Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the new Colombia

by Feiling, Tom

  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.

  The days in which ‘pigs, chickens, horses and cows lived intermingled with families of all classes and conditions’ were long gone, as was the Church’s control of Colombia’s education system. But the humility, reserve and durability of the elderly were as apparent as ever. What was new, at least to them, was the FARC, the terrible response they had provoked and the all-pervading fear that Colombians of all classes had learned to live with. Their fear was fully justified. Unlike Al-Qaeda, the IRA and the Basque ETA, Colombia’s insurgents had come close to toppling a government. Although they were much less powerful than they had been in 2001, The FARC was still the largest guerrilla army in the world.

  Their military power had been doubly frightening for having risen in tandem with their reliance on kidnapping the wealthy for ransom. Many of the students that I had taught at the private Universidad Externado in 2001 had had some personal experience of kidnap, as I found out when I asked them, unkindly I admit, to write an essay about the time they were most frightened. The story that stays with me is that of a girl whose father had received a letter from the FARC, stating that anyone with assets worth in excess of $1 million would be considered a legitimate target for ‘detention’. Only by paying a ‘war tax’ would his name be struck off their list. The girl’s father was keen to pay the tax and live in pe
ace, but had no way of locating the tax collectors. So he set off into the countryside, a manila envelope full of cash in his briefcase, to find his would-be abductors. He was lucky, in that he wasn’t robbed en route and somehow found a FARC front on the moors of Sumapaz. The girl’s father handed his money to the commander of the front, who gave him a receipt, and the millionaire was able to return to the city with some peace of mind.

  Others weren’t so lucky. I remember too a conversation with David Hutchinson, an English banker and long-term resident of Bogotá, who had been kidnapped by the FARC in May 2002. He spent his first month in captivity camped on the moors of Sumapaz. From his tent he could even see his own house, a graphic illustration of just how close the guerrillas had come to overrunning Bogotá.

  The government was locked into peace talks with the FARC at the time. To the guerrillas, it must have looked like a reprise of Cuba in 1959, or Vietnam in 1975: a moment when the balance of power between old and new creaked towards the latter. And yet, in the years that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the idea that communist insurgents might overthrow what upper-class Colombians liked to call ‘the oldest democracy in Latin America’ wasn’t just an affront, but an anachronism that only further isolated their country from the rest of the world.

  The peace talks of 2001–2 were a fascinating time for me, even if the near overthrow of the Colombian government went largely unremarked upon elsewhere. For the privileged families that have governed Colombia since independence, however, it was a humiliation that they vowed never to revisit. When the peace talks broke down in acrimony and mutual blame, the Air Force was sent in to drop bombs on the FARC’s encampment. The hundreds of envoys from the United Nations and European governments, who had been hopeful of a negotiated solution to the conflict, scuttled for cover. Since then, they have either professed themselves impotent or simply lost interest in Colombia.

  The United States, as potent and interested as ever, seemed to greet the return to war with relief. The political life of Colombia has been subsumed by its internal conflict ever since. The barrage of propaganda, designed to exhort the population and marginalize dissenters, has come to seem normal. Somewhere, far from the capital, volleys of gunfire echoed the rhetoric.

  The following Sunday morning, I was no sooner out of bed than off to the Avenida Séptima and on a bus heading north. I felt a need to run, to find a vista beyond the claustrophobia and paranoia of life in Bogotá, which the death of Mono Jojoy had only heightened. Half an hour later I got off at the Avenida Chile and walked a few blocks up the hill to Quebrada La Vieja – the Old Woman’s Brook – a stream that runs down from the mountains that border the eastern edge of the city.

  A beautifully manicured path wound its way along the course of the brook, past the grand apartment buildings of Los Rosales and then up into the forest. It was a steep climb to reach the crest of the hills, but there was a well-trodden trail, crowded with soaring eucalyptus trees and thick groves of bamboo. Within a few minutes all I could hear was the breeze in the treetops. As the air grew cooler and damper, the mosses grew thicker. A family of well-shod bogotanos with waxed jackets and Labradors passed me on their way down, but by the time I reached the top, I’d not seen another soul for an hour.

  Looking east from the summit I could see only thick woods covering steep-sided valleys. I headed south along a less used path that followed the crest, passing under pine trees that had carpeted the ground in a thick bed of dry brown needles, and came out onto a bluff that finally gave me the view I’d been waiting for. Below me lay Bogotá in the haze; its drone, emitted by big cities everywhere, was reminiscent of the sea. Behind me lay only wilderness.

  I had often wondered why the conquistadores chose to build their capital here. Although it sits on a verdant, sheltered plain, 2,625 metres above sea level, many of the mountains that surround Bogotá are dry and windswept. The capital is over 450 miles from the north coast, and the River Magdalena, which until well into the twentieth century was the country’s main trade route, was hundreds of metres below me. Cali and Medellín were both prettier cities, with easier climates and better access to the outside world.

