Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the new Colombia

by Feiling, Tom

  Valledupar’s main plaza was named after Alfonso López Michelsen, the state governor who had gone on to become president in 1974. It was dominated by an outsize sculpture in concrete and bronze, a pile-up of what looked like three conjoined lipsticks, thrusting skyward at a cock-like angle and carrying an over-muscled male torso and a second female figure, whose contours were lost in what I supposed to be buffets of silk. The sculpture was dedicated to La Revolución en Marcha, a grandiose, top-down development programme launched by Michelsen’s father, Alfonso López Pumarejo, when he was president in the 1940s.

  I found Lucho sitting at a table outside the café, where a thickset, dark-skinned man with a short neck poking out of a Hawaiian shirt was holding forth on the corruption of the governor’s office. The transport budget allocated by Bogotá had gone missing. It had been pilfered, he said, by the ‘cartel’ that was running the neighbouring town of Manaure. The six other local men at the table nodded in agreement with their friend’s assessment.

  The man sitting next to me introduced himself as Rodolfo. He had been born in Valledupar but lived in Bogotá, where he was a university professor and leading member of the Green Party (so named not for their environmentalist credentials, but for being the latest attempt to build a legal alternative to the old blue and red colours of the Conservative and Liberal parties).

  When Rodolfo went to the bar to order more drinks, Lucho told me in a whisper that he had been a childhood friend of Simón Trinidad, perhaps Colombia’s best-known ‘traitor to his class’. Trinidad had been born into one of the noble first families of Valledupar and studied at Harvard University for a time before becoming manager of the city’s branch of the Banco Popular. One day in 1987, under cover of a strike that filled Valledupar’s plaza with angry peasant farmers, Trinidad went to work and stole £10,000 from the vaults of his bank. He then made his escape to the mountains, where he joined the FARC. He took with him the account details of several of his former banking associates and family acquaintances, which, in the years that followed, the FARC used to extort large sums of money from some of Valledupar’s most powerful businessmen and landowners.

  By 2004, when he was arrested in Ecuador and speedily deported to Colombia to face charges of extortion and kidnapping, Simón Trinidad had become the FARC’s ‘foreign secretary’ and a leading member of its Secretariat. At the end of that year he was extradited to the United States to stand trial for the kidnapping of three American military contractors, and is currently serving a sixty-year sentence at the ‘Supermax’ prison in Florence, Colorado.

  In 2008, the man known as Jorge 40, the most powerful paramilitary chieftain on the coast, and by chance a childhood friend of Simón Trinidad, was also extradited to the United States, in his case on charges of cocaine smuggling. Jorge 40 had been implicated in more than 500 murders on the Caribbean coast, including twenty-one in the town of Aracataca, the town Gabriel García Márquez has acknowledged as being the inspiration for Macondo, the imaginary settlement immortalized in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Once classmates, Simón Trinidad and Jorge 40 had both taken up arms, one to fight for revolution, the other to organize what he called ‘the resistance’. Now they stood indicted by the same foreign justice.*

  I would have liked to ask Rodolfo what Simón Trinidad had been like as a child, but he was midway through giving the table his thoughts on a speech that Juan Manuel Santos had just given to Congress. The president had been outlining his Victims Law. Whether they were victims of the guerrillas, the paramilitaries or the Army, plaintiffs in any case since 1985 would now be entitled to compensation for what they had lost. If the Victims Law made it through Congress, the number of claims would in all likelihood run into the millions. It marked a huge step forward from the line taken by former president Uribe, who had always denied that there were any victims of state violence in Colombia.

  President Santos was also pushing for approval of a Land Law, which would put the onus on landowners to prove that they had legal title to their land. If passed, this too would have momentous consequences. In the late 1990s, paramilitaries had stolen land on a vast scale. In some cases, they simply helped themselves to the fields, houses and livestock left behind when their owners fled the fighting between the Army, guerrillas and paramilitaries. In other cases, they made the owner an offer he couldn’t refuse. Many campesinos had left for the city after accepting a paltry sum for their life’s labour. Once the paramilitaries had drawn up fake ownership papers, they would then sell the land, often to cocaine traffickers.

