by Austin Galt
Having quenched my thirst, I then set off around the outside of the walls. In the distance stood the skyline of Bocagrande with its many high-rise apartment blocks. It is situated on a peninsula between Cartagena Bay and the Caribbean Sea and caters to both the domestic and international tourist market. Whenever I look at the skyscrapers, I think, This is the town built by cocaine. Just as Miami saw its construction boom coincide with the cocaine boom, so too did Bocagrande.
Many drug deals would be made in some of Bocagrande’s high-rise apartments. This area certainly didn’t have the beauty of the Old City and walking around the area was not nearly as enjoyable as my earlier stroll. Apart from serving as a meeting place for gangsters, it is just another tourist spot.
Each year the Hilton Hotel in Bocagrande hosts the Señorita Colombia or Miss Colombia beauty pageant. Colombian society embraces femininity and the contest is a highlight on the tourist calendar. The Hotel Caribe is another big hotel in the area. In 2012, it was the scene of the infamous US Secret Service scandal when an agent took a local prostitute back to the hotel for the evening after agreeing on a price. In the morning he reneged on the agreement and kicked her out. She complained to police and all hell broke loose. President Obama was coming to town for the 6th Summit of the Americas – not that anyone remembers that.
The Castillo San Felipe de Barajas or San Felipe de Barajas Castle, which is a 16th-century fortress that sits atop a hill not far from the Old City, was also the scene of a scandal in 2012 when a pornographic film was made inside the castle in the plain light of day. The porn actress played a tourist guide, while the porn actor played a tourist. The tourist got lucky!
The year 2012 was an eventful one for the Cartagena tourism office. But as they say, all publicity is good publicity.
It was a decade before these scandals took place that I first took a dip in the waters there. The beaches are made of volcanic ash and formed from man-made breakwaters. This causes the waters to be muddied. Quite frankly, I was a bit nonplussed. They are not the beautiful beach paradises with crystal clear water one dreams about when thinking of the Caribbean. The nearby Rosario Islands are much more idyllic and are where several gangsters built their own tropical hideouts, including a massive villa built by Pablo Escobar. I would find my own tropical paradise a bit further along the coast near Santa Marta.
8
A TRUE PARADISE
The bus trip from Cartagena to Santa Marta, the capital of Magdalena and the oldest surviving city in the country, took about four hours, which was a breeze compared to some of my previous long-haul journeys. The bus made a brief stop around the halfway mark in the Atlántico state capital of Barranquilla, which is Colombia’s fourth largest city and the centre of commerce on the Caribbean coast. The city is also the home town of a couple of Colombia’s most famous exports – the singer Shakira, and the actress Sofía Vergara, whose older brother Rafael was murdered in 1998 on orders from Víctor ‘El Mellizo’ Mejía after he found out Rafael had been in the company of his girlfriend.
Setting off again, the bus then crossed the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta or Big Swamp of Santa Marta via a small, artificial strip of land. This is a huge swampy marsh that forms part of the delta system of the Madgalena River, Colombia’s principal river, beginning over 1500 kilometres away to the south in the Andean mountains.
Some mountains came into view as we approached Santa Marta which contrasted to the flat landscapes of Barranquilla and Cartagena. These mountains grow much higher into what is the highest coastal mountain range in the world – the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta or Snowy Mountain of Santa Marta. It is an isolated mountain range and separate from the Andes. Its peak is over 5700 metres above sea level and only 42 kilometres from the coast and features several differing ecosystems, depending on the altitude, such as cloud forests, montane forests and grasslands.
The Sierra Nevada is the site of La Ciudad Perdida or The Lost City. This is Colombia’s version of Machu Picchu, the ancient Inca citadel in Peru. It is believed to have been founded 650 years or so before Machu Picchu, but it was not discovered until 1972. Local indigenous tribes said they knew about the site before this but kept it a secret. There were hiking tours to the site on offer which involved a six-day hike through dense jungle and included walking through coca plantations. The area was a hotbed of criminal activity with right-wing paramilitaries opposing the presence of both the FARC and ELN guerrillas.
The Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) or National Liberation Army is regarded as the FARC’s smaller cousin. Originally, its ideology combined communism with liberation theology, which is an interpretation of Christianity that emphasises concern for the poor and oppressed. It was inspired by the Catholic Church’s response to the inequalities in Latin American society as depicted by Pope John XXIII at the Second Vatican Conference in 1962.
The ELN was founded in 1964 by Fabio Vásquez, who led a small group of insurgents training near the town of San Vicente de Chucuri, Santander. They prepared to launch an attack blitz the following year. On 7 January 1965, over 25 ELN guerrillas attacked the town of Simacota, Santander. They rode into town on horses killing several policemen and soldiers, ransacking the local bank and stealing some weapons before telling the townsfolk that the attack was not against the town but the system of capitalism.
The elenos, as the ELN guerrillas are referred to colloquially, had announced their presence on the country’s stage with their Manifesto of Simacota. They stated their political movement was based on anti-imperialist and anti-oligarchic proclamations, the protection of national industry, a public health plan and the creation of a national academy of science. Their catchcry was ‘Liberación o muerte!’ or ‘Liberation or death!’
The guerrillas backed up their initial assault with a string of actions which helped increase their presence in the minds of the Colombian people. On 3 February 1965, they attacked the town of Papayal, located a bit further north in Santander, killing a couple of policemen. On 17 March 1965, the ELN published the Plataforma para un Movimiento de Unidad Popular or Platform for a Movement of Popular Unity which laid out the group’s objectives for Colombia’s poor working class. On 22 April 1965, they made an audacious raid on Bucaramanga airport, killing a policeman and stealing a large amount of cash. On 3 July 1965, a guerrilla entered a hospital in Barrancabermeja and killed Florentino Amayo who had been the group’s first deserter and had divulged some key information to the military which led to several guerrillas being captured. On 17 August 1965, the guerrillas attacked the petroleum infrastructure on the outskirts of Barrancabermeja in what would be the first of many attacks against the country’s oil infrastructure over the coming decades.
It had been a sparkling honeymoon period for the guerrilla movement, succeeding in capturing the attention of left-wing radicals around the country, including Camilo Torres.
Camilo Torres was born into an upper-class family in Bogotá. Shortly after, his family moved to Europe where he spent the next 16 years. Upon completing schooling, he returned to Colombia and entered a Catholic seminary to train as a priest. This brought him face to face with the downtrodden and those forgotten by society and he became disturbed by the gross inequalities that existed in Colombian society. Torres eventually returned to Europe to study sociology before graduating in 1958. His thesis, The Proletarianisation of Bogotá, discussed the poverty that existed in the nation’s capital.
He returned to Colombia and became a popular and outspoken professor at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá, where he organised students and rebelled against the traditional church’s hierarchy. He believed Christianity’s message of ‘love thy neighbour’ needed to be materialised and could not be reduced to just a spiritual or charitable form. This led to him being fired from all his positions at the university and losing his funding for sociology works.
After renouncing the priesthood in 1965, he formed the political movement Frente Unido or United Front which brought together workers
, students and peasants as well as militants from various left-wing groups. It held large rallies and demonstrations to push its cause. However, with many of its activists being persecuted by the government, Torres left the movement and joined the ELN guerrillas in the mountains of Santander.
Camilo Torres died in his first battle on 15 February 1966. His death made him the official martyr of the ELN and the standard-bearer for other guerrillas to emulate. The government hid his body to prevent his grave from becoming a place of pilgrimage. He is known for his expression, ‘If Jesus were alive today, he would be a guerrilla’.
Internal crises in the ELN followed the death of Torres with several members executed. Many members were also captured by authorities and sent to prison. Under pressure from military forces in the early 1970s, the guerrillas found refuge around the municipalities of Anori and Amalfi in the north-eastern region of Antioquia. The group came very close to extinction in 1973.
