Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the new Colombia Read online

  TOM FEILING

  Short Walks from Bogotá

  Journeys in the New Colombia

  ALLEN LANE

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  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

  Introduction

  ‘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.

  1. The View from Bogotá

  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.