Durante la Tregua During the Truce

Durante la Tregua

During the Truce

Doherty embeds a bewitching tale of her experiences as an American college student on a junior term abroad within a searing excursion through Colombia’s history. The two narratives speak to one another, and to the reader, with subtlety and power. The result is at once shocking and delightful.

– Alison Richard, Crosby Professor emerita of Anthropology, Yale University

Doherty’s subtle, kind and evocative memoir of Colombia makes a lively counterpoint to her account of the country’s violent history. During the Truce really brings that history home.

– Dan Bullen, author of Love Lives of the Artists and The Dangers of Passion

Durante la Tregua is the real deal, part memoir part, travelogue, it takes the reader back to Colombia in the turbulent mid-eighties – a time of both great political repression and hope for a better future. Doherty’s writing is so precise the reader feels they are tagging along just a step behind her as she travels through Bogota from the wealthy shaded streets to the direst barrios and their armies of homeless children.

– Joe Gannon, author, The Night of the Jaguar, and freelance correspondent in Central America

$15 ISBN 978-1-937146-88-7

Levellers PressAmherst, Massachusetts

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Oonagh Doherty was born in Scotland, and grew up in both the United Kingdom and the United States. She has published prose in 34th Parallel, The Connecticut Review, and epiphany and has published poetry in many venues. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice, once for prose, once for poetry.

Oonagh C. Doherty

Photo by Sally Greaves

Advance praise for

Durante la tregua / During the truce

Doherty embeds a bewitching tale of her experiences as an american college student on a junior term abroad within a searing excursion through colombia’s history. the two narratives speak to one another, and to the reader, with subtlety and power. the result is at once shocking and delightful.

– alison richard, crosby Professor emerita of anthropology, Yale university

Doherty’s subtle, kind and evocative memoir of colombia makes a lively counterpoint to her account of the country’s violent history. During the Truce really brings that history home.


Durante la Tregua is the real deal. Part memoir, part travelogue, it takes the reader back to colombia in the turbulent mideighties – a time of both great political repression and hope for a better future. Doherty’s writing is so precise the reader feels they are tagging along just a step behind her as she travels through Bogota from the wealthy shaded streets to the direst barrios and their armies of homeless children.

– Joe gannon, author, The Night of the Jaguar, and freelance correspondent in central america

Advance praise for








Advance praise for








Advance praise for








in 1985, during the truce between the colombian government and guerilla movements, Wesleyan student Oonagh Doherty spent a semester abroad that left her feeling “… as though scales had fallen from my eyes.” her book During the Truce dovetails a personal account of her life while studying and living in colombia with the complex realities of the people, history and politics of that country. She reviews, in particular, the mired history and politics of colombia and the united States. in her enlightening memoir, Doherty, a gifted storyteller, uses rich language and insightful detail to leave readers feeling as though scales have fallen from their eyes, too. During the Truce is great story, great history, and great education.

– Sally Bellerose, author of The Girl’s Club, winner of the Bywater Prize for Fiction. Finalist for the James Jones Fellowship, the thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, and the Bellwether endowment.

Oonagh Doherty writes with eloquence, insight, and exquisite sensibility in this moving and important gem of a book. She sets the stage with a brief history of colombia and then invites us in to explore one small but important slice of time. She vividly brings to life the people of Bogota – the hungry children, the revolutionaries, the teenagers in jeans and sneakers, the peasant women and the brittle highclass socialites. She takes us inside the barrios, the encampments, the churches. She illustrates how we all are caught in our time like insects in amber. By shining a light on this particular time and place, she illuminates the dreadful longterm effects of u.S. foreign policy throughout South america.

– Jean Kilbourne, creator of the “Killing us Softly: advertising’s image of Women” film series, author of Can’t Buy My Love: How

Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel
















Durante la Tregua

During the truce

Durante la Tregua

During the truce

Durante la Tregua

During the truce

Durante la Tregua

During the truce

Durante la Tregua

During the truce

Oonagh C. Doherty

Levellers Pressamherst, massachusetts

Durante la Tregua

During the truce

Oonagh C. Doherty


Durante la Tregua

During the truce

Oonagh C. Doherty


Durante la Tregua

During the truce

Oonagh C. Doherty


copyright © 2015 Oonagh c. Doherty

all rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

cover photo: Daniel herard

Published by Levellers Press, amherst, Massachusetts

Printed in the united States of america

iSBn 9781937146887






iSBn 9781937146887






iSBn 9781937146887






iSBn 9781937146887

For Eresmere, Carolina, Maria, Juanito, Ana

Sofia, Julio, Mariana, Esteban,

Pacho and Lupe



Pacho and Lupe



Pacho and Lupe



Pacho and Lupe

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prologue:

A rudimentary history of Colombia from the Viceroyalty to the 1984 truce

From the conquest in the 1530s to independence in 1819, Colombia, a part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, was a colony of Spain. As a colony, New Granada’s acknowledged purpose was to enrich the mother country. Using the labor of indigenous peo-ple, slaves from Africa, and their mixed blood descen-dants, the Spanish extracted gold for the benefit of the Crown. Later, Spanish hacienda owners used slave and sharecropper labor to cultivate coffee, cacao, cot-ton, sugar, and tobacco for export. For over two hun-dred years, a tiny minority owned most of the land, and a serf-like majority worked it. The economic and social system was analogous to that of feudal Europe. As in feudal Europe, the Catholic Church formed an additional quasi-independent estate.

In the late eighteenth century and early nine-teenth century, a division emerged between the ethnically Spanish but American-born Criollos and the Peninsulares, the Spanish born administrators of the crown’s bureaucracy. The Criollos resented the Peninsulares’ access to the most lucrative bureaucratic positions, the legal limits on manufacture and trade

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in the Americas, and a royal taxation system which provided no benefit to the colonies. In Colombia a particular bone of contention was Spain’s monopoly on the sale of liquor, tobacco and salt, all of which were produced cheaply in the colony and resold by the crown at exorbitant prices. In the name of freedom for the Americas and independence from Spain, the Criollos Simon Bolivar and San Francisco de Paula Santander led a revolution against Spanish rule. The basic social structure, however – that of an ethnically Spanish wealthy minority ruling over a miserably situated mixed blood, Indian and black majority who had limited access to land, education, or any other form of potential wealth, did not change. Throughout the nineteenth and part of the twentieth century, it would be accurate to describe the land ownership and social structure of Colombia, particularly rural Colombia, as continuing to be semi-feudal, although in some of the highland provinces, a population of small farmers owned land. The number of small farmers increased as peasant pioneers moved into, cleared, and cultivated land in marginal areas. There was also a limited middle class consisting of craftsmen, shopkeepers, merchants, manufacturers, bureaucrats, professionals, small farmers, teachers, and the like. This was particularly evident in small towns and cities, and less true of the rural areas.

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After Independence, Colombia was ostensibly a two party democracy, in which those eligible to vote chose between the Liberal party and the Conservative party. In fact, neither party had an agenda which in-cluded changing the essential distribution of wealth, land, or power. There was little difference between the two parties – except that the Conservatives were allied with the Catholic Church and the Liberals were not.

It is a slight oversimplification to say that the United States filled the exploitative trade vacuum Spain left post-independence. Nevertheless by 1897, the notorious US owned United Fruit Company held extensive banana plantations in Colombia. Further, by 1903 the United States engineered the secession of the canal-ready Colombian isthmus that became Panama, then administered the canal profitably until 1999. In 1917, North American oil companies first sunk drills into the petroleum-rich Magdalena River Valley, and Exxon to this day operates a strip mine on formerly Indian lands in La Guajira. It is important to understand that US foreign policy towards Colombia since the late nineteenth century has been directed primarily at protecting the investment of U.S. and transnational companies in the low cost extraction of Colombian agricultural products, minerals, and petroleum.

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In part because of the geography of Colombia, it was difficult throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the capital, Bogota, to bring the hinterlands under political control. Those who inhabited the limited fertile lands in the various prov-inces were isolated from Bogota by mountain chains and the misty infertile wasteland of the paramo, both of which were nearly impassable. The isolated prov-inces operated independently, and although the seat of government was Bogota, the power to enforce law was entirely local. Liberal versus Conservative conflicts were rife, and often took on the clannish, vengeful nature of blood feud. Assassination and atrocity were not uncommon, and the frequently changing victors enriched themselves at the expense of eliminated opposing party members. This dynam-ic is described beautifully in the Colombian writer Eduardo Caballero Calderon’s novel Christ with His Back Turned, in which a local political boss in a pre-dominantly Conservative area runs the widow of an assassinated Liberal out of town, then takes over her store and merchandise.

In the mid-twentieth century, the nature of the Liberal versus Conservative conflict began to change. By the 1920s, a Colombian socialist party had formed. The Revolutionary Socialist Party assisted in organizing the banana and oil workers. When

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the United Fruit banana workers went on strike for better working conditions in 1928, they did so with the support of the Revolutionary Socialist Party and the nascent progressive branch of the Liberal Party. The Conservative Party’s central government, under pressure from the United States,1 which supported United Fruit against the strikers, sent in the military. The Colombian Army, when it arrived in the strike area of Cienaga, sealed off a town square where workers and their families, including children, had gathered after mass to hear pro-strike speakers, and then opened fire indiscriminately. The number of dead is disputed, but estimates run as high as 3,000. The so called Banana Massacre is described in Nobel prize winning Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.2 A young Liberal member of the House of Representatives investigated, publicized and condemned the Banana Massacre. His name was Jorge Eliecer Gaitan.

1 In fact, the U.S. Ambassador requested that a U.S. warship be sent to visibly patrol the coast near the area where the strike took place, and although his request was not granted, knowledge of it was exceedingly persuasive to the Colombian central government.

2 It is interesting to know that a Nobel prize winner and world famous literary luminary like Garcia Marquez was denied a visa for the United States for many years, based on his outspoken views on American economic exploitation of Colombia. Bill Clinton, once in office, issued an order that the ban against Garcia Marquez be lifted.

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Jorge Gaitan was not a socialist or a communist – he formed a part of the most progressive section of the Liberal party – but he wanted to see change in Co-lombia. He thought partial redistribution of wealth was necessary, and that Colombia, not United States companies and stockholders, should profit from Co-lombian petroleum and agricultural products. Gaitan continued to speak out about the need to change the social and economic system in Colombia, and won tremendous popular support. He declared (accurately) that Colombia was governed by a small, wealthy mi-nority which did not forward the interests of the ma-jority of the Colombian people. He made it clear that he supported land redistribution and worker’s rights. Because Gaitan enjoyed wide support among working and middle-class Colombians, he was poised to win the presidential elections of 1950. The changes he proposed posed a tremendous threat to the Colombi-an oligarchy and to the profits of foreign companies.

Instead of being permitted to campaign and win the presidency as a Liberal candidate, Gaitan was as-sassinated on April 9, 1948. The next day Bogota ex-ploded. Crowds of Bogotanos rioted through the down-town area. Angry citizens attacked the Presidential Palace, the Palace of Justice, which housed the Colom-bian Supreme Court, and several government minis-tries. The uprising spread to cities all over Colombia.

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After the fighting, various labor unions established temporary independent “revolutionary juntas” in ur-ban areas. With fearful memories of past Conservative reprisals, Liberal peasants formed rural militias.

In Bogota, the Conservative party and the more right-leaning factions in the Liberal Party responded to the explosion of popular rage by setting loose the Army and calling for Conservative civilian militia reinforcements to restore order. The Church sup-ported the Conservative party. Colombia descended into chaos, with Conservative forces slaughtering and committing atrocities upon known Liberals. Over the next decade, secret right wing paramilitary hit squads known as the birds, the pajaros, carried out selective assassinations of the more progressive Liberal leaders as well as socialists and communists. The murder, ar-son, and slaughter took on a less ideological and more chaotic, acquisitive and personal flavor, particularly in the countryside, with the victors taking over the lands and goods of the vanquished. Each act led to a venge-ful response, and soon entire provinces, towns and vil-lages were engaged in perpetual bloody feuds which sometimes had more to do with banditry and per-sonality than genuine political differences. In short, violence by and against both Conservative and Liberal party members raged, and the time between 1948 and 1957 is called La Violencia in Colombian history.

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In 1958, in an attempt to end La Violencia, the Conservative and Liberal parties formed the National Front. The two parties agreed to share power by alternating Conservative and Liberal presidents and ensuring equal representation of both parties at all levels of government. Since neither party by this time really had an interest in changing the status quo (the more progressive Liberal party members had all been eliminated during the La Violencia, leaving two parties of elite leaders with minor political differences) this plan worked fairly well. However, the poor were still miserably, grindingly poor, Colombia was still ruled by an oligarchy of predominantly Spanish descent, and the National Front arrangement, which for all practical purposes remained in place through the 1980s, was clearly not going to change anything.

During the National Front era, Colombia was fre-quently placed under a state of siege, which meant a suspension of constitutional guarantees such as freedom of the press and right to trial. In fact, under the all-too-frequent state of siege, the military was permitted to assume responsibility for investigat-ing and judging civilian crimes of a political nature.3 During the sixties and seventies the Colombian mili-tary used these special powers widely; civilians were

3 Coletta A. Youngers and Eileen Rosin Drugs and Democracy in Latin America, (Lynne Riener Publishers, 2005) p 123.

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secretly detained and tortured in military facilities.4 In spite of this, Colombia, with its institutionalized alternation of Liberal and Conservative party rule, was held up in the United States as an exemplary Latin American democracy.

It was in this context that the leftist guerilla groups of Colombia, the FARC5 the ELN6 and the EPL7 were formed. The M198 came last, in 1974. Since it was obvious that any sort of progressive change involving open elections, significant land reform, economic redistribution or interference in US and transnational corporations’ carte blanche to extract Colombian wealth was not going to happen under the National Front, and because of the constant state of siege and the abuse of military power, the guerillas had considerable support. Many middle class Colo-mbians, however, were completely alienated from any sort of partisan politics by the bloody decade of La Violencia, and supported the National Front. All they wanted from government was sufficient order so that they could get on with their daily lives in relative peace.

4 Youngers and Rosin, p 124

5 Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces

6 National Liberation Army

7 Popular Liberation Army

8 April 19 Movement

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8 April 19 Movement

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8 April 19 Movement

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8 April 19 Movement

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Right-wing political repression increased in Co-lombia in the 1970s, as it did all over Latin America, in response to the anti-leftist cold war policies of the United States. Increased repression in the form of arrests, disappearances and death squads helped the Colombian guerilla movements to grow and gain sup-port.

The effect in Latin America of the 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua cannot be overestimated. The Sandinistas, a nationalist and leftist guerilla army, underfunded and under-armed, but with tremendous popular support, actually succeeded in toppling the corrupt, US backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somo-za.9 Suddenly it seemed not just possible, but even likely that nationalist guerilla armies could lead popu-lar uprisings which would result in a return to demo-cratic electoral government and social and economic justice. Throughout the world, the Sandinista gueril-las were seen by many as heroes.

9 Anastasio Somoza was preceded in right wing dictatorship by his father, also Anastasio Somoza. Somoza the elder, of whom Franklin D. Roosevelt is famously reported to have said, “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch,” had been hand-picked by the United States to rule Nicaragua. The Somoza family dynasty remained in power from 1936 to 1979 – a run of forty-three years. Under the Somozas, press censorship, political assassinations and corruption were ubiquitous, but US and transnational companies did well.

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No doubt with the example of Nicaragua in mind, in 1982 Colombian presidential candidate Belisario Betancur campaigned on a platform of seeking a truce, a tregua with the Colombian guerilla forces.10 A truce would give both sides an opportunity to negotiate for an opening of the political process, so that guerilla groups could disarm, form legitimate political parties and participate in open, free elections. Betancur won the presidential elections, and began negotiating a cease fire with FARC and M19. The peace talks were jeopardized when the M19’s leader, Jaime Bateman, died in an unexplained plane accident on his way to a negotiation, but all parties persevered, and the truce began in 1984. Unfortunately, right-wing death squads went to work immediately, and many of the amnestied guerillas were murdered during the truce.11 M19’s second in command, Antonio Navarro Wolff, was chosen to head the Commission for a National Dialogue, the formation of which was one of the requirements of the cease-fire agreement. However, in May of 1985, a soldier threw a grenade at Wolff in a café in Cali, nearly killing him. Other M19 leaders were also attacked, and M19 officially withdrew from the truce on June 20, 1985.12

10 Forrest Hylton, Evil Hour in Colombia (Verso 2006) p 70

11 Bert Ruiz, The Colombian Civil War, (McFarland & Co. Inc 2001), p 169

12 Ruiz, p 169

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12 Ruiz, p 169

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12 Ruiz, p 169

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12 Ruiz, p 169

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In January of 1985, I traveled to Bogota, Colombia under the auspices of Wesleyan University’s semester abroad program at CEUCA, El Centro de Estudios

Universitarios Colombo-Americano (Center of Colombian-American University Studies). It was an

interesting time in Colombia’s history. The government and the guerilla movements, who had been at war since

1964, had recently signed a truce agreement.

