Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the new Colombia

by Feiling, Tom

  A labyrinthine geography that hindered communications; proud and isolated communities founded by pioneering colonos, who resisted laws drawn up in Bogotá as a matter of principle; a hidebound elite of landowners, listening out for the word of God, and accustomed to near-feudal relations with the peasants who worked their land; a guerrilla insurgency, rising in power and falling in popularity; and a backlash against them and anyone who looked remotely like them, largely funded by cocaine traffickers, often backed by the Army and put into practice by death squads.

  I thought too about all the people who have been forced to flee the fighting over the last thirty years. Colombia has more internal refugees than any other country in the world. There are 4 million of them, which means that one in ten Colombians has been displaced from their homes. Among the rural population this figure rises to three in ten.*

  Most of them have come to whatever rest they can find on the peripheral shanties of Medellín, Cali and Bogotá. I remembered being in the capital in 2007, when ‘Bogotá sin Indiferencia – Bogotá without Indifference’ – was the mayor’s watchword for the city. It was part of a campaign to get bogotanos to address the anti-social habits and general indifference with which many of them viewed their city. Having come to the capital from all over the country, in great numbers and over quite a short period of time, many of the displaced found themselves living in the unplanned, chaotic hillside neighbourhoods in the south of the city. Most of them were unaccustomed to city living; there was no room to grow cassava or plantain, and they found themselves living amongst equally poor and traumatized people.

  I’d been to those treeless barrios a handful of times. They were forlorn, windswept places, whose only blessing was the spectacular views they offered over the more settled neighbourhoods below them. There were only three textures to be seen: concrete, cement and the steel bars that protected doors and windows from the neighbourhood’s burglars.

  I also remembered a trip I made to the Pacific city of Buenaventura back in 2002. Colombia’s largest port was an obvious way out for those who chose to keep running. The port authorities had built high fences around the wharf and employed security guards to patrol it, but under cover of night plenty of young men swam out into the harbour and clambered aboard ships bound for San Francisco, Long Beach or the ports east of the Panama Canal.

  Eduardo was one such stowaway I met there. At the age of fifteen he and some friends had hidden in the hull of a ship bound for New Orleans. They had left home with the bare minimum – a bag of white cheese and another of panela sugar water. They had spent day after day at sea, living with the ship’s groans and the stench of their own diarrhoea, before the ship finally stopped moving and they were able to creep out onto the dock. They wandered the streets for a few days, three teenage Afro-Colombians in shorts and bare feet with only a handful of English words between them, before they were picked up by the local police and sent back to Colombia on the next ship.

  For many Colombians, running away has been their defining experience of nationhood. During La Violencia, they ran away from Liberal lynch mobs or gangs of vengeful Conservatives. Since the 1980s, they’d been fleeing guerrillas and drug traffickers. But in the last fifteen years, far and away the biggest villains of the piece have been the paramilitaries. Often working in collusion with local Army brigadiers, they would threaten local people. If necessary, they would kill the most prominent ones. This wasn’t just because they were suspected of being FARC supporters. That might have been the justification given, but the weeks I had spent on the road, travelling first to Villavicencio, then San José del Guaviare, Bucaramanga, Barrancabermeja, Mompós and now San Carlos, had shown me that the roots of the crisis ran deeper than that.

  Perhaps, at some point in the conflict, a group of wise men had gathered in the back room of some police station, Army barracks or government ministry, and decided that the millions of little plots, farmed by millions of little Colombians, were unsustainable. After all, many of those plots lay at the end of terrible roads, miles from city markets. Who could muster the will to invest in the infrastructure needed to turn things around? The farmers’ sympathies would never lie with a government that couldn’t or wouldn’t supply the healthcare, schooling and legal protection that they needed. In the future, with the help of their eminences at the Ministry of Agriculture and the World Bank, the campesinos’ fields would have to make way for the ‘megaprojects’. Talk was of West African oil palm plantations, oil wells, coalmines and gas-fields. These projects needed little input from the local population; indeed, they were only likely to be jeopardized by the locals. Perhaps, it had been decided, it would be better if they simply left.

