Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the new Colombia

by Feiling, Tom

  Fortunately, the mud only lasted for a few hundred yards, after which we followed a dry road that ran parallel to the railway tracks for four bumpy hours. All afternoon we rode in silence. Since the tarpaulin had been pulled down the pick-up’s sides to shield us from the rain, the only distraction was the young Wayúu woman sitting nearest the tailgate. With her was a clever-looking girl of five or so, who I took to be her sister. Like all the Wayúu women, the older girl wore a loose-fitting dress that reached to her ankles. She had high cheekbones, a wide Asiatic face and beautiful, open brown eyes. I watched the glistening skin on her jaw as she turned to look at the way we’d come, her slender neck and the outline of her breast where the afternoon light passed through her dress.

  I tried not to stare but there was nothing else to do. The other passengers were watching her too: some older women, with deep creases in their faces and long black hair, who looked like Red Indians; two younger men of thirty or so, with the build of hard workers and the same steady gaze as the women; and a jowled old man who looked like a frog. I wondered if it was me – the stranger – that made them watchful of her. Perhaps they were half protecting, half chastising the prettiest one aboard.

  When I did steal a peep from under the tarp, the landscape was as it had been for hours. The yellow clay of the desert was covered with a webbing of thorn trees that crouched close to the land as if sheltering from the wind. Come late afternoon, the same coal wagons that I’d seen leaving the mine at El Cerrejón passed us empty on their way back south. In the distance, two huge cranes on the wharf at Puerto Bolívar came into view. Beyond them, the sunlight was glittering on the Caribbean. We crossed the tracks to drop off the girl and her sister at the workers’ compound, then spent another half-hour twisting and turning between the thorn bushes, along a makeshift track that followed the gulleys cut by flash floods.

  The few Wayúu in the remote north of La Guajira live in huts of knotted-together sticks of yotojoro, the inner core of the local cactus, under roofs that let the rain in, unless they can afford corrugated zinc. They get their power from generators that run from sundown until bedtime and their drinking water from butts set under the eaves of their shacks. They had seen little benefit from the coalmine or the row of towering wind turbines that we came to a little further on.* Twin anomalies from the modern world they, like the chupacabra, seemed to have come to La Guajira only to suck the blood of the living before jetting back into the depths of space.

  At long last the driver let us off at a tiny settlement of three huts and drove back the way he had come. I waited with what was left of the passenger list, as the rain came down in occasional big drops and the sun gradually lost its power. Then we were in another old Land Cruiser with all the electrics wrenched out and windows that wouldn’t wind up, on another winding desert road, paved in three portions of about ten yards each, interspersed with stretches of rock and sand that went on for miles.

  Cabo de la Vela turned out to be no more than a handful of huts strung along the beach. I made for the nearest lodgings. Doña Flor’s was a yotojoro hut with two pokey rooms for guests, which gave onto a small concrete patio, where her husband Jorge strung up a hammock for me to use the next day. The patio led right onto the short beach. Though there was no electric light to see by, the moon illuminated the phosphorescent bodies of millions of underwater animals. It had been a long journey, so I made my excuses and went to bed, though only after Jorge had been around my hut with a pump-action insect fumigation pump.

  With the first light of the next day, the women of Cabo de la Vela came out to rake the little patch of sand in front of their properties. Between carefully raked stretches there was loads of rubbish that no one felt obliged to pick up, but as the mayor’s office seemed to be regarded as no more than a source of booty, there was no collective action to tackle the litter. There were signs telling the tourists not to drop litter, but as there were no tourists, the litter must have been dropped by the locals, the signs a tidy way of ducking the blame for it. The women kept their patch clear; the bits in between that belonged to no one went neglected.

  Though there was no music to be heard that morning, a little girl was gyrating with a beachside statue of the Virgin Mary to the reggaeton rhythm in her head. I walked along the beach towards the lighthouse, following the curve of the bay along a track that led between enclosed ranchería homesteads onto the bare headland. There the sand gave way to rusting red rock, whose outer layer had been cracked into countless tiny pebbles by the sun. The lighthouse stood atop a bluff, on the far side of which I sat for a while, looking down at a solitary canoe. I didn’t have a watch, but even after walking for two hours, it couldn’t have been long past eight in the morning by the time I got back to Doña Flor’s hut.