  Colombia’s topography has dictated the course of much of its history. It has been a blessing for its farmers – the mountains and the tropical lowlands that separate them include all varieties of climate, so all kinds of crops can be grown in them, from kale and broccoli to mango and pineapples. But the crumpled landscape has proved a curse for its traders. Since cities like Cali and Medellín have always been able to feed themselves, they have had little need for commerce with the rest of the country. Internal trade was also prohibitively expensive. As the crow flies, Bogotá is only 190 miles from Medellín, yet until the 1950s it cost less to carry a sack of coffee beans from Medellín to London than it did to take it down to the Magdalena and then up to the capital.

  So Colombia developed as a nation of isolated provinces. When it was a colony of Spain, cities like Popayán, Tunja and Mompós were provincial capitals. After independence, power increasingly accrued in Bogotá and they became backwaters. They were notable for their piety, haughty disdain for the modern world, and frequent ambushes of the tax collectors sent from distant Bogotá. Such was their poverty that foreigners visiting Mompós in the nineteenth century remarked that the town elders’ sense of superiority was all that separated them from their former slaves.

  For most of its history, Bogotá has been one of the smallest capital cities in Latin America. Even in 1900 it was home to no more than 30,000 people. I’d seen postcards of the city as it appeared in the 1950s, when its streets were unbroken and lined with villas with front gardens, and cars were few and far between. Yet even then, the appearance of prosperity was deceptive. Peering beyond the gleaming new buildings that housed the government ministries, I could make out the slums of Egipto and Las Cruces. Since the fifties, the city has grown like a boil, filled with millions of country folk escaping the poverty and violence of the hinterland. Today Bogotá is a city of 7 million people that sprawls north, south and west from the colonial hub like the dusty spokes of half a bicycle wheel, each spoke a highway that runs out past warehouses, factories and car showrooms. And yet the neighbourhoods of the south still feel like annexes of the city, villages that have been uprooted and dumped in the mountains.

  A huge amount of work has been done over the past ten years to try and catch up with decades of unplanned, chaotic growth. A succession of bold and visionary mayors has laid pavements and cycle paths along the highways, and built parks and libraries in the windswept neighbourhoods of the south. But they face huge challenges, not least of which is the indifference to others that seems to pervade this city of strangers.

  Generations of bogotanos have grown up regarding the city government – indeed, all government – as corrupt and ineffectual. It has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which few people pay their taxes and those elected to govern the city routinely pilfer the treasury. The public realm has been starved; hence the wasted people the size of children, lying filthy and emaciated in the doorways of shops, and the security guards who look out at them, their pump-action shotguns protecting anything of value that can’t be shuttered for the night.

  If only, I thought from my hilltop lookout, the night were reclaimed. If only an army of workers set about fixing all that has gone neglected for so long. If only the pavements were repaired, the houses painted and colour brought back to the grimy walls that line the avenues. If only the streets were lit and bogotanos felt safe to walk their city. As it was, many of them still called a taxi just to go to the supermarket.

  I clambered down the rocks from the ridge towards a mountain brook. Close by were the huge, straight trunks of eucalyptus trees that had tumbled over waterfalls and been blackened by the water. The winter rains must have washed away whatever hold they had on the hills. If I were to slip and break a leg, I too might lie here unseen. There was no sign of human life to appeal to: no mountain huts or roads; no
dogs; not even a telegraph wire to follow.

  In the distance, I could see three huge residential high-rises that were being built on the ring road, each twenty or thirty floors high. Being Sunday, they were deserted. They offered great views over the plain of Bogotá, but I could see that anyone who bought an apartment facing the hills would look down on a slum.

  Friends had warned me not to walk in the hills alone. Although they looked empty, they bordered a series of invasion settlements. Unplanned, unauthorized and un-policed, the slums act as a buffer between the city and the empty expanse behind the mountains. The kids who live there, I was told, would rob anyone who strayed onto their patch. I could have turned back and retraced my footsteps, but instead I carried on, trying to look purposeful. The ring road was only a few hundred yards away, I told myself.

  When I saw the first people, I instinctively stopped, stood still and waited for them to go. But as I got closer, I saw that to get to the main road I had no choice but to walk through the settlement. Once on level ground, I soon got lost in the warren of muddy paths that meandered between the zinc-roofed shacks. The further I walked, the more stupid I felt. Luckily, the first person I came across was an old man, dressed in a grey woollen poncho, brown trilby and rubber boots. He looked surprised to see me, but gladly pointed me in the right direction.

  Twenty minutes later, I was back in the fug and racket of the buses racing along the Avenida Séptima. I recognized a couple of teenagers I’d passed in the shanty, who were sitting on a wall. ‘What did you make of the neighbourhood?’ one of them asked with a wry smile. We chatted for a while. As I turned to go, they asked me, as if it were always worth a shot, if I could spare some change. I was about to reach for my wallet, but then I thought that they might snatch it. I didn’t want to dar papaya. ‘Que pena, no tengo,’ I said, and kept on walking.