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[ February 14 ]

There are three of us here from Wesleyan. Robin Brant lives with four Colombian college students in a decayed mansion in the Chapinero neighborhood. The house is owned by a bed-ridden old lady, Doña Berdegue. She has a thin maid who waits upon her and cooks and launders for the boys and Robin. Doña Berdegue has to rent rooms in order to survive. If she were English, she’d be a decayed gentlewoman.

Charley Anderson, the second Wesleyan stu dent, boards with another formerly middle-class Colom-bian family fallen upon hard times: a widowed mother, a twenty-year-old daughter, and their maid. They live in an apartment tower, and run a small day-care center during the day. The maid, Eresmere, who is only fourteen, came from an orphanage. Eresmere is still at school; she has a childish school notebook which she is very proud of. As far as I can tell from the notebook, all she does at school is color pictures of birds.

I live in the central area near CEUCA with the Cordobas, a family of three. There are three older children, but they have left home. The Cordobas are very kind to me. Our house has three bedrooms, one of which is mine. Anika, my Colombian sister, lives in the second bedroom, and my Colombian

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[ February 14 ]




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parents, Sergio and Maria, live in the third. There’s a combination living room/dining room area with a tiled floor and dirty corrugated glass roof. The roof lets in lots of light, and a Norfolk pine tree grows happily in one corner. There’s also a bathroom, a service area in back where the stone washing sink and clotheslines are located, and a kitchen. The television set lives in the parents’ bedroom, and we all settle down there at night on the large bed to watch the news and the telenovelas.13 My Colombian mother, Maria, sets the table for me and cooks all my meals. A laundress comes once a week to hand scrub, hang and iron our clothes. I haven’t enjoyed that kind of service since I was about six. I love my Colombian sister Anika, who is in her last year of high school. The father, Sergio, can be difficult. He stares at me too much. He tries to be kind, and took me out to tour the dazzling collection of Chibcha Indian gold artifacts at the Tequendama Bank building. I couldn’t believe the quantity – more gold than Fort Knox.

[ March 2 ]

Sergio, my Colombian father, got on my nerves again today. He sat at the table while I was trying to eat my dinner, leaned his elbows on the plastic lace tablecloth,

13 soap operas

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[ March 2 ]


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[ March 2 ]


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[ March 2 ]


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stared into my face, and went on and on about the Korean war and how de Gaulle of France was a huge man, huge, with huge arms, a huge head, and huge hands. Creepy implication of a huge penis? Difficult. I’ve really had Sergio under control for the last couple of weeks. I’ve managed to cut him off when he started those weird obsessive speeches. He has another one about the fruits of Colombia which involves a lot of hand gestures and is really uncomfortable to listen to.

[ March 4 ]

The air around the corner of 17th street and 10th avenue is always filled with bubbles. I get off the bus and bat the bubbles away as I cross. At this same corner, two scruffy fourteen-year-olds ripped off my only pair of valuable earrings. They literally each ripped one thin gold hoop from my ears before disappearing among the perpetually smoking, bat-tered buses and the crowds. Two passersby blinked curiously and a middle-aged man, whose stomach bulged under his non-conformist cream turtleneck sweater, asked me hopefully what the thieves had got. I felt my earlobes, which were unharmed, and leapt on the next bus home. I do not know anybody in Bogota who has not been robbed; in fact I know nobody who has visited for over six months and

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[ March 4 ]


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not lost something. I am glad they didn’t take my backpack and wallet.

In spite of the thievery, Bogota has redeeming qualities – such as the mysterious bubbles, and what must be the best urban bus service in the Western Hemisphere. Bogota doesn’t bore me. The sorest problem here is one of conscience, as I don’t like to see small children working and smaller children begging.

The Bogotanos: The country women, new city residents, run to a solid fatness. Wealthier women are hard-boiled, frosted, painted, unwrinkled and well-dressed; they wear expensive-looking sunglasses and have hard magenta fingernails. The daughters of the wealthy appear healthy, oversized, and American, with straight teeth, clear skin, and thick glossy hair. The city also produces scrawny poor girls of remarkable beauty, with too-thin legs and resigned faces. They carry younger sisters on their bony backs, and try to sell me overpriced mangos.

Bogota newspapers: El Bogotano and El Pais resemble each other and the New York Post as well. On the inside back page, you find the tits-and-ass pictures. The main front page headline tends to be eye-catching, bizarre and gory. “Dog drags infant’s severed head out of hiding.” “Man kills wife, four children, then suicides.” El Tiempo and El Espectador

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are the two serious newspapers. I have noticed that they take turns covering serious news stories. Monday El Tiempo is responsible for hard news. Tuesday El Espectador takes over. And so on. Both papers have several “soft” news sections. One day we read about beauty queens, the next day, cyclists. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s obsession with bizarre beauty queens – the Queen of Cattle, the Queen of Guava, the Queen of Cotton – accurately reflects a national preoccupation. In fact, since being in Colombia, I realize Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s realidad fantastico14 is not quite as imaginative as I had thought in the States. Garcia Marquez tells it like it is in Colombia. He’s a pretty reliable reporter of Colombian reality.

The shops in Bogota’s business district are not scattered at random as in the US or Britain. Instead similar businesses cluster together. There is a leather section, a camera store area, a wool area, a mattress block and a plastic area. There are several huge car-part blocks. My favorite is the parakeet and canary section, but I also enjoy the Styrofoam area near the center. Beauty shops, drugstores, cafes and bakeries are exceptions. They are scattered thickly everywhere. The system has advantages and disadvantages. You are never far from hot rolls, a manicure, a candy bar or an over-the-counter Demerol. On the other hand, it

14 magical realism

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14 magical realism

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14 magical realism

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is distressing to be lost in the wool area when you are trying to find lens paper.

You are always near a bus stop in Bogota, because really, there is no such thing. Any curb is a bus stop. Want a bus? Just stand at the curb (or in the middle of the road if you are feeling lucky) and wave your hand from the wrist with two fingers extended. If you don’t hold out two fingers, it will be assumed you are hitch-hiking and buses won’t stop for you. A sharp whistle may also engage the bus driver’s attention. Unless you are going somewhere really exotic, your bus will pass within two minutes. When you want to get off a Colombian bus, you stand up and shout “here please!” The bus stops.

Bus culture is fascinating. Passengers, once a seat has been vacated, will squat above the seat to avoid settling on it until the warm pleather cushion cools down. This is explained as a) prophylactic – prevents the spread of venereal germs or b) delicate – prevents feeling the warmth of somebody else’s body, particu-larly if that somebody is of the opposite sex or c) virile – the avoidance of the sterility caused when a man’s testicles get too hot. Everybody clutches their bags closely and suspiciously because of pickpockets. Yet on the bus it is considered polite to offer to hold a standing stranger’s handbag on your lap. Women con-stantly and gratefully pass their handbags to strang-

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ers. I have never been able to reconcile this trustful attitude with the extremely high petty crime rate. A timid middle-aged lady who never leaves the house wearing jewelry, who clutches her well-zipped leath-er bag tightly under her arm, who never goes out at night, and only frequents certain neighborhoods, will cheerfully hand her bag to a total stranger on the bus.

People sell all kinds of interesting objects in the street: little green parrots in perforated plastic bags; blood puddings; tropical fruits; umbrellas; pens; holy pictures; medicine made from rattlesnakes; fresh banana chips; tacky earrings; leather mini-skirts; hand-made sandals; cocaine; fake emeralds; belts; lottery tickets; Polaroid photos they have just taken of you; candy of the squashy, crunchy and sticky varieties; puppies; cups of tea; cups of coffee; holy candles; movie tickets; switchblades; address books; brass crowns; deep fried lungs; shoe shines; hair ribbons; watches; unbreakable plastic copies of DaVinci paintings; small green books which contain “all the condensed wisdom of the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, the Bhagvada Gita and the Kabala in one hundred and fifty compact pages;” Indian charms against the evil eye; giant loofahs and key rings dangling plastic-embedded coca leaves.

Druggists enjoy a very privileged position in Colombia, where doctors are scarce and expensive.

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A woman comes into a drug store. “My little girl is coughing, what do you suggest?” A yellow packet of capsules is handed across the counter. What are they? Nobody knows. You don’t need scrips here. Whatever else the pills are, they are cheap. Many little girls cough here in Colombia, where half the children under five suffer from some form of malnutrition and the attendant diseases of gastroenteritis and bronchitis.

[ March 5 ]

It’s 12:25 a.m. in Bogota. The only people awake are the street children, the whores, and the trash people. The trash people live in the dumps. They dress in dirty rags and push about wooden trolleys filled with trash. Some of them seem insane. There are entire trash families, all black with filth and covered in filthy rags. They sleep in heaps. Once we heard them singing and clapping round a bonfire of garbage – they made the most beautiful music. My Colombian sister, Anika said they were singing evangelical hymns.

[ March 23 ]

My mother visited. We took a bus trip through Colombia to Ecuador. The roads through the Andes run along the edges of giant cliffs. Old smashed bus

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[ March 5 ]


[ March 23 ]


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[ March 5 ]


[ March 23 ]


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[ March 5 ]


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skeletons crumple like buzzard-picked corpses at the foot of the drop. I was glad my mother was there in the Cali Bus Terminal at 2:00 a.m., when we changed buses. A soldier boy approached me, put his foot up on the plastic chair next to mine, crotch prominently in my direction, M16 pointing past my ear, and started interrogating me. He was completely into my personal space with his weaponry. “I’m going to Ecuador with my mother,” I said, and she emerged maternally from the bathroom. He drifted away with his nasty big gun and his olive uniform. Mothers lend respectability in Colombia.

Cali is the salsa and cocaine capital of the world. Apparently the gutters are littered with cocaine war casualties every morning. The bus station was more than enough for me. I’m glad to be back in Bogota.

Robin, Charley and I went out dancing last night. First we hung out at Charley’s place and he made us dinner. He is such a great cook. Susie Abel, a Vassar student who was at CEUCA last semester and is hanging out in Bogota this semester, showed up with her good-looking Colombian hippie boyfriend, Andres. They brought Charley some cocaine as their host gift. I think Andres deals it. I tried a line of coke. I thought, “Well, now I’ve had that experience. Can’t say much for it.”

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[ April 14 ]

Not so long ago, Bogota was a small colonial city of damp white plaster and gilt churches. The few neighborhoods edged the green foothills of the central cordillera of the Andes, and looked down on the swamps and farmlands of the Savana de Bogotá. Now the population of the city has exploded.

In the center, glass skyscrapers rise above the smog. Most are owned by Colombian banks, and are labeled accordingly. Grancolombiana lights up the night sky with blue letters. The Banco Cafetero sign, visible only during the day, is brown. Each evening the people who work in the skyscrapers descend fifty floors into the dust-colored mist of smog and drive to the northern suburbs. The roads of the North, lined with small trees, are wide and clear. Uniformed, armed security contractors with Rottweilers guard the pastel-colored stucco houses on either side. It is disconcerting to realize, while walking on the brick paths beside the empty green lawns of the North, that you are being closely watched.

To the south of Bogota, the twisted haphazard bar-rios nuevos rise out of the fog. These “new neighbor-hoods” are built overnight by peasants who flee the countryside. They build one- or two-room shelters from whatever is available – cinderblock for the lucky;

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[ April 14 ]




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scrap wood, tar paper and corrugated iron for the rest. The pressed-dirt streets weave among blocks of shacks. Water and electricity, if available at all, are pi-rated from the official city utilities. From a distance the South looks organic, like an insect colony. Thou-sands of sand-colored shacks cram together, clinging to the contours of the land.

In between the North and South, behind and be-low the skyscrapers of the financial district, are the houses and apartments of the middle classes. A deco-rative metal grate covers each window and door; they are intended to deter thieves. The current President, Belisario Betancur, came to power because he prom-ised peace between the Army and the active guerilla forces, and he has, in fact, negotiated a truce. When Betancur won the election, he sponsored a peace propaganda campaign. Bogotanos were encouraged to graffiti the streets with doves, and now the central middle-class neighborhoods are covered with draw-ings of birds. Bogota is a city of concrete doves; two and a half years after the election, they crack and peel. One dove near my house, carved into the trunk of a tree, has been decapitated by the natural growth of the bark.

Bogota is growing, and the slums, the barrios nuevos, are growing fastest. The North, too, eats at the remaining farmland of the Savannah. The

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skyline creeps up. At the top of the Granhoras building, the men who own Colombia look down on all the neighborhoods. The only higher object is the giant statue of Jesus Christ on the green peak of Monserrate. White arms outstretched, he blesses the dirt and fog of the city below. Every Sunday, Bogotanos climb to visit him. South Bogota slum dwellers climb the nearly perpendicular ascent on their knees.

[ May 1 ]

I went over to Robin’s this afternoon. We went out for a walk, and ran into Susie Abel and Andres. Susie was carrying one of those woven hippie shoulder bags. She kept sniffling and rubbing her nose. She said, “Oh my God, we just did so much coke. And we were up all last night!” I bet they were up all last night. I can imagine it only too well, and I’m jealous. Handsome Andres grabbed Susie’s hand, kissed her passionately, and they raced off together through the Bogota crowds. Wow.

[ May 3 ]

I visited a home for street children, gamines.The gamines are wild little boys who live in every Colombian city;15 they sleep in heaps for warmth, and

15 Actually, these children live in nearly every Latin American city, and in the cities of Africa, Asia, India and the Middle East as well.

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[ May 1 ]


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they beg and wash windscreens. When they get big enough, they steal, like the Artful Dodger.

After a chicken lunch the other day, I walked about the streets. The poor children don’t cry much in public, so I was shocked to see a boy, about eleven years old, half kneeling, half squatting on a street corner. He was pressing the left side of his face into a brick wall and wailing in misery. His face was filthy, and the tears made grey patterns as they trickled down his cheeks. He was thin, dressed in a sweater which I thought at first was brown, until I realized that the brown color was from dirt. Perhaps he had just recently gone on the streets. His pre-adolescent sister stood near him holding a baby – born under a month ago by the look of it. Her hair was pushed back with a dull plastic hair clip and she looked as thin and sharp as an overgrown adolescent boy. Her too-short, too-small skirt and her navy school sweatshirt were tinted by the eternal dust of South Bogota’s barrios nuevos. She held the quiet baby capably in one arm. Noting my attention on her brother, she asked me for a coin. Her tone was business-like. “Una moneda,” the children say to you with a beggar’s whine. “Una monedita.” “A coin … a tiny little coin.”

I used to think poor people in Bogota had enough to eat. Now I know better. The fortunate poor get rice

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and plantain and panela16 every day. The unlucky ones get panela or nothing.

I had eaten my roast chicken lunch with pleasure. I had licked my fingers. I have money for dozens of chicken dinners. In the States we throw away half eaten hamburgers and feed them to our dogs. We let food rot. Even middle-class Colombians eat every bit of chicken skin, sinew, and cartilage. They suck the bones dry.

I talked to Luis Eduardo, one of the caretakers at the gamines home. He is thirty-two. His mother died when he was born, his father died when he was seven. At the age of five he was on the streets. Back in those days, he says, life was tougher for gamines. Tougher, I asked myself, how could it have been tougher? I thought of the children I see: heaps of dirty rag, curled sleeping in dry corners where nobody has pissed, or lying on worn lawns. I thought of those small grey heaps with matted boy-heads emerging. How could it have been tougher?

There was more unity when he was on the streets, added Luis Eduardo, because of the bru tality of the life. Back in those days, the gamines were put in jail with adults, and sold to prisoners upon arrival. “Sold?” I asked. “For flesh,” he said. For sex, I think

16 Panela is raw sugar, sold in blocks. Poor people mix it with water and make a hot drink of it.

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he meant. He was twelve when he went to jail. There is a huge gash, a thick scar across his throat. I wonder how he got it. Jails were worse in those days, said Luis Eduardo. That is why he became … he smiled … an educator.

[ May 8]

I went to the North today, with Anika and Jose, my Colombian brother and sister, to see a movie at Unicentro. Unicentro is both a neighborhood and a shopping mall. The mall is huge, bigger than any I have seen in the States. The parking lot is full of new cars, not the usual motley wrecks and taxis, so when I go there, I feel I’m in a new country. Today a man in a boiler suit carefully freshened the lines in the parking lot by hand, in honor of the celebration of Unicentro’s tenth anniversary. There are several Burger Kings and pizza places in Unicentro. Many of the stores have English names. A delicate water sculpture spans three floors. The shop windows glow with merchandise and neon. Such a wealth of goods – the best of Colombia, as well as countless imports. There’s an indoor play park with bright flags and painted cars for the children to play on. A retired tank, painted a cheerful forest green, is the favorite.

