Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the new Colombia

by Feiling, Tom

  Mention the word ‘disappearance’ in Latin America and most people think of Chile under General Pinochet, where 3,000 people were killed or disappeared after the military coup of 1973. Others remember Argentina, where 30,000 people were disappeared by the generals in the ‘dirty war’ that they waged against the left in the late 1970s. In the 1980s the practice was taken up in Central America when civil wars engulfed Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. In the eyes of the world, Latin America became synonymous with fratricidal mania.

  And yet somehow Colombia’s dirty war seems to have gone barely noticed, subsumed as it has been by sensational stories of its cocaine traffickers and guerrilla armies. Between the late 1990s and 2005, Colombia’s paramilitaries waged a war of terror, though it was barely mentioned in the British press. Perhaps we had simply grown bored of hearing bad news from Colombia. Perhaps Bogotá’s foreign correspondents took their lead from Colombian friends, many of whom were just glad to see somebody do something to counter the rising power of the guerrillas. Or perhaps, post 9/11, we have come to believe that wars fought by pseudo-Marxists and crypto-fascists are just rather passé.

  Only now, as the threat of the FARC recedes, are Colombians themselves beginning to discern the grim outline of the paramilitaries’ brutality. When I was here in 2005, Colombia’s associations of families of the disappeared had spoken of there being 15,000 cases of forced disappearance. At the time, they were accused of exaggerating the numbers. By 2010, it was clear that in fact they had vastly underestimated the scope of the terror. A report from the Colombian Attorney General’s Office calculated that over the last twenty-five years, the paramilitaries have been responsible for 173,000 homicides and 34,000 forced disappearances, during which time they also committed 1,600 massacres.*

  The killings haven’t stopped. Though you’d never know it from reading a Colombian newspaper, let alone a British one, every day of the year a community activist or trade unionist goes missing in Colombia.† Well, that’s not strictly true: three times as many people are disappeared during the week than at weekends. Disappearing people is a job and nobody likes to work weekends.

  The following day, I met Teresa Castrillón again. This time, we walked out to Portón de la Vega. She told me that for as long as anyone could remember, it had been no more than a cocoa field, set among cattle pastures on the outskirts of the town. Then rumours began circulating, of hundreds of bodies buried under the cocoa trees. In no time, the owner of the field cleared the trees and built a new neighbourhood on what was reputed to be the town’s biggest mass grave.

  The two-storey houses had concrete stairs that looked as if they’d been cast from a jelly mould. Some kids were playing in a paddling pool on a patch of burnt grass in the middle of the estate. Men dressed only in shorts lounged in the shadows, staring forlornly into space. One of them was quietly singing along to a melancholy vallenato song that was playing on the radio.

  Teresa introduced me to a friend of hers called María Inés Gómez, a woman with blonde hair and skin that had been deeply tanned by the sun. She had a gossipy, maternal air about her. When Teresa told her that I was in Puerto Berrío to hear more about the NN of the town, María said that she was amazed that I was there at all. Most journalists steered clear of the town. I was a verraco – a brave man – she said. It was the last thing I wanted to hear. I looked around me and the men in the shadows returned my gaze sullenly. María invited me into her house to talk and sent her daughters out to buy a bottle of Cola, a pink, apple-flavoured drink.

  It was good to be out of the sun. A small poster that read ‘Love is the force behind this family’ had been tacked onto one of the bare breezeblock walls of the living room. ‘My husband disappeared on 26 February 1989,’ María told me. ‘He’d taken photos of some of the bodies that washed up on the river bank. He was going to take them to the mayor’s office. He thought they might be able to use them as evidence.’ His killers came for him the night after he had picked up the photos. Fearing that they might come back for her, María packed all that she owned into a couple of suitcases and left Puerto Berrío with her children a few days later.