  Around eleven o’clock, the sun came out for an instant, but the sky quickly loomed dark over the milky blue-white sea and it began to rain. The sun didn’t re-emerge until sunset, when a crack of golden light stole out from under its cloudy blanket, giving me a tantalizing glimpse of what Cabo de la Vela might look like if only it would stop raining.

  The guidebook had said that Cabo de la Vela was like a tropical version of the west coast of Ireland, but I seemed to be the only tourist to have believed them. There was next to nobody there and nothing to do. The following morning, I watched a pelican fly by. In the afternoon, I watched two dogs mating on the beach. At five o’clock, the hem of the curtain of cloud that had cast a thrall over the day lifted an inch, and a stream of tropical light gave me a late glimpse of the electric-blue and white Cabo that I had come here to see. By six, it was dark and by nine, I was asleep.

  Back at Doña Flor’s, we ate red snapper for lunch and we had it again for dinner. Jorge, a black man from Riohacha, told me that he had come up here to marry Flor, who was Wayúu. But conversation didn’t come easily to anyone in Cabo de la Vela, and Jorge preferred to eat in silence at the bench where he repaired his fishing nets. Flor, whose girth was so perfectly round that her behind and her belly were effectively one and the same, ate at a chair by the door. When she wasn’t cooking, she spent the day looking out onto the empty sand road that ran past her hut. Her feet didn’t touch the ground, so she dangled them in the air, gently kicking in time with some unheard rhythm. Such was Cabo de la Vela, where the land and everything else ran out. After two days, I felt as if I knew the contours of life there in their entirety. The only way now was back.

  10. The Emerald Cowboy

  Eishi Hayata is an esmeraldero, and was until recently one of the most powerful men in the emerald business. He is also the only foreigner to have made it big in Muzo, the humid village in the mountains of Boyacá, sixty-five miles northwest of Bogotá, from whose seams 80 per cent of the world’s emeralds are hewn. When I’d tried to track down Eishi Hayata in 2001, I was told that he was in Hollywood, hawking around a script of his life story. Since then I had seen no trace of him – until the day I happened to be in the office of a professor at the Universidad de los Andes and saw a poster for Emerald Cowboy on the wall. The professor told me that he was a good friend of Eishi Hayata – I was in.

  In the interim before we were due to meet, I went online to see what I could find out about Emerald Cowboy. Apparently, the Japanese emerald don had approached Jason Priestley to play the part of himself, but the Beverly Hills 90210 actor had turned the script down. Eventually, tiring of looking for backing in Los Angeles, Eishi decided to make the film himself. He named himself executive producer, and even took the lead role, at least in the present-day sequences. I was impressed by his verve, but I hadn’t seen the end result. The New York Times had – and wasn’t. Its reviewer wrote, ‘Emerald Cowboy must surely occupy a unique place in film history as the most solipsistic film ever made … The movie is crushingly mundane and is unlikely to attract any audience beyond close relatives.’ No matter: I was looking for somebody who could tell me more about Colombia’s emerald miners, not a film-maker.

  Although by now most bogotanos were win
ding down for the Christmas holidays, the emerald traders along the Avenida Jiménez were still huddled under the awnings of the shops around Plaza del Rosario, carefully unwrapping squares of white paper to inspect the tiny stones inside. They held them to the light with tweezers, searching for imperfections and the highly prized dark-green ‘garden’ at the heart of every stone.

  I threaded my way through the crowd of buyers and sellers thronging the pavement outside the Henry Faux building and took the lift, a scrupulously maintained brass-trimmed relic from the 1950s, to the fifth floor. Eishi Hayata’s office was behind a reinforced-steel door at the end of a long, echoing corridor. I knocked as loudly as I could and a small eye-level panel in the door slid back. A large, impassive face appeared close to my own. I told its owner my business; he gestured for me to wait and slid the panel shut. A moment later, the door opened and I was ushered into an adjoining room.

