Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the new Colombia

by Feiling, Tom

  The violence soon reached Bogotá, where most of the mine owners had their offices. ‘Every day, killing in front of me,’ said Eishi. ‘Beside me, guy sitting down, we were talking, young guy running and coming to look for his enemy. “Bang, bang, bang!” Only a few minutes ago he was here and now dead!’ He laughed and I found myself laughing along with him. When I had first met Eishi, his skinny, stooped figure, surrounded by deferential security guards, had made it easy for me to forget that he was a don, well accustomed to dispensing violence in a controlled and comprehensive way. If at first he hadn’t unnerved me, he did now, and my laughter came out hollow.

  In 1990 the Bishop of Chiquinquirá brokered a truce between the mine owners and the cartels. Pablo Escobar and his associates acknowledged that winning control of the gem trade would be impossible. Thereafter, emerald mining became a public–private venture, with much less scope for interference from the cocaine business. The softly spoken Carranza, backed by his own private army, emerged as the undisputed don of the mines.

  That same year, Eishi Hayata bought his first mine; the following year, he bought two more; the year after that, he went into partnership with a consortium of mine owners to expand into five more mines. Before long, he had a 5 per cent stake in Cosquez, one of the biggest and most lucrative mines in Boyacá. As his profits increased, he upped his stake and took on more miners. In his biggest mine, he employed 300 men. ‘After 1985, I start export. Then become biggest. Victor Carranza number one. I’m number two.’

  Emerald miners were expected not just to find emeralds, but also to defend their boss when jealous rivals went on the attack. Every mine owner had a retinue of armed guards, who regularly shifted their grip from pickaxe to pistol. In return for their loyalty, Eishi took care of their families’ medical bills and their children’s school fees. ‘My mine worker, my family. In the end, I am Indian chief tribe. System like that.’

  Eishi and his men soon found themselves fighting a war of their own in Cosquez. The neighbouring mine belonged to Martin Lojas, one of the dons who had fought and lost the Green War with Victor Carranza. As the rival esmeralderos pushed further underground, disputes broke out over the boundary between their mines. Overground, fighting would flare up over the smallest things and the working day often ended with a shoot-out. ‘Countryside mine area, his worker go a bar and then met my worker and “hijo de puta!” He kill my worker! At night, put body in jeep and taking to his father’s place. “Your son, accident killed.” Never say “fighting”. Otherwise revenge like that. Revenge!’ he said, stabbing the table with a bony finger.

  Revenge was a recurring motif in the isolated villages of Boyacá. Without laws respected by both sides, violence could only become cyclical. Eishi often found himself adjudicating in conflicts between families that went back generations, if only because he was the only person who could. There was no police station to take a complaint to. Title deeds meant nothing in Muzo and Cosquez, where lawyers were only hired to cover the tracks of the private armies. And Eishi knew all too well that his rivals would exploit the first sign of vacillation. If he didn’t retaliate to attacks, his men would doubt his resolve and might be tempted to supplant him. ‘Colombia is revenge country,’ said Eishi. ‘That’s why no need death penalty. Because has a thousand professionals. Easy to get cheap.’

  Lawlessness could be terrifying, but it was also a great leveller. The seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote that we enjoy a kind of equality when any of us can kill anyone else. Until President Uribe brought down his ‘hard hand’, violence was a fact of life, not only in the emerald mines but in hundreds of towns and villages across the country. Abiding by the law and deferring to the writ of Bogotá made no sense in the anarchy of Boyacá. In the absence of laws, what a miner needed was a patron and the loyalty of his fellow miners. Unfortunately, that loyalty was always at risk of being undermined by bribes or threats, so the balance of power was never stable. While for the most part the miners thrived on the camaraderie that existed between them, nothing was dependable and there were times when the colder, more calculating characters among them came to the fore.