  Her two children rushed back into the house. They were both about ten. One of them poured me a welcome drink while the other gawped open-mouthed at their foreign visitor. María had only returned to Puerto Berrío in 2005, she told me, shortly after President Uribe signed the Justice and Peace laws. Officially at least, paramilitarism was brought to an end, and María was relieved to see the local paramilitary commanders pushed out of the mayor’s office. The mayor, however, was nowhere to be found – he went about in a bulletproof jeep, guarded by armed escorts, she said. He had no contact with the people, much less the poor people living in neighbourhoods like Portón de la Vega.

  The People’s Defender of Puerto Berrío, whose father had been killed by paramilitaries, encouraged people to come forward with the stories they had long been too scared to tell. There was also a lone colonel at the battalion in town, who was at least willing to listen to María’s story. But he had no idea who the people in her husband’s photographs were, or what had happened to their bodies. María told me that he had seemed relieved to find that there was no case to prosecute.

  Under the Justice and Peace laws, fifty people in the town received compensation for the losses they had suffered. Teresa Castrillón was given about £17,000. It was some recompense for the loss of the main breadwinner in the family, but anyone wanting to know where the dead had been buried, or when their killers might stand trial for their crimes, was left in the dark. Requests for more information were ignored or passed to other ministries, government bodies or judicial bodies, which passed them back, on or up, in what seemed a concerted effort to hush up all that had happened over the past twenty-five years.

  Since then, Teresa and María had taken part in silent marches through the town, but their wordless reproach was the only protest they were prepared to make. As for the photos that María’s husband had taken, she thought it unlikely they would make any difference. The authorities didn’t want to know about the bodies that kept washing up in the town and most of the witnesses were too frightened to speak out. ‘NGOs and human rights people come through asking questions from time to time,’ María said. ‘But nothing seems to change.’

  The families of the disappeared are deeply stigmatized in Colombia. The bereaved are often threatened or forced to leave by people who regard their relative’s death as proof that they had some involvement with the guerrillas, and therefore deserved their fate. This is in marked contrast to attitudes towards the families of those who have been kidnapped by the guerrillas. In a country as polarized as Colombia, it should come as little surprise to learn that the victims’ associations too are split between ‘them’ and ‘us’, depending on who fell victim to whom.

  Critics have long argued that the Justice and Peace laws are a half-hearted attempt to put a stop to paramilitarism. Around 7,000 members of the private armies didn’t go through the demobilization process at all, and are still at large. And since 2005, many of those who did demobilize have returned to lives of crime. Most are former AUC commanders, the ones with the contacts in the cocaine business, who are determined to keep control of the territories and smuggling corridors they held before 2005.*

  The government, however, has drawn a line under paramilitarism. Ministers admit that there are bandas criminales, but insist that they should not be credited with having any political motivation. To do otherwise would be to acknowledge that the corruption and collusion that the paramilitaries depended on for their spectacular rise to power are as virulent as ever. This has led to situations as gruesome as they are absurd. In June 2010, a group of thirty uniformed paramilitaries showed up in an isolated village in the northern department of Córdoba, telling the people that they were from the Águilas Negras – the Black Eagles – before shooting a handful of local men and driving away. When the authorities eventually showed up, the villagers were told that the perpetrat
ors couldn’t have been from the Águilas Negras, because the group didn’t exist.*

  Only in late 2010 were city dwellers forced to sit up and take notice of the bandas criminales, when they killed two young students from the elite Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. Mateo Matamala and Margarita Gómez had been camping in a fishing village called Boca de Tinajones, in Córdoba. Prior to 2005 the Caribbean departments were notorious for the outright corruption of their politicians and their frequent collusion with paramilitaries. But tourists had never been given cause for alarm – or at least not until the two students pitched their tent on a key cocaine-smuggling route on the night a large consignment of cocaine was being carried to the coast.

  News of their deaths quickly reached Bogotá. It seemed to be the first time that Colombia’s urban middle class had been hit by violence from the right. Suddenly, everyone was talking about the bandas criminales. Forced to admit the scale of the problem, the police acknowledged that in the last two years the police and Army had engaged in more hostilities with the ‘bacrim’ than they had with the FARC. The head of the police, General Óscar Naranjo, called them ‘the biggest threat to national security’.