On 7 August 1973, the government of Misael Pastrana, the 23rd president of Colombia and father of future president Andrés Pastrana, ordered a military operation against the ELN guerrillas. It was called Operation Anori. The Colombian military flooded the zone, surrounding ELN positions and killing or capturing over 100 guerrillas, which was about half of their fighting force, thus putting them in a very fragile state. While the operation lasted until 18 October that year, the guerrillas remained boxed in for quite some time afterwards. When Alfonso López Michelsen became the 24th president of Colombia in 1974, he allowed the remaining guerrillas to escape in the hopes of commencing peace negotiations. Instead, they regrouped and refinanced.
After the debilitating defeat, several members deemed responsible were executed. Fabio Vásquez fled to Cuba and stayed there rather than submit to a ‘revolutionary tribunal’. He was replaced by Manuel Pérez and Nicolás Rodríguez Bautista, who guided the guerrillas back from the brink.
Manuel Pérez, known as ‘El Cura Pérez’ or ‘The Priest Pérez’, was a Spanish priest who travelled to Colombia to join the guerrilla movement in 1969. He had been inspired by Camilo Torres and had come to the country with two fellow Spanish priests – Domingo Lain, who was killed in battle in Anori in 1973, and José Antonio Jiménez, who was killed by a snake bite in the mountains of Antioquia in 1970. After more than two decades of leading the guerrillas, Pérez died in 1998 after contracting hepatitis C.
Nicolás Rodríguez Bautista, known as ‘Gabino’, joined the guerrillas in 1964 while still only 14 years old. He participated in their first assault on the town of Simacota. Known as a hardliner, he became the top leader in 1998 following the death of Manuel Pérez.
The ELN command structure is similar to that of the FARC. Around two dozen members make up the Dirección Nacional or National Directorate, while around five members make up the Comando Central (COCE) or Central Command. Under the leadership of The Priest Pérez and Gabino, the ELN increased their kidnapping and extortion activities, entered the drug-trafficking business and formed new fronts to attack both Colombian and international companies operating in oil-rich zones.
The Domingo Lain Front was formed in 1980 and operated in the municipalities of Arauquita, Saravena and Tame in Arauca state. It soon struck oil, literally. In 1983, Occidental Petroleum discovered a huge oil field in Arauquita. The Caño Limón oil field became a cash cow for not only the company but for the ELN as well. A pipeline was built to transport the oil to Coveñas on the Caribbean coast 780 kilometres away, and it provided some easy access to oil for the guerrillas who would blow it up and steal the oil, or receive extortion payments for not blowing it up. These ‘petrodollars’ were just the tonic for the ELN to get them going again after struggling since the near-annihilation in Anori.
The guerrillas looked for ways to assimilate into the area and many locals joined their movement. Family members, friends and neighbours all entered the guerrilla ranks and were therefore able to share in the spoils. The ELN also instituted standards of behaviour for both the guerrillas and civilians. Everyone was expected to abide by the rules. The mantra of the guerrillas in Arauca remains to this day, ‘You are with us or against us’.
Despite the new oil revenues, the ELN guerrillas still kept up their kidnapping activities which were always a good money earner. In 1984 they kidnapped four German engineers working for Mannesmann AG which was the company contracted by Occidental Petroleum and Colombia’s state-owned oil company, Ecopetrol, to build the Caño Limón–Coveñas pipeline. A German private investigator was brought in to help facilitate the release of the engineers and to also guarantee the future of the pipeline in the face of guerrilla resistance.
The engineers were freed after an alleged payment of several million dollars, although the company has denied this. Part of this alleged payment was in cash while the other part consisted of investments in the community, such as building kindergartens and hospitals, as well as infrastructure projects, such as aqueducts and sewers. According to police, the man responsible for negotiating the alleged deal was Werner Mauss. He would go on to gain infamy in the country.
