Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the new Colombia

by Feiling, Tom

  Los Santos was a pretty village, hotter than Bucaramanga and perched on the edge of the Chicamocha Canyon, which, as we were soon to discover, was hotter still. On the lower side of the village square was an old colonial house that had been built around a courtyard of undulating terracotta tiles. It was offering lunch, so we went inside and sat in the shade cast by the veranda that ran around three sides. It was wonderfully quiet and as we waited for some service, I found myself watching the spiders poised in the dusty rafters overhead. Our hostess emerged in her own good time and shuffled over to our table. She looked to be about seventy and might have passed for Italian or Greek. The women of Santander are famously steely; she wasn’t one for an easy smile, but she did what she was there to do with stoicism, as if expecting some idiot to upend the cart at any minute.

  When I’d arrived in Bucaramanga, I noticed that many of its people had green or blue eyes. Our bus driver had been a brawny, ginger-haired man who could have been from Newcastle. I heard about the Germans who had settled in Santander in the nineteenth century, but Carlos told me that the local look was down to the Guane. They were an indigenous people unlike the rest for not having migrated from Asia. The Guane were white-skinned, a racial quirk that nobody seemed able to explain, and were known to have been excellent weavers and stonemasons. Their carvings could still be seen around Los Santos.

  Lunch arrived: first a fish soup served with deliciously sweet arepas con choclo – maize pancakes with cheese. Then goat, which came with a side dish of diced goat’s innards in saffron rice. Tender and succulent with a slightly gamey after-taste, it was the perfect way to start a day of walking.

  The dusty path that led down into the canyon started behind the restaurant. At the first switchback we came to, Carlos scrambled over the rocks to a lookout point tucked under an outcrop. I followed and together we gazed out over the vast, silent canyon beneath us. Downriver, the slopes were of white and grey scree, but on the lip of the bowl-shaped upper valley where we were sitting, cacti and all kinds of low trees and shrubs had taken root between the rocks.

  ‘Punto rojo,’ said Carlos, as he stuffed his pipe. ‘All the way from Corinto. Colombia’s finest.’ It was a name I had heard before. Corinto was a village in the southern Andes, lauded by locals as the only place in the world where chickens had learnt how to swim, supposedly in order to have sex with the ducks that lived on an island in the river that flowed through the village.

  Carlos stopped two or three times that day to pack his pipe with Colombia’s finest, so my experience of the canyon was a dazed one. Once stoned, Carlos didn’t initiate much conversation and replied to my openers with an anodyne ‘uh-huh’ that didn’t encourage a follow up. This was fine by me; my conversation starters were only made to break the silence of the canyon and the sudden strangeness of being stoned in the middle of nowhere. Besides, my Spanish stumbles after a smoke.

  Carlos walked ahead, partly because I stopped from time to time to take photos but more because he was accustomed to walking alone. We made our way down the stone path in silence as the sun beat down mercilessly on our heads. It seemed like the kind of bucolic existence that I could let myself be taken in by for weeks.

  We passed an abandoned farmhouse with cracked adobe walls and a pitched-in roof of palm fronds. On leveller ground, the stones had been cleared to plant fields of tobacco. A fork in the path was marked by a pile of rocks that somebody had topped with a simple black wooden cross. In fresh white paint were daubed the words ‘We are children of God.’ I walked on, wondering if it was meant as a consolation or a warning.

  After two hours of hiking we came to the bottom of the canyon, where the River Chicamocha flowed through the tiny village of Sube. It wasn’t on the map: the first road to connect Sube to the outside world had been completed in 1994. Until then, the only access the villagers had had to the outside world had been over the rough stone paths that led north and south up the steep slopes of the canyon.

