Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the new Colombia

by Feiling, Tom

  Sometimes, a body would be found. I noticed that instead of a flower, the name ‘Johana’ had been pinned to a dragonfly. Johana was fifteen when she was abducted. Her body was found buried in the backyard of the CARE building in 2005. ‘The dragonfly represents freedom – for her body as well as for her family.’

  ‘And here’s my daughter Sandra,’ Mira said, pointing to another dragonfly. ‘The paramilitaries held her for six months before they killed her. She was buried near Jordán for seven and a half years. Finding her was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, but we got her back in the end, in July 2009.’

  Mira told me that the paramilitaries of San Carlos had also kidnapped and tortured her teenage son Jorge. In a break from his torture, one of the younger paramilitaries, who was just a teenager himself, had started talking to him. He wanted to demobilize; he’d had enough of terrorizing people who had been his classmates only a year before. But he was frightened of what his bosses might do to him if they knew his true feelings. Jorge told the young fighter to go and talk to the pastora. Days later, the boy showed up at Mira’s house. She knew Jorge was dead when she realized that the young man standing at her front door was wearing her son’s clothes.

  Just weeks after his death, the Justice and Peace laws came into effect. In return for lenient prison sentences, paramilitary fighters were required to admit their crimes and identify their victims, including the location of their graves. Thanks to these generous terms, only two paramilitaries have had to stand trial for murder. Eduardo Cobo Téllez, better known as ‘Diego Vecino’, and Uber Bánquez, alias ‘Juancho Dique’, were found guilty of the forced disappearance of 1,194 people in and around Mampuján, a tiny village in the northern department of Bolívar. The local police suspected their involvement in 6,000 other crimes, but under the terms of the Justice and Peace laws, the maximum sentence the judge could give them was eight years.

  Judges often asked members of the press to leave the hearings before former combatants revealed the names of the politicians and Army officers who had given them the green light to kill somebody. Proponents of the Justice and Peace laws insisted that leniency for the accused, and impunity for those who paid them, was the only way to bring the paramilitaries’ reign of terror to an end.

  One by one 31,000 paramilitaries from the forty-three blocks that the AUC had established all over Colombia handed over their weapons and turned themselves in to the authorities. As demobilized paramilitaries gave their testimonies, Colombians were forced to acknowledge the extent of the savagery that the AUC had visited on their country. By May 2011, the government had identified the remains of over 10,000 people disinterred from unmarked graves, while acknowledging that at least that many again had yet to be identified.* In San Carlos, hundreds of people had been killed or disappeared, and thousands had been forced to flee their homes. As bodies were pulled from mass graves in the hills around the town, Mira was able to add a few more dragonflies to her pin-board.

  ‘It’s not a bad thing to have feelings of hatred or to want revenge,’ Mira told me. ‘The question is: what do you do with those feelings? An eye for an eye is the worst thing you can do. That just means that everyone becomes blind. Committing yourself to non-violence doesn’t just mean that you don’t throw the stone. It means convincing the man with the stone in his hand not to throw it. If we can just exercise some self-control, we can build ourselves a house with those stones. We can start building a different kind of country.’

  In 2006, Mira and the other mothers of the disappeared banded together with those who had lost limbs to landmines and concerned officials from the mayor’s office and set up the Centre for Reconciliation and Reparation. She told me about a demonstration that CARE had organized in 2009. Their placards were all blank except for one, which asked ‘Who will take responsibility for what happened in this town?’ One by one, people came forward to take the microphone. Some simply told the crowd what had happened to them. Others tried to justify what had been done, saying that it had been the only way to get the guerrillas out of the town.

  I asked Mira if any former paramilitaries had come forward to take part in the reconciliation process. She mentioned a local man who had been one of the band that had come up to San Carlos from Jordán, where the local paramilitaries had had their base. He hadn’t said much, but he had written something in the CARE visitors’ book, which Mira pulled out to show me. She turned page after page, much of it written in the sprawling hand of local children, until she found his words: ‘Believe in me and I’ll believe in you’ was all it said.