  Who are these organized crime groups that have displaced the FARC at the top of Colombia’s list of public enemies? A fifth of the bacrim are dedicated cocaine-trafficking organizations, prominent in the coastal departments, the lower Cauca, the south of Bolívar, Meta, Guaviare and Medellín – all regions important to the traffickers. But half of the bacrim gangs are also engaged in illegal mining and expropriating land. They include the Rastrojos (who have 2,500 members), the ERPAC (1,400 members) and the Paisas (800 members).

  The third grouping of bacrim is more akin to the old AUC. The days when paramilitaries controlled entire departments might be gone, but the new generation is still capable of intimidating voters and funding candidates. They still have military structures, territories that they control, and strong links with local Army and police units, not to mention politicians. They are in the business of driving people off their land, killing community leaders, fighting the guerrillas and controlling communities – all of which give them a distinctly political profile. They include outfits such as the Águilas Negras and the Nueva Generación – the New Generation.* These were the names whispered under cover of the vallenato ballads that boomed from the cafés and bars of Puerto Berrío.

  Back at my hotel, the woman at reception asked me, not for the first time, why I had come to the town. After all, there were no sights to see. When she’d first asked, I had told her that I was there to visit friends. This time, against my better judgement, I told her that I’d come to find out more about the disappeared of Puerto Berrío. ‘Talk to the river,’ she said with a strange smile. The river couldn’t talk; despite the much-celebrated demobilization of the paramilitaries, neither could anyone else. Once in my room, I wrote up my notes on my laptop and then tore the originals into tiny pieces.

  The following morning was my last in Puerto Berrío. Teresa had suggested I talk to a friend of hers called Mary, so I called her and we arranged to meet outside the Hotel Golondrinas. While I was waiting for her to show up, I watched two men on horseback drive a herd of young heifers through the main street of the town. The pavements were crowded with farmers and their families, who had come into town to buy storage tanks, plastic buckets and bags of fertilizer. A man walked past me hawking bootleg DVDs. I had been told to be watchful of the DVD sellers: they were often sicarios, who held the latest Hollywood titles in one hand, only to distract their victim’s attention from the pistol in the other hand.

  Mary was indigenous, with dark copper skin and long black hair that she wore plaited down her back. She told me that she was seventy, but she had the upright gait of a much younger woman. We walked out of town, along the same country road that had taken Teresa and me to Portón de la Vega the previous day. The sky was overcast, so the walking was easier than it had been the day before, but the air was humid and the dew still wet on the grass come ten o’clock. Overhead were the power cables, running between enormous pylons, that I guessed to be carrying hydroelectricity from the dam at San Rafael across the Magdalena to Bucaramanga.

  Long-eared Brahman cows watched us walk the dusty road with the dumb curiosity of cows everywhere. Mary asked me about the price of a pound of meat in England. I thought of the packets of mince I used to buy in Tesco, what seemed a very long time ago. I must have paid about £3.99 for 500 grams – how much of a pound was that?

  Two farmers astride quad bikes greeted us and asked where we were going. They seemed excessively polite, as if protesting their innocence. ‘Nowhere, just walking,’ Mary told them. They smiled and rode away. A mile or so beyond Portón de la Vega, we came to a creek. Mary picked me a guava fruit from a tree that was hanging over the track. ‘It’s good for babies. It gets their appetites going. Makes them grow up big and strong.’

  We sat on the bank of the creek and Mary told me her story. ‘I have seven children, but they killed two of them. Jacinto Alberto was twenty-one. We used to call him Cuerpopan – Bread Body – because he was big and chubby. A friend of his told me that a white van had pulled up at the football field. The men in the van had a list of names of local boys and Jacinto’s was at the top of it. At first, the boys thought that the men were looking for farm workers. But when they dragged them into the van, they realized that they were paramilitaries.

