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

  Apart from a cleaner and a security guard, nobody was watching the television in the corner, so I bought a coffee and pulled up a chair at their table. The newsreader was a statuesque blonde woman with a steely, penetrating gaze. I had the feeling that her beauty was a deliberate ploy to distract viewers like me, who knew that the news was important, but found their coverage of it rather boring.

  Over the years, she said, the FARC had been instrumental in kidnapping dozens of soldiers and police officers. The picture cut to a press conference, where an Army general was addressing a bank of cameras and microphones. ‘The FARC should know that we are coming after them. We won’t let our guard down. We still have a long way to go.’

  The cleaner harrumphed and shuffled off with her bucket and mop. The security guard stayed where he was and together we watched more stories of neighbourhood criminals and disasters brought on by the winter rains, with a familiar cast of pleading locals and resolute policemen. Then the news segued into Farándula, a daily roundup of celebrity gossip presented by a woman who might have been the newsreader’s equally svelte twin sister.

  A girl of nineteen or so asked if she could share my table. I nodded and watched as she began eating her soup with a delicacy that I didn’t usually associate with Colombians. Perhaps it was her flawless skin, or the braces on her teeth, or the long thin arm that she rested on the table, but she struck me as being almost Japanese. It seemed ridiculous to sit there wordlessly, especially since the table was so small, so I asked her what the soup was. ‘Ahuyama,’ she told me. I’d never heard the word before – I later found out that it was squash.

  Her name was Katalina and she lived in Los Rosales, an exclusive neighbourhood of modern redbrick apartment complexes on the lower slopes of the northern hills. When I told her that I lived in La Candelaria, she said that she’d be worried to live there, especially after dark. I smiled, groaning inwardly at the fearfulness of the city’s gilded youth, whose sanctuary this was. The poor were like ghosts to people like Katalina – rarely seen, but ever-present and often malevolent.

  Of course crimes were committed at night in my neighbourhood. One morning I found my landlord clambering over the terracotta tiles on the roof, trying to salvage what was left of the telephone lines. The thieves had been after the copper wires, which they sold for scrap, he told me. Night-time marauders would steal the neighbourhood’s manhole covers too, to the same end. At the end of my street, some good citizen had used the branch of a tree to warn oncoming drivers of the hole in the road. Guillermo, my landlord’s son, told me that in the late 1980s, when the capital was passing through its darkest times, he used to venture out wondering not if but when he would be mugged.

  Even my friend Ricardo, who liked to scoff at upper-class paranoia, was quick to tell me how dangerous the city streets could be. His cousin had been walking in La Candelaria in the middle of the afternoon when someone on the flat roof of the market building had thrown a stone at him, which split his head open. Before the ambulance came to take him away, his attacker had come down onto the street and emptied his pockets.

  But those days were gone. Despite the widespread perception of Bogotá as a dangerous city, in the years since I last lived there it had emerged to become one of the safest cities in Latin America. These days, you were more likely to be robbed in Caracas or Quito.* Venturing out at night still had its risks though: many of the street lights in La Candelaria didn’t work and the combination of holes and darkness made any night-time wanderer a hostage to fortune. Only in the last twelve months had the city’s mayor come up with the idea of fitting plastic manhole covers, though I had yet to see one for myself.

  I left Katalina in peace and found a quiet coffee shop, where I spent the afternoon on the phone, trying to find a tour guide or local historian who might help me find out more about Bogotá. I didn’t come up with much. The shelves of the bookshops groaned under the weight of the memoirs of Pablo Escobar’s mistress, the Franco-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt’s account of her time as a captive of the FARC and hundreds of analyses of the conflict, but there was nothing that might have told me more about the capital.

  The light was fading from the sky by the time I got back to the Andean Centre to meet Maribel. We had some dinner and went to see The Social Network. The entire country seemed to be on Facebook, so I wasn’t surprised to see that the auditorium was packed. After the film, we walked over the road to a bar in the Zona Rosa. The hardwood panelling on the walls and the stark, skinny plants, dramatically uplit by spotlights buried in troughs of big grey pebbles, were reassuringly nondescript. I had the giddy feeling of being in an airport terminal, a secured bubble of globalized good taste, divorced from any indication of where on the planet I was.