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[ May 8]


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[ May 8]


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[ May 12 ]

I went to the North again this morning, just to walk around. I saw a man jogging in the early morning damp, like a bad imitation of an American yuppie. The pavements are smooth and well mended in the North. Nobody walks there.

I heard a story about a private high school in the North. In the seventies, Putney-style farm schools were all the rage, even in Colombia. A private school acquired several cows. They still graze on the school grounds, and add a picturesque touch. The only trouble is the shit. You can’t have cow shit in the North, and you can’t expect wealthy young Colombians to pick it up as a part of their curriculum. It isn’t 1972 any more, and nobody is interested in learning how to milk either. Luckily the cows dried up long ago. To deal with the shit problem, the school administrators hired an extra caretaker. His sole responsibility is to follow the cows, and shovel the cow shit as soon as it hits the ground. Thus a passerby is not offended unless his timing is so bad that he actually sees a cow lift its tail. The beauty of the green pasture remains unsullied. Trianon.

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[ May 12 ]



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[ May 20 ]

When my friend Lisa Levy was a CEUCA student, she decided she was not going to live with a middle class Colombian family. She wanted to live in a barrio nuevo, and give her money to a poor family. So she found Doña Marta, and stayed in her house for six months. Today Lisa took Charley, Robin and I to visit Doña Marta, who lives in the small, centrally located slum of El Paraiso (Paradise) under the Christ statue of Monserrate.

Doña Marta’s house is neither very bad, nor very good. At least it is built of cinder block, at least there is electricity, at least there is a water faucet in the yard. Doña Marta has three children, the oldest two are eleven-year-old fraternal twins, the youngest, Carolina, is six. Carolina is a pretty child, with excess energy and the type of hopeful, grubby face you see on Christian Children’s Fund advertisements. Possibly you have actually seen her, because she really is one of these CCF children you can sponsor with your sixteen guilty American dollars a month in return for a photograph, a biography, and the occasional thankful letter.

The house – a bedroom, kitchen and bathroom – looks down the stony eroded dirt tracks to the National Park and the city. The view is spectacular, especially in

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the evening, worthy of a penthouse. The whole pan-orama of the financial district skyscrapers, the Inter-national Center, Banco Cafetero, Banco Tequendama, Banco de Bogota and Granhoras sparkles with rows of yellow and orange light. The flatter spill of lights to the South extends to the irregular flickering shapes of pestilential shantytowns. They look like a bright lake in the darkness. El Paraiso is far from a penthouse, but the neighborhood is better than Ciudad Bolivar in the South. The good houses are tolerable enough. The bad ones are cobbled together from flaking scraps: flattened large oil cans; recycled wood; and tar paper. The dirt roads erode and stream with mud during ev-ery downpour. Chickens peck hopefully at the road-side garbage. High school students in navy sweaters stand about and smoke cigarettes in shop doorways. Children of five run down the steep crumbling hill-side carrying shopping bags, then duck into houses identifiable as stores only because of the small Pepsi or Bavaria Colombiana17 signs that hang outside.

I sat in one of those stores for an hour, and no one bought anything except onions, potatoes, cigarettes, and cilantro.

The evening I spent at Doña Marta’s was a Friday. She gave us dinner, but as soon as we left we all went out to eat at a restaurant. This is not as greedy as it

17 a beer brand

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17 a beer brand

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sounds, because dinner for us, for the three children, and for Doña Marta herself consisted of a slice of bread and a half cup of hot chocolate each. We sat in the damp combination bedroom/living room and watched telenovelas,18 Los Ricos Tambien Lloran,19 and La Furia.20 La Furia is the story of a hot-blooded poor girl from the slums of Mexico City who marries a rich boy, but is deceived by his interfering parents, ejected from their wealthy home, and turned into the street to starve with her twins. Things were going badly for “Furiacita” on Friday evening. One of her twins was dangerously ill, and she could not afford medicine or a doctor. Doña Marta’s eldest child, Maria, herself a fraternal twin, sipped her meager cup of hot chocolate as she stared, entranced, at the blurred television.

The room was painted a pink that had been stained by time and damp. Two double beds crowded a chest of drawers and several cardboard boxes filled with rags and toys. After La Furia ended, Maria extracted a school exercise book from one of the boxes. It was filled with drawings, writing practice, and math problems. The sums were simple addition. Many were wrong, but uncorrected. The writing was very basic – it appeared Maria, aged eleven, had not

18 soap operas

19 The Rich Cry Too

20 The Fury

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19 The Rich Cry Too

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18 soap operas

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18 soap operas

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yet learned to write full words. Instead she had copied syllables over and over. Ma ma ma ma ma. La la la la la. Clearly, Maria had put much effort and care into her little book, and it was filled with congratulatory check marks in pen, but I was not impressed by what the book suggested about the quality of her education.

Maria and Carolina’s brother Juanito, a restless boy wearing rubber rain boots and patched, dirty trousers, kept shooting sucker-tipped arrows around the pink room. They bounced off the walls, two of which were covered with magazine pictures of the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo and busty blonde pinups from the TV magazines. The obligatory Christ picture hung above the bodacious girls. One of Christ’s hands was raised in blessing; the other indicated his iridescent bleeding heart. A rubber tipped arrow narrowly missed Him and bounced off the face of a Menudo member. Doña Marta aimed a slap at her son, and he dodged her, laughing.

[ May 31, Friday ]

The semester is over, I have moved out of my Co-lombian family’s home, and I have been living with Julie Wanczyk for three weeks now. Julie’s a stringer, or freelance journalist, and also teaches English. We share a one-room apartment which is actually a con-verted living room rented from another impecunious,

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[ May 31, Friday ]


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formerly upper-middle class Colombian family. The brick house is beautiful from the outside. A plant shop rents the garage and the entire first floor. Our landlady, her husband – who looks mummified with age – and their seventeen-year old-granddaughter, Ana Sofia, live in the other two upstairs rooms and the kitchen. Weirdly, Ana Sofia shares a bedroom with her desiccated old grandfather, and Doña Luisa has her own private bedroom. Julie doesn’t know where Ana Sofia’s mother and father are, but Ana Sofia once said her mother was an artist. We all share the up-stairs bathroom. The water supply is unpredictable because the plant shop uses so much water. Julie and I have occasional access to the kitchen stove for hot drinks and coffee only.

I sleep on a camp bed and use a cheap sleeping bag, which was cold at first, but then I learned to pull the top of the sleeping bag over my head. My breath warms the inside and I am comfortable enough.

I have got a job teaching English, one-on-one, to Colombian business executives. Most of them are nearly fluent, and many have studied in the United States. I show up at their incredibly fancy offices and we chat for an hour. Sometimes I take a bus to the North, along with the domestic staff, and I am admitted to a mansion to give an English lesson to a housewife.

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Today. I went to the National University21 after lunch to find out I had missed an organizational meeting about the upcoming national civil strike, as well as a meeting about the war in Central America, complete with music and a movie. Most middle class Colombians avoid La Nacional if they can, and scrape or borrow to send their children to the Universidad de los Andes instead. The Nacional students are always protesting, and the army is always shutting the campus down, so it takes years and years to finish a degree and graduate.

While at La Nacional today, I met a handsome po-litical activist called Pepe. He says he has committed his life to the Revolution, and for that reason he will never have children. He does not expect the Revolu-tion for another ten years, but he is willing to wait. He quit his teaching job at the seminary when the ad-ministration threw his friend Fernando out. Fernan-do asked too many awkward questions about politics and theology, so he will never be a priest now. Pepe said that people get disappeared in Colombia, just as they do in Argentina, Chile and El Salvador. But not the rich people of North Bogota, and you do not read about disappearances in the papers.

21 The low cost public university

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[ June 3 ]

One of my wealthy executive English students is Sebastian Mutis. Sebastian is with Continental Insurance, a subsidiary of the American multi-national, the Sigma Corporation. He is young and handsome with brown hair, green eyes, and light skin. His face is round, his shoulders stoop slightly, his moustache droops gently on his upper lip, and his fine hair is cut short. Overall, he gives the impression of physical softness. I am always surprised by his height when he stands to say goodbye to me at the end of a lesson.

Mutis – for he prefers me to call him by his last name – comes from one of Colombia’s wealthy fami-lies – “the elite,” as my friend Jaime Eduardo would say – and he spent his childhood in the pleasant green north of the city. He grew up enjoying annual trips to Miami, and weekends on the family ranch. He had his very own trained show jumper, which he rode on the flawless green grounds of Bogota’s Jockey Club. He knows his French wines, and prefers Ferraris to Peugeots. Today he sits at his desk in the corner of his office and looks out of the glass windows at the expanse of Bogota. We have discussed many things together in English, Mutis and I: machismo, drugs, our personal histories, economics, travel, and horses.

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[ June 3 ]



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He smiles often as he talks, and though he has clas-sic macho self-assurance, there is an undercurrent of vulnerability he cannot hide. He looks over some credit card slips on his desk. “I have so many bills,” he says. “It is difficult being short of money.”

“What are they for?”“My wife … but she works hard too, you know. She

is a psychologist – a company psychologist for a firm which grows flowers for export.” Mutis met his wife at university, and fell completely in love. He says she is thin, though she hates exercise. She is never still. They have a son just over a year old, who is learning to swim in the swimming pool at the family ranch. When he is four, he will begin his riding lessons. Mutis and his wife did not intend to have a baby so soon after marriage, but … he shrugs his shoulders to indicate that life does not always go as planned. Actually, they had not intended to marry so young (Mutis is 26) but their parents insisted. They had planned to travel around Europe together for a couple of years after graduation. But Colombian parents are old-fashioned. “My own mother was very sheltered,” says Mutis. “When she became engaged to my father, he kissed her for the first time. She was terrified. She thought she was pregnant. She was seventeen years old.”

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When Mutis was seventeen, his father died in front of him. At that time Mutis was behaving wildly and doing poorly in school. He was drinking at home and leaving school early, he was spending time with older women. His mother was very distressed about his grades, and because she had seen him drunk and disrespectful at home, so she asked his father to speak to him. They went for a drive together in the country. Mutis’s father said “Listen son, you must not disappoint your mother. Do what you want, but do it discreetly, out of the house. Keep up a reasonable level of school work.” This was the extent of the scolding. They stopped for a drink at a small roadside stand. It was the kind of place Mutis’s mother had never set foot in – an ordinary roadside restaurant serving fried offal, corn on the cob, and cold beer. Mutis and his father were laughing together over their beers, when Don Eduardo cried out and slumped in his chair. Mutis thought it was a joke at first. Then his father fell to ground and Mutis found himself with his father’s head on his lap, trying to protect his father’s head from the hard cement floor. The forty-nine-year-old Don Eduardo was dead. He had suffered a massive heart attack. After the ambulance left, Mutis called home on the restaurant’s phone and asked to speak to his elder brother. He could not bear to tell his mother what had happened.

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A month after Mutis finished high school, he got into trouble. He collided with another car, and fought with the driver. He was so angry, he removed an unregistered pistol from his glove compartment. When the police arrived, the gun barrel was in the other driver’s mouth. Luckily – Mutis smiles in a self-deprecatory manner as he tells the story – he had his family name supporting him, and the passenger in his car was his best friend, the son of a general.

After this incident, Mutis’s family decided to send him to the United States to study English for a year. He lived in a small Midwestern town, where he attended high school. He says he smoked pot a couple of times, attended prom, and experienced the four seasons of a temperate climate. He was also seduced by a woman six years his senior, who he describes as having “taught me a lot of things.” She is married now, and sometimes they write.

When Mutis returned to Colombia, he enrolled for four years at the Universidad de Los Andes, where he studied law and met his wife. After graduating he was hired by Continental Insurance. He is happy, he says. But his mother will never understand why his wife wants to work.

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[ Saturday, June 7 ]

Robin Brant is leaving for the States next week. I will miss her.

I worry about money. Teaching English does not pay well. My jeans are wearing out, and so are my socks and underwear. Luckily, café con leche and hot bread are cheap, delicious, and available everywhere.

Today Robin and I are climbing the road up to Monserrate with a Colombian friend, Miguel Angel. We want to visit the Christ statue and the shrine. Miguel Angel says he’ll make sure we don’t get robbed. The path goes through the barrios nuevos.

Tomorrow my lawyer friend Jaime Eduardo and I are going rock-climbing and hiking.

Jaime Eduardo is small and thin with mestizo gold skin, and a receding chin. His nose is large and curved, like a beak, his hair smooth and dark. He works as a lawyer for the Federal Prosecutor, in one of the government offices on the Plaza Bolivar. He works hard, with ambition and discipline. He says he likes his work.

I imagine Jaime Eduardo as a spindly child, clever and unpopular in elementary school. He has fought this legacy successfully, for his personality is cheerful and faintly magnetic.

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Jaime Eduardo is in love with self-discipline. He lifts weights with his thin arms three days a week, and puts aside four hours a week for improving reading. Sundays, he says, he “keeps for himself.” The rest of his waking hours are spent at work, or on work-related study, although he does permit himself an evening or two a week for a concert or film. In elementary school, he learned to make himself a color-coordinated schedule of his days. Even the lunch hour appeared as a colored time slot. He makes these schedules still. He does not smoke, and drinks only in moderation. If somebody must remain sober to drive, Jaime Eduardo will. Yet he is not a serious, humorless person. There is something of the small boy about him, both in his humor and his fits of annoyance. He recently brought a small snake into the carpeted corridors of the prosecutor’s office, and gave it to an excessively formal female co-worker. The woman screamed hysterically and cried for five minutes. Jaime Eduardo grins like a twelve-year0-old as he tells this story. “The tears were running from her eyes, and she was as jumpy as a cat all day. My boss came out to see who was doing all that screaming, and when he saw me, he said, ‘I might have known.’”

On the Sundays that he “keeps for himself,” Jaime Eduardo goes rock-climbing or hiking. In college (he graduated only a year ago) he trained every day for

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his weekend trips; he practiced going without food or water. He has climbed on ice, in the Sierra, and his greatest dream is to go to the Himalaya and climb there. All this discipline and toughness goes poorly with his mild, melancholy face and thin wrists.

Jaime Eduardo says his family is “comfortable but not elite.” They were able to afford private school for their children. Jaime Eduardo seems ambitious, and I predict he will reach a position of some power because of his intelligence, his hard work, and his relentless self-discipline. He has little interest in politics. His division of the Federal Prosecutor deals with corporate mischief, such as money laundering and the illegal exportation of capital. This is a difficult task because of the rampant corruption. Presently he is working on a new law to prevent the illegal flight of capital. He feels it an honor that he has been selected for this work, young as he is. But his attitude towards corruption seems tranquil. His career and his personal achievements are what matter most.

Jaime casually and calmly agrees that yes, Colom-bia is in great financial difficulty, that yes, she is ex-ploited economically by the United States. He says that the democracy of Colombia is a farce. He even says he expects a violent revolution or a military coup within the next few years. But these are intellectual ideas for him. They do not touch him. He says with

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a far away look that he will “go to the hills” if neces-sary, should the time come. I suspect he would bolt his door and await the outcome of any civil unrest, not through cowardice, for he is not a cowardly person, but through prudence and lack of interest. He does not let vague suppositions about dependency and capitalist exploitation affect his everyday life. Popular demonstrations are totally ineffective, he says, shrug-ging. Investigative newspaper articles are what influ-ence the opinions of the elite, and only the elite can effect change.

When Jaime Eduardo was twenty, he and four friends – a group from the Universidad de los Andes – went climbing in an unexplored area in the moun-tains. They came upon an abandoned hut with a post-er of Lenin on the wall. This was before the present truce had been declared so the army and the guerillas were still at war. They left quickly, rightly fearing the shelter belonged to a guerilla group.

That night, when they were fetching water from a stream, they were surrounded by guerillas, both men and women, with covered faces. They had stumbled upon a division of FARC. FARC forced the five students to march through miles of wilderness to a larger encampment. They held Jaime and his friends for three days, demanding, in return for their release, that the government free several jailed comrades. The

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government acceded. FARC released the students. A National Police helicopter waited to evacuate Jaime and his friends. Unfortunately, a second group of Los Andes students appeared on the scene. They had been hiking the trails in search of Jaime Eduardo’s group. The helicopter was small; it was only possible for the National Police to airlift out four students at a time, and darkness was falling. Jaime Eduardo and one other volunteered to wait. They were left in the forest for the night.