  ‘They took them to a nearby farm. They said they wanted to recruit them. They made all kinds of promises, but Jacinto didn’t want to join them. Then they accused him of being a grass, and put a revolver to his head. They took him outside. They had a grave ready. His friend told me that before he died, Jacinto said, “I want to talk to my mum.” They kicked him into the hole and then a man they called El Cabo shot him.

  ‘By chance, I saw El Cabo five days later, as I was walking back into town. He was with some of his men. He knew my name. I didn’t know how or why. “Why’s this old woman still moaning on about her son?” he said. “Do me a favour – make sure I never see you again. And don’t ask me about your son. I don’t know where he is.” ’

  Jacinto’s friend chose to join the paramilitaries, but was killed before Mary found out where her son had been buried. ‘I always hope that my son will come back. But I know that he can’t, that he’s buried out there somewhere. But where? I pray to God that he’ll tell me where he is. I even have dreams where I’m asking the same question. Not so long ago, I saw a man on a street corner and thought it was Jacinto. I rushed up to him, but of course it wasn’t him.

  ‘One day, I was at the cemetery with my friend Emilse. Bodies were being brought in in bags. Nobody knew who they were. “Why don’t we adopt two of these NNs?” Emilse asked me. “One for you and one for me?” I felt very strange. I don’t really believe in those things, but I went along with it and we did the nine-day wake for two of the NNs. Emilse bought herself a lottery ticket and a few days later she won a million pesos. To keep our side of the deal, we went back to the cemetery to bury her NN. When the gravedigger uncovered the body, we saw that it was a young woman. She had been cut up with knives and her forehead had been crushed.’

  A mule was braying in a field that ran alongside the river; a terrible, hopeless cry that I had often heard, but could never get used to. It was time to go. We crossed the metal bridge over the creek and watched two fishermen cast their nets into the still water. ‘Cómo son las historias de aqui: bonitas o feas? – What are the stories like around here: nice or nasty?’ Mary asked.

  ‘Both,’ said one of the men, as he pulled his empty net from the river.

  9. From Valledupar to the Cape

  After Puerto Berrío, I decided to put away my Dictaphone and laptop. I had heard enough – or at least, enough to know why so many Colombians felt so let down, not just by the government and the law courts, but by the guerrillas who had proposed to take their place. I needed some time to digest the heavy meal that had been put before me, as well
as to see the country, which was after all my original reason for coming back.

  So I took a flight to Leticia, the Amazonian town where Colombia meets Peru and Brazil, then another to Popayán in the southern Andes, from where I bussed my way to the pre-Columbian burial sites at Tierradentro and the Desierto de la Tatacoa. I took a boat up the River Atrato, from the steamy border with Panama to Quibdó, the capital of the department of Chocó. From there, I went to Manizales, sixty miles away as the crow flies, though by bus and with the western Andes to climb, the journey took over twelve hours. I went to Pereira, Palenque and Pamplona, by bus, taxi, plane and boat, through rainforests, cloud forests and highland páramo. I never did make it to Playboy (or Balmoral or Berlín), but I got my fill of Colombia’s bounty and met with nothing more threatening than idle curiosity.

  Then, on the first day of December, I had an email from Lucho. I hadn’t seen him since the morning we’d walked down Calle 19 in Bogotá, when the newspapers had been celebrating the death of Mono Jojoy. He was planning to fly to Valledupar the following day to hear testimonies from a group of local people who were commemorating the paramilitary massacres that had taken place on the coast. By chance, I was a bus ride away from Valledupar, so I emailed him back, and he suggested that I join him and his friends for a drink at the Café de la Plaza.

  The following evening was a hot and close one. People were sitting outside their houses, chatting with friends under the low trees. Valledupar had seemed very orderly, at least as seen from the bus. There were none of the low shacks teetering on the edge of a fetid swamp that are the usual sign that you’re about to enter one of Colombia’s coastal cities. This was a prosperous place, built on cattle raising, though I guessed that the bonanza marimbera had played its part too. That was what costeños called the marijuana boom of the 1970s, when a generation of North Americans had latched on to smoking Santa Marta Gold.