Journeys in the New Colombia
ALLEN LANE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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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
Introduction
Map
1. The View from Bogotá
2. Meeting the McCormicks
3. The Last Nomads
4. An Imaginary Place between Macondo and Medellín
5. The Armed Strugglers
6. Downriver to Mompós
7. Going Back to San Carlos
8. ‘NN’: No Name
9. From Valledupar to the Cape
10. The Emerald Cowboy
11. Merry Crisis and a Happy New Fear
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.
‘Do they have skyscrapers?’
It was my last night in London before leaving for Colombia, and I was having a drink with a friend in the West End. He knew that I’d been coming and going between London and Bogotá for several years and that I’d lived there for a year in 2001. He knew that I’d made a documentary about hip-hop in Colombia and that I’d worked for a human rights NGO called Justice for Colombia. On hearing that I was going back he had given me a wink and tapped the side of his nose – a reaction that I was well used to – but until now, he’d never expressed much interest in the place.
With his question, it dawned on me that my friend knew next to nothing about Colombia. He knew that it was where cocaine came from. He also knew that the Medellín cartel had had Andrés Escobar killed when he scored an own goal for the national team in a World Cup match with the United States in 1994, though his ignorance was no worse than Alan Hansen’s. Watching the highlights of the game the next day, the football commentator had said (innocently) that ‘the Argentine defender warrants shooting for a mistake like that’.
I daresay most of the millions of casual cocaine users in the UK don’t know much about Colombia either. They turn a blind eye to the trade that carries their Friday night entertainment from some remote Andean hillside to the toilet in the pub at the end of the road. The British press, which routinely ignores news from Colombia, bears much of the blame for this benightedness. In the 1980s and ’90s our newspapers couldn’t get enough of the sensational, bloody war that Colombia’s cocaine cartels were waging. That war exercised a grim fascination and set a precedent for news reporting from Latin America, which has veered between the comic and the grotesque ever since.
Such is our love of the macabre details of ‘real-life crime’ that, according to the Swedish criminologist Nils Christie, depictions of organized crime in films, books and video games are currently worth more than organized crime itself.*
Pablo Escobar has become a modern-day legend, but since he was gunned down on a Medellín rooftop in 1993, the business that he pioneered has become more discreet and less entertaining. Colombia’s cocaine traffickers have become yesterday’s news.
The same might be said of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who were long ago relegated to the status of ‘insurgents’, then ‘narco-guerrillas’, and are now just plain old ‘terrorists’. Despite having rumbled on for the last fifty years, the FARC’s struggle with the Colombian government is a low-intensity war. It threatens no strategic western interests and the numbers are never really spectacular – at least, not until you look at the cumulative totals.
So the foreign correspondents were transferred from Bogotá to more newsworthy capitals. News editors turned their gaze towards Mexico, where the never-ending ‘war on drugs’ has decamped for its latest, gruesomely compelling chapter. Colombia is left with a war that most outsiders show no interest in and a reputation for crime and violence that is second to none. It is both demonized and ignored. Most people can’t even spell its name properly.
I quit my job at Justice for Colombia in 2005, and in time I too stopped following the news from Latin America. Notwithstanding the enormous changes taking place in Venezuela and Brazil, I thought that perhaps the French writer Dominique Moisi had been right when he wrote that ‘Latin America is not where the future of the world is being decided, nor will it become so in the immediate future.’* My Spanish got rusty, my memories faded and I moved on to other things. It still irked me when outsiders judged Colombia to be a basket case; that its cocaine traffickers, guerrillas and death squads seemed to capture, in a neat précis, all that they might want to know about the place. But the thrill I had once felt in immersing myself in that most obsessive and introspective of countries seemed gone.
Then, one day in the summer of 2010, while I was queuing for a pint of milk in my local newsagent’s, my eye was caught by the latest edition of Newsweek. For the first time in what seemed like years, Colombia was front page news. I bought a copy, and idled home with my nose stuck in its lead story. ‘In the past eight years, the nation of 45 million has gone from a crime- and drug-addled candidate for failed state to a prospering dynamo,’ it said. President Uribe’s ‘hardline policies on drugs and thugs’ had rescued the country from ‘almost certain ruin’. Colombia was ‘stable, booming and democratic’. It was ‘the star of the south’, one of the six emerging markets singled out by canny investors as ‘ones to watch’.†
Clearly, things had changed in the years since I lived in Bogotá. Back in 2001, all eyes had been on the peace talks that then-president Andrés Pastrana was holding with the FARC. Ultimately, the protracted negotiations and the well wishing of the hundreds of diplomats, politicians and journalists who made their way into the remote plains of Caquetá to see the guerrillas in the flesh came to nothing. After months of standing by and watching the government talk, the Army lost patience. The government called off the negotiations, and within hours the Air Force was bombing the FARC’s encampment.
