Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the new Colombia

by Feiling, Tom

  Much of the insecurity and general lawlessness that until recently dominated life in Colombia is down to the rise of the clase emergente – the cocaine traffickers. Nouvean riche narcos might besmirch Colombia’s reputation overseas, but they have played an important – and largely overlooked – role in encouraging poor Colombians to become less deferential and more impatient for material betterment. This new-found assertiveness often works in mysterious ways. Although Bogotá’s churches are full on Sundays, priests complain that nobody makes confession any more. Ostensibly, their parishioners are great fans of authority, respect and orderliness. As I knew from personal experience, Colombians can sit in meetings for hours, and love to talk in high-flown bureaucratese. But they make better kings than subjects, and the construction of a truly democratic, pluralist society is still a work in progress. Traditionally they respect those who lay down the law, but not the act of obeying laws. It follows that the smartest – and possibly the happiest – were the abejas, the bees – the schemers and charmers; great company, but watch your back.

  As I prepared to fly back to London, I thought about what I was leaving behind. Certainly, a love of parties: Colombians are supremely sociable people. I had rarely seen them alone: in parks, bars and cafés, they were always in company, whereas I often went to all three just to read a book. But Colombians are not great readers; nor are they great ones for hobbies, most of which are solitary. Thanks to their love of company, hundreds of model airplanes go unassembled, back gardens untended and sweaters un-knitted.

  Their distaste for solitude meant that I had met few shy, reserved or awkward Colombians on my travels. They didn’t seem to be hampered by lonely ambition, as many Anglo-Saxons tend to be. In fact, they weren’t hampered by loneliness of any kind, which is rapidly becoming the biggest cause of physical and social ills in the west. While they prided themselves on their love of hard work, nobody was striving to improve, better or reinvent themselves. They seemed to have little interest in self-expression, self-discovery or self-anything for that matter.

  My time in Colombia had been a welcome break from life in London. While sociable, they weren’t ones for the gossip and backbiting I overheard on British streets. There was none of the cutting sarcasm or self-deprecation that comes with British company. Despite their country’s fearsome reputation, Colombians seemed more hospitable, better mannered, and kinder – both to themselves and others – than a lot of British people.

  In 1800 the French doctor Marie-Françoise-Xavier Bichat, the father of descriptive anatomy, defined life as ‘the collection of functions that resist death’. Maybe, after living through so much violence and injustice, Colombians have decided to make a project of life, as a conscious act and endless struggle. While the British seem to enjoy indulging their most gloom-laden imaginings, Colombians don’t give voice to them. Maybe they have realized that there is no point in taking serious matters too seriously.

  Or perhaps, rather than being a resigned response to the conflict, their happiness precedes it. I am sure that Colombians owe much of their vitality to living on a continent so obviously blessed by nature. However wracked by human folly, Colombia’s mountains, rivers and jungles are a source of inspiration to anyone who lives among them. Their sheer abundance is an affirmation of life at its most elemental, one that those eking a living in tundra, desert or concrete jungle will never be able to count on.

  Perhaps that explains their striking insularity. For despite having received few foreign visitors and practically no immigrants since the nineteenth century, the Colombians I met on my travels seemed surprisingly lacking in curiosity – not just about the outside world, but their own country. Notwithstanding their strident patriotism, few of them had travelled its country roads, and given the chance of a holiday, most chose to head for Miami. Those who couldn’t afford the flight would rather go to the Caribbean than the Sierra Nevada or the Amazon. Perhaps their fear of the open road is a habit picked up when the risk of running into a FARC roadblock was ever-present. Those days are gone, yet the country hostels where I stayed were more likely to host foreign backpackers than young Colombians eager to see the most bio-diverse country in the world.

  The first time I visited Colombia in 1999, a man stopped me on the street in Cartagena and thanked me for ignoring the nay-sayers. He was glad to see a foreigner look beyond the one-way mirror and pay a visit to a notorious country. Twelve years later, growing numbers of foreigners are discovering the bounty of Colombia. Despite the ragged contours of its national history, it seems destined to emerge from its years of solitude in the years to come. The world is in for a treat when it does.

  Acknowledgements

  For their insights into the history of the conflict, I’d like to thank Luís Eduardo Celis Méndez of the Corporación Nuevo Arco Iris, Omar Gutierrez, Michael Reed of the International Center for Transitional Justice, Timothy Ross and everyone at the Fundación Fenix.