  It was a contradiction well expressed by the salsero Alfredo ‘Chocolate’ Armenteros, when he sang ‘Tu no tienes problema conmigo si no te lo buscas – You’ll have no problem with me unless you’re looking for one.’ It was a line from a salsa song that I often heard in bars and cafés in the countryside. Many of the peasant farmers I met on my travels were great individualists. On meeting, they would offer one another an open hand, but were always ready to turn feisty if need be. Campesino culture could be violent, but it was also free, and the earthiness of many of the country people I met on my travels was as appealing as it was unnerving.

  Back in London, I had often found people to be indifferent or downright rude, because there is no law against bad manners. But in Colombia’s villages, offending somebody without good reason can still get you shot. When there is no police officer to turn to, people become surprisingly well mannered. Like most British people, I am not in the habit of using violence to negotiate my way through the world. When civility breaks down, most Londoners are more likely to sign up for classes in anger management than to wade in with their fists. But wherever the law is less than resolute, assertiveness training won’t get you very far. Generations of Colombians who have grown up on the lawless frontiers have learned to fight or risk losing everything. Was it any surprise that, if they made it to university, their children studied ‘violentology’ and ‘conflict resolution’?

  Martin Lojas was in no mood to resolve the conflict with Eishi Hayata. He would accept nothing less than total control over the disputed mine. ‘Then, he like to kill me,’ Eishi said, sounding a little hurt at the idea. ‘I don’t like to kill him. But I like to give back shit.’ Both dons began to invest a rising share of their profits in men and weapons. ‘I had hundreds of fighters. I don’t say how many killed!’ Not for the first time, Eishi made his emerald war sound like just another scrap in the school playground in Kyushu. But then he would remember something closer to home and the smile would fade from his face. ‘Lojas send hitman lot time here. But they can’t do. Rich man, always half dozen bodyguard in jeep.’

  The final denouement wasn’t long in coming. Hayata contracted 300 mercenaries to come to Cosquez from Medellín. ‘I have paramilitary chief friend. Lots. Medellín paras very strong.’ They headed down to the Magdalena and then up into the mountains of Boyacá in a fleet of nine coaches.

  ‘But then call from Victor Carranza.’ The other mine owners were worried that the feud between Hayata and Lojas was about to become a second Green War. As the ultimate powerbroker in the region, only Carranza could avert that eventuality. ‘Mr Hayata, you can’t do that,’ Carranza told him. ‘If you put your paramilitaries in Cosquez, you’ll have to fight all of us.’

  Even Eishi’s bank manager felt moved to intervene, warning his client that he would have no choice but to cut off his line of credit if he were to provoke another war. So Eishi bowed to Carranza. ‘You have to make friends with Martin Lojas,’ Carranza told him. ‘You have to give him a hug.’

  Peace-making didn’t come easily to Eishi. ‘Brother Carranza,’ he begged, ‘let me fight. Otherwise, they never respect me. They think I’m fucking weak foreigner. I’m not.’ But Victor Carranza persisted, and in 1994 he had the thirty mine owners of Boyacá, including Eishi Hayata, negotiate terms for another peace agreement.*

  The onset of peace in the mines raised hopes that Boyacá might flourish on the back of its emerald wealth. But Colombia’s economy has always been at the mercy of world markets and the emerald business is no exception. The mine owners’ truce coincided with the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy. Suddenly, the biggest market for Colombian emeralds dried up. Reserves of emeralds had run low during Eishi’s feud with Martin Lojas, but with international prices at rock bottom, there was no incentive for anyone to replenish their reserves. Colombia’s biggest emerald exporter lu
rched from one crisis to another until eventually he was forced to sell up.

  The hundreds of campesinos from all over the country who had followed him into the mines, anxious to strike it rich, now found themselves jobless. Few of them had seen any lasting benefit from the emerald business. They had laboured in poverty, beset by the threat of an early death in a region that the government had abandoned to the dons. Many of them left for the cities. Others turned to coca cultivation, for the international market in cocaine has always been an oasis of relative calm in the stormy world of global commodity prices. ‘Nowadays, only money laundry people making money,’ Eishi told me. ‘This country really shit working nicely drug capital. Government completely rotten. Drug people invited me many, many times, but I never accept, because I’m too proud.’ Eishi seemed miles away, lost in his scorn.