  I could hear steam hissing from an urn in the kitchen that filled the air with the sweet aroma of eucalyptus tea. Eishi Hayata was sitting at the dining table, which had been cleared of lunch, looking out of the window at the street below. He was wearing a dark-blue suit that had grown shiny with age and wrap-around Armani shades. When he took them off, his eyes struck me as being at once expressionless and slightly child-like. He ran his fingers through his hair, pushing it back over his head. It was still thick and black and looked unwashed.

  He told me that it was the day before his seventieth birthday. ‘No be a stupid proud, but I think I can say that I am one of the last adventurers in this world,’ he said brightly. ‘But not now,’ he said with a derisive flick of his fingers. ‘Now there is no adventure. Maybe only killing – but that’s not adventure.’ I recognized the quick, impatient gestures: Eishi had been in Colombia for a long time.

  In the 1990s, the Japanese press had dubbed Eishi Hayata ‘the king of emeralds’. ‘That time, I had fifty million dollar export yearly. Commission eight per cent – imagine, eight per cent of fifty million dollar!’ But the recession had hit the jewellery business hard, particularly in Japan, the biggest export market for emeralds. Ever since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Eishi had heard only bad news. ‘Now I don’t even have $2 million yearly. In the future, maybe finish.’ He winced at the thought and stared out of the window gloomily.

  The first outsiders to set foot in the New World had found emeralds all over the northwestern corner of South America. The precious green stones excited their cupidity no less than gold, but it wasn’t until 1564 that the conquistadores found the source of the emeralds, when the Spanish captain Juan de Penagos literally stumbled upon the hidden treasure of Muzo, after a strange object hobbled his mount. Lifting the horse’s hoof, he found a green rock the size of a child’s fist embedded in its frog. Crossing the brow of a hill, de Penagos found what until then only a few chosen members of the Somondoco tribe had been permitted to see. On a mile-long spur of the hill, he watched in fascination as native diviners, inspired by a hallucinogenic brew prepared from the ayahuasca plant, tried to locate the richest veins of emeralds. Once found, they prised the stones loose with long sticks before flushing them down the mountainside through a system of water channels, to be graded and cut.

  Having located the source of Colombia’s emeralds, the Spanish were keen to take control of it. But good Christians couldn’t just help themselves to what wasn’t theirs, so their priests set about devising some justification for the plunder that was to come. The Jesuit naturalist José de Acosta ventured that it was part of God’s design to hide the world’s precious stones in its remotest parts, among its most primitive peoples. ‘God placed the greatest abundance of mines (in such remote places) so that this would invite men to seek those lands and hold them, and in this way to communicate their religion of the true God to those who did not know it.’

  It was an elegant justification for the pillage of the Americas by Spanish adventurers, and de Acosta also came up with a simple metaphor to illustrate God’s intentions: ‘A father with an ugly daughter gives her a large dowry to marry her; and this is what God did with that difficult land, giving it much wealth in mines so that by this means he would find someone who wanted it.’*

  Unfortunately for God and the Spanish, the ugly daughters of Boyacá didn’t see it quite like that. They put up fierce resistance to the invaders, so it was another twenty years before the conquistadores got their hands on what were to become the richest emerald mines in the world. Having secured control of Boyacá, the Spanish expelled the Somondoco’s diviners and brought in African slaves to work the mines alongside the local indigenous men. Together, they made a handful of impoverished European noblemen very wealthy.

  The history of the mines has been no less bloody since the Spanish were driven out of Colombia. In 1848, Congress decreed that the country’s emerald deposits be worked under the direction of the nation. But this noble writ from Bogotá was easily bypassed by the men who ran the department of Boyacá. Government ministers, seeing that they had no way of enforcing the laws they had drafted, happily signed contracts with private parties. Despite a glaring lack of qualified geologists and engineers, and chaotic management, the emerald mines at Muzo have been worked almost continuously ever since. In the 1950s the mines fell under the control of Efraín González, one of the best-known Conservative bandits of the era of La Violencia.