While Jaime Eduardo and his friend were asleep, the Colombian Army arrived and began firing on the guerillas. The students were caught in the middle. FARC tried to recapture them at gunpoint, and got their sleeping bags and camping equipment. However, the Army started firing again, and in the confusion, Jaime Eduardo and his friend escaped from the FARC, and hid in the woods. They spent a cold night huddled between two rocks in their underwear, listening to the crossfire.

When the National Police helicopter arrived early the next morning to airlift them out, Jaime Eduardo met the captain of that particular anti-guerilla division, a man named Cesar Rioja. Cesar congratulated the two students on their bravery, and he invited them to dinner. A friendship started which has lasted the two years since the incident. Jaime Eduardo says he will

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introduce me to Cesar, who lives in a luxurious police training school in the suburbs of Bogota. There are horses, which I may be invited to ride, a golf course, and trained anti-guerilla dogs to keep Cesar safe. Jaime Eduardo visits often for a talk and a glass of wine. They discuss Cesar’s future forays against the guerillas. Last week Jaime Eduardo was shown a new weapon, a sighted rifle which can take down a man at three hundred yards and can be used in the dark with infrared settings.

[ June 12 ]

I went to the Solidaridad offices to offer my services as a volunteer for the Nicaragua campaign. There was a demonstration in support of the upcoming national strike at the Plaza Bolivar today, and I thought I could help leaflet. I met Esteban. He caught my attention because he was small and blonde. I thought he was a foreigner like me, a Scandinavian, perhaps, or a German. His tall companion wore a beret and a beard, and had an air of intense, perhaps self-important seriousness. They shook my hand and turned away to speak to Mariana, the coordinator of the Committee in Solidarity with Nicaragua.

Mariana is thin and always seems to be smoking quickly, even when there are no cigarettes nearby. She moves her hands as though she is smoking. She

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[ June 12 ]



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has over-tweezed eyebrows and wears a lot of brown makeup on her eyes and under her cheekbones. The three of them spoke quickly together in low voices, so it was more than usually difficult for me to follow everything they said. I did realize they were talking about “campamientos,” or “encampments.”

“What kind of encampments,” I eventually asked. “Campamientos de Paz.”“Of what?”“Of peace. Encampments of Peace.”“You mean the M19?”22

“Yes.”“Are you members of the M19?”“No.” The serious man left, but blonde Esteban hung

about chatting to Mariana about the upcoming paro civico, or national strike. He told me he could get me an interview with one of the guerillas. Why did I want one? I explained I wanted one because I was writing about the young people of Colombia and their political stances – or lack thereof in some cases. Actually, Esteban told me casually, sitting down on one of the school desk chairs in the Solidaridad office, he was sorry to say he had lied to me already. He was a member of the M19.

22 Movimiento 19 de Abril, April 19th Movement, a Colombian guerilla group

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Images of serious, intent fighters, of armed struggle, of Sandinistas, and of the famous Che poster rushed through my mind. I looked at the blonde boy sitting in front of me and felt my face turn a deep scarlet. I could think of nothing to say. Eventually I said, “I’ve never knowingly spoken to a guerillero before.” Esteban smiled and tapped an unlit cigarette on the desk.

“We are just flesh and blood,” he said, “You don’t have to go to the jungle or the mountains to find guerilleros in Colombia.” We arranged an interview for later in the week. He promised to take me to the M19 encampment in the slum of Villa Gloria, in the south of Bogota.

Half an hour later Esteban, Mariana and I set out for the pre-national strike warm-up demonstration in the government square, Plaza Bolivar. We were going to hand out leaflets for a fund-raising event in support of the Sandinista government.

As we walked, Mariana and Esteban chattered about the future. They were much less cautious about what they said than most visiting Americans I know. They discussed the coming government repression, and the people. “They are so completely committed,” said Esteban, “I feel so safe in that barrio.”

“Completely committed,” agreed Mariana, stab-bing the air with one of her imaginary cigarettes.

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They used the word, “campamiento” often, although the streets were full. Later I was to learn that the habit of discussing the armed struggle in public is surpris-ingly prevalent among M19 members.

Suddenly Esteban caught sight of a thin man in a dark sweater talking to a tall traffic cop. He told Mariana and I to wait in a nearby coffee shop, and disappeared. I had been feeling slightly paranoid about the fact that I was walking down the street with at least one guerilla – possibly two – and Esteban’s sudden disappearance didn’t make me feel any happier. I sipped my café con leche and told Mariana about my course of study back in the States. When Esteban reappeared with the man who had been talking to the policeman I felt my anxiety go up a few notches. The new compañero,23 Pacho, looked dressed for the part of a guerilla in a Hollywood movie. He wore a black bushy beard, a Greek peaked fisherman’s cap, and a black turtleneck. Mariana produced a new round of cigarettes, and she and Esteban proceeded to discuss the national strike with Pacho. We were

23 The word compañero is difficult to translate. It literally means companion and partner. The word has an informal, egalitarian, warm feel to it, an inherent friendliness. Compañero has been used in Latin America in the last three-and-a-half decades to denote anybody the speaker feels is an ally in a struggle for social justice, or a supporter of progressive causes. The guerillas use the term to address one another and those they perceive as potential allies.

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already forty minutes late for the demonstration in Plaza Bolivar, but no one seemed concerned about this. As we stepped out of the coffee shop, Esteban stole Pacho’s hat and joked about the false alarm with the traffic cop. “Carajo, Pacho, I thought you had turned informer on me, or were being interrogated, how was I to know the guy was a former student of yours?” Merry laughter all round. I felt as though I was in a play; a sense of unreality had set in.

We waited with Pacho for his bus to South Bogota. Now we were an hour late for the demonstration. “There is going to be blood spilled on the day of the national strike,” said Esteban suddenly. “And not all of it will be ours.”

“In the coming repression,” answered Mariana, “it will not only be our friends who suffer. It will be the friends of friends.” They were full of nervous energy and half-veiled excitement. We arrived at the meeting place for the demonstration and there was hardly anybody there. “How strange,” said Mariana. I observed that we were by now over an hour and a half late. We began to walk towards the Plaza Bolivar, the government plaza. The streets were full of people leaving work. We passed a church; the prayers echoed in the strange blue evening light.

Mariana and Esteban kept meeting friends. I found it most disconcerting when middle aged women in

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business suits and high heels greeted Esteban and asked him if he was posted in Medellin or here in Bogota for good now, and whether the people of the Barrio Villa Gloria were firm in their commitment.

I began to fantasize nervously about a persona non grata stamp on my passport. We passed lines of police in full riot gear: helmets, billy clubs and plexiglass shields. I asked Mariana if it was safe to leaflet openly. There were only about one thousand demonstrators in the Plaza Bolivar. The Anarchist Party contingent was in fine fettle as usual; they gathered around a bonfire shouting slogans to themselves. I disposed of my leaflets easily enough. Esteban stayed close to me, explaining it was dangerous for me to be alone, because of undercover paramilitary agents.

People said, “Thank you, compañera,” as they took my leaflets. I noticed there was an amazing prolifera-tion of guerilla literature at the demonstration: small M19 cards, and EPL (Ejercito Popular de Liberacion, or People’s Liberation Army) cards were scattered every-where. As I was handing out the pamphlets for Soli-daridad, I felt a sudden flurry of paper over my head, so close I could hardly believe I had not thrown the paper myself. I looked down and saw cards for the Ri-cardo Franco Front, a sinister urban guerilla organiza-tion which had been censured by many of the other guerilla groups for its excessively violent tactics, and

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which was not in truce with the government. People would surely think I had thrown the cards. I disliked the thought that a member of the Ricardo Franco Front, a probable planter of bombs, had been breath-ing down my neck.

After the demonstration we went out for coffee again. More cigarettes. Esteban cut his cigarette in half, to save some for later. I was feeling wired and drank chamomile tea.

“Every time I drink coffee now,” remarked one of my companions casually, “I think of what happened to Compañero Wolff in Cali. It is so easy for somebody to just drop a grenade on the table.”24 Somehow, that put me off my herbal tea. A new man sat down with us and began to complain about how boring city life was, and how he wanted to get back to the mountains. I decided it was time to get going, so I reminded Esteban of our appointment Friday, and walked home.

I felt as though a curtain had been lifted. I could see behind the façade of neutrality, into a dim smoky interior, where bloody shapes moved sluggishly. I felt

24 I didn’t recognize his name at the time, but in fact Antonio Navarro Wolff was an M19 commander and head of the Commission to organize a National Dialogue, (a national dialogue was required under the truce agreement). Wolff was severely wounded by a grenade thrown into a Cali café in May of 1985. His face was damaged and he lost part of his right leg. This attack signaled the beginning of the end of the truce.

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as though the scales had fallen from my eyes. First of all, I was faced with the existence of guerillas, and with their normalness. They were people, not some anonymous organi zational acronym in a Latin American history book. Secondly, I now believed on a visceral level that the nightmarish world of the military torture chambers was as real as Esteban, Mariana and Pacho.

I considered the suppressed excitement of the gue-rillas, the air of conspiracy. Did they want violence? Did they believe that they could win an armed con-frontation? Did they plan to start one on the day of the civil strike?

Even as I write, somewhere in this city a prisoner is being beaten and a child is starving or dying of dirty water. Guerillas are making miguelitos25 and Molotov cocktails. Next Thursday, the day of the national strike, tanks will roll, the new shipment of 300-yard infrared military rifles may fire, and people may die.

[ June 15 ]

Today I went to Villa Gloria with Esteban.Villa Gloria is the most miserable of the group of

barrios nuevos called, collectively, Ciudad Bolivar. Over half the houses are built, not of brick or cinderblock, but of tin, wood scraps and tar-paper. The sewage

25 tire-puncturing wire tacks

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[ June 15 ]




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runs down the sides of the packed dirt paths between the shacks. Villa Gloria is built on the sides of hills. Garbage accumulates everywhere; it falls over eroded cliffs and gathers in heaps on corners when the wind blows. A gritty yellow dust rises with the dirty papers and scraps. Stray dogs lie in the sun, bark, and play with scruffy children. I passed the bloated bodies of two dead puppies as I walked up the hill. “Hard to tell which are skinnier around here,” said Esteban. “The children or the dogs.”

Most established barrios nuevos have a few real stores, or a few sturdier cinderblock buildings. Villa Gloria is five years old and has nothing. We passed a woman selling vegetables. She was seated on a square of cloth, changing her baby’s diaper.

“Hello compañera,” said Esteban, “Did you get the paper for your roof?” She looked at him for a moment, and answered, “No,” with little enthusiasm. We continued up the hill and passed a team installing light posts. Esteban pointed out to me the plastic tubes, half buried in dirt, which had been laid down to divert pirated water to the barrio. “We organize the people to break into the city supply pipes and provide water for themselves,” he said. We met four or five men on the walk. They approached, and shook hands with Esteban and I.

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Esteban at Camp

Guerilla camp, “Bateman Lives”

Esteban at Camp

Guerilla camp, “Bateman Lives”

Lupe and young guerillas

Guerilla kitchen

Lupe and young guerillas

Guerilla kitchen

View of city from camp

Waiting eagerly for M19’s free lunch program

View of city from camp

Waiting eagerly for M19’s free lunch program

The eve of the national strike

Shack near camp where mother, newborn, and toddlers lived

The eve of the national strike

Shack near camp where mother, newborn, and toddlers lived

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“How are the people?” Esteban asked each of them. “Are they firm? Committed?”

“Yes.”The yellow dirt road to the guerilla encampment

was relatively new. “On the day of the national strike,” said Esteban, “We will put barriers here to stop the government tanks. We will fight.” He gestured along the road. “All this will be blocked. Do you see our flag?” I looked around blankly for a few moments until he patiently pointed out the red, white and blue M19 flag waving above us. Until that point in the climb, the flag had been hidden by the great banks of yellow dirt. “I feel such emotion when I see it,” continued Esteban. He started to sing the anthem of the M19. He had a good voice. We strode along into the wind, then stopped and shook hands with an adolescent boy wearing a ruana, a Colombian wool poncho. He looked about fifteen. “Are you on watch?” asked Esteban, and the boy nodded.

The encampment consisted of two temporary tar paper, wood, and plastic buildings, and a small parade ground for morning exercises. Inside the kitchen/office/information area, two women prepared food – a huge cauldron of rice and a huge cauldron of soup – over an open fire. One of the cooks was a girl of nineteen. She wore thick make-up. Her tight black trousers and high heeled boots were covered with the

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blowing dust. The other woman was dressed more sensibly in an apron and dress. She was dark, with Indian features, and when she smiled, she showed large teeth, one of which was slightly rotted. A rough board table with two stools filled the remainder of the office/information area. A man sat there cutting paper into playing card sized pieces. Esteban introduced me and I shook hands with everybody. Lupe, a thin, short, intense girl with curly dark hair and glasses, spoke to a visiting young couple with great animation. She wore a white button-down shirt, a tidy blue coat, and pearl button earrings. Several children hung about the margins of the parade ground, eyeing the steaming cooking pots. Four of the six men at the encampment wore hats of some kind, canvas beach hats or wool Greek fisherman’s caps. All the men looked very poor. They were not college student revolutionaries. They were not educated and had never been well off.

The other construction – it was hardly a building – was larger, with one wall of brick and three of wood and tar paper. This was the guerilla sleeping area, said Esteban. A sheet painted with the portrait of a martyred M19 member hung on the outside wall. Slogans had been painted beneath. A few raised sleeping benches were fixed to the inside walls, and another sheet, printed with a portrait of Jaime Bateman, the martyred founder of M19, hung there.

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“Our father,” said Esteban.“Our example,” corrected one man.“He wasn’t my father,” said another. “I don’t know

about your mother Esteban, but mine was a very honest woman.” Two more teenaged boys lounged on the sleeping benches. One was reading. They both looked very poor.

The bookshelf held the New Testament; a biogra-phy of Jaime Bateman, a Red Cross first-aid book for soldiers, a copy of The Geneva Convention on Human Rights, Mao’s rules for guerilla fighters, Garcia Mar-quez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, and several politi-cal tracts. I bit my nails and listened to jokes I didn’t quite get in Spanish. The atmosphere was desultory and aimless. This changed when Lupe came in to speak to me.

Lupe was charismatic, lean, energetic and andro-gynous. She drew the attention and liking of the others. What could have sounded fabulous and implausible from somebody else sounded natural from Lupe. She radiated confidence, and created coherence.

As we ate lunch, Lupe joked. She drew smiles from men who been surly moments before. The hungry barrio children who had been hanging about came forward and were given big bowls of soup and rice to eat. A brief quarrel ensued over the excessive use of

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garlic in the soup, and Lupe put an end to it with a few authoritative words. She silenced a man older than she was without making him look resentful. Two new guerillas arrived. They had been off trying to prevent the eviction of a family in another Ciudad Bolivar barrio. They seemed sheepish and inarticulate. Their mission had not been a success. Denounced and identified the moment they arrived, they had been taken into custody then dropped off unharmed in the neighboring barrio of San Francisco.

Lupe turned to me, energetic. “These compa ñeros,” she said, “Were victims of repression. They went to another barrio and were spotted by agents of the paramilitary squad B2. They are lucky to be alive.” The men stood up straighter, and one pushed back his hat. “We thought, when they drove us behind that hill, they were going to kill us,” he said with confidence. Lupe had given their failed mission importance, she had given it meaning in the context for revolutionary struggle.

As I spoke to Lupe, I felt her incredible confi dence. The rag tag band of students, teenagers, and working men and women became fighters, soldiers in a battle between good and evil. Lupe let her soup grow cold as she spoke about the barrio, the ideology of M19, their importance in the struggle, nationalism, and the future. “We don’t want revolution in five years, two

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years, or twenty years,” she said, “We want it now.”I asked about the youth of some of the guerilleros.

“Those four boys look about fifteen,” I said, “and this worries me. Do they fight?”

Lupe explained that the boys had joined only because M19 was in a truce with the government, and was therefore a civilian organization. “These boys, one of whom is fifteen and three of whom are sixteen, joined as civilians. They live here. They came to us and asked to live with us. We did not seek them out. Some of them have problems with their families and cannot live at home.”

“Why did you join?” she asked the boy who had been reading a book on political organizing in the sleeping area.

“I went to a meeting in the barrio, at the meeting they invited us to go to a people’s congress in Robles. I went, I became more aware of the reasons for poverty in Colombia. I went on a two week trip and I never returned home.”

“Have you fought with arms?” I asked.“No. But I will if I have to.”Lupe sent the boys out to practice with their

slingshots, which were the only weapons in the camp. According to Esteban, there are other weapons hidden in houses in the barrio, in readiness for trouble during the national strike. It is possible that

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these boys will use their sling shots to hurl Molotov cocktails at the army on Thursday. Not much of a match for rifles, machine guns, tanks and grenades. I voiced my doubts about the M19 firepower. What can they do against tanks? Against the army? Against a large number of soldiers? Lupe looked me in the eye. “The army has tried to dislodge us twice already. They got near our camp. Then all the people came out of their houses with sticks and pots and tools. They sent the army back. On the day of the national strike, we will barricade the streets, we will fight. They will not dislodge us.”