  ‘When you actually sit down and talk to ex-combatants, you find that a lot of them come from really violent family backgrounds. It’s amazing how much abuse of children there is here,’ Mira told me. ‘But macho culture says that men don’t cry, so a lot of the men who have been affected by the violence turn to drink to blot things out and end up neglecting their homes. People say, “OK, so send the dad to jail.” But it’s not as simple as that. Sending the dad to jail just leaves his wife to raise their kids by herself.

  ‘I know a man called Miguel whose brother was disappeared. Their mother lives in Jordán and I’ve spoken to her about what happened. But Miguel? Never. He’s never let any of us into his world.’ I wondered if I might meet him. Mira told me that he was running for a seat on the district council. He’d probably be at the mayor’s office.

  Mira had a parting shot for me before I left. ‘These aren’t problems that the government can solve by decree. If San Carlos is peaceful today, it’s not because of any help we’ve had from the mayor or from Medellín. It’s down to what we did ourselves. The war won’t come back here. We won’t let it come back!’ She hit the table with her fist and the coffee cup jumped in its saucer.

  Polling day was seven months away, but campaigning for the local elections had already begun. Since the candidates no longer had to cut deals with one or other of the armed groups, there was a good chance of a clean contest. When I first arrived in San Carlos, I had seen yellow banners strung across the street and naively thought that they signalled the rebirth of the Unión Patriótica in Antioquia. Yellow had been their colour; it had marked them out from the red and the blue of the Liberal and Conservative parties. But the UP and over 3,000 of its most active members really were dead and buried. The banners were for Sylvia Ramírez, a local woman who was running for mayor.

  I found Miguel Ángel Giraldo at the town hall, where he was deep in conversation with two women from the committee that had been set up to help those who had recently returned to San Carlos. The first thing I noticed about him was the scar on his face. It was unavoidable: a white line that ran along his hairline from one ear to the other. He had a second scar in the corner of his mouth, where it looked as if he’d been stabbed with a broken bottle.

  I introduced myself and told him that I was there to find out more about the days when the guerrillas and the paramilitaries were vying for control of the town. Miguel seemed more than happy to talk. He was planning to go to Jordán that afternoon – he wanted to hear what the villagers expected from their council representatives. He had hired a motorbike; if I covered the cost of the hire, he’d be more than happy to show me around. ‘There’ll be plenty of people with stories to tell in Jordán,’ he said. ‘It was one of the paramilitaries’ biggest regional bases. Carlos Castaño used to land there in his helicopter.’

  It was hard to hear what Miguel was saying as we sped towards Jordán. A mile or two outside the village, we came to the River San Carlos. Not so long ago, the paramilitaries had thrown their victims from the bridge; they used to cut open their guts and weigh their bodies down with stones so they wouldn’t float. Once over the river and past the Army checkpoint, the road turned to gravel and we snaked our way through dense forest bordered by neatly trimmed laurel hedges. We passed two young men at the wheel of a bulldozer, which was clearing the road of the topsoil brought down by the winter rains. Their girlfriends were chatting on a nearby log.

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sp; Not far from Jordán, the chain slipped off our motorbike for the second time. Miguel decided that we’d be better off leaving it by the side of the road and getting a ride with the bus that we’d just passed. It was a chiva, a converted American school bus, open-sided and decorated with folk paintings of posies. We clambered aboard and the bus strained its way higher into the forest, roaring and groaning as it went. The driver’s bench had room for seven. The girl who was the driver’s slightly-too-young girlfriend had a beguiling mix of European and Asian features. She would probably spend the rest of her life in the mountains of eastern Antioquia, but if ever she made it to Japan, she’d be an instant hit among manga fans.

