Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the new Colombia

by Feiling, Tom

  Shepherded away from their own country, elite Colombians are schooled in the thinking of the transnational business community and graduate as firm believers in the dogma that foreign investment will be Colombia’s saviour. But despite the fanfare in Newsweek that had sparked my trip, the ‘technology transfers’ that the poor world expects from the rich have yet to be made. GDP has grown, but mainly because of rising prices for the oil, coal and minerals under Colombia’s soils, and a one-off wave of investment that was bound to follow in the wake of the FARC as they fled to the most remote parts of the country. Foreign journalists might be impressed by the giddy excitement of stockbrokers, but the vast majority of Colombians remain spectators.

  In unguarded moments of exasperation, the same elite Colombians who have spent the past twenty years blaming their country’s poverty on the FARC will lambast imperialist domination of the developing world – rub him hard enough, and even the most dyed-in-the-wool free trader will revert to resentful to isolationism. But in fact, the rich nations’ trade with Latin America is currently so small as to be insignificant: only 6 per cent of the United States foreign trade is with Latin America. Far from being bled dry through its ‘open veins’, countries like Colombia would probably benefit from some mutual bloodsucking.*

  Another chimerical source of faith is trickle-down economics, which supposes that sooner or later a healthy chunk of the nation’s wealth has to pass from its upper to its lower echelons. This might be realistic if Colombian businesses were more ambitious, but generally speaking they’re not. Colombia exports fruit, gold and oil, but the best parts of all three sectors is owned by foreigners. The one business still in Colombian hands is coffee – and even that is processed abroad.

  Two conglomerates dominate Colombia’s economy: the Santo Domingo group and the Ardila Lulle group. The conglomerates make their money from banking, insurance and air transport. They also control most of the Colombian media. What production there is focuses on processing food and drinks for the masses, and luxury goods for the rich. The near-monopolies they enjoy make for huge profits. Until his death in 2011, Julio Santo Domingo was one of the richest men in the world, reputedly worth $6 billion.

  When Pablo Escobar first started exporting cocaine to the United States in the early 1980s, Colombia was a country of 28 million people. Today, its population is closer to 45 million. If prospects for education and employment were better, the country would be well placed to take advantage of the huge growth in population it has seen in the past thirty years, as other once poverty-stricken countries like Japan and South Korea did in the 1950s. But Colombia has yet to develop the high-value export industries that might offer a way out of poverty and soak up the productive energies of its young workforce. There is little industrial production, and Colombian businesses have yet to export anything with added value, bar cocaine.

  Instead, its most powerful sectors have been seduced by the temptations of the captive market. Their insularity is part and parcel of their long-term occupation of the moral high ground, from where they alternate between ignoring, provoking and admonishing the country’s large reserve of idle hands. For the only way the poor can survive is by working in the informal economy, by nature unregulated, shadowy and an endless source of anguish for law-and-order enthusiasts.

  Officially, joblessness in Bogotá stands at 10 per cent, but even the bureaucrats acknowledge that another 34 per cent of the workforce is ‘under-employed’. Those confined to the informal economy soon abandon the rules of the formal market economy, which has in effect abandoned them. Hundreds of thousands of bogotanos spend their working day not in offices, factories or shops, but on the street, flogging bootleg CDs and DVDs, knock-off car parts and stolen mobile phones.

  Bogotanos depend on the underground economy for all kinds of illegal goods and services. They borrow money from loan sharks, who charge exorbitant and illegal interest rates – eleven bogotanos were killed in 2010 because they couldn’t pay their creditors. In neighbourhoods like Suba, Kennedy and Barrios Unidos, which no denizen of the north ever ventures into, they buy and sell fake euros, fake drivers’ licences, fake passports, and even clean criminal records. They build houses without planning permission and steal power from the nearest overhead cable. They get illegal abortions and buy dodgy knock-offs of prescription drugs, which from time to time put somebody in hospital – if they can afford to go to hospital, that is. They drink copies of brand-name whiskies, chilled with ice from fridges that have been smuggled into the country without paying import taxes, part of a trade in contraband that has long been used by cocaine smugglers to launder the dollars and euros they earn abroad.* Illegality is rampant in Colombia, and has to be, because the legal economy only has room for half the population.