President Pastrana had come bearing an olive branch, but Manuel Marulanda, the FARC’s commander-in-chief, never intended to lay down his weapons. Instead, he callously exploited the goodwill of millions of Colombians, stalling the government in peace talks while his high command drew up plans for a military takeover of Bogotá. Or at least, that was how the papers explained things.
After the talks collapsed, peace became a dirty word in Colombia. In 2002, not long after I returned to London, an openly belligerent candidate won the presidential election for the first time in twenty years. Álvaro Uribe had no intention of talking to the guerrillas. The way he saw it, the FARC were no more than terrorists. They were also responsible for the bulk of the cocaine production and trafficking that had so destabilized the country. If only they could be defeated, he reasoned, Colombia would soon be on the road to peace and prosperity. Uribe struck a chord with many Colombians, who were by now so desperate to live in peace, free from the threat of kidnap, robbery and extortion, that they happily voted for a man who promised yet more war.
When Álvaro Uribe came into office, most of the Colombian countryside was a no-go zone. Even the biggest roads were liable to be commandeered by FARC guerrillas on the look-out for passing millionaires they could kidnap for ransom, a venture they called la pesca milagrosa – fishing for a miracle. By the time Uribe stood down in August 2010, just a few weeks before I flew back to Bogotá, his country had seen ten years of Plan Colombia, a multi-billion-dollar programme of military aid from the United States. The Colombian Army had doubled in size and the FARC had been pushed back, up the remotest mountain slopes and into the densest jungle expanses. When I had lived in Bogotá in 2001, 400 of the country’s thousand or so mayors found themselves forced to share power with either left-wing guerrillas or the right-wing paramilitary armies that had sprung up to counter them. Now all the country’s mayors could work unhindered by ‘the men of violence’.
Wealthy Colombians no longer lived with the constant threat of kidnap and the country’s once-notorious murder rate fell to its lowest level for twenty-five years. Even the wealthy now felt safe to drive into the mountains that divided Bogotá from Medellín and Cali. Encouraged by the peace that followed in the wake of Uribe’s war, they began spending at home what they had long invested in Miami. Before long, the skylines of all three cities were dominated by cranes, as Colombia enjoyed a boom in construction.
The multinationals weren’t far behind. Between 2002 and 2010, foreign direct investment in Colombia jumped fivefold, from $2 billion to $10 billion per year. The value of Bogotá’s stock market shot up, as news spread of the abundance of natural resources Colombia had to offer the world. Tourists also cottoned on to the country’s natural bounty. In the first half of 2011 alone, the number of Britons holidaying in Colombia rose by 40 per cent.*
By the time I got home, milk and Newsweek in hand, I had all but booked a flight back to Bogotá. Not only were the roads safe to travel for the first time in thirty years, I knew that visitors to Colombia would search in vain for a book that explored its fascinating and little-known history. This was my chance to write that book: to venture into Colombia’s hamlets and villages, and get to grips with the stories their people had to tell. I was already itching to get back.
A few weeks later, I was sitting outside a coffee shop near the Hotel Tequendama in Bogotá with a man who had once been a member of the FARC – my London friend would probably have assumed that he was a drug trafficker. Funnily enough, we were surrounded by skyscrapers. I had been telling him about the general lack of interest most foreigners had in a country that remains a byword for general nastiness.
‘We are at war in Colombia,’ he told me sternly. ‘But the way you Europeans see it, no war fought in the Americas can ever be as dramatic or as testing of a nation’s moral fibre as World War Two was to European nations.’
He had a point: if Colombia was an unknown to my friend in London, perhaps it is because we judge the issues at stake in its various conflicts to be trifling, at least when compared to the titanic struggle between democrats, fascists and communists that dominated Europe for most of the twentieth century. But now the tables have been turned. I can imagine few causes that might inspire Londoners to take up arms – thankfully, Europe has had no reason to go to war with itself for more than sixty years. But London has become home for thousands of people fleeing foreign wars, many fought by soldiers convinced that war offers the only solution to the challenges their people face.
As a young man, the former guerrilla had certainly thought so. He had fought to achieve ‘true independence’ for his country, he told me. Now middle-aged, he was all too aware of the FARC’s role in making his country the epitome of festering, futile conflict. But his optimism for what was still for him ‘the New World’ was undimmed.
‘By the European reckoning, the nobility of a war is measured by how much blood is spilt. Colombia was conquered by Spaniards with great bloodletting. But it was liberated by Americans with comparatively little blood spilt.’ The wars of independence, at least, were something that Colombians could feel proud of, he told me.