  We had a few whiskies, or at least I did. Maribel had a lychee martini before switching to vodka. As the night wore on, the salsa got louder and couples took to the dance floor behind us. I was tempted to join them, but something in the atmosphere that night kept me in my seat. Young guys in designer denim and herringbone shirts eyed their fellow dancers steadily from under pristine felt cowboy hats, as they shuffled and kicked their way around the room. They clung to their partners possessively, as if they were human shields in a carefully choreographed battle scene.

  On our way out at three in the morning, a smaller, slighter figure than any I’d seen that evening opened his jacket to show me an iPhone. He whispered a price, I shook my head and he darted away into the crowd. I was reminded of something that a friend had once said to me: ‘If I go to Norway, I can see that their experience isn’t a universal one. No Norwegian lives like poor Colombians do. But go up to the Zona Rosa in Bogotá and you can see that the people there live much as people do in Norway. That’s why what’s happening in Colombia is of more universal importance than what’s happening in Norway – because we have first, second and third worlds living side by side.’

  It was strange to be back in a country that seemed at once universal and isolated. Despite its particular history of fratricidal conflict, spending time in Colombia had often felt like being in a microcosmic version of the world at large. Both are run by a white-skinned elite that makes up about 10 per cent of the population. In both, the privileged one in ten lives in the cooler climes and owns about 80 per cent of the mines, farms, industries and banks. He eats and lives well, studies at the best schools and universities, receives medical treatment in the best hospitals and usually dies of old age.*

  Below him on the social ladder are another four out of ten Colombians, generally a little darker-skinned than the privileged one, who spend their lives working as hard as they can, not so much to join the privileged one, as to stave off the possibility of falling into the poverty endured by the remaining five in ten. This bottom half live in the hottest regions, on the worst land, in the most isolated parts of the countryside or on the neglected margins of the big cities. They are black, Indian, white or mixes of the three. The poorest of them live from day to day, never sure of where their next meal will come from. That’s the way the world is, and Colombia is a small-scale version of it.

  I’d met few Colombians who had the will or the means to move between the three worlds to be found in their country. Maribel was one of them, but she was as careful as anyone to get a taxi that the security guards outside the bar could vouch for. Everyone seemed to have a story to tell of a friend who had taken a taxi and agreed to a short cut, only for the driver to turn into a darkened street, where he stopped to let in his two accomplices. They called it el paseo de los millonarios – the millionaires’ stroll: a midnight ride around the cash points of the city, a pistol digging into the victim’s ribs, until the account was empty.

  With Maribel safely homebound, I spent twenty minutes waiting for a taxi driver who might take me south, but none of them wanted to leave the uptown neighbourhoods. So I started walking; all this watchfulness was making me feel claustrophobic. All I had to do, I told myself, was stick to the Avenida Séptima; if I kept up
a good pace, I reckoned on being home in a couple of hours.

  Over the first ten blocks I passed groups of well-heeled young men and women who were trying in vain to hail taxis home. A pair of young businessmen were propping up a third who was being sick into a bin. ‘Not on your shoes, Raúl!’ said one. After half an hour I came to Chapinero, euphemistically known as ‘the theatre district’, where I passed same-sex couples walking home arm in arm. A face peeped out warily from the doorway of an innocuous-looking house whose windows were shaking to the sound of techno. For the next few blocks, I could have been in Camden Town circa 1978, as the street was crowded with leather-clad punks waiting for southbound buses.

  Beyond Chapinero there were roadworks under way, so pedestrians had to cross and re-cross the avenue. I ended up walking down the badly lit streets that run parallel to the Avenida Séptima. I walked fast, dodging the potholes in the road, the shoots of rainwater that gushed from the gaps between the paving stones, and the empty spaces once capped by manhole covers. The horror stories I’d heard from Katalina, Ricardo and Maribel ran through my head. I tried to reason my way past them. The story here was not crime, but bogotanos’ exaggerated fear of crime, I told myself. But a nagging voice in my head told me that I was dando papaya. It was an expression I had heard time and again. Its literal meaning was to ‘give somebody a papaya’, but Colombians use it to describe anybody who gives a thief an opportunity: in other words, a mug. It seemed very bogotano to blame not the fox but the rabbit silly enough to venture into his path.