  The paths had been built in the mid-nineteenth century, at the orders of an entrepreneur called Geo von Lengerke, one of a handful of Germans who fled to Santander in the aftermath of the Revolutions of 1848, when Europe’s monarchs rolled back the progressive tide of Liberalism. Lengerke was a giant of a man, hungry to make a name for himself in the New World. The land he found in Santander was good, so he began to cultivate tobacco and the cinchona trees whose bark was the basis for quinine, which in those days was the sole antidote to malaria. The governor of Santander, keen to foster ambitious newcomers, granted him a concession of 12,000 hectares. But Lengerke had no way of getting his crops from the highlands to the River Magdalena, which at that time was the only route to the Caribbean coast and the distant markets of Europe. So Lengerke had his men lay over 370 miles of stone paths, braving the sinister growl of the jaguars in the trees overhead, yellow fever and countless attacks from resentful local tribes.

  Geo von Lengerke was overawed by Colombia. He called it ‘a country in which everything remains to be done, dedicated to the rush of revolution’. He was determined not to be drawn into the bloody feuds then raging between the country’s Liberals and Conservatives, who he disparagingly called ‘romantics’. Lengerke was a pragmatist, while the Colombians were ‘excessive’ and had ‘no sense of proportion’. But as a European – and a hard-drinking, womanizing, not very God-fearing one at that – he was an easy target for those jealous of his commercial acumen. When civil war next broke out, the mock-German castle he had built at Montebello was razed to the ground.

  Lengerke died broke and broken by the land he had come to call home. His vision and dedication had come to nothing, ‘but it is beautiful and it seems it cannot be otherwise’. Though rarely used, the pathways he had built survive to this day. Lengerke said that they incorporated ‘the suffering, hope and uncertainty of all those who walk them’.*

  Only when I saw the bridge over the river at Sube did I remember the story of Colombia’s first iron bridge. When Ricardo’s dad told me about the bridge that the McCormicks had built, I imagined that it would look something like the original at Ironbridge: entirely of iron, with countless rivets covered in countless layers of black paint. But the bridge at Sube was like nothing I’d ever seen before, at once rudimentary and apparently indestructible. Wooden planks were suspended from thick iron cables that ran sixty feet between the enormous brick ramparts on either side of the milky brown river that coursed below.

  Crossing the bridge, we came to the deserted village square. A woman was sweeping the flagstones with a broom of bound twigs. Seeing us, she came over to open up the recently restored posada. They were hoping that the inn would bring in the tourists, Angela told us, though few had come to stay yet. She was waiting for an inaugural visit by the governor of Santander, who was due to be helicoptered in that very day. We looked up at the darkening blue of the cloudless sky. ‘He’ll probably come tomorrow,’ she said with a faint smile.

  The posada was basic but beautiful. A cobbled yard sloped down to a stone basin, where a solitary chicken was washing herself. But the bare rooms and freshly limed walls were hardly cosy, so Carlos and I wandered over to the farmhouse on the other side of the bridge. In a near-empty barn three teenagers were shelling corn and watching MTV. Carlos negotiated some dinner for us and had just put his feet up on the bench running around the veranda when he was interrupted by a phone call.

  It was his friend Carolina, calling him from Bucaramanga. He sounded less than pleased to hear her voice. ‘It’s not a good time to talk,’ he told her. Why not? ‘I really don’t want to talk about that.’ Why didn’t he want to talk? What was wrong? The more he remonstrated, the more she held on. Nodding and sighing, he drifted into the dark courtyard, where one of the farmhands was washing her hair in a tub.

  By the time he re-emerged, I had spent twenty minutes watching the mosquitoes swarm around the single bare bulb that lit the yard and enjoying the evaporation of the sweat that matted my hair. Over a cold beer, I asked Carlos about his nov
el. I’d taken Desde Aquellos Días and the town of Empalá to be products of his imagination, but he told me that in fact, his imaginary town was based on Sube. ‘I grew up not far from here. Over the years, I’d hear about Sube from time to time, though I’d never actually visited the place.’

  In the late 1990s, Carlos told me, he had taken to walking in the safer parts of the mountains of Santander. When he reached Sube, he heard a quite amazing story. ‘The mayor of the village was a tough old bird called Roque Ferrer. Not long after the first road was opened in 1994, Don Roque went on a crusade against his opponents in the village council. One by one, he started killing them off. The local people fled for their lives. By the time I came here, about eighty per cent of the inhabitants had left. Don Roque had died by then. I think the villagers ganged up on him one night and killed him.’