  There has been a lot of speculation about just how much land the displaced have left behind over the past thirty years. Lower estimates are of 2 million hectares; upper estimates are closer to 5 million. According to the most recent, and most credible, calculations, 6.6 million hectares – 25,482 square miles – is nearer the mark. That’s an area the size of Ireland.* Such was the scale of the land grab, it has been said that half of Colombia’s productive land has been acquired illegally. Not that it is very productive any more: more than half of those displaced from their land believe that their fields have simply been left to grow weeds. This in turn suggests that the land was bought not for farming, but as a quick and easy way of laundering the cocaine traffickers’ ill-gotten US dollars for Colombian pesos.

  ‘Get that,’ Rodolfo said with a stab of a stubby finger, ‘America’s staunchest ally in the war on drugs has done nothing to stop drug traffickers buying up half the country! Well, if the president is finally making noises about returning that land to its rightful owners, all to the good. But I’ll believe it when I see it!’

  Returning fallow land to its rightful owners should be relatively straightforward. But in the many cases in which the land is being farmed, the process is going to be more difficult. If the Land Law is to reverse the rural counter-revolution that the AUC oversaw, and achieve justice for the millions of smallholding farmers who have been forced off their lands, Santos will have to take on the cocaine traffickers, as well as the stubborn remnants of the paramilitaries.

  Unlike his predecessor Álvaro Uribe, Juan Manuel Santos isn’t a landowner. Prior to becoming a politician, he worked as a journalist and then as a businessman. He is from one of the most illustrious families of the bogotano elite. I had seen photos of a young Juan Manuel with a beard, posing by his Alfa Romeo in the mid-1970s, before he set off on a road trip around Europe. He didn’t put the wind up me like Uribe once did; by default, I liked him. So did millions of Colombians – in the presidential election of 2010, he won more votes than any candidate in the country’s history. Santos has admitted that Colombia is ‘a very unequal country’, adding, ‘if we don’t correct that we will never really have a solid democracy.’* He says that he wants to make his government transparent, effective and responsible, and has vowed to root out corruption, create a million and a half jobs and build a quarter of a million new homes – what isn’t to like about Juan Manuel Santos?

  So why was he challenging the narcos? I asked. Contrary to received opinion, they aren’t exactly pariahs in Colombia: a third of those with seats in the last Congress were thought to have struck deals with cocaine traffickers, paramilitaries or both. ‘It’s a populist move,’ said the man in the Hawaiian shirt. ‘He’s just trying to curry favour with the voters.’

  Lucho wasn’t so sure. ‘Santos knows that agriculture has to be modernized,’ he chipped in. ‘Most of the narcos are only interested in raising cattle – the rightful owners would put it to better use.’ It was a neat answer, but a little too neat for my liking. While cocaine traffickers have left much of their land fallow, they have also invested in huge plantations of West African oil palms for biofuels, as well as many other crops that are exactly what the globalized food business is looking for. Far from holding back the progress of Colombian farming, some of the narcos are at the forefront of modernization.

  In fact, it is the poor campesinos who are most at odds with Santos, the technocrats at the Ministry of Agriculture and thei
r World Bank advisors. Remembering the conversation I had with Humberto Martínez in Jordán, it struck me that even if the peasants did get their land back, they were going to have to grapple with the familiar problems of rural poverty. They needed access to markets and easy credit. The studies to determine what was and what wasn’t a viable crop had yet to be written.

  Be that as it may, in the last months of 2010, bureaucrats from Incoder* – the Colombian Institute for Rural Development – set about distributing token amounts of land. Although most of it had long been left fallow, official ceremonies in departments like Putumayo, Meta and Chocó showed that there was real political will behind the president’s campaign.

  But attempts to kick-start land reform in the villages around Valledupar weren’t going well. Prior to his arrest and eventual extradition, the paramilitary chieftain Jorge 40 had forced out hundreds of campesinos. What he didn’t keep for himself, he parcelled out to his friends in the mayor’s office, killing seventeen people in the process. ‘Incoder was due to hand over one hundred and seventy-two properties in December,’ said Rodolfo, ‘but the head of the local branch had to resign after they found out that even he had had a hand in the paramilitaries’ land grab. Plenty of local lawyers, mayors and police officers were in on it too. They’ve been making fraudulent deals in land around here for the past twenty years. Lots of the landowners around Valledupar are testaferros – fronts for cocaine traffickers. The local authorities have got used to negotiating with corrupt businesspeople and corporations.’