  A lot of the people of eastern Antioquia were strikingly beautiful. The faces kept coming: the boy with dark eyes set in a slender, olive-skinned face, who leaned into the driver’s seat to fill the bus with petrol when we pulled into Jordán, might have been Sephardic Jewish. I’d heard more than one proud antioqueño put the region’s famous work ethic down to the Jews who came to this part of Colombia after their expulsion from Spain at the close of the fifteenth century.

  Once off the bus, Miguel asked a young man on a motorbike, who looked like Prince’s better-looking brother, if he might ferry us from the bus stop to the hamlet. He was happy to help, so we trundled down the hill for a mile or two, until we came to a bar, set on a switchback in the sandy road leading down yet another hillside. Some local boys were playing pool; plaintive vallenato ballads boomed out across the treetops. Alongside was a thatched hut, where people from the outlying smallholdings had gathered to put their concerns to their prospective councillor.

  While Miguel drummed up support for his election campaign, I sat on a grassy bank looking out over the valley. One by one, the locals came over to tell me their stories. Humberto Martínez had left Jordán for Medellín in 2001. ‘We couldn’t stand it any more,’ he told me. ‘They were killing a lot of people – good people who’d done nothing wrong.’ On his return to Jordán in August 2009, Humberto found the plot of land where he had once grown plantain and cassava overgrown with weeds. His house was in ruins. Inside, the bath, toilet and sink had been ransacked – even the electrical fittings had been stolen. The surrounding roads were in a terrible state and there were no public services. Most of the teachers of eastern Antioquia, who to this day are routinely branded guerrilla sympathizers, had fled. The doctors had run away too, for fear of being cajoled into treating the injured of one armed group or the other, which only made them targets for reprisals from the other side.

  The return of thousands of displaced sancarlinos had put the mayor’s office under great strain. Humberto had gone to the mayor’s office to ask for help, but all they could offer him were roof tiles, ‘and they only gave me them after a lot of arguing’. Councillors were usually able to give returnees small sums of money for the seed, fertilizer and calves they needed to get their little farms up and running again. But they couldn’t guarantee them food, shelter or work.

  ‘A lot of people who came back to San Carlos are worse off now than they were before they were displaced,’ Humberto told me. ‘It’s a miracle some of them survive at all. There’s no work, no food and no productive enterprises at all. We just hope that all the improvements in security aren’t blotted out if we’re forced out again by hunger.’

  Miguel and I had to cadge another lift back up the hill to Jordán, but his scant resources never dampened his spirits. Everywhere we went in the village he was pressing flesh and kissing babies. Everyone was his amigito – his little friend. He was getting farmers to sign up to a scheme he had launched with the department government in Medellín. The governor would cover the costs of the seeds, fertilizer and tools; all the local farmers had to do was contribute their labour. ‘Amigito,’ he asked each man, ‘avocadoes, cocoa, fattening poultry or fisheries?’ It sounded like a good deal, though judging by the wary looks on the farmers’ faces, they were long accustomed to seeing politicians’ promises go unfulfilled. Still, they signed up, gave Miguel their mobile phone numbers and watched as he dashed off to find another would-be supporter.

  Only at the end of the day, when we were sitting in a café, drinking the sweet hot water that passes for coffee in the Colombian countryside, did Miguel tell me how he got the awful scars on his face. The paramilitaries had tried to kill him eight times. At their last attempt, they’d beaten him with iron bars and left him for dead. ‘You know what an egg shell looks like after you’ve cracked it open and thrown it in the rubbish?’ he asked me. ‘That’s what they did to my head.’ Considering what he’d been through, his wounds had healed remarkably well. He had titanium plates holding his forehead, cheeks and nose together. ‘My face is pioneering,’ he said proudly.

  Remembering what Mira had told me, I asked him if he ever felt anger towards his persecutors. ‘Of course I do. But I never let it show.’ And he didn’t. In the course of the day, I saw none of the telltale signs of anger or bitterness. No scowl, sneer or frown marked his face. ‘Thanks to God,’ he kept saying.