  After my meeting with Richard and Kurt, I took a southbound bus back to my flat in La Candelaria. I decided to take a break from my carnivorous diet by making a salad; the very idea of raw, crunchy vegetables seemed almost subversive. I searched the fridge for the ingredients for a dressing, but the cream cheese was off, even though the sell-by date said 13 January – almost a month away. The phoney Cheddar was off too, and the sell-by date on that was 30 January.

  But what was I going to do? Sue? Of the 15,000 murders recorded in Bogotá in the past three years, in only a third of cases has a defendant been brought to trial, let alone convicted. When it comes to robbery, hold-ups and burglary, the legal system is even more shambolic. Of 180,000 cases reported to the police since 2007, only 15 per cent have made it to a courtroom.† With such a pitiful clear-up rate, what chance did I stand of convincing the supermarket to reimburse me for mouldy cheese? My salad went un-garnished.

  Neither politicians nor journalists seem able to square their love of ‘democratic security’ with the rampant criminality and impunity that most of Colombia’s people have to live with. Looking through the country’s one-way mirror from the comfort of a seat in one of the Andean Centre’s upscale restaurants, the root causes of its problems seem a world away. The patrons of Bogotá’s snazzier restaurants live big city lives, and though overwhelmingly schooled in progressive, liberal ideas, the elite that runs Colombia is at heart indifferent to the rolling crisis the rest of the country lives with.

  Despite all the simple-minded talk of Colombia being a democracy under siege from terrorists, my travels had shown me that the FARC is just one of many threats to democracy, and the country is ruled not by the people, but by a clique. Even poor Colombians who voted for Juan Manuel Santos know that he is a member of an oligarchy, and that the meaningful choices are made before, not after, their ballots are cast. The Colombian version of democracy is an incestuous affair, with many spectators and few participants, and every one of them on first-name terms with everyone else.

  Corruption and intimidation ensure that most Colombians put little faith in press, courts, Congress, or the other institutions that democracy depends upon. Instead, the pervasive lawlessness creates an incessant demand for law and order, which is how populist authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and Álvaro Uribe come to be elected. I remembered an anecdote Ricardo had told me as we were climbing Moguy, of a TV vox pop of attitudes to then-president Uribe’s proposal to put the death penalty on the statute books. Most passers-by were broadly in favour of capital punishment and nodded away to the sound of Uribe dishing out the ultimate punishment. The last of those interviewed was an impoverished old man. When asked what he thought of the death penalty, he thought for a moment. ‘Well, it doesn’t seem to have worked so far,’ he replied. His words came from the other side of the mirror, where vigilantes and sicarios take the place of police officers and judges. Those on the receiving end of their rough justice have all of the wisdom but none of the power needed to act upon it.

  Ricardo told me another story that day, of the time he spent working as a pollster. The survey was conducted by researchers from a British university, who wanted to find out more about living conditions in the poorest parts of Bogotá. Ricardo’s
job was to go into people’s homes and confirm that indeed, the father had left a while ago, the three children shared a single bed, and the mother cooked on a single hob, using power that she filched from the power lines running overhead.

  The part of the survey that dealt with work gave respondents the option of describing themselves as unemployed, but nobody did. Despite mass unemployment, there was no welfare system, at least not for the jobless, so everybody did something, even if it was only touting boiled sweets on buses or packs of felt-tip pens outside Juan Valdez.

  According to the survey, all such workers were to be listed as ‘independent trades people’. To Ricardo’s surprise, far from feeling aggrieved by the phoney poll, the respondents felt pleased to be called ‘independent trades people’. They were not ‘unemployed’, but ‘determined lone operators’. The flattering picture that the outside world drew of their poverty was, well, flattering. Ricardo told me that he couldn’t handle the duplicity and quit the same day (no wonder he couldn’t afford the bus fare).