  In helping me to understand the plight of the Nukak Maku, I’d like to thank Giovanni Lepri of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Villavicencio, Dr Albeiro Riano, and Richard McColl. On the impact of the conflict on the department of Meta, my thanks to Edinson Cuellar Olveros and Carolina Hoyos of the Colectivo Sociojurídico Orlando Fals Borda.

  I’d like to express my gratitude to Carlos Gómez for inviting me to hike the Canyon Chicamocha with him and for letting me quote from his book Desde Aquellos Días. Roddy Brett at the Universidad del Rosario was great company in my first days back in Bogotá and put me in touch with Gonzalo Patiño at the Universidad Industrial de Santander, whose insights into the rise of the ELN guerrillas were much appreciated, as were those of Joe Broderick.

  My trip to San Carlos, Antioquia was instigated by Oystein Schjetne from the Golden Colombia Foundation in Bogotá and wouldn’t have been possible without the assistance of Pastora Mira García from CARE San Carlos and Miguel Ángel Giraldo. My trip to Puerto Berrío was organized by the photographer Paul Smith in Medellín, who worked incredibly hard and let me take a back seat throughout the time we spent in the town.

  On the coast, I’d like to thank Carlos Sourdis, and in Valledupar Stefani Jiménez Mora and the vallenato historian Tomás Dario Gutierrez Hinojosa.

  For feeding me leads and stories from the emerald mining business, thanks to Nicolás Lazzarelli, Ralf Leiteritz at the Department of Political Science at the Universidad del Rosario and Jacinto Pineda Jiménez of ESAP Boyacá in Tunja.

  My thanks to friends in Bogotá who kept me company and distracted me from writing – Simone Bruno, Tiziana Laudato and Nate Russo, who was also good enough to offer tips on my pitch. For bringing my Spanish back up to scratch, my thanks to Luz Ángela Castelblanco. For sharing the many stories he heard while working at El Tiempo, as well as his gin and tonic, thanks to Richard Emblin from the City Paper in Bogotá. Thanks too to Maribel Lozano, who was as generous as ever with ideas and contacts. Special thanks to Ricardo Andrés Sánchez Mosquera, my best friend in the city, whose meanderings through time and space it was my pleasure to share.

  Back in the UK, I’d like to thank my agent, Broo Doherty, for fighting my corner and my mum, Deirdre Feiling, who patiently listened to a line-by-line reading of the first draft of this book. Thanks too to Michael Ryan, Sam Low, Adam Fausset, Geoff Grint and my editor Helen Conford, who gave me precious feedback on the first draft.

  Wherever I have mentioned monetary sums, I have worked from an exchange rate of £1 = 3,000 Colombian pesos, which was correct at the time of going to press.

  Some names have been changed to protect the identities of people at risk of stigmatization, intimidation or worse.

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  First published 2012

  Copyright © Tom Feiling, 2012

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Cover photographs: Tom Feiling; Alexander Rieser

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-84-614584-1

  * See Nils Christie, A Suitable Amount of Crime (Routledge, 2004).

  * Dominique Moisi, The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope are Reshaping the World (Doubleday, 2009).

  † ‘Colombia Becomes the New Star of the South’, Newsweek, 16 July 2010. The article went on to praise Colombia as one of the CIVETS, the emerging economies destined to follow the rise of the BRIC countries: Brazil, Russia, India and China. The CIVETS are Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa.

  * ‘In Pablo Escobar’s Footsteps’, Guardian, 13 September 2011.

  * The quote is from Angosta, by Héctor Abad Faciolince (Planeta, 2003), p. 12.

  * There are more kidnappings per person in Mexico, Ecuador, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela than in Colombia; see http://bigtravelweb.com

  * See Héctor Abad Faciolince, ‘Colombia: Boceto para un retrato’, El Espectador, 9 March 2009.

  * Raúl Reyes was a high-ranking FARC commander, killed by the Colombian Army in a cross-border raid into Ecuador in 2008.

  *Alfonso Cano was killed by the Army in November 2011. At the time of writing, the FARC was led by Rodrigo Londoño, alias ‘Timochenko’.

  * Marco Palacios, Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia 1875–2002 (Duke University Press, 2006), p. 44.

  * Inequality is measured by the Gini coefficient, a number between 0 and 1, where 0 corresponds with perfect equality (where everyone has the same income) and 1 corresponds with perfect inequality (where one person has all the income, and everyone else has zero income). Colombia had a rating of .59 in 2008.

  * David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself (University of California Press, 1993).