He quoted a favourite author: ‘For the last two centuries this country has been known by a name that, if the history of the world weren’t a sequence of absurd coincidences, would have been given to all America: Colombia.’* He smiled and let out a sigh. Somewhere between the euphoria of the New World and the tragedy of the real one, Colombia’s story was waiting to be told. It was good to be back.
I had a few preparations to make before I could hit the country roads, as well as some old friends I was keen to catch up with, so I paid £220 for the month and moved into a little flat in La Candelaria, Bogotá’s old colonial quarter. It was on the fourth floor of Casa Los Alpes, a new apartment block, just around the corner from Casa Los Andes, the warren of Andean cottages where I’d lived back in 2001.
The Andean version had offered Eduardo the limping handyman a template, but the flats he had built at Casa Los Alpes had none of its rustic charm. The ceiling and the roof were made of great concrete slabs that he had pebble-dashed and whitewashed. The windows had metal frames, into which he had gummed squares of glass with silicon. Since the frames ran flush with the outside wall, they took the brunt of the winter rains, which seeped between the glass and the metal. I liked Eduardo and didn’t have the heart to complain about his craftsmanship. The puddles that accumulated at the foot of the window evaporated soon enough and I soon got used to drawing the green nylon curtains whenever it rained – which, as I soon discovered, was all day every day. The curtains, the rings they hung from and the poles on which the rings were strung were all home-made too. Eduardo had also made the kitchen counter, the shower cubicle and the single sheet of corrugated steel that was my flat’s front door.
The building was owned by an old Italian with bristling eyebrows, who would eye me suspiciously whenever I passed him in the street. If there was a ranking among the expat community, the old man was at the top, whereas I was just a rung above the dreadlocked backpackers who lived in the hostel at the top of my street. The old man shared a tiny office with his son Guillermo, who was the more amenable, public face of the enterprise. Tacked to its walls were various pithy bons mots, all of which hinged on the folly and menace of the global communist conspiracy.
Over the course of October, I found a tutor who helped me to get my Spanish back up to scratch and scoured the newspapers to re-accustom myself to the intricacies of the political scene. After eight years in power, Álvaro Uribe had left office in August 2010 as far and away the most popular president in the history of the republic. To his defenders, he was the greatest Colombian of modern times, the cattle farmer who restored the good name of a proud country. He was credited with building a dedicated, professional Army that had taken the war to the terrorists. His belligerent treatment of the guerrillas seemed to have secured the peace and prosperity that years of negotiations had not.
Once out of office, however, his star was quickly losing its lustre. An American court had called him to testify at the trial of alleged paramilitaries who had been extradited to the United States to face cocaine trafficking charges. Protesters had disrupted the lectures that he had been invited to give at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. And in Spain lawyers were preparing to prosecute him for human rights abuses. Back in Bogotá, the intelligence agency officials who had served under him were being called to account for the chuzadas or wire-tapping scandal. In the last year of his second presidential term, Uribe had tried to change the constitution so that he might run for a third time. Colombia’s intelligence agents (and, by implication, their boss) stood accused of bugging the journalists, judges and opposition politicians who had spoken out against the constitutional amendment.
In terrorizing the terrorists, Uribe had strayed a long way from the constitution he had sworn to uphold. But inadvertently, he had also made it possible for journalists to visit the villages that had been on the front line of the conflict. On my map, whose greens, beiges and deep browns hinted at the dramatic peaks and troughs of the unseen country, I began to plot a route.
My abiding memory of Bogotá had been of a city rendered pin-sharp by blazing Andean sunshine. In my fondness I’d forgotten how cold and damp the capital could get. On most days it rained so heavily and for so long that the narrow streets of La Candelaria became rivers that left those without rubber boots and umbrellas stranded on whichever city block they happened to be standing on. Come evening the rain would finally let up, allowing the storm drains to swallow the last of the floodwater. Mist descended from the surrounding mountains like a cloak, enveloping my neighbourhood in fog.
Yet it seemed that the city had got used to life without central heating. So one morning I walked down to the clothes shops below the Plaza Simón Bolívar, hoping to find a decent jumper. All I could find were hoodies and tracksuit tops – it seemed that bogotanos also lived without wool. So I jumped on a bus heading north. After the huge riots that had gripped Bogotá in 1948, anyone with any money had deserted the traditional barrios of the city centre to settle the north of the city. The banks, embassies and corporations had followed them. Their employees moved into pleasant tree-lined streets of brick low-rises, where their wives could spend their afternoons in beautifully appointed boutiques and patisseries styled after those of Paris and Miami. They left the accumulated architectural heritage of the city centre and its rather gloomy history behind, to be blackened by exhaust fumes and soot.