  I have spent time in other countries where the young make up the best part of the population. In the Ghanaian capital of Accra, I watched young women minding their stalls in the marketplaces; their eyes fixed on the mid-distance and seemed to stay there all day. Their passivity was dispiriting, or so I thought until Sunday, when I went to a local church and saw ranks of young women singing their praises to Jesus and crying their eyes out over the unhappiness of their earthly existence.

  In Ghana, most young people grow up with little prospect of escaping the poverty they were born into, but still choose to obey the law – or did, until Colombian cocaine traffickers started teaching them how to get ahead. But Colombia isn’t a country in which the law is held in high regard. I have met many young Colombians who are well aware that the opportunities that the one in ten takes for granted will never be theirs, not because they lack merit or determination but because they were born on the lower rungs of an oligarchy. They will not take a life of poverty lying down. Five hundred and twelve years after the first European dropped anchor off Cabo de la Vela, Colombia is still part of the New World; it is a project, not an inheritance, and it demands ambition, not stewardship. Like all the countries of the Americas, Colombia was born of hope – first for riches; then order; and lastly for justice. Until those hopes are realized, it will continue to simmer with accumulated frustration and resentment.

  11. Merry Crisis and a Happy New Fear

  Over a period of four days in the run-up to Christmas 2010, 200 soldiers from the Colombian Army’s elite FUDRA counter-insurgency force secreted themselves into one of the guerrillas’ main supply corridors in La Macarena national park. They found a 75-foot-high tree, decorated it with 2,000 Christmas lights, and beat a hasty retreat under the protection of several Black Hawk helicopters. The Ministry of Defence called it ‘a Christmas present for the FARC’, part of its campaign to encourage guerrillas to hand in their weapons over the holiday season. ‘Demobilize this Christmas: anything is possible’ ran their slogan.*

  Days later, President Juan Manuel Santos delivered a Christmas message to the troops at the Tolemaida military fort. ‘This has not been an easy year,’ he told them. ‘The beast, as President Uribe used to call it, is still alive. We have him cornered and he’s weak. But weak, cornered beasts are more dangerous and more cowardly. That’s why we have to persevere. We won’t let our guard down for a single minute until we have secured complete peace for this country.’†

  Resolute, honourable and united, the president’s speech seemed the perfect end-of-year message for a country emerging from decades of internecine strife. But the stirring team talk masked a rather messier reality. The Army’s success in pushing the FARC ever further up the slopes of the southern Andes or into the jungles of the llanos has been mired in controversy ever since what came to be known as the ‘false positives’ scandal was brought to light. In the closing months of 2008, nineteen young men disappeared from Soacha, a sprawling suburb of Bogotá. Their bodies turned up the following day in the department of Norte de Santander, where the Army claimed to have killed all nineteen in fire-fights with the guerrillas. When the victims’ families went to collect their bodies, they began to ask questions. How could the deceased have been recruited, trained and sent into battle by the guerrillas only twenty-four hours after disappearing from their homes? One of the dead was known to have had mental health problems; another was physically disabled. Was the FARC really so desperate for new recruits that they would send such men into combat with the Army?

  Senator Gustavo Petro, a long-standing critic of the government’s ‘democratic security’ policies who was elected mayor of Bogotá in October 2011, believed that the killings were the logical consequence of ‘directive 29’. This Army memorandum entitled any soldier who killed a guerrilla or paramilitary fighter in combat to a reward of around £1,000. Directive 29 had led to a series of illegal killings in towns and villages up and down the country. Soldiers hoping for a cash bonus or time off to visit their families would befriend a civilian – usually a young, unemployed man – and entice him back to base with the promise of work. The victim would then be driven into the countryside, where he would be killed, dressed in the uniform of a FARC guerrilla and taken to the Army morgue, to become another number in the Army’s body count and further proof of its successful prosecution of the ‘war on terror’.

  The practice had started with soldiers from the Fourth Brigade in Medellín, before being taken up by other brigades around the country. Wherever the Army was struggling to overrun guerrilla fronts, soldiers were likely to boost their body count by killing unwitting civilians. Although ‘directive 29’ was dropped when abuses first came to light in May 2006, this ‘body count syndrome’ remained unaffected. By October 2009, the Attorney General was investigating over 900 cases of alleged ‘false positive’ killings.