I took some photographs of guerillas by the flagpole, guerillas by the kitchen, of the young boys flexing their developing muscles and showing off their slingshots in the shadow of Jaime Bateman’s portrait.

The guerilla leader named Pacho arrived. He asked me why, as an Irish girl, I was living in America instead of with the IRA in Belfast, fighting the imperialist British. I explained I’d never in my life been to Ireland, though my father was Irish. Pacho said I could, if I wished, travel with a combat squad of guerillas in the mountains of the Cauca region, and write about it. I said I would like to very much, but that I was afraid, to which he replied, “That is a risk we must all take.”

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More and more guerillas arrived from their day jobs. These people, grown men and women, instilled more confidence in me. They seemed to know what they were doing. On my way down the hill to the bus stop, a man named Fernando took me on a tour round the barrio. Esteban accompanied us. Many people greeted Esteban and Fernando, they said, “Hello compañeros, how’s it going?” Fernando and Esteban showed me the most horrible of the shacks. I saw a crumbling yellow cliff, poised like a breaking wave over the wood and paper sheds. Raw sewage and garbage ran down the cliff-side into the surrounding area. “The woman who lives in that one,” said Fernando, “gave birth to a child five weeks ago, in that filthy hut. They have no water. No doctor or nurse has seen mother or child. No doctor even knows of the little creature’s existence.” Two toddlers emerged from the gaping crooked door of the shack and looked up at us.

On the way down the hillside, we stopped at a small house and were invited inside by the woman who lived there. Two rooms: one a tiny kitchen with hens running in and out, and a small living room/bed room. The floors were pressed dirt. Not that different from the stone Glasgow tenement my father grew up in. Four people live in that Villa Gloria house, two are children. Eight lived in my father’s tenement flat. The

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woman of the house runs a low cost day care during the day, so mothers can work in the city as maids or street vendors. We stopped at a house which also turned out to be a small shop selling the few essentials: lard, rice, Coca-cola, panela (raw cane sugar), matches, and soap. When Fernando commented that times were hard, the shopkeeper agreed and went on off a little tirade against the government.

We met a pretty girl in a leather jacket who was walking up the hill to the encampment. Fernando turned back and accompanied her up the hill. “Is she of the M19?” I asked.

“No, she is a student who is helping us with the national strike,” answered Esteban. He smiled at me mischievously and added, “but I think she is almost within our claws.”

[ June 19 ]

There are machine-gun-carrying soldiers posted on every street corner in downtown Bogota today, and small urban tanks roll down Seventh Avenue. My friend Charley says they are not tanks, but armored personnel carriers. I don’t know – they have big mounted guns and no windows, and are painted olive green. They look like tanks to me.

I suppose all this is in honor of tomorrow’s national strike.

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[ June 19 ]



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[ June 19 ]



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[ June 19 ]



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I asked one of the soldiers if it was OK for me to take pictures of the tanks rolling by and he said it was fine.

[ June 21 ]

The national civil strike took place yesterday. It was a bit of an anticlimax, which I suppose is a good thing. The paper did not report any significant fighting.

Charley picked up a few miguelitos as souvenirs and gave me one.

[ June 22 ]

In the paper today I saw a photo of Pacho and Lupe. They were lined up against a light colored wall along with other “subversives” who had been caught on the day of the national strike carrying miguelitos and small explosives. Lupe’s real name is Desdemona, according to the caption on the photograph. I hope she and Pacho will be released. I hope they will not be killed.

[ July 1 ]

I met my friend Miguel Angel months ago at a Catholic youth theatre workshop organized by a Liberation Theology group. He wants us to start going out, but I don’t think that’s a good idea. Miguel Angel’s very good-looking, but he’s younger than me,

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[ June 21 ]



[ June 22 ]


[ July 1 ]


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[ June 22 ]


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and he’s complicated. Also, I’m not sure he always tells the truth. He says he went to a rich kids’ private high school on scholarship but then dropped out. He says he used to smoke bazooko, and was hooked for a while, but managed to quit. Bazooko, a kind of poisonous free base, is a by-product of cocaine manufacture. Slum dwellers and street kids smoke it. It’s really bad for you. Besides the negative effects of the coke itself, bazooko is full of toxic chemicals. I don’t know whether to believe Miguel Angel. Still, he takes me around Bogota, into neighborhoods I wouldn’t otherwise visit. We laugh together and have a good time.

Today Miguel Angel and I saw Betsy Abel from Vassar and hippie Andres in the street. Betsy was sniffling again, all coked up. After they left, Miguel Angel said, “I know that guy. Is he your friend’s boyfriend? He’s crazy.”

[ July 3 ]

I am in the barrio of Cordoba with Miguel Angel, at a Liberation Theologist church.

Cordoba lies just within the circle of respect ability which excludes South Bogota. The streets are properly paved and the houses sturdy, if somewhat irregular. I see more poor children in Cordoba than I do in Central Bogota, and I saw more country people in

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[ July 3 ]



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the bakery where we paused to drink coffee. A thin grubby girl in a blue sweater bought a thirty centavo loaf. She breathed in the bakery smell hungrily. Her brother, still round with the fat of early childhood, leaned his forehead against the glass case of cakes. The bells sounded for six-thirty mass. We finished our coffee and left.

Now I am seated at a pew inside the church, which is plain, with a red tile floor and walls of seamless blue plaster. The roof is made of thick corrugated plastic. Outside, there’s a rough concrete feel to the building. Scraps of construction material lie about beneath an unfinished wall. The concrete looks scraped, ash-colored and damp, as though it would feel sepulchrally cold to the touch.

Inside, every wooden pew is crammed full, and people stand at the back. I see middle-aged peasant women, swathed in wool ruanas;26 their braids taper down their backs. They smile at each other in greeting, and show gold-filled or missing teeth. Their husbands look curiously elegant: thin, with close clipped hair, perfectly creased trousers, and ruanas folded just so across the left shoulder. These men, who start off unremarkable, age into something refined; age lengthens their faces. Yet the beautiful young women, gold-skinned and full-lipped, become robust,

26 Thick Colombian wool ponchos, white, brown or fawn in color

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thickened beings who half comfort, half frighten me with their bulk. But I am describing the country-born, the immigrants to the city. Their children, city-beings, are completely different.

The city-born, the television watchers, are similar the world over. The teenagers of both sexes wear jeans and sneakers. Older women wear polyester imitations of expensive dresses, and walk on pointed high-heeled pumps. The men attempt middle-class casual respectability in their open-necked shirts and sports coats. Perhaps the very poorest of the city born look a little different. Their hair is too long, their faces too thin, and their clothing worn and grey-tinged.

All these citizens gather in the church. I, who am an admirer of baroque carving, of glittering saints, embroidered cassocks, and gloomy religious scenes framed in gilt, like this plain building more than any other church I have seen. By the altar sits a statue of the Virgin, surrounded by winking golden candles. Above and in front of us, Christ bleeds on the cross. The altar is covered by a plain white cloth. There are a few flowers. A girl acolyte, wearing a hooded robe of easily laundered white sweat-suit fabric, holds a polished wood chalice for the wine. To the right of the altar, red paper cutout cartoony letters spell the words, “Solidarity in Liberation.”

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The lead priest, Father Frederico, wears a micro-phone, though his voice alone would be sufficient. His skin is moreno,27 his hair curly. He wears dark-rimmed squarish glasses, and has a fine-boned face. His legs under the cassock are long, thin, and clad in green corduroy. The second priest, Father Juan, is pasty with light brown eyes, mousy hair, and a gray-ish, lumpy, large-pored nose. His spectacle lenses are very thick. His ears stick out, and he has a huge smile. He seems uneasy with the microphone, as he has a cold, and the mic picks up every cough and sniffle.

In terms of liturgy, the service is unremarkable for Colombia. I am, as always, fascinated by the thump-ing of the chest, and the ritualistic whine of mea cul-pa mea culpa mea gravisima culpa28 as well as all the crossing during the rhythmic intonation of Padre hijo y espiritu santo.29 Forehead, xyphoid, left shoulder, right shoulder. The especially religious add a quick double tattoo of crosses on chin and forehead.

Father Frederico preaches. His face is the darkest in the room. He looks out on a sea of golden shades, from honey to teak, to creased leather. Eyes of all colors look back at him: mud green, golden syrup brown, black, and even grey.

27 dark

28 My fault, my fault, my most grievous fault

29 Father Son and Holy Ghost

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He preaches a very concrete sermon, full of exhortation and reality. He preaches about who is Christian, and what Christian means.

“It doesn’t mean first communion.” Doesn’t it though? I imagine all the women and

girls in the room look back with pride on the day when their parents begged, stole or borrowed white puffed dresses, lace tights, white patent leather shoes and white silk head-dresses with veils, so they could, along with a train of other miniature brides, kneel for the first time to take the host. Blood of Christ, body of Christ.

“It doesn’t mean baptism.” But there are so many babies here, quiet, wrapped

in woolen shawls, resting in their fathers’ arms, baby girls with tiny gold earrings, tiny boys with close clipped hair. Wasn’t it an important day when those babies were blessed with a baptismal name, sprinkled with drops of holy water, held by godmother and godfather?

“And it doesn’t just mean marrying within the church.”

Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it mean the stiff veil, the white dress, the indissoluble bond?

“And it doesn’t” (Father Frederico is shouting now) “It doesn’t just mean going to church on Sundays.” Father Frederico scowls at us because we are all

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here in church on Sunday. My eyes wander to the “Solidarity in Liberation” letters, to Christ on the cross, to the Holy Virgin, all pale pink and beautiful, all creamy and delft blue. Her large eyes look solemn, but forgiving.

“Christian means committing yourself to the community, to your neighbor, to dialogue, to change. It is not easy. It is a constant struggle. It wasn’t easy for Christ and it won’t be easy for you. It means fighting, it means struggle, it means caring about those who have less. It doesn’t mean ritual indulgence in sacrament. He who helps his community is more of a Christian than a churchgoer who is selfish outside the church building. These words mean something! Confessing to me does little good unless you also confess to those who you have wronged. If you find this easy, either you are not a Christian, or you are an absolute saint!”

Father Frederico’s voice fills me with sympathy and shame as well. People glance uneasily up at the Christ, who is dripping his painted crimson blood above the altar. Frederico pauses, and from the front, I hear the strumming of a guitar. This song is played at every service. Those in the back seem self-conscious as they sing “Let me be, oh Lord, an instrument of your peace, let me be, oh Lord, an instrument of your peace.”

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[ July 6 ]

Last night I stayed with my friend Lucia out at Barrio Rincon, the same barrio nuevo where Miguel Angel lives. Lucia, who is only nineteen, introduced me to her boyfriend, Roberto, the local Catholic priest. He doesn’t look much like a priest and he doesn’t wear robes or a priest’s collar. He looks like a tall skinny hippie, like a modern version of Lytton Strachey. Roberto was not very friendly to me. He appeared depressed and barely smiled or spoke.

I asked Lucia how she happened to end up with a priest as a boyfriend? Well, she was helping out at the Parish House. She was active in the local youth group. Roberto had to have surgery on his penis for some reason. She helped change the dressings and nurse both him and his “poor pipi.” As he began to recover one thing led to another … I’ll tell you I was agog to hear this, I think my mouth was hanging open.

Lucia is so beautiful. She has beautiful Indian features. She never wears any make-up. Her skin is golden and healthy and smooth. Her cheeks are rosy. She is narrow hipped and wide shouldered. Lucia is gentle and funny and kind to everyone. I told her she is beautiful because she has a “cara de India,” the face of an Indian. She and her friends burst out laughing. To say somebody has a “cara de India” is a common insult in Colombia, apparently.

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[ July 6 ]




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[ July 7 ]

Sitting by the window at home. A pigeon arches its wings on the red clay of the rooftop opposite, struts, arches, struts. The wind ruffles the leaves of books on the window sill. Sun reflects off a reel of sticky-tape shadows so they look like the yellow gleam in honey or beer. A spider navigates the typewriter keys, braces against the breeze that ruffles the leaves of the books on the window sill. Trees sway. Leaves flutter. A pearl grey sky hangs over passersby, over a woman in a scarlet shawl, over a girl who swings her hips as she walks. Sparrows battle for the center of the telephone lines. Against the roof of red Spanish clay, an Andean sky of streaked grey. The sun glints on the typewriter keys, the wind ruffles the leaves of the books on the window sill.

[ July 12 ]

Yesterday was a terrible day. Our landlady’s seventeen-year-old granddaughter, Ana Sofia, has been really odd since she returned from a vacation trip to the coast with her high school boyfriend and his older cousin. Her boyfriend’s family lives in the North, they are much wealthier than Ana Sofia’s family. “They are oligarchia,” she says with pride. I don’t know how Ana Sofia managed to attend the same wealthy high school. Perhaps she had a scholarship, or perhaps her father

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(we don’t know who he is) paid. The past few days, Ana Sofia’s been manic. I knew there was something wrong. After she came back from the holiday, she kept borrowing our phone to call her boyfriend, but his family always said he was out, and he never called back. Ana Sofia became more and more agitated, though she continued to smile. Her conversation got very free-associative. She was too animated, her voice became loud and shrill. She smiled and drew strange doodles very quickly then suddenly asked my friend Miguel Angel what he thought about virginity. I was worried, but Julie kept saying Ana Sofia was fine.

Yesterday she got really hysterical and they carted her off to a drug clinic, to see if she had been drugged.

[ July 15 ]

Our landlady, Doña Luisa, is being extra difficult. She complains if we use water. She says we have to “collaborate” and pay extra money for the gas because we make too many cups of coffee. She says she is running low on gas. I say, “OK we’ll use the electric ring,” and she says, “no, then my electric bill will go up.”

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[ July 15 ]


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[ July 16 ]

Doña Luisa and her husband have put poor Ana Sofia in a mental hospital.

My roommate Julie flipped when she heard about it and lectured the two of them in fast angry Spanish.

[ July 17 ]

I went horseback riding at the police academy with my young lawyer friend, Jaime Eduardo, yesterday. We rode with his friend Cesar Rioja, the leader of one of the special anti-guerilla National Police teams. This is the same Cesar who had rescued Jaime Eduardo after his college hiking group ran into a division of FARC. It was our second visit to Cesar and his wife, Clara Claudia.

On the first visit, we ate paella for lunch, prepared by Cesar’s maid. The paella the maid served us was decorated with a small blob of scarlet ketchup which glowed in the center of the carefully molded and mounded rice mixture. It looked like a ketchup- nip-pled rice tit sitting in the middle of the plate. The pa-ella didn’t taste very nice – it tasted of old leftovers.

Yesterday was a lot more interesting.Cesar Rioja lives in the well-guarded compound

of the police academy, which is located in the exclu-

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sive, ironically named North Bogota barrio of “Cuba.” Armed guards surround the chained gate to the acad-emy. They question every visitor closely. Male visi-tors are required to leave their cedulas – identification cards – and wear numbered red buttons. Women are not, an interesting and chivalrous distinction, as half the guerillas are women.

Once past the gates, we drive through acres of fenced meadow. Groves of trees block any view of the city. In the distance we see the smoky green hills of the savannah. Antique machine guns and signs saying “The Youth of Colombia Say No to Drugs” and “I am Proud to be a Policeman” dot the side of the road. Jaime Eduardo tells me there are basketball courts and squash courts, tennis courts and even a golf course. The police dogs and police horses live here. The rank and file sleep in barracks, but officers have houses. Cesar is a captain, and his house is a good one, with parquet floors, and modern expanses of white wall.

Near the officers’ housing, olive-uniformed guards wander about, some accompanied by glossy Dober-mans, some carrying machine guns.

Cesar is thin, and gives the impression of height. In fact, his height is average. He is an ugly man, but his manner is attractive. His closely clipped hair appears strangely patched, his skin pitted and dark,

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his nose large, and his face lumpy and uneven. He slouches when he stands, and looks best in formal riding clothes. There is something restrained and serious about him, almost angry. Though he is young, he has a forbidding and paternalistic manner in front of his juniors. When he tells jokes, he suddenly seems a different person. His wife Clara Claudia jokes with him a lot.

Clara Claudia appears self-possessed and intel-ligent. She does not cater to her male guests in the usual Colombian manner, that is, she doesn’t flirt, or listen in avid and childish silence. Instead, she radi-ates common sense. Both she and her husband like to tell dirty jokes. Clara Claudia dresses badly, and is plump with unremarkable features. Her charm is in her conversation.