  But the man whose name has become practically synonymous with emerald mining in Colombia is Victor Carranza. Born into a poor family in Guateque, a village set amidst the sacred lakes of highland Boyacá, Carranza knew little of his father, who deserted the family when he was still a baby. A few years later, his older brother found a large emerald and went to Bogotá to sell it, promising to return with the proceeds and buy a plot of land for the family – that was the last they ever heard of him. Young Victor vowed that he would find an emerald of even greater value, and set to work as a prospector in the mines. Some say he was only seven at the time; others, that he was already ten. None dispute that he achieved his goal, for Victor Carranza went on to become the biggest emerald don of them all.

  Eishi Hayata had other motives for going into the emerald mines. ‘When I was young, two movie I like only. Adventure – American guy went Guatemala, Nicaragua and Chile. Other one is Arabe Lawrence. I loved that type life. I wanted to go somewhere. Maybe Latin America. Somewhere like war.’

  Eishi had been born in Tokyo, but his family was evacuated to Kyushu, in the far west of Japan, for the duration of the Second World War. He was four years old when the war ended in 1945. ‘That was very rough countryside of conservative age in Japan. Hard place. Hard people. Everything hard. I was good family, not strong like country bear. But Kyushu people like to give a shit to Tokyo people and I had to fight to protect my family.’

  At high school, Eishi became the leader of his gang. ‘I don’t like to be beaten by that shit yakuza. But I never hit anybody – somebody attacked and I react. That’s defence. Always shit guys run.’ After graduating in 1957, Eishi went to the United States in search of adventure. ‘I went Arizona, Nevada, Indian reserve area. Just hitch hiking, living like Indian. About one year and a half, I was looking for adventure. But nineteen century is over. No more gold rush. Old western doesn’t exist!’

  So Eishi went back to Japan, trained to be an aircraft mechanic, and went to work for Northwest Airlines. ‘Mechanic engineer chief O’Higgins telling, “Oh, you go Latin America with smuggler.” ’ Cigarette and alcohol smuggling was rife in the Caribbean in the late 1960s, so Eishi decided to try his luck in Costa Rica, where he soon found work maintaining the smugglers’ planes. It was while living in Costa Rica that he first heard about Colombia’s emerald mines. They seemed to promise the kind of adventure he had been searching for, so in 1973 he moved his young family to Bogotá and started buying rough stones in the mining villages of Boyacá. From there, he would take them back to the capital, where his team of Japanese gem cutters would prepare them for sale.

  ‘The first couple y
ears get back by bus, because poor esmeraldero. Then, 1975, I bought Land Rover – like a cowboy get a horse.’ Eishi had come to Colombia at a time of great change in the emerald mining business. Increasingly, miners needed bulldozers and high-pressure water pumps to expose new seams. The mine owners had to borrow money to buy the equipment, but the emerald mining business was fraught with risk and they couldn’t guarantee potential backers any return on their investment.

  In the early 1980s, the mines of Muzo found themselves in the sights of Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellín cartel. The newly minted cocaine baron was flush with US dollars and keen to find a reliable way of laundering them. At first it seemed a mutually advantageous partnership, but Escobar wasn’t content to play banker to the mine owners, and soon began muscling his way into the emerald business. The local bosses refused to roll over for the upstart from Medellín and before long Muzo found itself on the front line of a bloody turf war. Between 1984 and 1990 rival clans of miners banded together to resist the cocaine cartels, then fractured as they set to fighting amongst themselves over ownership of the mines. Locals called it the Green War.

  ‘Victor Carranza like to take everything,’ said Eishi. ‘But other emerald mine owner, they can’t stand. Of them, chief was Martin Lojas. Not only Carranza and Lojas fighting – everybody want their benefit. Kill, kill, kill!’ The words came out of his mouth as if they were punches. By 1989, when Pablo Escobar’s cartel was being wracked by spasms of internecine suspicion and retribution, the most dangerous part of Colombia was not Medellín but the mining district of Boyacá. During the six years of the Green War, the number of murders committed in Muzo soared. In 1990, the homicide rate peaked at 439 per 100,000, a staggering figure when you consider that in Honduras, currently the most murderous country in the world, the homicide rate is 82 per 100,000. Up to 5,000 people – a full 6 per cent of the population of Muzo and the surrounding villages – died in the fighting.*