I jumped off the bus outside the Andean Centre, Bogotá’s best-known upmarket shopping mall. I padded its marble floors, cautiously eyeing the expensive imported clothing in the shop windows. Eventually I found a sweater in Benetton and paid the equivalent of £50 for a fluffy mixture of every warm thread imaginable, including alpaca, which is what kept most Andeans warm over the centuries before the arrival of cheap Asian polyester.
I’d arranged to meet an ex-girlfriend in the city’s nightlife district, a square mile of bars and clubs around the Andean Centre that is known as the Zona Rosa. I had some time to kill before we were due to meet, so I found a seat overlooking the atrium and ate a burger. A pair of replica monkeys were gliding up and down electric-green jungle creepers, watched by twin infant boys in matching school blazers and caps. I cast an eye around at my fellow diners. Notwithstanding the tropical theme, I could have been in Madrid. Everyone was impeccably dressed, and nonchalantly watching one another as they tucked into their barbecued ribs and stuffed-crust pizzas. Of course the illusion was dependent on there being no poor people in the Andean Centre, which meant that there were no Andeans to be seen either. There was no trace of the Muisca, the original inhabitants of Bogotá, nor any of the other ethnicities native to the highland capital, much less the black Colombians who make up a fifth of the country’s population.
Apart from a cleaner and a security guard, nobody was watching the television in the corner, so I bought a coffee and pulled up a chair at their table. The newsreader was a statuesque blonde woman with a steely, penetrating gaze. I had the feeling that her beauty was a deliberate ploy to distract viewers like me, who knew that the news was important, but found their coverage of it rather boring.
Over the years, she said, the FARC had been instrumental in kidnapping dozens of soldiers and police officers. The picture cut to a press conference, where an Army general was addressing a bank of cameras and microphones. ‘The FARC should know that we are coming after them. We won’t let our guard down. We still have a long way to go.’
The cleaner harrumphed and shuffled off with her bucket and mop. The security guard stayed where he was and together we watched more stories of neighbourhood criminals and disasters brought on by the winter rains, with a familiar cast of pleading locals and resolute policemen. Then the news segued into Farándula, a daily roundup of celebrity gossip presented by a woman who might have been the newsreader’s equally svelte twin sister.
A girl of nineteen or so asked if she could share my table. I nodded and watched as she began eating her soup with a delicacy that I didn’t usually associate with Colombians. Perhaps it was her flawless skin, or the braces on her teeth, or the long thin arm that she rested on the table, but she struck me as being almost Japanese. It seemed ridiculous to sit there wordlessly, especially since the table was so small, so I asked her what the soup was. ‘Ahuyama,’ she told me. I’d never heard the word before – I later found out that it was squash.
Her name was Katalina and she lived in Los Rosales, an exclusive neighbourhood of modern redbrick apartment complexes on the lower slopes of the northern hills. When I told her that I lived in La Candelaria, she said that she’d be worried to live there, especially after dark. I smiled, groaning inwardly at the fearfulness of the city’s gilded youth, whose sanctuary this was. The poor were like ghosts to people like Katalina – rarely seen, but ever-present and often malevolent.
Of course crimes were committed at night in my neighbourhood. One morning I found my landlord clambering over the terracotta tiles on the roof, trying to salvage what was left of the telephone lines. The thieves had been after the copper wires, which they sold for scrap, he told me. Night-time marauders would steal the neighbourhood’s manhole covers too, to the same end. At the end of my street, some good citizen had used the branch of a tree to warn oncoming drivers of the hole in the road. Guillermo, my landlord’s son, told me that in the late 1980s, when the capital was passing through its darkest times, he used to venture out wondering not if but when he would be mugged.
Even my friend Ricardo, who liked to scoff at upper-class paranoia, was quick to tell me how dangerous the city streets could be. His cousin had been walking in La Candelaria in the middle of the afternoon when someone on the flat roof of the market building had thrown a stone at him, which split his head open. Before the ambulance came to take him away, his attacker had come down onto the street and emptied his pockets.
But those days were gone. Despite the widespread perception of Bogotá as a dangerous city, in the years since I last lived there it had emerged to become one of the safest cities in Latin America. These days, you were more likely to be robbed in Caracas or Quito.* Venturing out at night still had its risks though: many of the street lights in La Candelaria didn’t work and the combination of holes and darkness made any night-time wanderer a hostage to fortune. Only in the last twelve months had the city’s mayor come up with the idea of fitting plastic manhole covers, though I had yet to see one for myself.