  The gloomy backstreets were empty – anyone venturing out at this hour would be in the back seat of a car or taxi. In fact, with Chapinero behind me, the entire city seemed to be empty. Perhaps this was the solution to night-time crime: with most of the city having taken to their beds long ago and the revellers behind closed doors, muggers found that their only would-be victims were homeless old men.

  Maybe the silence of the city and the fear it inspired explained the great sentimentality with which my Colombian friends talked about their own patch: their family, friends and the neighbourhood they lived in. In time, I’d come to recognize the wariness with which one region eyed another. If I were going to Cali, bogotanos would tell me to be careful; it was ‘muy peligroso’ – very dangerous. Once in Cali, people would warn me of the same danger being particular to Bogotá, Medellín or Barranquilla. I had thought that people might have grown accustomed to the violence, but in fact, they seemed more scared than I did. Whatever lay beyond the end of the street was potentially dangerous.

  I soon came to the barrio of Teusaquillo. In the days before the first Europeans reached the Andes, when the Muiscas ruled the city then known as Bacatá, their tribal leaders would bathe in the springs here. By the 1950s Teusaquillo had become a pseudo-English garden suburb of bungalows and faux-Tudor houses with neat front gardens. Though faded, it still had some charm. Behind a barred window and muted by lace curtains, a bare bulb shone. A security guard stood outside his kiosk on the corner of the empty street. Through the half-light cast by a flickering street lamp, I could make out a solitary local, who was walking his dog.

  I came to the Avenida Caracas. Running down the middle of the avenue were two new concrete highways that had been built for the Transmilenio, the name bogotanos give to the gleaming fleet of bendy buses, harbingers of a twenty-first-century version of the city, that shuttle from the wealthy north to the impoverished south and all points in between. A depot-bound bus was waiting at the traffic lights for a man who was pushing a cart laden with offcuts of wood, metal poles and bags of empty plastic bottles. The weight of the cart, and his skeletal frame, which was bent double by the effort, meant that it took him ages to cross the road. The bus hummed patiently.

  On the other side, an indigent man was squatting at the kerb, picking through a bag of scraps that had been left outside a shuttered restaurant. With him was a teenage boy who was inhaling glue from a plastic bag. A boy in rags strode past me on a mission, singing at the top of his voice, alone, free and seemingly oblivious to anyone who might have been listening.

  These old men and teenagers, dressed in tattered hand-me-downs, their toes poking out from cast-off shoes, and a sack of tin cans for the scrap merchant slung over one shoulder, had been here when I was last in the city. Despite the signs that Colombia was emerging from its twenty-year-long crisis, they were still here. They were short and skinny, with matted hair and furrowed, greasy faces tanned by the Andean sun. Solitary walkers through the night, they slouched with downcast eyes, hoping to avoid other members of their tribe. In the early mornings, as the commuters returned to take the city they half-owned, the homeless they would shrink away to sleep under cardboard boxes at the back of car parks. They re-emerged in the afternoon, but confined themselves to the backstreets, where I’d occasionally be asked for the price of a bread roll or a cup of coffee.

  When the Hotel Tequendama came into view, I knew that I’d soon be home. It was five in the morning and the sky was growing light. There was still no sign of the stark Andean sunshine that had illuminated my memories of the city. That morning, the city was hemmed in by cold, grey clouds that swept over the mountains from the east. A lone man eyed me up as he spoke into a lapel mike. Ahead, a security guard with a muzzled Rottweiler slowly paced around in front of the hotel’s grand main entrance. I made it back to the Casa Los Alpes just as the first of the day’s commuters were coming into the city centre.