  As news of the scandal spread northwards, members of the US Congress began asking why American taxpayers were supporting human rights abusers. Pressure was brought to bear on the Colombians to clean up their act. With so much money riding on Plan Colombia and the United States’ support for the Colombian armed forces, then-president Uribe was determined to stop his ‘democratic security’ policies being dragged into the mire. The Minister of Defence – the future president, Juan Manuel Santos – insisted that he had ‘zero tolerance for violations of human rights and corruption’. The head of the Army, Mario Montoya, was forced to resign, as were thirty other senior officers.

  Once the peripatetic gaze of the camera had passed, however, the armed forces returned to time-honoured tactics. The generals agreed to prepare an internal report, but kept a public enquiry off the agenda. That done, the high command closed ranks and President Uribe simply refused to discuss the matter any further. Mention of falsos positivos was deemed akin to being unpatriotic; those who sided with the victims were part of an international smear campaign orchestrated by foreign NGOs, whose self-righteous talk of peace and justice only provided intellectual cover for terrorists. Juan Manuel Santos warned that he would have no truck with ‘false allegations’. The question of who might be issuing such falsehoods and why was left unanswered.

  Some took Uribe and Santos’ belligerent response to the false positives scandal as licence to issue death threats against the families of the victims. General Carlos Suárez, who was given the job of leading the inquiry into the killings, told US ambassador William Brownfield that Army officers had even threatened his family. While his inquiry had the support of Santos and the head of the Air Force, the new head of the Army, Carlos Ospina, was opposed to it from the outset. By his reckoning, calling the Army to account for anything was an affront, and would only discourage his soldiers from fighting the terrorists.

  The false positives scandal shows how desperate the Colombian Army is to give the appearance of winning. The idea that the FARC can be defeated on the ground is crucial to the legitimacy of both the Army and the government. But success is ha
rd to gauge, which is why the body count is so popular with generals, politicians and the press: it is as easy to understand as it is to manipulate. Worse, the scandal shows that in the name of fighting terror, Colombian soldiers are prepared to kill the very people they are supposed to be protecting from terrorism.

  Even the official statements of contrition that followed the scandal soon proved to be window-dressing. A UN report published in May 2010 found that more than 98 per cent of the 900 cases of falsos positivos had gone unpunished.* And in May 2011, a second scandal broke when it was found that 270 soldiers who had been found guilty of torture, disappearances and extrajudicial killings, and imprisoned in the ‘reclusion centre’ of the fort at Tolemaida, were in fact living in holiday cabins. ‘My general often comes round to my place,’ said one convicted soldier, who an undercover journalist found relaxing in the sun outside his cabin. ‘He’s been a big help.’† Most convicts still received wages from the Army; some ran the military fort’s taxi services; a lucky few had even been given ‘leave’ to take holidays on the Caribbean island of San Andrés.

  Of course, President Santos made no mention of the ‘false positives’ in the speech that he gave to the troops gathered at the military fort at Tolemaida. He was there to boost, not sap their morale. ‘The whole world has said: “Look at Colombia: it’s an example of how a democracy that was once cornered can arise once more, with vigour, while guaranteeing the freedoms and rights of its citizens.” ’ In a country as demonized as Colombia, foreign approval is guaranteed to put a spring in a soldier’s step. No mention, then, of the fact that, far from guaranteeing its citizens’ rights, the Colombian Army has the worst human rights record of any armed force in the western hemisphere.

  In 2006 I accompanied a delegation of British MPs and trade union leaders to Colombia. We flew from Bogotá to the town of Saravena, close to the border with Venezuela, where the Army was fighting running battles with FARC and ELN guerrillas. Both groups had come to depend on the money they extorted from foreign oil companies in the region. Caño Limón is Colombia’s biggest oil pipeline and the target of endless sabotage. After intense lobbying by their biggest oil companies, the United States had spent $100 million on the creation of a new battalion of the Colombian Army that was dedicated to protecting the pipeline.