  I knew that he’d been back to Japan a few times, so I asked him what he thought of the country it had become. He sighed. ‘When I get there, one day, “Oh, nice modern country. Organized way. Restaurant good. People gentlemen.” But second day, bored. Nothing happen.’ Modern Japan had been built on peace, democracy and prosperity, and he could find few reminders of the Japan that he had grown up in. His childhood friends seemed glad, but Eishi couldn’t help wondering what his home country had lost, as law conquered chaos and the traditions of righteous anger and vengeance faded away. Estranged from what was once familiar, he was always quick to get a flight back to Bogotá.

  ‘Japan collect logic. But Colombia is not logic. Is not collect. Colombia is … ’ He rooted around for the right expression. ‘Ridiculous disorder.’ He looked half disgusted, half thrilled by the idea. ‘But that’s original human nature, I think. When we are born we need food and steal. Colombia looks like modern, but it is not. Too many poor people.’

  I also knew that, having grown up with their father in Bogotá, his children now lived in the States. I wondered if he ever considered following them there. He said that he did, though only reluctantly. ‘My children say, “Father, we know you’re a man likes shit country.” Yeah, I like this shit country. Because I’m complete adventurer. Samurai spirit, I have. Maestro look for a place and a time to die.’

  Eishi told me that he had always admired Saigo Takamori, the samurai from Kyushu who had led the revolution that brought down Japan’s Tokugawa government in 1867. Despite the success of his revolution, Takamori soon grew bored of peace and threw himself into planning an ill-fated invasion of Korea. The new Meiji government was near bankrupt and didn’t have the means or the inclination to back Takamori’s plans. But his supporters were outraged by the new government’s reluctance to support their leader, so 40,000 of them marched on Tokyo from Kyushu, determined to avenge the slight. They were vastly outnumbered by the 300,000 soldiers that the government sent to meet them. Takamori was pushed back towards his hometown of Kagoshima, where he found refuge in a cave on Mount Shiroyama. ‘He had everything, but don’t care,’ Eishi said. ‘He want another adventure.’ Saigo Takamori gathered a handful of loyal followers and committed hara-kiri – ritual suicide. ‘He lost, but he won’t be sorry.’*

  I’d spoken to countless Colombians who told me that theirs was a ‘normal’ country, blighted by the cocaine trade and the pariah status that foreigners afforded it. It was an understandable reaction, though it went hand in hand with a reluctance to admit, much less tackle, the source of the violence that has until recently plagued their country. Eishi Hayata, on the other hand, seemed to revel in the lawlessness that he found in Colombia. Now that it looked to be on the road to ‘normality’, and Eishi on the road to a comfortable if boring retirement with his kids in Miami, I wondered how he pictured the country’s future. ‘I think Colombia will modernize and then become weak,’ he told me. ‘Nowadays young generation all looks same. Corner of London, corner of Thailand – everywhere, nice, educated gentleman. No more roughness!’

  A few days after meeting Eishi Hayata, I was introduced to one of the ‘nice, educated gentlemen’ who are gradually taking over from Colombia’s emerald cowboys. I was back in the north of Bogotá, where the boutiques and bars of the Zona Rosa were festooning their windows with tinsel and baubles in the run-up to Christmas. I had spent the afternoon with Richard Emblin, a Colombian-Canadian long-term resident of Bogotá and editor of the City Paper, the capital’s only English language newspaper.

  Richard was a familiar dynamo of coffee-fuelled intelligence and rapid-fire diction. He had been regaling me with stories of running the picture desk at El Tiempo, a job he held for most of the 1990s, and one that gave him a front row view of the saga that culminated in Colombia practically being labelled a failed state. Now it was getting dark and he had to rush to meet a client who owed him some money for advertising space. So we walked a few blocks to one of the upmarket Juan Valdez coffee shops that had mushroomed across the city with the good times.