  8. ‘NN’: No Name

  While we had been hiking the Canyon Chicamocha, Carlos had described for me the mental sketch he’d made of his second novel. It was set in another imaginary Colombian town, whose mayor forbids its residents to leave. Since nobody comes through the town, nothing ever happens. Over time, people’s lives stagnate and they become profoundly bored. One day, a newcomer arrives in town: a dead man, found floating in the river. More bodies appear. The townspeople pull them from the river and bury them in the cemetery. Nobody knows who they are or why they died.

  Being bored, the people of the town start to make up stories about the lives the dead once led. They give them names and talk about the families and careers they left behind. As these stories become more elaborate, the characters in the town’s drama begin to mingle; one story overlaps with another; lives entwine and then become entangled. The townspeople start arguing about what one dead man might or might not have done to another dead man. Before long, they are at war with one another to defend the honour of their imaginary friends. The fighting goes on for years, passed down from parents to their children, who inherit these sacred causes without ever really understanding what they mean or how they started.

  Carlos told me that the story was inspired by the time he spent in Puerto Berrío, a town on the Magdalena four hours east of San Carlos. In the mid-eighties, he had completed his military service there. Puerto Berrío was in the paramilitary heartland of the country. I knew that the fighting had been no less fierce there than it had in San Carlos, and wanted to find out more about the town and the modern-day parable it had inspired.

  I arrived on a Saturday afternoon, with the mercury nudging 38 degrees. From the bus station, I followed the abandoned railway tracks that led over the river into the town. It was over 300 miles from Puerto Berrío to the Caribbean, but the Magdalena was already over a mile wide. The railway had been built in the mid-nineteenth century to carry British machine tools from the coast to the textile factories then being built in Medellín.

  From the bridge that carried the tracks over the Magdalena, I could see a group of men sifting sand on the banks of the river below me. A truck laden with sandbags was lumbering along the rutted lane that ran under the bridge, bound for the cement factory upriver. Carlos had told me that the sandbaggers had often lent a hand when the Army recruits arrived to pull bodies from the river. They had grown used to the sight of bloated corpses drifting with the current.

  The Magdalena wasn’t the only Colombian river to have borne the dead to a watery grave. In the early 1990s, when Cali’s cocaine-trafficking cartel was at its height, their sicarios (hitmen) would often throw their victims into the River Cauca, which flows north through Cali. Their bodies would float downstream for many miles, until they came to a bend in the river at the town of Marsella, where many of them got caught in the trees or were washed up on the sandbanks.

  Local fishermen would heave the bodies from the river and take them to the town morgue. Special buses were laid on from Cali so that the families of the disappeared could go to Marsella to see if their sons and husbands were among the dead. Often, the bodies were so badly disfigured that relatives could only recognize them by the shoes they wore. When a body went unclaimed, it would be taken from the morgue to the cemetery, where the gravedigger would remove
the corpse’s shoes before burial. His grave would be marked ‘NN’ (ningun nombre – no name). His shoes would be lined up outside the cemetery wall, waiting for the day when a relative might recognize them.

  In the days when cocaine trafficking was in the hands of colourful killers like Pablo Escobar, stories like these regularly made their way into the newspapers of distant countries. Over the past twenty years, however, Colombia’s once-famous cocaine cartels have been broken up. These days, the real money is made by the Mexican cartels, while the Colombian end of the business has splintered into hundreds of mini-cartels. Cocaine production and smuggling is still a lucrative enterprise, but those who stepped into Escobar’s shoes have learnt the value of discretion. Killings are rarer than they were and no longer make the headlines, even of El Tiempo.

  The bodies pulled from the Magdalena and buried as ‘NN’ in the cemetery in Puerto Berrío might have been those of rival traffickers. Or perhaps they were spies for the guerrillas, informants for the Army, whistle-blowers, gossips, or any of the thousands deemed to know too much. In truth, nobody knew who they were, since they’d been pulled from the river with no trace of identification. If they showed up shortly after a local person went missing, there was a chance that a relative might be found and the corpse identified. But most of the NN that the sandbaggers of Puerto Berrío dragged out of the river were not local men. They could have been pitched into the Magdalena anywhere downriver of the rapids at Honda, northwest of Bogotá.