I left Katalina in peace and found a quiet coffee shop, where I spent the afternoon on the phone, trying to find a tour guide or local historian who might help me find out more about Bogotá. I didn’t come up with much. The shelves of the bookshops groaned under the weight of the memoirs of Pablo Escobar’s mistress, the Franco-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt’s account of her time as a captive of the FARC and hundreds of analyses of the conflict, but there was nothing that might have told me more about the capital.
The light was fading from the sky by the time I got back to the Andean Centre to meet Maribel. We had some dinner and went to see The Social Network. The entire country seemed to be on Facebook, so I wasn’t surprised to see that the auditorium was packed. After the film, we walked over the road to a bar in the Zona Rosa. The hardwood panelling on the walls and the stark, skinny plants, dramatically uplit by spotlights buried in troughs of big grey pebbles, were reassuringly nondescript. I had the giddy feeling of being in an airport terminal, a secured bubble of globalized good taste, divorced from any indication of where on the planet I was.
We had a few whiskies, or at least I did. Maribel had a lychee martini before switching to vodka. As the night wore on, the salsa got louder and couples took to the dance floor behind us. I was tempted to join them, but something in the atmosphere that night kept me in my seat. Young guys in designer denim and herringbone shirts eyed their fellow dancers steadily from under pristine felt cowboy hats, as they shuffled and kicked their way around the room. They clung to their partners possessively, as if they were human shields in a carefully choreographed battle scene.
On our way out at three in the morning, a smaller, slighter figure than any I’d seen that evening opened his jacket to show me an iPhone. He whispered a price, I shook my head and he darted away into the crowd. I was reminded of something that a friend had once said to me: ‘If I go to Norway, I can see that their experience isn’t a universal one. No Norwegian lives like poor Colombians do. But go up to the Zona Rosa in Bogotá and you can see that the people there live much as people do in Norway. That’s why what’s happening in Colombia is of more universal importance than what’s happening in Norway – because we have first, second and third worlds living side by side.’
It was strange to be back in a country that seemed at once universal and isolated. Despite its particular history of fratricidal conflict, spending time in Colombia had often felt like being in a microcosmic version of the world at large. Both are run by a white-skinned elite that makes up about 10 per cent of the population. In both, the privileged one in ten lives in the cooler climes and owns about 80 per cent of the mines, farms, industries and banks. He eats and lives well, studies at the best schools and universities, receives medical treatment in the best hospitals and usually dies of old age.*
Below him on the social ladder are another four out of ten Colombians, generally a little darker-skinned than the privileged one, who spend their lives working as hard as they can, not so much to join the privileged one, as to stave off the possibility of falling into the poverty endured by the remaining five in ten. This bottom half live in the hottest regions, on the worst land, in the most isolated parts of the countryside or on the neglected margins of the big cities. They are black, Indian, white or mixes of the three. The poorest of them live from day to day, never sure of where their next meal will come from. That’s the way the world is, and Colombia is a small-scale version of it.
I’d met few Colombians who had the will or the means to move between the three worlds to be found in their country. Maribel was one of them, but she was as careful as anyone to get a taxi that the security guards outside the bar could vouch for. Everyone seemed to have a story to tell of a friend who had taken a taxi and agreed to a short cut, only for the driver to turn into a darkened street, where he stopped to let in his two accomplices. They called it el paseo de los millonarios – the millionaires’ stroll: a midnight ride around the cash points of the city, a pistol digging into the victim’s ribs, until the account was empty.
With Maribel safely homebound, I spent twenty minutes waiting for a taxi driver who might take me south, but none of them wanted to leave the uptown neighbourhoods. So I started walking; all this watchfulness was making me feel claustrophobic. All I had to do, I told myself, was stick to the Avenida Séptima; if I kept up a good pace, I reckoned on being home in a couple of hours.
Over the first ten blocks I passed groups of well-heeled young men and women who were trying in vain to hail taxis home. A pair of young businessmen were propping up a third who was being sick into a bin. ‘Not on your shoes, Raúl!’ said one. After half an hour I came to Chapinero, euphemistically known as ‘the theatre district’, where I passed same-sex couples walking home arm in arm. A face peeped out warily from the doorway of an innocuous-looking house whose windows were shaking to the sound of techno. For the next few blocks, I could have been in Camden Town circa 1978, as the street was crowded with leather-clad punks waiting for southbound buses.