Cesar and Clara Claudia have a small son, David, a good-natured and ugly baby.

Both Cesar and Clara Claudia treat guests with formal Latin American courtesy. Clara Claudia immediately brings café tinto30 in matching cups, and later provides chilled tankards for the beer. There is nothing studentish about the way they entertain, though they are both in their mid-twenties. When we go to sit in the sunshine, in the garden, the maid spreads a blanket and brings us cushions. Cesar’s

30 espresso

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30 espresso

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German Shepherd bitch whines and wags her tail in a fenced run beside the sunny lawn. Clara Claudia passes potato chips on a silver-plate tray – no grabbing handfuls from a plastic bag.

The living room is furnished sparsely with a good plain coffee table and a set of beige upholstered furniture. A mid-size oriental carpet spreads over a section of the polished parquet floor. One wall is covered with elaborately framed small pictures. Some are miniature copies of classics, others are cheap mass produced images of big-eyed, wispy-haired children on quilted silk. Three china horses graze and prance on one of two small side tables. One horse, as Cesar shows me with pride, is a marked collector’s edition. A lamp with a baroque plaster base, all arcs and flukes of plaster confounded with women’s naked bodies, stands on the other side table. It is a hideous thing, obviously new. Around the foot of this lamp cluster many blown-glass animals.

Above the mantelpiece hangs another of the mass produced paintings, done in something resembling oil on canvas. It shows a woman in a low-necked lavender dress with a matching parasol. Like the waifs on the quilted silk pictures, she has a strange, huge-eyed look. The brush strokes are muted – a kind of fake impressionism. The painting must have been made in Taiwan, like the silk-quilted miniatures.

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The dining room is full of fruit – an incredible profusion of fruit rolls on every surface. The sideboard groans under very ripe mangos; obviously somebody has made Cesar and Clara Claudia the gift of a full box. Like the living room coffee table, the modern dining room table is unremarkable, and made of good wood. The dining room walls are decorated with a riding stick, the hilt of which is a deer’s cloven hoof; a military sword; a collection of military insignias mounted on a plaque; and a guitar. A huge, chubby, cheap-looking faux ebony Buddha stands to one side of the built-in bar.

The house – minus furnishings – is nice in a non-obtrusive way. It is a bright house; there are three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a maid’s room.

The middle-aged, patient-looking maid wears a large plaid apron – as do most Colombian maids. She responds quietly to Clara Claudia’s rather bad-tempered orders. She obviously knows her place, though under the plaid apron, she is dressed much like Clara Claudia.

Baby David rolls happily around in his wheeled walker, leaving a trail of crumbled biscuit behind him.

On my first visit, Cesar showed me the kennels and dog runs. I was struck by the glossy healthy beauty of the police dogs. Jaime had taught his own dog how to negotiate the police obstacle course. She climbed

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fences, jumped over jumps, ran along brick walks, climbed ladders, weaved in and out of poles like a barrel-racing pony, and leapt through a hoop. We also toured the barn, then went home to drink Chilean wine and pore over maps of guerilla-occupied areas of Colombia. Cesar is head of anti-guerilla training for the police force.

On this second visit, I ride. Cesar brings us to the stables. The walk is pleasant, through green fields grazed by expensive-looking horses. The stables are quite luxurious: two jumping courses; a dressage ring, an indoor school, and several outdoor riding rings. Each stall is thickly bedded with golden straw, rather than the wood shavings we use in the States. I am offered a ride. I am used to grooming and tacking up myself, accustomed to leaping up and fixing stirrups one-handed on horseback, rein looped over wrist. I had always understood this to be a basic test of adequate riding. No need at the police compound. Here, each horse is accompanied by a uniformed attendant, who leads the animal out of the barn, adjusts the stirrups, and fetches us riding sticks. He also fetches spurs for Cesar, and then, because Cesar isn’t happy with his first saddle, a new saddle. Colombian saddles are not very good, and I agree that if Cesar gives me money, I will buy him a saddle when I return to the States and ship it to him.

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First I ride a stiff, lazy pony, but once Cesar can see I know what I am doing, he asks the attendant to bring me another mount. I am given an enormous grey hunter-type with the most beautiful, free canter. Cesar can ride fairly well, but you can see he hasn’t been doing it all his life – he leans too far forward.

After riding we walk to a small building which seems to be some sort of officer’s club. Upon hearing I study history, one of the other guests turns the con-versation to Nicaragua. He remarks that Eden Pasto-ra31 is the only democratic and nationalistic alternative for Nicaragua. “Never mind, perhaps he’ll be killed,” I remark jocularly, misunderstanding completely. I get some funny looks. “No, no, he’s not dead at all,” says Cesar Rioja gently, “Your government has just given him twenty-eight million dollars.” I feel puzzled by his comment. I know direct US aid to the Contras has been prohibited by the Boland Amendment since last year.32

We eat our lunch at the club. Cesar is quite perfunctory with the waiter. Much of the club is fitted with the same grainless golden wood in the same modern unobtrusive style as Cesar’s house. Photographs of dogs and horses hang everywhere.

31 a contra leader

32 I suppose this was an early indication of the facts underlying what would later be known as the Iran-Contra crisis.

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31 a contra leader


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31 a contra leader


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31 a contra leader


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Above the sideboard, an enormous panoramic black and white photograph of Universidad Nacional students demonstrating covers much of the wall. They are killing a horse. The rider, a police officer, is weeping. Above the bar, I see a stuffed horse’s head. Is it the same horse?

After lunch I chat with the other guests, including the architect who made the Eden Pastora comment. He tells me about a church he designed in the North, with a magnificent Christ statue. “I told the priest,” he says, “that I wanted a male Christ, a live Christ, I wanted…” he pauses dramatically, “a Christ that smelled of semen.” I am unsure how to respond, so I smile and look down at his expensive riding boots. I turn to a woman named Randy, who sits to my right. Randy is American, but has married into a Colombian family. She teaches English. Her husband, who is very good-looking, has just retired from the anti-guerilla forces. Although he is young, half his hair has turned grey. Randy is seven months pregnant. She has short red hair, a plain face, and a sweet smile. She and her husband wrote a simple history of Nicaragua recently, in their spare time. It is something, says the husband, that they both know a lot about. “Eden Pastora….” he begins. Then he says, “You know the elections, the last Nicaraguan elections? They were fraudulent of course.”33

33 The post war elections which the Sandinistas won

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“Really?” I say, smiling vaguely. I decide not to mention that I am a Sandinista supporter. The conversation turns. Randy and her husband are leaving for Miami tomorrow morning. Cesar Rioja looks thoughtfully towards the huge photograph of the Nacional students stoning the horse.

“There is more opportunity in Miami,” he says. Randy smiles sweetly and pats her stomach.

“More opportunity for the baby,” she agrees.Jaime Eduardo, Cesar and I get up to go. We say

goodbye to Randy, her handsome husband, and the Christ-loving architect, but we are all distracted in the middle of cheek kissing and address exchanging. Fritz, a very valuable liver-colored Doberman is trying to hump Greta, an equally valuable but immature German Shepherd female. Chaos! This must be prevented at all costs. Fritz, who I had noticed padding around restlessly at lunch as he sniffed the table cloth and turned his red eyes upon us, gets captured after a bit of chasing about.

“Fritz is a good dog,” says Cesar Rioja, restraining him with difficulty. “His mother Heidi was a prize winner, and his father Hans was one of the best anti-personnel dogs we ever had.

“Why do they all have German names?” I ask, but nobody answers.

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We return to Cesar’s house, drink beer in the sun, and Cesar, Clara Claudia, and Jaime Eduardo tell some jokes about black people and gay men. I attempt to join in and tell a Polish joke, but as I have forgotten an essential Spanish vocabulary word – the word for “grenade pin,” it falls rather flat. Cesar comes to my rescue and tells the story of how he once pulled out the pin and threw the pin instead of the grenade. We go upstairs to watch a little television: Charlie’s Angels dubbed into Spanish. Cesar stares intently at the screen. He says all the best programs are police programs: Charlie’s Angels; SWAT; Starsky and Hutch; Barretta and The Streets of San Franciso. I say how much I like Hill Street Blues. “Oh yes,” he answers distantly and I feel I have made a faux pas.

I leaf through the wedding and baby albums. Clara Claudia jokes about how involved her husband gets in watching TV. “You aren’t allowed to talk to him!” she says. Onscreen, someone with a stocking over his head is creeping up behind Farrah Fawcett-Majors. Commercial break! Bored, Cesar reaches into his bedroom closet and pulls out a machine gun. I accidentally drop the photo albums. I have never seen a machine gun close up.

“May I look at it?” I ask. Grinning, Cesar places the huge gun in my arms. The metal is heavy and cold. I point it towards the bathroom door. “It’s not loaded of

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course?” I ask. Cesar, by way of answer, leans forward and detaches the clip. He releases the safety catch.

“Fire it,” he says. I squeeze the trigger, there is a click, but because the clip is lying on the flowered quilt between us, nothing happens. I look at Cesar, and wonder what it is like to sleep arm’s length from a loaded machine gun. I look at Clara Claudia and wonder what it is like to live with a man who sleeps arm’s length from a loaded machine gun.

“What are you afraid of that you keep a gun in the bedroom closet?” I ask.

Cesar bridles slightly, “I’m not afraid of anything. It’s a safety precaution.”

“Because of the guerillas,” explains Jaime Eduardo. “Do you remember when the Ricardo Franco Front attacked here?”

I do indeed remember the Espectador headlines and photo in May, just two months ago. The picture showed two dead nineteen-year-olds sprawled over a fallen motorcycle – the remnants of some one hundred and fifty Ricardo Franco Front guerillas who had set off bombs around the neighborhood of Cuba, and simultaneously mounted an armed attack on the police academy. That was when Cesar started taking his ametralladora34 to bed with him, says Jaime Eduardo.

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34 machine gun

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Cesar wants to go to the movies, so a chauffeur in a police van picks us up, and we drive to a mall. Cesar keeps a loaded semi-automatic pistol on his lap during the entire drive, and stuffs it into his waistband once we get there. We see a movie about Vietnam which features some blonde actor called Chuck Norris. Jaime Eduardo asks me if I like Chuck Norris, and I explain this is the first time I have ever heard of him. Cesar identifies aloud the model, make and caliber of each onscreen weapon. After the movie, the green police van takes me back to my apartment. We all talk about the States on the way. Cesar and Clara Claudia plan to visit soon, with little David. I give them my address. They will come next year, promises Cesar, but adds gloomily “unless all of our people have to be working, out in the field, by then.” This is just one of several similar dark hints he has thrown out that day.

We take a detour to look at the American Embassy. The streets are empty and the Embassy looms quietly. The dark green fence looks black. I half expect, after all Cesar’s fiddling with the semi-automatic under his sweater, that a car, or more likely a motorcycle, will speed from the shadows with a masked gunman riding pillion as light crackles out of his machine gun muzzle. But nothing. I wonder what Cesar has done that the guerillas bear him such a grudge.

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Later I learn that police barracks in Colombia are often used for interrogation and torture.

[ July 23 ]

I bought some squares of chewy Frumi brand candy from a little boy working on Seventh Avenue. He agreed to tell me about his life if I gave him some money. His name is Julio.

Julio says he is thirteen, but looks ten. He was sitting outside Burger King on Sunday with a cardboard box of fifty small Frumi packets. He sells the packets for six pesos each. The profit per cardboard box is about one hundred and twenty-four Colombian pesos – just under one US dollar. On his best day, Julio sold three boxes. On a bad day, he does not even sell one full box.

Julio is more American-looking than your average Colombian child, but not extraordinarily so. His hair is sandy brown, his face pale and freckled. His features are very Anglo. He would look at home in Boston; his is the kind of advertising-friendly face that sells soft drinks and cereal in America. But there he sat, in grimy clothes, on the curb next to Burger King, chatting to Burger King’s personal security guard, a man he is on good terms with. The guard wears a navy blue military-style uniform like many Bogota

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security guards, only he has a Burger King insignia on his cap, and discreet yellow “Burger King” lettering where epaulets might otherwise have been.

Julio is less neatly dressed than the guard. He wears scuffed school shoes, pants with a broken fly, and a grimy, patched bottle-green sweater. His throat is dark with dirt, and his eyes puffy, as though he had been crying. Probably he is tired. He tells that there was a big engagement party at the Hilton yesterday, and he worked all last night watching cars in the parking lot. He does this for many Hilton parties. Occasionally he also works at a supermarket in the North, where he weighs potatoes and loads shopping bags. Some days he is the only family member who brings home any money.

His four younger brothers and sisters, ages two to eleven, do not work. Their mother, a maid and washerwoman, is afraid to let them out, for she knows the temptation to turn gamin – street child – is strong. Julio, however, is the oldest.

Julio’s father is dead. His family is luckier than many, because they live in a neighbor’s house rent-free, he says, as caretakers. Others in the barrio have lent money when times were very hard. Also, Julio has rich relatives, he says. His uncle has a car. When there are medical emergencies, such as hernias and infected teeth, his mother calls the rich uncle.

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Julio does go to school. He is in the second year of a five-year high school. But he doesn’t read or write well, he admits. In spite of this, he names composition as his favorite subject. He doesn’t appear to think it odd that a second year bachillerato student is illiterate. There are forty students in his class, he explains, and the teacher doesn’t come very often, for the teachers are always on strike. When the teacher does come, he frequently leaves the students alone to play.

I ask Julio how he finds time to work as much as he does and attend school as well? He explains that school is from one in the afternoon to five at night. At five he eats his dinner, and then he goes to work until midnight, selling Frumi to the patrons of Burger King and the Bogota Hilton. It depends who the guard is, too. There is one guard who suffers from bad temper, and another who suffers from hangovers. The end result is the same for Julio: in neither case will the guard let him work the block, and he goes elsewhere.

Julio doesn’t eat the candy he sells. He eats at home. For breakfast, the family has bread and hot chocolate made with water. For lunch, they alternate between soup made from sheep head and rice, or potato and an egg each. Meat is too expensive. When asked if he has noticed the forty percent rise in food prices during the last six months, Julio frowns. “Yes,” he says. “Frumi have gone up. Sometimes I can’t buy

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a box to sell.” Today is probably not going to be a good day for Frumi. Nobody seems to want them.

Julio is not originally from Bogota. He used to live in the countryside of Cundinamarca with his grandparents, who have a small farm. Two years ago he moved to Bogota. He likes Bogota better than the country, where they made him work too hard.

“Doing what?” He grins. “Weeding.” Sometimes he goes back to visit his grand parents.

His mother is in the country now, because his grandmother must come into Bogota for an operation.

I wonder what will become of Julio. He cannot read or write. He will probably not finish high school. His responsibility and self-reliance are impressive. I imagine him at the Hilton, waiting on drunken partygoers, people who have just spent ten thousand pesos on an evening’s entertainment. I am sure he stands, unresentful, alert, waiting for the patrones to come out and claim their automobiles. They probably like him, if they notice him; he is a singularly likeable boy. When will he become angry about his life?

Julio is humming to himself and eyeing the passersby hopefully. I ask him what he will do when he grows up. “Work,” he says. “I’ll work and help my mother.” What kind of work? “I don’t know. I’ll help my uncle and my mother.”

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[ Epilogue ]

On November 7, 1985, three and a half months after I left Colombia, I picked up a Boston Globe in the Wesleyan University library and saw that M19 had taken over the Palace of Justice in Plaza Bolivar, the municipal center of Bogota. The Palace of Justice, which housed the Colombian Supreme Court, was a modern, bunker-like concrete building; it looked completely indestructible. I thought to myself that the Colombian army would have a hard time getting M19 out. The thirty-five M19 guerillas were holding over three hundred and fifty people hostage, a dozen of whom were Supreme Court justices.

The M19 had actually entered the Palace on No-vember 6. That same day about one hundred and fifty low level civilian hostages were released (or rescued by the military depending on who you believe). The guerillas said they had taken the palace because they wanted President Belisario Betancur to stand public trial before the world for violation of the truce agree-ment. They wanted the trial to take place in Plaza Bo-livar, for maximum public exposure.

When I lived in Bogota, I had been told by a stu-dent that M19 were the chevere35 guerillas. Back in 1974, they had stolen the sword and spurs of the nine-

35 Cool, great, awesome

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teenth-century nationalist revolutionary war leader, Simon Bolivar. In 1979 they had tunneled quietly un-der a Colombian Army depot and liberated five thou-sand weapons from under the noses of the military. What nerve! And they were musical too. One of the most popular hit songs during my time in Colombia was Grupo Niche’s Cali Pachangero, a catchy salsa love song to the City of Cali. I heard the tune everywhere, Bogota hummed with it. “Que todo, que todo, que todo el mundo te cante …”36 Esteban the guerilla had amused me with the alternate M19 lyrics, which he insisted were also quite widely sung: “Que todo que todo que todo el mundo toma armas. …”37 Was M19 chevere? I wasn’t sure, but nobody could deny the compañeros had both style and a sense of humor.