  The head of the local association for the disappeared was Teresa Castrillón, a middle-aged woman with deep-set eyes, who I met at the town cemetery the following morning. She wore rosary beads and a small, worn wooden cross around her wrist. Over the past twenty-five years, Teresa’s mother, uncles and nephews had all been killed or disappeared. Her father and brother had been killed together. She read out their names from the list of the murdered and disappeared that had been painted on the wall of the cemetery. ‘Julio Sierra Taborda, killed on 13 February 1985. Jesús Sierra Taborda, killed on 12 December 1985. María Ovidia Taborda, killed on 10 November 1988 … ’

  The list had been painted in a mock-parchment style in shades of brown, complete with cracks in the margins of a curling scroll. I tried counting the names, but there were too many. I did a rough calculation: there were thirty names in the first column and seven columns, which meant that over 210 people had been murdered or disappeared in Puerto Berrío since 1985. The population of the town was 6,000 – perhaps 8,000 if you included the outlying farms.

  Most of Teresa’s family were cattle farmers. Perhaps they had been targeted because they owned land coveted by other landowners? But why would anyone have wanted to kill her husband? He had worked in the local bank – perhaps he’d been killed because he was a member of the bank workers’ union? Or perhaps he’d turned down somebody’s application for a bank loan? His killer’s motive was as much a mystery as the location of her husband’s grave. Teresa was resigned to the fact that she would probably never find answers to any of her questions.

  What was beyond dispute was that her dead relatives were not the ‘collateral damage’ of Colombia’s ‘war on terror’. The last guerrillas in the Magdalena Medio had been driven out in the early eighties. The last of the critical journalists, teachers and trade unionists who might have been suspected of collaborating with them had either left or been killed a long time ago too. In these parts, at least, Colombia’s dirty war was over. But the tactics devised to fight that war had since been adapted for day-to-day business practice. They might be used to secure a building contract, drive down the asking price for a farm, or extort money from the owner of a supermarket. Terror had become a last resort in all kinds of disputes.

  I asked Teresa if she knew who was responsible for killing her relatives. ‘I see them all the time,’ she said. ‘They were the men in sunglasses that you saw lounging outside the café earlier today. They’re the ones on the big motorbikes that always get waved through the Army’s checkpoints on their way back from the finca at Quebrada El Suán. Everyone knows that it’s a paramilitary base.’

  There was little trace of indignation in her voice. Although Teresa had long since given up hope of seeing the killers brought to justice, when President Uribe passed the Justice and Peace laws in 2005, she thought that the demobilization of the paramilitaries would at least bring some peace to Puerto Berrío. The first signs were promising. The fighters of the local AUC front turned in their weapons and prepared to be ‘re-inserted’ into civil society. The government paid them a monthly stipend to tide them over while they looked for legal work. Some signed up for courses in computer science, catering or bricklaying. Others owned and drove most of the taxis in Puerto Berrío.

  But the law of supply and demand ensured that the killings went on. On the second of the three days that I spent in the town, a teenager was shot and killed by local vigilantes for selling marijuana. Teresa told me that for a week of the previous month, bodies had been showing up on a daily basis. People whispered about the new paramilitary groups that had risen from the ashes of the old, under the relatively innocuous name of bandas criminales – criminal groups.

  A friend of Teresa was on her way out of the cemetery. She’d been laying flowers on her husband’s grave. ‘If God wants it, you have to go,’ she said languidly. She and Teresa walked slowly away into the midday sun, leaving me alone to have a look around. On a wall of the porch over the main entrance was a sign that read ‘Aqui todos somos iguales – we are all the same here’. The avenue that led up to the little chapel at the top of the cemetery was lined with gravestones, most of marble and all well tended. Beyond them ran a wall that was covered in plaques, behind each of which was a small chamber for the bones of the dead.