Werner Mauss has been described as the German James Bond. In Colombia, he was called Agent 008 and a suit brought against him by the Colombian government was called Case 16,000 as it was twice as scandalous as Case 8000 involving the Cali Cartel’s financing of the Samper presidential campaign. Interestingly, it was Ernesto Samper’s interior minister, Horacio Serpa, who was flown to Germany by the German government and entertained at a castle owned by Mauss, allegedly to talk about possible peace negotiations between the Samper administration and the guerrillas.
Horacio Serpa described Mauss as a promoter of international peace. The Colombian police described him as an agent, contact and supplier for the ELN. The government of Antioquia described him as a kidnapping commission agent. The German government described him as an influential person able to resolve disputes, while he was also described as a multinational company agent by the German company Siemens.
Mauss, who used various aliases, had originally come to Colombia in 1984 as a consultant for Siemens which was a partner in a consortium that won the contract to build the Medellín subway. The project cost blew out to three times more than was budgeted and was the subject of a corruption investigation. Mauss was alleged to have coordinated bribes on behalf of Siemens, and it was considered peculiar that during Serpa’s supposed peace mission to Germany, he made a trip to Siemens’ facilities.
From Werner Mauss’s initial contact with the ELN guerrillas in 1984, he became the go-to man for liberating foreign executives who became the victim of kidnappings. He was instrumental in securing the release of several high-profile kidnapping victims, including Brigitte Schoene.
On 15 August 1996, eight ELN guerrillas burst into the home of Ulrich Schoene, the ex-BASF chemical company head, in the wealthy neighbourhood of Llanogrande just outside of Medellín. While Schoene was away on business, his wife Brigitte, their five-year-old son and a maid were at home. After being rounded up, a guerrilla said to them, ‘This is a kidnapping. You are all coming with us’. The watchman on duty was also taken, however he and the maid and the boy were released the next morning to raise the alarm.
Ulrich Schoene brought in the British firm Control Risk to negotiate his wife’s release. After negotiating the ransom down to around $200,000, substantially less than the original $2 million demand, Werner Mauss entered the scene offering to help. Schoene rejected his advances and then, all of a sudden, communication from the guerrillas stopped.
Mauss called Schoene a few weeks later and is believed to have shown him proof that Brigitte was still alive and that he could get her released immediately. However, the ransom had jumped back up to $1.5 million. (Mauss was alleged to receive 25 percent of all ransoms.) Schoene felt he had no other option other than to pay it if he wanted to see his wife again. Mauss then instructed him to cut off relations with the police and Control Risk and return to Germany with his son, which he did in early November, reportedly to arrange
the payment.
Colombian investigators began seeing similarities with this case and previous rescues by Mauss, leading them to believe the German was in cahoots with the ELN. Intelligence sources received information that the guerrillas were going to turn Brigitte over to Mauss on 16 November 1996, three months after being taken. Police operatives were placed in the Rio Negro airport just outside of Medellín and Werner Mauss was spotted there at 11.30 pm with his wife and Brigitte Schoene as they were about to board a chartered plane bound for Germany. They were stopped by officials who asked them for identification, and false passports were produced for all three. The police were onto them, however, and Brigitte was freed while Werner Mauss and his wife were taken into custody.
Colombian authorities alleged that, as well as profiting from the liberation of kidnapping victims, Mauss was intimately involved in planning kidnapping operations with the ELN guerrillas. He was charged with carrying false passports, aggravated extortion and conspiracy to kidnap. But after spending over a year in jail, all charges were dropped with Werner Mauss and his wife cleared of all wrongdoing.
As for the deal he allegedly negotiated with the guerrillas in Arauca, despite benefiting the community a vocal critic of the ELN’s criminal activities arose in a Catholic Church bishop, Jesús Emilio Jaramillo. Jaramillo had also aligned himself with the military which annoyed the ELN and, on 2 October 1989, the 73-year-old bishop was murdered by the guerrillas. The Priest Pérez was excommunicated from the Catholic Church for this unholy crime.
Many church leaders have been killed over the years in Colombia because of their refusal to cooperate with the outlaw groups. An expression in Colombia goes, ‘The communists rape the nuns and kill the priests’.