The taking of the Palace of Justice was not without successful precedent. Back in 1980, seven teen M19 members, disguised as casual soccer players, their machine guns stored in athletic bags, had taken over the Dominican Embassy during a cocktail party. In doing so, they had captured, along with the attention of the entire world, the papal nuncio and fourteen ambassadors, including the US Ambassador. M19 demanded the release of jailed comrades, and ransom money. They held the Embassy for over two months.

36 May everyone, may everyone, may everyone sing to you….

37 “May everyone, may everyone, may everyone take up arms….”

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The government negotiated, and in the end, M19 members walked away with over $1 million for the cause and safe passage to Cuba.

There was also a Sandinista precedent. On the 22nd of August, 1978, a mere eleven months before final victory, the Sandinistas had taken the National Palace in Managua’s central government square. They held 2,000 hostages, including the entire National Assembly.38 The Somoza government had negotiated, paid a substantial cash ransom, agreed to release sixty jailed Sandinistas and provided safe passage to Panama or Venezuela for the guerillas.39 The success of this takeover lent tremendous credibility to the Sandinistas and resulted in a wave of young recruits who swelled the Sandinista ranks to critical mass. In fact, some saw the successful Sandinista takeover of the National Palace in Managua as the revolution’s tipping point, the beginning of the end for the Somoza dictatorship.

However, when M19 took Bogota’s Palace of Justice, instead of permitting the government to negotiate, the military stepped in. The soldiers surrounded the Palace of Justice with tanks, then drove through

38 equivalent to our Congress and Senate.

39 Eden Pastora, the future Contra leader much lauded by the Reagan government in the eighties, was one of the leaders of that particular Sandinista action.

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the front door. They also attacked the building with rockets, which damaged part of the exterior walls and set the entire structure on fire. The guerillas were listening to the national radio from inside the Palace of Justice, and were able to telephone out and speak to reporters. As the artillery fire continued, Alfonso Reyes Echandia, the First Justice of the Supreme Court, frantically begged President Betancur on the air to order the army to hold their fire. He was followed by the guerilla second-in-command, Alfonso Jaquin, who also begged for a cease fire, and said incredulously that although First Justice Reyes Echandia had called the president personally to ask that the army stop firing, the president would not take the phone call. They would all die together, said Jaquin, not because M19 had taken the Palace of Justice, but because the military had driven in tanks and was firing indiscriminately on everybody inside.

Late that night, as the army continued to periodically bombard the building with heavy artillery, the structure burned out of control. M19 command and many hostages, including most of the Supreme Court Justices, had taken shelter from the fire in a fourth floor bathroom. The floor was flooded and the guerillas and hostages were packed in like sardines, but they survived the overnight blaze. Others survived the night in a third floor bathroom.

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At seven o’clock the next morning, the military announced that they believed all the hostages were dead, and they were going in to finish off the guerillas. This information was repeated on the radio, and the hostages in the fourth floor bathroom convinced the guerillas to send out a negotiator to prove they were still alive. They released Judge Reynaldo Arciniegas who walked out of the front door of the Palace and explained that many civilian hostages, including the Supreme Court Justices, had survived the night. President Betancur, on hearing this, sent the Red Cross to negotiate, but before the Red Cross could attempt contact, the Army proceeded with their original plan. They shot more incendiary rockets into the building, then sent in soldiers with machine guns, who opened fire while the hostages begged for their lives. M19 returned the fire, and many of the remaining hostages perished in the crossfire, including eleven Supreme Court justices. All but two of the guerillas also died.

In total, ninety-four people perished at the Palace of Justice. One of the two guerillas who survived, a law student named Irma Franco, along with Alternate Justice Carlos Uran Rojas, three visitors to the build-ing and several cafeteria workers were evacuated alive from the Palace by the military, as contemporary film footage clearly shows. The civilian survivors, who the

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military intelligence unaccountably suspected of aid-ing M19, were subsequently tortured and forcibly dis-appeared. The Alternate Justice Uran Roja’s body was dumped back at the Palace of Justice with a precise bullet hole in his heart and another in his head.

I still wonder whether Esteban, Pacho, Fernando, Mariana and Lupe died at the Palace of Justice, and whether Cesar Rioja participated in the assault on the building.

I have never returned to Colombia.


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AFTERWORD:

COLOMBIA AFTER 1985

What has happened in Colombia since 1985? What became of M19, and the other main guerilla groups, FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) EPL (Popular Liberation Army) and ELN (National Liberation Army)? What of the fight, whether armed or peaceful, for land distribution, equalization of wealth, and even the freedom to express political opinion? What became of the fight to keep the profits from the extraction of Colombia’s natural wealth within Colombia?

As the military had intended, the 1985 massacre at the Palace of Justice crippled M19. An incidental – or not so incidental – side effect was that the Colombian judicial system was also temporarily decimated.1,2 The remnants of M19 demobilized in 1990 and formed a political party, the M19 Democratic Alliance. As of 2015, many of the former M19 guerillas participate in Colombian electoral politics, and have served as congressmen, mayors, and departmental governors. EPL also demobilized in 1990 and formed a civilian political party. FARC and ELN continue to fight, and still control substantial territory in Colombia.

American mainstream media does not connect the guerilla organizations to the lack of social and

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economic justice in Colombia. Instead, the media tells us that FARC and ELN are purely terrorist organizations, corrupted by their involvement in the drug trade and their practices of kidnapping and extortion. I believe there is much deceptive propaganda in this simplistic version of reality.

At this point it may be useful to briefly review how the image of Latin American rebel groups has changed in the last thirty years. It is interesting to know that US Ambassador Luis Tambs, who was appointed to Colombia by Ronald Reagan in 1982, coined the word “narco-guerilla.”3 The term is a brilliant example of negative marketing. Back in the early eighties, dur-ing Tambs’ tenure, many Americans viewed guerilleros differently. The successful nationalist Sandinista gue-rillas in Nicaragua, and the FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front) in El Salvador enjoyed con-siderable world wide support. The Sandinistas had recently toppled a 43-year-long dictatorship and insti-tuted a more democratic government in Nicaragua. In El Salvador, the leftist and nationalist FMLN fighters looked poised to do the same.

El Salvador, ruled by a military junta from 1979 to 1981, with the majority of the land concentrated in the hands of the so called “fourteen families,” was a nightmare of right-wing death squads, state sanctioned assassination, torture and disappearance.

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Anybody who worked to better the plight of the poor was suspected of subversion and became a target. There were, however, numerous “liberated zones” in the mountains of El Salvador, where the FMLN guerillas maintained strongholds, and worked with limited means to provide a modicum of services to the poor. Guerillas built primitive schools and clinics, and ran adult literacy campaigns. Many Americans supported FMLN efforts. Charley Clements, an American doctor who is now at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, worked with villagers in FMLN territory. It is interesting, in 2015, to read his 1983 book Witness to War.

Although the United States government under Carter increased funding and aid to the Salvadoran military, Americans continued to mobilize in support of the Salvadorian resistance and the new Sandinista government. Tens of thousands of Americans signed the Pledge of Resistance – a pledge that they would commit civil disobedience at the nearest federal building if the US invaded Nicaragua. In short, in the late seventies and early eighties American liberals believed that leftist and nationalist guerilla movements in Latin America were fighting successfully for free elections, amelioration of poverty, and an end to brutal right-wing dictatorship.

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Back to Colombia. In spite of US Ambassador Tambs’ accusations about narco-guerillas, in the mid-eighties the cocaine cartels were allied, not primarily to the left-wing and nationalist guerilla groups like FARC, M19 and ELN, but to right-wing paramilitar-ies. The cartels and paras also had allies in land-owning dynasties, particularly the cattle barons, and in the military. The cattle baron/paramilitary connec-tion continues to this day.4 The eighties was a time of growth for the cocaine elite, who were buying main-stream politicians, taking over other people’s land, and building private armies. The best known of the cocaine kings was Pablo Escobar of the Medellin Car-tel. His power was so extensive that he was able to order successful hits on uncooperative judges, poli-ticians, and uncorrupted members of the security forces.5 He also contributed to the campaign coffers of Liberal Party presidential candidates.6 The cocaine business did not exclusively support high level narcos, however. Coca cultivation became a stable source of income for impoverished peasant farmers, and the co-caine trade provided employment for the urban poor. For many Colombian families, coca was survival.

During the truce of 1984 and 1985, in an attempt to achieve their political goals through electoral poli-tics, the FARC guerillas, together with other leftists, formed a civilian political party, the Patriotic Union.

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Many activists who had never participated in the armed struggle joined the Patriotic Union, which be-came an organization that encompassed a variety of movements committed to peace and social justice. Patriotic Union members included Afro-Colombians, indigenous groups, hu man rights defenders, and the urban poor. In 1986, the Patriotic Union achieved the election of five national senators, nine congressmen, and twenty-three mayors.7 This successful participa-tion of a grassroots third party in Colombian politics was an unprecedented challenge to the power of the Colombian oligarchy.

Unfortunately, after their successes in the 1986 elections, Patriotic Union members were subjected to repressive backlash. According to Amnesty Inter-national, 1987 “was marked by a dramatic increase in human rights violations.”8 Many Patriotic Union members fell victim to assassination and forced dis-appearance. Believing that under such circumstances, fair and open electoral politics were impossible in Colombia, the leadership of FARC withdrew from the truce and returned to the armed struggle. Many civil-ian Patriotic Union members persevered with elec-toral politics and in spite of continued repression, the Patriotic Union won eighteen provincial mayoral seats and 256 municipal council seats in the 1988 elections. Again, the right-wing paramilitary death squads and

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the military responded to Patriotic Union gains by murdering Patriotic Union mayors, and displacing and evicting communities of Patriotic Union support-ers. By 1988, over 500 Patriotic Union party members, including four members of the national parliament, and the presidential candidate Jamie Pardo Leal, had been murdered or disappeared by the paras9 and their military allies. By 1990, the number was over 3000.10 At this point, with the Patriotic Union party in disar-ray after the repression and assassination of so many of its members, it seemed unlikely that significant political and socioeconomic reform could be achieved through the electoral process.

In the late eighties and the early nineties, the situ-ation continued to deteriorate. The right-wing para-military organizations, the most prominent of which was AUC (The United Self-Defense Forces of Colom-bia), widened their target range to include students, academics and progressive liberals. Anybody engaged in organizing around a progressive social move-ment was vulnerable. As Amnesty International put it: “Hundreds of suspected opponents of the armed forces were detained, tortured or killed by ‘death squads’ apparently composed of military personnel or civilians acting on behalf of the armed forces. … The victims extended beyond the left-wing opposition to include members of virtually any independent orga-

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nization or profession considered to be critical of the armed forces’ campaign against ‘subversion.’”11

Further, with the increase in cocaine production and export in the late eighties, and the cartels’ negative response to the enforcement of extradition treaties, the drug-related urban violence flared out of control. Kidnappings and murder rates broke all records and political and criminal violence at times became hard to distinguish.

The FARC guerillas, increasingly militant after the failure of civilian politics, began to rely upon kid-napping and their own form of “taxation” for finan-cial support. From FARC’s point of view, they were entitled to collect revenue from transnational-owned oil-related facilities which operated in their areas and stole the wealth of Colombia.12 FARC governing documents explained that they had instituted a “tax for peace” to be collected “from those persons or cor-porations whose wealth is greater than $1,000,000 US,” because “trans-national corporations continue to loot our natural resources and the labor of our ma-jorities.13 The FARC also felt justified in kidnapping upper-class and even middle-class Colombians. Such tactics, particularly kidnapping, did not increase their popularity internationally or within Colombia.

So much for the FARC and the ELN guerillas. But who were they opposed to? What about the paramili-

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tary and military Colombian factions which the Unit-ed States government supported? Who exactly were they, and what was their stake in the battle? Human Rights Watch had the following to say concerning Co-lombia’s paramilitaries and their relationship with the regular military and Colombian mainstream politi-cians:

Colombian paramilitary groups trace their origins to small “self-defense groups” formed by local land-owners and businessmen to defend themselves and their property against guerrilla violence, and to death squads created by drug cartels in the 1970s and 1980s. Operating with the tolerance of, and often in collusion with Colombian military units, paramili-tary groups have a long and horrific history of ab u ses against civilians, including massacres, assassinations, torture, forced displacement, forc ed disappearances, and kidnappings.

Financed through the drug business, extor tion, and forced takings of land, paramilitary groups have a great deal of economic power. They have been estimated to control an enor mous share of Colombia’s drug trade, and they illegally own vast expanses of land that they have taken by force.

These groups also have increasing political influ-ence in Colombia. Through their territorial control, paramilitaries have been able to install or manipu-late many local politicians. Even at the national level, there are now politicians who openly support para-military groups.14

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In short, the paras were primarily responsible for the management of the Colombian cocaine trade, collaborated with the Colombian military and were allied with mainstream Liberal and Conservative party politicians.

What did the paras do with the land they accumu-lated? The para-appropriated land, once em p tied of peasant farmers, was used for the luc rative cultiva-tion of monocrop export products like African palm15 and beef cattle, so that the increased consolidation of Colombian land in the hands of the paras and their allies in the military and the mainstream elites re-sulted in new agro-industry which benefited export transnationals.

The paras have been responsible for the lion’s share of political carnage in Colombia since 1985, and they apparently fear no reprisal from the gov ernment. From 1987 on, the paras perpetrated massacres upon rural peasants suspected of being sympathetic to the gueril-las. One such massacre occurred in Uruba in 198816

and another in La Rochela, Magdalena Media in 1987.17 The twelve judicial func tionaries, both judges and fact-finders, who were sent to investigate the paramilitary massacre in La Rochela were themselves murdered by the paras in 1989.18

In 1990, the paramilitary force AUC killed presi-dential candidate Benardo Jaramillo of the Patriotic

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Union; with the 1987 assassination of Patriotic Union presidential candidate Jamie Pardo Leal, that made two Patriotic Union presidential candidates murdered by paramilitaries in a two-and-a-half year period. The leader of the demobilized M19 Democratic Alliance party, presidential candidate Carlos Pizarro, was also murdered in 1990.19, 20

Although the paramilitaries were primarily in-volved in the drug trade, the story we are handed in the United States is that the guerillas are responsible. It is true that in the early nineties FARC and ELN began “taxing” the coca industry and profiting from coca production within their area of control.21

However, they had been preceded in coca profiteering by the cartels, the paramilitary forces, mainstream politicians and other Colombian elites. One might say that FARC and ELN joined other powerful Colombian factions at the lucrative coca trough. They were not the original and pri mary engineers of the cocaine industry, however. The coca business did not belong to FARC and ELN exclusively any more than the petroleum industry had, although the guerillas did make a practice of extracting revenue from both.

In large areas of rural Colombia, particularly in the south where coca was cultivated by small farmers, for all practical purposes FARC was the only govern-ment. FARC did not spend their “cocaine tax” gains

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exclusively on weaponry and supplies. In areas under their control they contributed to local infrastructure, building bridges, roads, water and sewer systems. They also made some investment in education and health care.22 This is not to say that FARC and ELN were starry-eyed idealistic revolutionaries. Both FARC and ELN were at war. They kidnapped civilians for ransom, executed their perceived enemies, occasion-ally attacked non-combatant settlements, and planted land mines dangerous to civilians in order to defend their camps from attack. But they were certainly no worse than the right wing paramilitaries, who were motivated purely by the desire to extend personal wealth and power.

