houses I caught a glimpse of a young boy who was watching tropical fish twitch and turn in a tank.

  As the bus approached San Carlos, we passed properties with ‘for sale’ signs hammered to their walls. The Army wouldn’t let prospective buyers in until they were satisfied that there were no landmines planted in the houses. San Carlos is still the second most heavily mined municipality in the second most heavily mined country in the world. Other properties were being slowly colonized by weeds. On one little house somebody had painted the words ‘death to paramilitary grasses’, probably a parting shot from the FARC before they pulled out of the area in the early 2000s.

  I had a cold shower, got dressed, and went downstairs to have breakfast at the bakery under the hotel. A passing couple caught my eye – she had Sophia Loren’s eyes; he was wearing a fake Armani tee shirt. They could both have been modelling for the real thing. They got on the back of what should have been a Vespa, but was actually a spluttering Indian moped, and trundled off across the square.

  I found Fernando Pamplona waiting for me with two cups of coffee in his hands. He was one of the few indigenous people I’d seen in Antioquia and one of the 4,000 people who had chosen to stay in San Carlos for the duration of the conflict. We found a table next to a glass cabinet of cakes iced in dayglo orange and green that was slowly revolving in the corner of the bakery. Fernando worked for an organization called Acción Contra Minas. He showed me the scars on his leg. He had been making his way up to his little plot, an hour’s walk into the mountains, when he had trodden on a mine. The scars didn’t look too bad; he’d been lucky.

  I asked him if he knew who had planted the mine, but he spoke only of ‘the armed groups’. His vagueness was probably deliberate. I’d often found that victims of guerrilla or paramilitary violence didn’t like to distinguish between them for fear of being seen to be taking sides. When I pushed Fernando for details, he lowered his voice and told me that AUC paramilitaries had planted 1,800 landmines around San Carlos. But the guerrillas had planted mines too, he said, mainly to protect their coca fields. And even the Army planted mines to protect their bases.

  ‘Landmines are the perfect soldiers,’ Fernando said. ‘They don’t need to eat or sleep, they don’t need supplies and they don’t get demoralized.’ But they were less discriminating than real soldiers. A demobilized FARC recruit had told Fernando about the twenty-four mines that he had planted along a path as his unit beat its retreat. His comandante had told him to go back and make sure they ha
d been set properly. He checked each of them in turn but trod on the twenty-fourth, which blew his leg off. Soldiers on all sides knew just how much it demoralized a young recruit when he saw one of his friends lose a limb.

  Since the mid-seventies the Ninth Front of the FARC had occupied everything to the west of San Carlos, all the way back to Granada. Since the mid-nineties, the AUC had occupied everything to the east, from the village of Jordán, where they had a base, down to the River Magdalena, where they had their strongholds. As the paramilitaries gained the upper hand, the FARC were forced to retreat into the mountains. They planted landmines so they wouldn’t be followed.

  Fernando had just come back from a meeting of landmine victims in Medellín. What had most struck him was that the vast majority of them had lost a left foot. ‘Why the left foot and not the right?’ Fernando asked with a puzzled smile. It was good to hear him find humour in the situation. He showed no outward signs of suffering or trauma. If I hadn’t seen his leg, I’d have taken him to be a typical citizen of ‘the third happiest country in the world’. But despite his cheeriness, Fernando admitted that he was always thinking about the unexploded mines that still lie under the paths leading from the town into the surrounding mountains. In San Carlos alone, 109 people have been killed or injured by landmines. Some of the survivors have prosthetic limbs but most don’t, and few have been able to find work. Some don’t even want to work – anyone who has lost a limb to a landmine is prone to depression, Fernando told me. I asked him what he thought of those who’d planted the mines. He said he felt a helpless rage.

  Pastor Mira García was sitting at the café under the flowering trees in the square. She was watching a pick-up truck, heavily laden with wardrobes, mattresses and dressing tables, inch its way into a parking space in front of the church. It was another family of returning sancarlinos. Like Fernando, the pastora was one of the hardy few that had stayed in San Carlos for the duration of the conflict. I liked her straight away: she was fifty or so, straight-talking, engaging and impatient. She smoked a lot, unlike just about every Colombian I’d ever met, who if tempted, seemed content to buy a single cigarette for a couple of hundred pesos. She drank a lot of coffee too and talked nineteen to the dozen, so it was an effort to keep up with her as she pointed this way and that around the square, telling me who had died, where they had been shot and by whom; even what their families had said at their funerals.

  Mira had been living with the violence all her life. She still remembered the day a neighbour had called at her house and pushed her away with the barrel of his gun before training it on her father. The neighbour was a chulavita, affiliated to the Conservative Party; her father was a life-long Liberal. She was five years old at the time. ‘The first job I ever had was in a place right next to the house where the man who killed my dad lived. I wanted to tear his eyes out. But what do you learn if you just perpetuate the evil that’s been done to you? So I started helping him out. His kids were having a hard time of things, so I used to dress them and take them to school. I felt something very positive inside when I was able to do good.’

  The inter-party feuding that followed the assassination of the populist leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 had wracked many of the small towns of Colombia, including San Carlos. For most of the sixties, however, Mira’s hometown had been relatively peaceful. ‘When the guerrillas first came here, relations were good. The Army and police were nowhere to be seen, and the guerrillas came in proposing that they take their place. There were selective killings, but the problems only really started in the late seventies, when the guerrillas began extorting money from the local cattle farmers. Then they started kidnapping them and stealing their herds. The government didn’t do much about it, so the farmers began recruiting local boys to help them defend themselves.’