  Rodolfo was not optimistic for President Santos’ Land Law. ‘Look what happened up in Apartadó,’ he went on. In the closing months of 2010, attempts to return land to its rightful owners in the banana-growing lowlands near the border with Panama had also failed. Local farmers had stood in line for hours, clutching weathered photocopies of the deeds to their properties, patiently waiting for the officials from Incoder to show up. If their title were acknowledged, the years of humiliation would be over. The landless and the displaced would become true citizens, with rights recognized and respected by the state. ‘They showed up on the Friday and before Monday morning, the president of their co-operative was dead,’ said Rodolfo. Everyone assumed that he had been killed by sicarios from one of the bandas criminales still active on the coast. ‘It was a brutal way of saying “over our dead bodies … and if we have any say in it, yours”.’*

  President Santos’ attempt to address the longstanding grievances of those forced to flee their lands is a laudable one. But even if every displaced farmer gets his land back, the government faces a steep uphill struggle if it wants to secure peace in the Colombian countryside. Ever since independence, its landowning families have ruled huge haciendas, particularly in the coastal departments and the eastern plains. These antioqueño and costeño families enjoy the kinds of privileges last enjoyed by the feudal lords of medieval Europe. As Alfonso Cano, the late leader of the FARC, once pointed out, only one in every two hundred farms in Colombia covers more than 500 hectares, but those estates cover over 60 per cent of the country’s farmland.† In Cauca, the southern department whose fertile soils are ideal for growing sugar cane, pineapples and all manner of tropical crops, one can travel for hours without leaving the property of one man. Huge swathes of land are given over to raising cattle, which generates few jobs and little food. Much of this land is under-used because while owning land is a sign of wealth, keeping it unused is a sign of great wealth.

  Colombia’s biggest landowners have jealously guarded the status quo for generations. Direct taxes on property, land or income, which would have a disproportionate impact on the rich, contribute a much smaller proportion of the government’s income than they do in richer countries.* That is because the landed rich have long had more political clout than other interest groups. That clout only grew bigger when they joined forces with Colombia’s paramilitaries and drug traffickers. In defending their interests, they’ve colluded in some of the worst atrocities and become still more reactionary, belligerent and uncompromising. Mindful of atrocities to come, President Santos has made it clear that his Victims Law will accept compensation claims until 2021.†

  The next morning I was woken by the sound of a man singing at the top of his lungs, in a hoarse voice that veered from lament to reproach. Then I heard what I took to be an exotic bird; in fact it was the sound of his cackle. He seemed to fall asleep after that. Moments later, the students of the music school around the corner from the Hostal Provincia struck up the national anthem on their drums, trumpets and triangles.

  On the list of things to see and do around Valledupar, the owner of the hostel had mentioned the spot where Jorge 40 and 2,000 of his men had demobilized in 2005. Only a few years before, the people of Valledupar would have been too scared to mention his name. Now, with the local patrón behind bars in Miami, they were encouraging the tourists to come and have a look for themselves.

  I’d arrived in the low season. The Hostal Provincia was only a couple of years old and was still having teething troubles. A carpenter was taking a plane to the edge of the bathroom door, which had been sticking in its jamb. The landlord and a couple of high-school apprentices looked on expectantly. This was the city’s first foray into hostel tourism and the owner was hopeful that it would attract young backpackers, both Colombian and foreign, to his city. Valledupar, he told me, was the obvious jumping-off point for a trip into the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the highest coastal mountain range in the world. Pico Cristóbal Colón is 5,775 metres high, but only 25 miles from the idyllic beaches of the Caribbean.

  Over dinner at ‘Nandoburgers’, I found myself sitting opposite a cattle-ranching family, who were all wearing cowboy hats. The head of the family looked as prosperous and paunchy as a bull, as he sullenly chewed a steak that looked like boot leather. I ordered the meatballs. ‘They’ve had the last of them,’ the waitress told me, pointing with her lips at the family slurping their way through plate-loads of cassava, plantain, rice and beans. I ordered the chicken – again. The colour of green vegetables glowed in my memory like emeralds, so long had it been since I last ate one.