Beyond Chapinero there were roadworks under way, so pedestrians had to cross and re-cross the avenue. I ended up walking down the badly lit streets that run parallel to the Avenida Séptima. I walked fast, dodging the potholes in the road, the shoots of rainwater that gushed from the gaps between the paving stones, and the empty spaces once capped by manhole covers. The horror stories I’d heard from Katalina, Ricardo and Maribel ran through my head. I tried to reason my way past them. The story here was not crime, but bogotanos’ exaggerated fear of crime, I told myself. But a nagging voice in my head told me that I was dando papaya. It was an expression I had heard time and again. Its literal meaning was to ‘give somebody a papaya’, but Colombians use it to describe anybody who gives a thief an opportunity: in other words, a mug. It seemed very bogotano to blame not the fox but the rabbit silly enough to venture into his path.
The gloomy backstreets were empty – anyone venturing out at this hour would be in the back seat of a car or taxi. In fact, with Chapinero behind me, the entire city seemed to be empty. Perhaps this was the solution to night-time crime: with most of the city having taken to their beds long ago and the revellers behind closed doors, muggers found that their only would-be victims were homeless old men.
Maybe the silence of the city and the fear it inspired explained the great sentimentality with which my Colombian friends talked about their own patch: their family, friends and the neighbourhood they lived in. In time, I’d come to recognize the wariness with which one region eyed another. If I were going to Cali, bogotanos would tell me to be careful; it was ‘muy peligroso’ – very dangerous. Once in Cali, people would warn me of the same danger being particular to Bogotá, Medellín or Barranquilla. I had thought that people might have grown accustomed to the violence, but in fact, they seemed more scared than I did. Whatever lay beyond the end of the street was potentially dangerous.
I soon came to the barrio of Teusaquillo. In the days before the first Europeans reached the Andes, when the Muiscas ruled the city then known as Bacatá, their tribal leaders would bathe in the springs here. By the 1950s Teusaquillo had become a pseudo-English garden suburb of bungalows and faux-Tudor houses with neat front gardens. Though faded, it still had some charm. Behind a barred window and muted by lace curtains, a bare bulb shone. A security guard stood outside his kiosk on the corner of the empty street. Through the half-light cast by a flickering street lamp, I could make out a solitary local, who was walking his dog.
I came to the Avenida Caracas. Running down the middle of the avenue were two new concrete highways that had been built for the Transmilenio, the name bogotanos give to the gleaming fleet of bendy buses, harbingers of a twenty-first-century version of the city, that shuttle from the wealthy north to the impoverished south and all points in between. A depot-bound bus was waiting at the traffic lights for a man who was pushing a cart laden with offcuts of wood, metal poles and bags of empty plastic bottles. The weight of the cart, and his skeletal frame, which was bent double by the effort, meant that it took him ages to cross the road. The bus hummed patiently.
On the other side, an indigent man was squatting at the kerb, picking through a bag of scraps that had been left outside a shuttered restaurant. With him was a teenage boy who was inhaling glue from a plastic bag. A boy in rags strode past me on a mission, singing at the top of his voice, alone, free and seemingly oblivious to anyone who might have been listening.
These old men and teenagers, dressed in tattered hand-me-downs, their toes poking out from cast-off shoes, and a sack of tin cans for the scrap merchant slung over one shoulder, had been here when I was last in the city. Despite the signs that Colombia was emerging from its twenty-year-long crisis, they were still here. They were short and skinny, with matted hair and furrowed, greasy faces tanned by the Andean sun. Solitary walkers through the night, they slouched with downcast eyes, hoping to avoid other members of their tribe. In the early mornings, as the commuters returned to take the city they half-owned, the homeless they would shrink away to sleep under cardboard boxes at the back of car parks. They re-emerged in the afternoon, but confined themselves to the backstreets, where I’d occasionally be asked for the price of a bread roll or a cup of coffee.
When the Hotel Tequendama came into view, I knew that I’d soon be home. It was five in the morning and the sky was growing light. There was still no sign of the stark Andean sunshine that had illuminated my memories of the city. That morning, the city was hemmed in by cold, grey clouds that swept over the mountains from the east. A lone man eyed me up as he spoke into a lapel mike. Ahead, a security guard with a muzzled Rottweiler slowly paced around in front of the hotel’s grand main entrance. I made it back to the Casa Los Alpes just as the first of the day’s commuters were coming into the city centre.
Two days later I woke to news that Air Force bombs had killed the man known as ‘Mono Jojoy’, the commander of the FARC’s Eastern Block. After breakfast I logged on to the FARC’s website. ‘It is with profound remorse, clenched fists and chests heavy with feeling that we inform the people of Colombia and our brothers in Latin America that Commander Jorge Briceño, our brave, proud hero of a thousand battles, commander since the glorious days of the foundation of the FARC, has fallen at his post, at his men’s side, while fulfilling his revolutionary duties, following a cowardly bombardment akin to the Nazi blitzkrieg.’