  Mira was keen to show me the town’s Centro de Acercamiento, Reconciliación y Reparación (CARE) – the Centre for Reconciliation and Reparation – that she had helped to found after the paramilitaries of the AUC demobilized in 2005. So we finished our coffees and walked down the hill, past the town’s heavily barricaded police station, to the CARE office.

  ‘Between 2002 and 2004, this building was one of the paramilitaries’ command posts,’ Mira said. ‘When we first moved in, there were still bloody handprints all over the walls.’ She made us some more coffee, while I had a look at the children’s drawings that had taken the place of the bloody handprints. One of them was of what looked like a tall house, surrounded by armed men.

  ‘That’s the hydroelectric dam that they built at San Rafael,’ Mira said, handing me my coffee. Heavy rainfall, steep-sided valleys and mighty rivers ensure that Colombia gets 70 per cent of its power from hydroelectricity. The mountains of Antioquia were a prime location for expansion and the dam at San Rafael had been a huge undertaking, requiring considerable investment. It had aroused a lot of opposition from local people; the guerrillas, who considered themselves a buffer between the poor and the politicians, had backed them. ‘That’s when things started to get really bad,’ said Mira.

  It was a grim irony that in Colombia, these outward signs of economic progress were invariably accompanied by an upswing in violence, as the guerrillas sought to sabotage the country’s dams, gas-fields and oil pipelines, and the paramilitaries tried to protect them.

  By the mid-1990s paramilitaries from the river towns of the Magdalena Medio had linked up with ‘self-defence’ groups in the banana-growing department of Urabá to form a chain to block the guerrillas’ path. The AUC had promised to ‘wipe out anyone opposed to the development and security of this country’, which included opponents of the dam at San Rafael. They came up from the river into the hills around San Carlos, looking for recruits. They considered anyone who shied away from the fight to be on the side of the guerrillas and were liable to ‘disappear’ them.

  Paramilitarism might have been born in the Magdalena Medio, but in the late 1990s and early 2000s it flourished in Antioquia as nowhere else. Almost two thirds of the victims of paramilitary violence in Colombia are antioqueños. In each of the 120 municipalities that cover its rugged mountains, an average of 200 people have been killed in the past twenty-five years, mainly by paramilitaries. Antioquia might be the most dynamic, modern and efficient department in the country, but it also has all the conditions needed for paramilitarism to thrive. Much of its farmland is in the hands of big landowners, who depend on the labour of poor campesinos, who have long had to struggle just to survive. Its politics are clientelistic, in that people are accustomed to voting for the candidate who pays best, whatever their provenance. Despite their reputation for being fiercely independent, come polling day many campesinos are no less servile than their feudal ancestors. Ask a paramilitary soldier who he works for, and he will nod towards the big house and say ‘el patrón’, just like generations of rural labourers before him.

  Many Army officers backed the landowners when they began organizing private armies to defend themselves against the FARC. Their rabid anti-communism was deemed sufficient justification for waging terror on the civilian population. Lastly, Antioquia and its capital, Medellín, were crawling with cocaine traffickers, who had the will and the means to turn the AUC into a well-disciplined and heavily armed force of 18,000 men.*

  Looking back on the early years of the AUC, the former paramilitary commander Ernesto Báez insisted that their terror campaign had the near-unanimous backing of local elites. ‘I can’t understand how a politician who is campaigning in areas infested with paramilitaries or guerrillas can say that he had nothing to do with those who run the region – that he won the election fair and square. That’s just not possible. When I first arrived in Puerto Boyacá, all the authorities were there: the DAS [intelligence service], the Bárbula battalion of the Army, the police, the Attorney General’s office and the mayoralty. But nothing happened without the say-so of Henry Pérez, who was the commander of the self-defence forces at the time.’†

  Back in 2001, when the
conflict was still raging in San Carlos, Mira would spend her days tending the tomato and broccoli crop that she and a group of local women raised in polytunnels on the outskirts of the village. But at night, they’d talk about how they could find their missing relatives. Such was the generalized state of fear among the people of San Carlos that two thirds of disappearances went unreported, even by the victims’ families. The mothers of the disappeared lived in suspense, never knowing whether their husbands, uncles, sons and daughters were alive or dead.

  As the years went by, they came to fear the worst, but always held out the hope that somebody might tell them where their loved ones were buried. Mira’s neighbours were too frightened to talk openly about what they’d seen or overheard, so she and her friends would slip photocopied maps of the area under their doors, asking them to mark any gravesites they knew of. The following night they would come back to collect the pages. Invariably, they had been left untouched.

  The mothers of the disappeared only began to make progress in 2005, when the government put its weight behind the Justice and Peace laws. ‘President Uribe was looking to be re-elected and saw that he needed to clean up the image of the state,’ Mira told me. ‘Human rights abuses had rocketed and the United States wanted the government to put a stop to the killings. They called it a peace process, but really it was about getting their tigers back in their cages.’

  Mira led me into an adjoining room to show me a pin-board that had been covered with paper flowers. ‘Don’t forget me. I deserve a tomb,’ said the title at the top of the board. ‘We only stop existing when people stop remembering us,’ Mira told me. ‘But the disappeared are never forgotten, because there’s always someone waiting for them.’ Each of the flowers had been labelled with the name of somebody who had been ‘disappeared’ from San Carlos. ‘There are two hundred and forty-seven of them,’ Mira said.