  After dinner, I took a stroll around the town. One house I passed seemed to be getting ready for a party. Twelve or so plastic chairs had been set up around the little front garden, all facing a sound system that must have scared the birds out of the trees hours ago. But apart from two teenage girls, the seats were empty, and since the vallenato was too loud to make conversation, they just stared into space. Everywhere I’d been in Colombia, I’d heard the sounds of vallenato. A couple of tunes had stuck in my head, but for the most part, I found its shrivelled vocabulary of boy-meets-girl, set to an umpah-lumpah rhythm, to be uninspiring stuff. I was looking forward to getting back to Bogotá, where salsa was king and vallenato was the country cousin.

  So when I returned to the hostel to find the courtyard crowded with musicians tuning their accordions and guitars, getting ready for a vallenato session, I gave an inward groan. But the music they played that evening was worlds apart from what I’d heard on the radio. They sang about local people that everyone seemed to know and their songs were accompanied by loud laughter and cheering.

  During a break in play, they invited me to sit in and a fresh bottle of rum was cracked open. The accordionist told me that they were in town for the same commemoration of the paramilitary massacres of the nineties that Lucho had attended earlier that day. I asked him why the vallenato he was playing sounded so much better than the generic fare I’d heard booming from bars, buses and isolated Army checkpoints up and down the country.

  ‘The vallenato that they play on the radio is popular, but it’s no longer folk music,’ the accordionist said. ‘Folk songs can be inspired by anything, you know? The birds singing in the trees, how the river has risen, a friend who’s had a mishap … The good, the bad – everything.’ Vallenato had been the dominant sound in the coastal departments for generations, he told me, but it was only in the last ten years that it h
ad become popular outside the region. Now there was only one kind of vallenato. The sounds of merengue, puya, paseo and son were gone, as were the stories they illustrated. ‘These days, all they sing about is love. It’s a shame, but it’s the record label that decides what is recorded and all they want to know is whether the song will sell or not,’ the accordionist said, as he helped himself to more rum.

  Tomás, a wiry and quick-witted man of fifty, had been listening to our conversation and chimed in. ‘The music they make now sounds like ranchera,’ he said, dismissing the Mexicans’ cowboy music with a wave of the hand. ‘Vallenato is no longer a music that identifies the people who make it.’ Like many Colombians, Tomás was a keen and gifted raconteur. Real vallenato had evolved over hundreds of years, he assured me. The music-makers of the Caribbean coast had composed merengue-vallenatos to pay tribute to Simón Bolívar during the war of independence. Eighty years later, Felipe Yepes had written vallenato songs for his fellow soldiers during the War of a Thousand Days, before dying on the battlefield in 1901. But to understand the roots of vallenato, Tomás told me, I had to know something about the history of Valledupar.

  Not for the first time, I found that a question about the present quickly led me to an answer from the distant past. Tomás topped up our plastic cups, took a thespian pause for breath and began to tell me the story of his hometown. ‘Valledupar lies between the Sierra Nevada to the north and the tail end of the Andes further south. To the west is the River Magdalena; to the east, the desert of the Guajira …’

  The city was originally called la valle de Upar, Upar being the chief of the Chimilas, the people indigenous to this part of Colombia. In 1531 the German Ambrosius Dalfinger became the first European to reach Upar’s valley. One of the members of his expedition kept a journal, in which he described the natives’ farms and fields, as well as their trade route inland, where they traded their sea salt for gold. This pass opened to the south and was an obvious avenue for Dalfinger’s quest to reach the South Sea. The natives were ‘a very numerous and spirited people’, the journal keeper wrote, and ‘from what we saw and learned … a truthful people’. Moving up the pass, Dalfinger’s men met another peaceful people, the Pacabueyes, who invited them to stay in one of their villages, which had over 1,000 huts. Dalfinger’s journal keeper wrote that ‘all the Indians of this town of Tomara work gold. On some days, we obtained, by gifts or by trading, over 20,000 castellanos (91 kilos) of gold.’