  There we met Kurt Winner, the American director of an online business-networking organization. Kurt was a new arrival, keen to catch a ride on the rising fortunes of the Colombian economy. In the lapel of his blazer he wore a three-inch-square flat-screen TV that was running an advert for Corona beer in mute. He must have been in his early fifties, and had the look of a one-time college athlete. He sat with his legs wide apart and flashed his smile like a weapon, revealing perfectly shaped, slightly opaque teeth. His very blue, wide-open eyes lent him an appearance of unnerving earnestness. Somebody had polished his brogues to a high shine.

  Once he’d given Richard his cheque, Kurt started telling us about the skills he was teaching to Colombia’s business executives.‘There are three types of people in the world,’ he said, as he drew a square, a circle and a triangle on a paper napkin. He asked us to choose the shape that we most identified with. Richard and I both chose the triangle; Kurt said that he too was a triangle ‘That’s because we’re all kinda spikey’. Squares tended to be intelligent, he said, while circles liked sex and drugs. It sounded as if Kurt didn’t like squares or circles.

  The smart bars and restaurants in the north of the city were swarming with entrepreneurial Americans like Kurt. Former president Álvaro Uribe’s ‘democratic security’ policies had given foreign companies the confidence to start making long-term investments in Colombia. As the dollar and euro continued to decline in value, the price of gold had hit an all-time high. British companies were investing millions to expand production in the country’s gold mines. Australian, Canadian, Brazilian and even Indian mining companies were also combing the Colombian countryside for opportunities. The Chinese were after the country’s iron, but also had ambitious plans to build a new city on the Caribbean coast and even a new canal through the swamps of the Darien Gap, which would allow their container ships to bypass Panama.

  On paper, Colombia has all the makings of a twenty-first-century success story: in addition to its wealth of minerals, it has a biodiversity rate that is second to none, huge wind and water resources, and millions of hectares of potentially bountiful farmland. The United Nations has identified seven countries that, together, have the potential to increase global food production by half in the next fifty years.* Colombia is one of them; although currently near-roadless, the great eastern plains may yet become one of the world’s biggest suppliers of maize, rice, soya, sugar cane and all kinds of tropical fruit, not to mention cattle, pigs, rubber and hardwoods.

  Such talk makes the coterie of diplomats, academics, politicians and journalists responsible for Colombia’s image management giddy with excitement. The Economist has named Colombia the ‘C’ in CIVETS, the select group of emerging economies poised to boom in the next ten years. There are sticking points, but everyone (or at least everyone in the north of Bogotá) seems to agree that a turning point has been reached in the government’s battle with the FARC. By a combination of American arms and multinational capital, Colombia’s new friends in the international community are determined to make up for the years in which Bogotá, Cali and Medellín were no-go zones for investor
s. The Colombian government has sealed the deal by signing a free-trade agreement with the United States and would like to do the same with the European Union. As Eishi Hayata said, this is no longer an adventurers’ country. Thanks in large part to Álvaro Uribe, Colombia is on its way to becoming a neo-liberal showcase.

  But Richard, the honorary Colombian who had braved the worst of the bad times, wasn’t convinced. He referred to the new arrivals as the country’s fair-weather friends, all primed to jump ship the next time a bomb went off in the capital. I wasn’t convinced either; I wanted to share in the optimism of people like Kurt, but after several months of travelling Colombia’s highways and byways, I couldn’t help but remember the one-way mirror that David Hutchinson had looked through when he was with his FARC captors in the mountains overlooking Bogotá in 2002. The stock market might have been booming, but most Colombians I had met had yet to see any improvement in their living standards, and nothing I had witnessed suggested that would change any time soon.

  In most developing countries, the children of the poor have traditionally escaped poverty through the education system. There is a public education system in Colombia, but since few people with any money use it graduates often find that they don’t have the right contacts to get the few well-paid jobs to be had in the private sector. The public sector is more accessible, but it is shrinking, and most of the bureaucrats that run the country also hold degrees in business management or international relations from American or European universities.