It was a morning of glorious sunshine. It picked out the pine trees on the steep, wooded hills that rise up from the plain of Bogotá to form a north–south wall for the city. The whitewashed walls of the church of Monserrate gleamed from the summit. I made my way through the Journalists Park, with its statue of Simón Bolívar under a neglected limestone cupola, and followed the creek upstream, past the students making their way to the Universidad de los Andes, to the Quinta de Bolívar. This is where Simón Bolívar, the hero of Colombia’s wars of independence, lived when he was in Bogotá. I had come to catch up with the thinking of the academics and NGOs that have been faithfully monitoring, measuring and struggling to come up with solutions to Colombia’s convulsions since the fifties. Unfortunately, I’d got my timing wrong: the conference had ended, not started, at 10 a.m. I’d forgotten what a nation of early risers this was.
On my way back down into the city, I fell in with Lucho, an old friend from the Arco Iris Foundation, one of the most respected of Colombia’s NGOs. He seemed less than surprised by the morning’s news. ‘The death of any soldier is to be expected,’ he said solemnly. ‘Every FARC commander has his understudy waiting to replace him should he fall in combat. Mono Jojoy is sure to have agreed his own treaty with Death.’ Lucho’s easy recourse to metaphysics sounded exotic to my ears, accustomed as they still were to the talk of Londoners, few of whom have agreed to anything as grand as a treaty with Death.
‘And anyway,’ he went on, ‘the guerrillas don’t count for much these days. The real problem facing the country is the mafia. They’ve bought out half of Congress.’ In a country that practically defined itself by its ‘war on terror’, this came as something of a surprise.
We hit the news-stands on Calle 19, where Lucho asked for a copy of El Tiempo. Colombia’s oldest daily newspaper has long been a cornerstone of its democracy, except for a brief period in 1955 when it was shut down by the military dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. For a while, El Tiempo reappeared as Intermedio, ‘The Times’ becoming ‘The Intermission’, before Rojas Pinilla was booted out of office and normal service was resumed. It was Colombia’s first and last experiment with dictatorship.
But at one kiosk after another we were told that that day’s edition had sold out. A young boy with a bundle of newspapers under his arm was winding his way between the cars waiting at the traffic lights. ‘Extra, extra!’ he shouted. Lucho snapped up the eight-page supplement while I ordered us a couple of tintos at a street-side coffee bar. He propped his elbow on the counter and began hungrily scanning the pages.
Perhaps I was expecting cars to be honking their horns in jubilation at the news, but there was nothing so palpable. The politicians and journalists might have been celebrating the death of Mono Jojoy as another blow to the terrorists, but Lucho seemed less than impressed. ‘The newspapers are always saying that peace is just around the corner. Today, it’s Mono Jojoy. A couple of years ago it was Raúl Reyes.* When I was a kid, my dad used to tell me about Capitán Desquite and Tarzán and Efraín González. These days, they’d call them terrorists, but back then they were just bandits. Colombians have always had short memories.’ I later found out that Capitán Desquite – Captain Revenge – had been a Liberal guerrilla in the 1950s and that Efraín González was a Conservative guerrilla from the same period.
Mono Jojoy’s death had come just a few weeks after the inauguration of Colombia’s new president. To untrained eyes the Air Force’s strike might have confirmed that Juan Manuel Santos had adopted the hardline tactics of his predecessor, Álvaro Uribe. But Lucho suggested that it signalled a change in strategy. ‘Hugo Chávez and the FARC high command would have been aware of the strike in advance. Maybe they even gave it their blessing.’
The idea that the Venezuelan president might have colluded with senior FARC commanders sounded far-fetched, but Lucho was adamant. Mono Jojoy had been one of the hardline leaders of the FARC’s military wing. With Jojoy out of the way, the FARC’s leader, Alfonso Cano, who had always been more open to negotiations with the government, had a free hand to talk to President Santos.* Unlike his predecessor, Santos seemed keen to talk to the enemy, or at least keener than he might admit to his supporters.
‘It may well be that Santos hammers out a deal with Cano some time next year, perhaps with Chávez acting as intermediary.’ Lucho drained the remains of his coffee and stuck his hand out for a cab. ‘Maybe the FARC will demobilize in return for a toughened up Land Law. Who knows? In Colombia, nothing is impossible.’
I was still nodding, struggling to take it all in, when Lucho jumped in the back of a taxi with a wave and sped off into the traffic. I clearly had some catching up to do. I reached for the copy of El Tiempo that Lucho had left on the counter. The front-page story celebrated the ‘monumental blow’ that the Army had dealt to the guerrillas; the man that President Santos described as ‘a symbol of terror’ was finally dead.