  By now it was past eight o’clock and there was still no sign of the bus that might take us from Jordán back to San Carlos. Luckily, Sylvia Ramírez also happened to be campaigning in the village that day, so Miguel asked the mayoral candidate if we might load his stricken motorbike onto the back of her pick-up. She was happy to help, so we followed her to her Toyota 4x4. It was a machine of rare beauty in those parts, and was emblazoned with her campaign posters. Her husband Álvaro took the wheel and Sylvia struggled to get her bulk into the passenger seat.

  She wasn’t an immediately appealing candidate. She had fake eyelashes and the immobile, doll-like expression common to those who have had too much plastic surgery. But her girlfriends/advisors – two well-fed middle-aged women with too much make-up – deferred to her in a way that suggested she wasn’t to be messed with. I made a mental note to tread carefully. Colombia’s landowning class always gives me the creeps.

  I daresay the feeling was mutual. European journalists are widely regarded as troublemakers. Any Colombian with an interest in politics knows that behind the Europeans’ objections to Colombia’s human rights record lurks a cabal of lily-livered, know-it-all do-gooders. Thanks to them, when President Uribe asked for the European Union’s support for his war against the terrorists of the FARC, its parliamentarians blanched, leaving the Americans to pick up the bill for equipping and training the Colombian Army.

  Sylvia told me a little about her campaign, but was quick with questions of her own. Who did I work for? What did I think of Colombia? Did I like the former president and the wonderful things he had done for his country? I kept my answers short and sweet and so did she. As the few street lights of Jordán receded into the distance, she fell quiet, so it was left to her friend Liliana to explain her friend’s plans for San Carlos. ‘The environment is at the heart of Sylvia’s campaign,’ she told me. ‘Sylvia is very keen to protect the forests, to make this region’s development sustainable and to encourage organic production.’ This wasn’t what I had expected to hear at all: it sounded eminently laudable.

  ‘The old way of doing politics is on the way out,’ Liliana went on. This could only be a good thing: I had heard that two former mayors of San Carlos had been killed while in office. Another two were in prison, having been convicted of colluding with paramilitaries. ‘The new breed has closer contacts with the people and is committed to them and their interests.’ What did she think of the current mayor, I asked. She thought for a moment, trying to find a diplomatic way of explaining herself. ‘He’s a good person, but he’s too provincial. He has the heart of a melon, so he doesn’t have the right contacts. Plus, he’s surrounded by unqualified and inexperienced advisors, who have driven his budget into the red.’

  Sylvia, on the other hand, was wealthy and had travelled the world, so she didn’t need to go pilfering the municipal coffers for the price of a car or house. This struck me as a pretty watertight argument for rule by the rich, but I didn�
�t say a word. Neither did Miguel, who was looking out of the open window at the fireflies blinking in the black fields. He could have used a car of his own – but I suppose he didn’t have the right contacts either. ‘Sylvia isn’t a professional politician,’ her friend stressed, ‘but she knows politicians and that is very important if we’re to attract the international, national and departmental funds that San Carlos needs.’

  It must have been close to midnight by the time we got back to San Carlos. Sylvia and her team were sorry not to be able to talk more, but they had to be back in Medellín for a meeting with the governor of Antioquia the following morning. If they set off now, they could be there by dawn. Miguel and I watched them go, their taillights receding into the distance. The side streets were empty and near silent, but as we walked towards the town square, the sound of vallenato came booming out from bars on all sides. Only when the music was loud enough to cover his voice did Miguel tell me that Sylvia Ramírez was a testaferro – the business partner and legal front for a well-known Medellín cocaine trafficker. She had also been found guilty of fraudulently selling national park property to cattle ranchers, which had led to the clearance of hundreds of hectares of virgin forest. So much for her ‘eminently laudable’ green credentials.

  Back in my room in the hotel above the bakery, I lay in bed, listening to the windows reverberate in time with the bass line. It was like trying to sleep inside a loudspeaker. The music seemed to be a fire, keeping the people of San Carlos warm. As I waited for sleep to come over me, I set to thinking about the stories I had heard.