  Not long after becoming president in 2002, Álvaro Uribe ordered the police back into the hundreds of villages, scattered over thousands of square miles, that had become virtually lawless in the course of the last twenty years. In Sube, the police moved into one of the grand warehouses that Geo von Lengerke had built to store his cinchona crop. Thirty-three police officers found themselves in command of a village of just five residents. Since then the villagers had started coming back to reclaim and restore their homes, though many of the houses in the side streets were still eerily quiet. When Angela came by later that evening with more beer, she told us that Sube was still ruled by relatives of Don Roque, albeit less murderously.

  ‘The story of Don Roque made a big impression on me,’ Carlos said. ‘But it was only when President Uribe was running for a third term, uprooting our democratic traditions and allowing one man to speak for all Colombians, that I started to think about Sube again.’ By Carlos’ reckoning, Álvaro Uribe was entirely driven by his blind hatred of the guerrillas. Once in power, he used that hatred to justify his own brand of increasingly violent authoritarianism. His ‘democratic security’ policies had brought security to some, but Uribe took anyone who opposed his government to be a friend of the guerrillas. For them, the eight years that Uribe spent as president had brought neither democracy nor security.

  Appalled by what was happening in the name of the ‘war on terror’ in Colombia, Carlos took the story of Don Roque in Sube, turned him into Don Roque Monteeiro of Empalá and wrote a tragedy about a small-town mayor who orchestrates a bogus war on terror as cover for the murder, rape and robbery of the people. ‘Roque Monteeiro is corrupted by power. Once he finds that he has no opponents left, he has to mask his true intentions by inventing an imaginary opponent.’

  Carlos was warming to his subject. He spoke with great conviction, his voice soaring and diving for dramatic affect. His take on the conflict chimed with what I’d heard from other war-weary Colombians. The guerrilla threat existed, but it was routinely exaggerated because the fear it provoked was such an effective way of turning the public good to private ends. ‘More than ever, I believe that the government and the guerrillas need each other. The government needs the guerrillas because they justify the status quo. The guerrillas need the government because they give them their raison d’être. The oligarchy wants to maintain the power it has, and the guerrillas want to maintain their army.’

  By Carlos’ account although both the former president and the fictional mayor wrapped themselves in the national flag, paid warm tribute to the armed forces and swore to uphold the constitution, it was all a sham. ‘There are no principles at work in Colombian politics. Everything is open to negotiation,’ he said scornfully. ‘But there are interests – money, power, even religion – that have to be defended. And there are interests that transcend immediate interests,’ he said ominously. ‘Causes that are bigger than the causes.’

  Carlos was from the generation that had come of age in the eighties. There was still something of the romantic idealist about him, a thirst for justice that might once have inspired him to throw in his lot with those committed to the armed struggle. But as he’d watched the medicine prescribed by the guerrillas do more harm than the illness it was supposed to cure, he had become jaded. It wasn’t just that the war had lost whatever purpose it might once have had – it was being perpetuated by people with a vested interest in ensuring that peace was never realized.

  ‘This so-called “war on terror” has been going on for years, and it has always been used as a way of ducking responsibility for the big, underlying problems. I’ve worked with lots of indigenous groups and the government has always told us that things can’t be improved because the guerrillas are too strong and the state can’t function in those outlying regions.’

  Now that the FARC have been pushed out of many of those regions, I wondered who the government would blame for their lack of development. If President Santos had been having a beer with us that evening, he might have said that he was making the countryside safe so that the big foreign mining companies could invest in the bountiful natural resources that Colombia had to offer. ‘Indeed, Mr President,’ I imagined Carlos saying, ‘but judging by the experience of other Latin American countries, foreign investment and national development are quite distinct propositions. The wealth generated by the gas-fields of Bolivia hasn’t lifted its people out of poverty. And multinational agricultural corporations are making Argentina’s farmers poorer, not richer.’