  * John Hemming, The Search for El Dorado (Michael Joseph, 1978), p. 77.

  * Ibid., p. 86.

  * Ibid.

  * ‘Legión Británica en la independencia de Colombia’, unpublished article by Coronel Guillermo Plazas Olarte; also General Álvaro Valencia Tovar, ‘La Legión Británica’, El Tiempo, 18 April 2005.

  * ‘Colombian Army Accused in Massacre of Drug Police’, Washington Post, 18 June 2006.

  * Héctor Abad Faciolince, ‘El puñal y la herida’, El Espectador, 18 December 2010.

  * ‘Unos 3.000 niños, asesinados por paramilitares en Colombia’, El Mundo, 19 February 2010, citing a report published by the NGO Tribunal Internacional.

  * ‘La noche negra de alias “Cuchillo” ’, El Espectador, 29 December 2010.

  † Strictly speaking, the subjunctive is not a tense, but a mood, used to denote doubt rather than assertion. It is widely used in Spanish, but there are only vestiges of it to be found in English grammar, ‘If I were a rich man …’ being the example that most readily springs to mind.

  * John Hemming, The Search for El Dorado (Michael Joseph, 1978), p. 23.

  † ACNUR, Comunidades Indigenas en el Municipio de Villavicencio (2010).

  * Hemming, Search for El Dorado, p. 16.

  * Ibid., p. 29.

  † Ibid., p. 56.

  * Ibid., p. 63.

  † Ibid., p. 102.

  * Marco Palacios, Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia 1875 – 2002 (Duke University Press, 2006), p. 167.

  * Hemming, Search for El Dorado, pp. 38, 139.

  * Richard McColl, ‘The Plight of the Nukak Maku’, City Paper (Bogotá), July 2009.

  * La Defensoria del Pueblo is the ombudsman’s office, created by the Constitution of 1991; it is the last resort for any Colombian with a legal grievance against the state.

  * Organización Nacional Indígena de Colombia.

  * Pedro Gómez Valderrama’s La otra raya del tigre, first published in 1977, is a wonderful, fictionalized account of the life of Geo von Lengerke. Sadly, it is only available in Spanish.

  * ‘El unanimismo de hoy lo hubiera envidiado Álvaro Uribe’, interview with Cecilia Orozco in La Silla Vacía, 4 January 2011.

  * Much of what follows is from Frank Safford and Marco Palacios, Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society (Oxford University Press, Inc., 2001); David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself (University of California Press, 1993); Marco Palacios, Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia 1875–2002 (Duke University Press, 2006); Forrest Hylton, Evil Hour in Colombia (Verso, 2006); and Alfredo Molano, ‘The Evolution of the FARC: A Guerrilla Group’s Long History’ in NACLA Report on the Americas, Sept/Oct 2000.

  * Bushnell, Making of Modern Colombia, p. 163.

  * Palacios, Between Legitimacy and Violence, p. 142.

  * Hylton, Evil Hour in Colombia, p. 52.

  † Gonzalo Sánchez Gómez, Pasado y presente de la violencia en Colombia, cited in Steven Dudley, Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia (Routledge, 2004), p. 7.

  * Esperanza Paz y Libertad (EPL) means ‘Hope, Peace and Freedom’.

  * Álvaro Salazar, UP propaganda chief, cited in Dudley, Walking Ghosts, p. 95.

  * The remark was made by the Minister of Defence, General Samudio, to a presidential advisor, Carlos Ossa Escobar; see ‘Former Presidential Advisor: Army Worked with Paramilitaries to Exterminate Opposition Party’, Justice for Colombia newsletter, 5 June 2011.

&
nbsp; * Dudley, Walking Ghosts, p. 202.

  * Robin Kirk, More Terrible than Death: Drugs, Violence, and America’s War in Colombia (Public Affairs, 2004), p. 144.

  † Dudley, Walking Ghosts, p. 146.

  ‡ Ibid., p. 148.

  * ‘Official Report Illustrates Uribe Carnage’, Justice for Colombia newsletter, 27 January 2011.

  * In Colombia, a costeño is somebody from the Caribbean coast, though ‘the coast’ refers to the departments which border the Caribbean, which may extend up to a hundred miles inland.

  * Many of the religious customs and local legends mentioned in this chapter are taken from Luís Eduardo Cabrales Jiménez, Mitos, leyendas y relatos del Río Magdalena comentados otra vez ( Jiménez Editorial Lealon, 2009).