  Two days later I woke to news that Air Force bombs had killed the man known as ‘Mono Jojoy’, the commander of the FARC’s Eastern Block. After breakfast I logged on to the FARC’s website. ‘It is with profound remorse, clenched fists and chests heavy with feeling that we inform the people of Colombia and our brothers in Latin America that Commander Jorge Briceño, our brave, proud hero of a thousand battles, commander since the glorious days of the foundation of the FARC, has fallen at his post, at his men’s side, while fulfilling his revolutionary duties, following a cowardly bombardment akin to the Nazi blitzkrieg.’

  It was a morning of glorious sunshine. It picked out the pine trees on the steep, wooded hills that rise up from the plain of Bogotá to form a north–south wall for the city. The whitewashed walls of the church of Monserrate gleamed from the summit. I made my way through the Journalists Park, with its statue of Simón Bolívar under a neglected limestone cupola, and followed the creek upstream, past the students making their way to the Universidad de los Andes, to the Quinta de Bolívar. This is where Simón Bolívar, the hero of Colombia’s wars of independence, lived when he was in Bogotá. I had come to catch up with the thinking of the academics and NGOs that have been faithfully monitoring, measuring and struggling to come up with solutions to Colombia’s convulsions since the fifties. Unfortunately, I’d got my timing wrong: the conference had ended, not started, at 10 a.m. I’d forgotten what a nation of early risers this was.

  On my way back down into the city, I fell in with Lucho, an old friend from the Arco Iris Foundation, one of the most respected of Colombia’s NGOs. He seemed less than surprised by the morning’s news. ‘The death of any soldier is to be expected,’ he said solemnly. ‘Every FARC commander has his understudy waiting to replace him should he fall in combat. Mono Jojoy is sure to have agreed his own treaty with Death.’ Lucho’s easy recourse to metaphysics sounded exotic to my ears, accustomed as they still were to the talk of Londoners, few of whom have agreed to anything as grand as a treaty with Death.

  ‘And anyway,’ he went on, ‘the guerrillas don’t count for much these days. The real problem facing the country is the mafia. They’ve bought out half of Congress.’ In a country that practically defined itself by its ‘war on terror’, this came as something of a surprise.

  We hit the news-stands on Calle 19, where Lucho asked for a copy of El Tiempo. Colombia’s oldest daily newspaper has long been a cornerstone of its democracy, except for a brief period in 1955 when it was shut down by the military dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. For a while, El Ti
empo reappeared as Intermedio, ‘The Times’ becoming ‘The Intermission’, before Rojas Pinilla was booted out of office and normal service was resumed. It was Colombia’s first and last experiment with dictatorship.

  But at one kiosk after another we were told that that day’s edition had sold out. A young boy with a bundle of newspapers under his arm was winding his way between the cars waiting at the traffic lights. ‘Extra, extra!’ he shouted. Lucho snapped up the eight-page supplement while I ordered us a couple of tintos at a street-side coffee bar. He propped his elbow on the counter and began hungrily scanning the pages.

  Perhaps I was expecting cars to be honking their horns in jubilation at the news, but there was nothing so palpable. The politicians and journalists might have been celebrating the death of Mono Jojoy as another blow to the terrorists, but Lucho seemed less than impressed. ‘The newspapers are always saying that peace is just around the corner. Today, it’s Mono Jojoy. A couple of years ago it was Raúl Reyes.* When I was a kid, my dad used to tell me about Capitán Desquite and Tarzán and Efraín González. These days, they’d call them terrorists, but back then they were just bandits. Colombians have always had short memories.’ I later found out that Capitán Desquite – Captain Revenge – had been a Liberal guerrilla in the 1950s and that Efraín González was a Conservative guerrilla from the same period.

  Mono Jojoy’s death had come just a few weeks after the inauguration of Colombia’s new president. To untrained eyes the Air Force’s strike might have confirmed that Juan Manuel Santos had adopted the hardline tactics of his predecessor, Álvaro Uribe. But Lucho suggested that it signalled a change in strategy. ‘Hugo Chávez and the FARC high command would have been aware of the strike in advance. Maybe they even gave it their blessing.’