  Development: it is hard to see how such an anodyne word could be responsible for so much conflict. Early in his novel, Carlos warns his readers: ‘Generally, understanding how things end is not as complicated as understanding how they begin.’ Everybody knows the bloody mess that Colombia ended up in, with guerrillas, paramilitaries and cocaine traffickers thrashing it out between themselves usually at the expense of ordinary Colombians. But few seem able to explain how it all started.

  In 1978, when the FARC were at the height of their popularity, their struggle had seemed a honourable one, to a sizeable minority at least. Nobody wanted war, said the guerrillas; but it had been thrust upon them. The campesinos had to protect themselves from the landowners, who had long used violence to break up any threat to their power and prestige. The guerrillas claimed to be the protectors of the campesinos and had resorted to arms only when every legal avenue had been closed to them. Thirty long years later, the FARC have come to embody the very cruelty and indifference that they deride the oligarchs for. Any claim they make to be an ‘army of the people’ is laughable. Among those they claim to speak for, they have never been so unpopular.

  How has this happened? The short answer is that when the guerrillas were popular, they weren’t powerful, at least not in military terms; and in the process of acquiring power, they lost popularity. So was their revolution doomed from the start? Carlos seemed to think so. When Toño, the young student rebel of Desde Aquellos Días, is asked about the revolution he has in mind, he says that if it is left to the poor, they’ll all be worse off than before. ‘The campesinos don’t have the worldliness or the experience needed to exercise power responsibly,’ he says. Once they are in charge, ‘they’ll just take their revenge and plunge the country into a civil war.’ Toño goes on to say that, ‘in the end, the rich are, in their way, as much victims of the system they invented as the poor. What we have to do is make them see that, and get them involved in our cause. Which should be yours.’

  By now, Carlos and I were the only ones still awake at the farmhouse. We left our empty beer bottles on a pile of maize husks and slowly made our way back over the bridge to our posada. The planks lurched on their cables; the river churned white water under our feet; the crickets chirruped from the darkness. That night, I had a dream about the old woman who had brought us our lunch at Los Santos. I asked her if I should sit on a cushion when I was writing. She said that I shouldn’t – it would make me complacent.

  We were perching perched atop a huge boulder in a stream. We were a short way out of Sube, and Carlos was preparing the first of the day’s pipes. It was still early and the air was cool and fresh. In the distance,
a huge plume of white water was soundlessly cascading over the brim of the canyon. I smiled to myself at the sheer excitement of the place. I felt as if I’d stumbled into Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World. ‘Que maravilla!’ I said, not for the first time. It really was a marvellous place, though I only said so because I thought it might lift Carlos’ mood, which had been bad since he had woken up.

  We set off to climb the other side of the canyon, with Carlos taking an early lead on the rugged stone path, which he kept up for most of the day. Perhaps it was just as well that I was alone, trudging between the switchbacks that carried the path up the ever-steepening incline, when a huge butterfly with electric- blue wings fluttered past me. It seemed a gift, one I tried to preserve with a photo, hoping to share the magic of the moment, but the end-result was just a bright blue blur.

  Around noon, we finally reached the top of the canyon and walked to a farmhouse to wait for a ride to take us into the nearby town of San Gil. Exhausted, we sat in the shade of the back porch with a refarto, a refreshing mix of beer and Colombiana, a soft drink that tastes of bubble gum. The farmhouse had high-ceilinged rooms and tiled floors that sagged between old joists. I could smell myself. Under that high note rode others, first of dry mud and then of warming wood.

  In the yard in front, the farmhands were playing bola, a local version of skittles. I watched as they took turns to try and knock down three heavy pins that had been lined up in front of a thick wooden pallet.

  In a lull in play, I decided to have a go. It must have been ten metres from pitch to base, which is a long way to throw a heavy iron ball underarm. I did pretty well with my first couple of throws, but my third attempt was a good fifteen feet wide of the mark. I watched as the ball sailed off to the left and knocked a dent in the wattle-and-daub wall of the main house. My next throw was worse: I chipped one of the tiles on the roof. Everyone laughed, but I thought it best not to try again. I didn’t want to see their faces if I pitched the ball through the roof.