  The sunlight glancing off the whitewashed tombs was blinding, so I walked up the avenue in the hope of finding some shade. The panteón militar was a wall of plaques commemorating the soldiers of Puerto Berrío who had died fighting the guerrillas in the early eighties. A middle-aged woman was carefully scrubbing the black metal grill in front of a plaque. I could see an airbrushed photo of a fallen soldier. He looked to have been in his twenties, a blond-haired, blue-eyed face surrounded by clouds and framed by the beams of a setting sun.

  Most of the plaques carried the names of men who had died young. One of them read: ‘So destiny has separated us without giving us the opportunity to love one another as we dreamed we might.’ Another bore the words: ‘Lord, in the light of your splendour, everything looks different: life, pain and death.’ The language of the faithful was foreign to me, but even I could see that without their faith in the divine it would be hard to bear so little earthly justice or protection.

  Every Monday, a special mass was held for the children of Puerto Berrío. The priest’s words crackled over the loudspeakers that were dotted around the cemetery. The faithful sat or stood all over the cemetery, listening attentively. When an old woman took to the microphone and began to sing a plaintive folk song, they sang along.

  Wandering the tombs, their singing drifting in and out of earshot, I found the NN of Puerto Berrío behind the multi-storey vaults, hidden from the avenue that led up to the chapel. Their tombs had been blackened by the rain and then bleached by the sun, and the whitewash was flaking away. Black birds with thick beaks hopped from the path into the dry grass as I walked the length of the walls.

  On the slab that enclosed one tomb was scrawled a question, ‘This is not David. Is it Luna?’ The disappeared of Puerto Berrío were names without bodies; the NN were bodies without names. It was only natural that the bereaved should try to put them together, in an attempt at normalizing the abnormal. The people of the town believed that by adopting an NN they might curry favour with God. If an innocent had been killed, he was sure to be in Heaven. By tending his grave, a woman – the adopters all seemed to be women – might have celestial favour bestowed upon her.

  Nearly all of the NN tombs had been ‘adopted’ by someone in the town
and most of their plaques had been engraved with the words ‘Thank you for the favour received – a devotee.’ Many of the NN had been given names by their adoptive families. One read, ‘Though unknown, you will always have a friend.’ In some cases, the adoptive family hadn’t had the money to pay for a plaque for their NN, so the gravedigger had simply marked the concrete slab covering the hole in the wall with an inky finger. In some cases, he had just written ‘Escogido – Chosen’ – by whom and for what, we were not to know.

  I watched a woman walk ahead of me. She tapped three times on each of the tombs. ‘It’s a custom in Antioquia,’ she said. She smiled, but not for long. ‘You knock three times on the tomb of the deceased and say a quick prayer for the person inside.’ She had adopted her NN a week ago. ‘My husband was a paramilitary. He demobilized in 2005, but they disappeared him not long after that. They were worried that he would talk. His body still hasn’t been found, so the wife of the cemetery keeper told me to choose an NN. I liked this one,’ she said, pointing to a small marble plaque. ‘I cleaned it up – it was very dirty before. I imagine it’s a man – most of them are. I call him my little friend.’ I asked her if she had made a wish when she adopted her NN. She nodded. ‘But it’s a secret. If I tell you, it won’t come true.’

  When I’d checked into the Hotel Golondrinas, I’d asked the receptionist why the hotel was named after swallows. ‘You’ll find out later,’ she’d said. As the light faded at the cemetery, I watched the swallows dart out from behind the cracked slab covering a tomb. One after another, they dashed up into the reddening sky. When I got back to the hotel, I fell asleep, convinced that I had sunstroke. I woke up at nine o’clock that evening, still exhausted, and looked out of the window. The swallows were massing in their hundreds on the telegraph wires overhead and the balconies of the block opposite. As I fell back to sleep, I could hear them outside my window, chattering and tapping at the air-conditioning unit. I couldn’t help but imagine that they were carrying the hundreds of fevered stories the dead would never get to tell.