Mono Jojoy was the latest name to be added to the list of FARC commanders killed by the Army or extradited to stand trial on cocaine trafficking charges in the United States. To the optimists in the new government, the guerrillas’ surrender was only a matter of time. As and when they turned in their weapons, their country would once again become ‘the Athens of South America’, a beacon of democratic moderation in a continent that has long been prone to populist excess. El Tiempo didn’t have to spell out the alternative: that Colombia remain the guerrilla-infested, cocaine-addled basket case depicted by foreigners.
Although the official line on the war with the FARC was straightforward enough, I had a feeling that I wasn’t getting the full picture. The triumphalist pride and unspoken humiliation were worryingly familiar. The media bombast that followed the death of Mono Jojoy only encouraged me to find out more about the man and his struggle. I thought about going to his funeral. No date had been announced, since his body was still in the Army morgue in Bogotá, but in time his remains would have to be handed over to his family. Lucho had said that the FARC commander would probably be buried in Cabrera, the small town southwest of the capital where he had been born.
But every journalist that I spoke to in the days that followed told me that the trip would be too dangerous. Cabrera was in Sumapaz, the high moors that overlook the capital, where local farmers have spent years arguing the relative merits of Marx and Bakunin. Both the FARC and the state intelligence agents likely to be monitoring the mourners would be highly suspicious of a foreign journalist asking questions.
It was clearly going to be difficult to pierce the united front the government was intent on building. I had every intention of avoiding danger, if only because it would leave me open to fear, which seemed to cripple the faculties of all those it touched. The Colombians that I had met since my return were delighted to see a tourist defy their country’s awful reputation. But they wanted me to see the sights, not go rummaging through their dirty linen.
I would however get occasional clues to the stories that complicated the official line on the country’s ‘war on terror’. Buried in the city news pages of El Tiempo, I found a small piece about nine people who had been shot and killed across Bogotá the previous night. Most of them had been killed by paramilitary death squads. Masked men in a park in Ciudad Bolívar had shot three teenagers, including a thirteen-year-old boy.
On clear days I could see Ciudad Bolívar from my window. It was a huge barrio, built high on the treeless southern slopes of the city. Over the past twenty years it had absorbed many of the millions of Colombians driven, whether by political violence or poverty, to seek new lives in the capital. Nobody wanted to live in Ciudad Bolívar, but those who had no choice in the matter had built, plumbed and wired a neighbourhood that the utilities companies and town planners largely ignored. Infamous for crime and violence, most taxi drivers wouldn’t even go near it.
I knew that Nidia, the housekeeper who had a little room on the ground floor of Casa Los Alpes, lived in Ciudad Bolívar. When I got back, I found her sweeping the already spotless stairs. I asked her if she knew anything about what had happened in her neighbourhood the previous night. She’d heard the news, she said in a whisper; the death squads often took it upon themselves to root out anyone they believed to be working for the guerrillas.
I balked; it was hard to believe that after eight years of a nationwide Army offensive that had pushed the FARC into the mountains and along the rivers that run out into the jungle, the guerrillas still had operatives in the capital. Whether through fear or ignorance, Nidia couldn’t tell me what the guerrillas’ urban militias did, bar some mutterings of the type I’d heard from her on previous occasions, about rowdy teenagers swigging beer at the bus stop outside her house. To her mind, revolutionary violence and under-age drinking were of a kind; they were the doings of subversivos.
Nidia always called me ‘su merced’ – ‘your honour’, an archaic term of address that was no less surprising for being so widely used. Such deference might have sounded strange outside the highland departments around Bogotá, but it was quite common to hear poor people in the capital address their social superiors as ‘su merced’. Whenever I heard the expression, I couldn’t help but ponder the question posed by a Frenchman who visited Bogotá in 1840: ‘What is one to expect from a republic where every man calls “master” any individual whiter or better dressed than himself?’
One hundred and seventy years later, La Candelaria was full of very short, very old people living in cramped, unheated houses that had seen little change since the coming of electric light. Their poverty and instinctive deference to anyone with more money or education than themselves went back further still. A visitor to the city in 1900 had found it divided between energetic modernizers and hidebound devotees of the Catholic Church. It was ‘a world in which confusion and clarity walked together, as did superstition and faith, arcane ritual and logical deduction’.* That year, the parents of half of all the children born in the city were unmarried, despite the fact that Bogotá had more priests per head of population than anywhere else in Colombia. The city’s clergymen railed against the sin of illegitimacy, as they did against the dangers of drink, but were widely ignored on both counts and with good reason. The municipal government had a monopoly on the production of booze, and depended on the revenue for the bulk of its wages bill. Despite the outward signs of piety, it was said that farm workers around Bogotá got half their intake of calories from corn liquor.