FARC and ELN involvement in the coca mar-ket reduced narco and paramilitary profit, and the paramilitary forces had yet another motive for their attacks on civilian communities. An illustrative ex-ample of a paramilitary massacre occurred in 1997 in FARC territory at the town of Mapiripan. A team of fifty AUC paras flew into a Colombian military con-trolled airport adjacent to an army base which flew US military-led coca eradication fumigation operations. Although US collusion cannot be proven, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has found that the Colombian army helped plan the attack. Co-lombian soldiers helped the paras load weaponry onto

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Colombian military transport.23 The paras went on a five-day murder spree in Mapiripan. They had a list of suspected guerilla sympathizers, who they took to the local slaughter house. The screams could be heard all over town. A local judge, Leonardo Ivan Cortes, called the military command for help, but none came. He paid for his audacity, and soon had to leave Colombia due to death threats.24

Another para massacre occurred in the area of Ituango, Antioquia. For a really detailed record of the events which took place there, it is best to read the decision of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in The case of the Ituango Massacres vs. Colombia.25 In fact, an examination of the geo-graphical index of that court will reveal several other Colombian human rights cases related to paramilitary and military massacres.26 27

The essential facts of the Ituango case are that in 1996 and 1997, AUC, with the support of Colombian security forces, searched out, tortured and executed civilians they suspected of being sympathetic to the guerillas. The victims included old men, women and a fourteen-year-old child. After torturing their victims to death, the paras burned nearly all houses to the ground, stole the livestock, and destroyed municipal records. Over 1,200 people were displaced from the community. As one witness said, “the region was

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left in ruins.” And, one might add, much land was freed up for exportable monocrop cultivation. The Court held that: “it has been proved, and the state has acknowledged that the paramilitary incursion …and also the theft of the livestock happened with the acquiescence or tolerance of members of the Colombian Army …”28

In 1998, Conservative President Andres Pas-trana began new peace talks with FARC, and by the end of 1999 the Pastrana administration and FARC leadership had agreed upon an agenda for negotiation which included redistribution of land to the rural poor, social and economic restructuring, respect for human rights, and the fair use of Colombia’s natural resources.29 Although FARC had alienated many middle-class Colombians who might formerly have sympathized with their goals, they were still theoretically clear on a redistributive agenda. Unfor-tunately talks fell apart because FARC claimed (credibly) that the Pastrana government was unable to restrain the military and the paramilitary forces.30 Further, Pastrana had no ability to deliver in terms of land reform or limitation of the foreign exploitation of Colombian oil, agricultural, and mineral resources. In fact, Pastrana negotiated a further International Monetary Fund loan which pledged the Colombian economy to neoliberal policies, including even more

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favorable resource extraction terms for transnationals, cuts to the public sector, and the privatization of already limited public services.31

Another key point of the Pastrana presidency was Plan Colombia, which was sold to the American public as a method for fighting the cocaine menace. Under Plan Colombia, a joint project of the Pastrana and Clinton administrations, Colombia was to receive a multi-million dollar infusion of United States aid. President Pastrana’s original plan, recognizing that when you eradicate a lucrative source of income to the poor like coca, you need to provide an alternative means of support, included substantial social invest-ment, and only secondarily investment in the Colom-bian military. However, in the final version, which was heavily influenced by United States negotiators, the majority of the funds went to the military for the stated purposes of attacking FARC and eradicating the coca crop. Amnesty International continues to criticize the militaristic focus of Plan Colombia.32 As Ambassador Robert White, formerly assigned to the US Embassy in Bogota said, “if you read the original Plan Colombia, not the one that was written in Wash-ington, but the original Plan Colombia [written by the Pastrana administration] there’s no mention of mili-tary drives against the FARC rebels. Quite the con-trary, [President Pastrana] says that the FARC is a part

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of the history of Colombia and a historical phenom-enon, he says, and they must be treated as Colombi-ans.”33

The coca eradication component of Plan Colom-bia poisoned peasant communities and resulted in fur t her displacement of small land owners. The pri-mary method of eradication was fumigation – the spreading of heavy pesticides from small planes. As a result, the farmlands, waterways, villages, wild life, farm animals and worst of all the people of the coca producing regions were heavily dusted with a Mon-santo pesticide, Roundup SL, which has not been approved for use in agricultural areas in the United States.34 The World Health Organization has recently found that the main ingredient in Roundup, glypho-sate, is a carcinogen.35 The immediate result for the communities at the receiving end of the heavy pesti-cides was eye, skin, respiratory and digestive disease, contamination of water sources, the killing of food crops and fruit trees, and the poisoning deaths of dogs, chickens, pigs and cattle.36 This economic dis-ruption to small farmers led to further displacement from their lands37 and further consolidation of land ownership. Even the World Wildlife Fund expressed concern about the effect of the massive pesticide cam-paign.38

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Plan Colombia also provided the Colombian mili-tary with crop dusting planes, armed escort helicop-ters, and privately contracted pilots.39 Millions in United States tax dollars went to private mercenary corporations. The Plan Colombia fumigation cam-paign was worth $200 million to a Blackwater-like $1.4 billion mercenary- and military-support corpora-tion called Dyncorp.40

And then there was the war against the guerillas. In 2000, the United States spent nearly $800 million on weapons for Colombia’s armed forces.41 By 2013, that figure had reached $9 billion.42 Under George W. Bush, FARC was officially designated as a “terrorist organization” which according to the Washington Post, opened up sources of secret funding for CIA-led special covert operations.43 Starting in 2007, the US military and the Colombian military used the same smart bomb technology that had been used in Afghanistan to target the FARC. The use of smart bombs against FARC forces continues today.

Why was the primary military target of Plan Colombia the leftist FARC, rather than the right-wing paramilitaries who were even more deeply involved in the cocaine trade and who had committed so many well-documented massacres and displacements of civilian communities?

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Perhaps the reason that FARC and the ELN guerillas, rather than the paras, were the primary identified military target is that the guerilla groups’ stated political goals are the nationalization of extractive Colombian industries (at the expense of transnational profit) and the redistribution of land and other wealth. These goals are similar to those of civilian nationalist movements all over Latin America, and they are therefore far more threatening to the current economic status quo and to transnational profit than the right wing “private property and order” ideology of the Colombian paramilitaries and the majority of the military leaders.

Some critics think that today, our relationship with Colombia has as much to do with petrochemicals as it does with cocaine. In December of 2014, the United States imported roughly equal amounts of oil from Iraq and Colombia, and the transportation cost from Colombia is lower, which makes Colombian oil cheap-er as a practical matter.44 Yet few Americans have any idea that Colombia is a major exporter of oil to the United States. According to Energy and Capital, an investment advisory group which publishes regular information on lucrative investment opportunities in the energy sector, Colombia has substantial untapped oil deposits.45 As our relations with neighboring Ven-ezuela have cooled (the Bolivar government national-

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ized the oil industry, cancelled exploitative contracts with transnational oil corporations, and instituted ex-tensive social programs with the increased revenue) the importance of potentially profitable, accessible Colombian oil revenues has increased.46

Andres Pastrana was followed in office by the extremely right wing Alvaro Uribe, who ran on an anti-insurgent platform. Uribe was a good friend to the Colombian military, and a cocaine, and paramilitary-connected cattle baron in his own right.47 His goal was to wipe out every last guerilla – no more negotiation.48

A secondary stated goal was to demobilize the paramilitaries, in particular AUC. The original Uribe campaign was supported by the military, the Liberal party, the banana corporations, and other agricultural mono-crop industries. Interestingly, leaders of the paramilitary group AUC also supported Uribe.49

Four days after his election, Uribe called a State of Emergency under which the government was able to “preventatively detain” citizens without warrant, suppress political protest, limit the freedom of the press, and declare curfews.50

Uribe served a second term, remaining as presi-dent of Colombia until 2010. During his years in of-fice, he continued the neoliberal economic policies of Pastrana, and privatized additional public services. His priority was to make Colombia safe for trans-

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national investment. Uribe said during a 2004 BBC interview: “of course we need to eliminate social in-justice in Colombia but what is first? Peace. Without peace, there is no investment.”51 Some might counter with the argument that without social justice, which can only come with an end to transnational exploi-tation of Colombian natural resources, and a more equal distribution of wealth, there will never be peace in Colombia.

Although Uribe was successful in taking territory back from FARC guerillas, in part because of the previously mentioned use of smart bomb technology and CIA-directed intelligence operations, he was not successful in permanently disarming the para-militaries. In fact, according to Human Rights Watch,52 Uribe’s demobilization plan let the paras off the hook completely.53 As Human Rights Watch put it:

The government of Colombia has been engaged in negotiations for the demobilization of paramilitary groups since late 2002, when paramilitary leaders unilaterally declared a cease-fire. The cease-fire dec-laration and the ensuing negotiations appear to have been motivated primarily by paramilitary leaders’ desire to obtain a deal that will allow them to avoid extradition to the US while serving as little time in prison for their crimes as possible. Observers have also pointed out that paramilitary leaders and drug lords at the negotiating table may view demobiliza-tion as an opportunity to launder their illegally ac-quired wealth.

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Paramilitaries have been blatantly flouting the cease-fire. A September 2004 report by Colombia’s Public Advocate (Defensoría del Pueblo) stated that in the first eight months of 2004 it had received 342 complaints involving apparent paramilitary breaches of the cease-fire, including massacres, selective killings, and kidnappings. Estimates of violations made by Colombian NGOs are even higher, with the Colombian Commission of Jurists stating that as of August 2004 paramilitaries had killed or forced the “disappearances” of 1,899 people from the date of cease-fire declaration.

Why did the Uribe government, as Human Rights Watch put it, “let the paramilitaries off the hook?” Because Uribe, a scion of the cattle baron elite of Antioquia, had family ties to cocaine cartels.54 Uribe’s father, who died in 1983, had been subject to an extradition order to the United States for drug trafficking.55 The paramilitary and cocaine cartels well-documented close relationship to the official military and Uribe’s political allies were no doubt another factor.56 This is not unsubstantiated rumor. Since 2006, more than fifty-five current and past members of Colombia’s national legislature, including a senate president, have been convicted of conspiring with the paramilitaries.57

One hopeful development in Colombia has been the increasing independence of sectors of the legal and judicial system. For example in 2008,

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twenty-three years after M19’s takeover of the Palace of Justice, Colonel Luis Alfonso Plazas Vega, the commander in charge, was prosecuted by the Colombian attorney general for the disappearances of the missing survivors. In 2010, Colonel Plazas Vega was sentenced to thirty years in prison.

President Uribe did not approve. His comment upon being told of the Colonel’s sentence was “a criminal alliance between the narco-traffickers and the guerillas murdered the Supreme Court in 1985 and those criminal actors are not in jail. And now they have condemned a member of the armed forces who was just trying to do his duty. That hurts. It’s sad.”58

Uribe wasn’t the only right-wing Colombian who felt saddened and hurt by the Colonel’s sentence. The presiding judge, Stella Jara, received multiple death threats. After the trial ended, she had to go into exile with her child.59

Uribe’s poignant moment at the thought of the military doing their duty was especially touching coming, as it did, after the most revolting scandal of his presidency, the so called “false positives” controversy. Since one of Uribe’s priorities was wiping out the guerillas, rather than negotiating with them, his government created an incentive by providing financial bonuses for high body counts. As a result, nefariously inspired members of the military lured

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groups of poor and unemployed boys and men to isolated locations near conflict zones with promises of work. They then executed them, dressed the dead bodies in combat fatigues, photographed the corpses, and claimed they were dead guerillas. A United Nations special reporter, Phillip Alston, investigated and documented similar schemes in at least thirteen departments, so the practice was geographically widespread and involved many different army units.60 One has to ask whether these crimes were not in fact a logical result of offering the Colombian military extra cash for documented kills. Surely this is an example of neoliberal economic incentive payments gone mad. In other similar cases, military members dressed up random homicide victims in military fatigues, and claimed them too. In the latter circumstance, in addition to gaining the perpetrators cash bonuses, the inflated guerilla kill statistics had the agreeable effect of reducing the reported criminal homicide rate, which was a major goal of Uribe’s government anyway.61

No review of the Uribe presidency, and of the increasing independence and courage of some sec-tors of the Colombian judiciary would be complete without consideration of Uribe’s 2009 agreement awarding the United States access to seven Colombian mili tary bases. Access to Colombian bases became important when neighboring Ecuador’s progressive

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nationalist president Rafael Correa refused to renew the United States’ lease of the Manta military base in his country. Uribe’s Colombia stepped into the breach and agreed that the United States would be given the right to use Colombian bases, and expand and improve upon them. Under the agreement, the Palanquero base alone, located in Cundinamarca, was slated to receive an infusion of $46 million. The reaction from other Andean nations was immediately negative, with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela accusing Colombia of “hand[ing] over its sovereignty to the United States,” and Correa of Ecuador stating that the agreement “constitutes a grave danger for peace in Latin America.”62

This was not imaginative hyperbole. The US Air-force budget estimate submitted to US congress in 2009 noted that Palenquero Airbase “provides a unique opportunity for full spectrum operations in a critical sub region of our hemisphere where security and stability is under constant threat from … anti-US governments. …The strong security cooperation ar-rangement [with Colombia] also offers an opportunity for conducting full spectrum operations throughout South America. …”63 No wonder Colo m bia’s progres-sive neighbors were nervous.

The happy ending was that in August of 2010, Colombia’s Constitutional Court struck down Uribe’s military base agreement, holding that a treaty of that

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nature was illegal without the approval of the Colom-bian congress.64 This judicial independence is par-ticularly admirable when one considers the context of security services’ wiretapping of judges, death threats, and successful assassination attempts.65

Another cause for optimism against the odds is political change in the surrounding Andean nations of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. In each of these countries, open and fair political processes have led to the election of nationalist presidents who reject neo-liberal economics, nationalize extractive petrochemi-cal and agricultural industries, and reinvest the gain in social programs.

As of 2012, Uribe’s successor, President Juan Man-uel Santos, who had been Uribe’s minister of defense, increased bombing strikes against the FARC. He si-multaneously began peace talks with FARC which are still, at time of press, in process. The parties have agreed upon a few points, one of which is “radical transformation of rural Colombia.” This reportedly means “economic and social development of rural areas and the provision of land to poor farmers.”66

Unfortunately, it is easy to predict how “economic de-velopment of rural areas” will be accomplished under a pro-neoliberal government: more cash crop for ex-port. The further consolidation of peasant land in the hands of transnationals continues in spite of negotia-

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tion language promising the opposite. In September of 2013 the international charity Oxfam denounced the Cargill corporation, one of the largest agricultur-al transnationals in the world, for illegally acquiring large tracts of farmland in an area of Colombia des-ignated by law for small farmers.67 Under such cir-cumstances, the successful “provision of land to poor farmers” is difficult to envision without a very signifi-cant change in government and policy.

As Americans, we need to understand how our tax dollars are spent in Colombia, and elsewhere in Latin America. The story of Colombia is not a simplistic tale about evil terrorist narco-guerillas who attack civilian society. We do not champion a blameless civilian government against terrorist hordes. In fact, we have repeatedly provided financial support and weapons to a state which colludes in the further impoverishment of the majority of its people and in the murder of civilians who dare to speak out. We spend our so-called aid on programs which will profit extractive transnational industries to the detriment of the poor. Isn’t it time for us to wake up again, and to speak out for justice in Latin America, as we did in the late seventies and the early eighties? And isn’t this need especially pressing at a time when our own federal government cries poor, and has attempted to justify decreased investment in social programs within our own borders?

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Back in the days of the cold war, the United States government proselytized the domino theory. Ameri-can politicians believed that where one country fell to communism, the neighbors were sure to follow. Let us hope that the domino theory holds true for nation-alist democracy in Latin America, that what has hap-pened in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela will happen in Colombia. Perhaps a progressive and independent Colombian presidential candidate will step forward – and will survive his or her campaign. May free and fair elections in Colombia lead to the nationalization of banana plantations, cattle kingdoms, and the pet-rochemical industry. May profit finally be returned to the Colombian people in the shape of land reform, fair wages, and investment in healthcare and educa-tion. Only then will the children of the poor be liber-ated from the need to work the city streets to survive.

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[ Afterword Endotes ]

1 International Center for Transitional Justice, “La Toma” 2012 https://www.ictj.org/news/colombia-la-toma

2 As the Inter-American Court of Human Rights put it in their December 2014 decision regarding the siege of the Palace of Justice “aspects that characterized the situation of the judicial branch during the late seventies and the early eighties [included] (i) violence affecting the Judicial Branch, with an average of twenty five judges and lawyers per year being the victims of attempted assassinations, and (ii) decisive pronouncements adopted by the Supreme Judicial Court of Justice and the Council of State which marked the independence of the Judicial Branch from the Executive and which in various occasions caused discomfort among different sectors in the country. I/A Court H.R., Case of Rodríguez Vera et al. (Persons Disappeared from the Palace of Justice) v. Colombia. (November 14, 2014) http://www.corteidh.or.cr/index.php/mapa-interactivo

3 Forrest Hylton, Evil Hour in Colombia (Verso 2006), p. 70

4 Nicolas Bedoya “Former Governor Pleads Guilty to working with Paramilitaries” Colombia Reports, October 15, 2014 http://colombiareports.co/para-politician-accuses-president-colombias-cattle-association-working-paramilitaries/

5 Hylton, p. 74

6 Hylton, p. 77

7 Genocide Against the UP, Twenty Years of Impunity, June 10, 2005. Inter-Ecclesiastic Commission on Peace and Justice (a Colombian Christian Human Rights Organization) http://justiciaypazcolombia.com/GENOCIDIO-DE-LA-UNION-PATRIOTICA

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5 Hylton, p. 74

6 Hylton, p. 77


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5 Hylton, p. 74

6 Hylton, p. 77


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5 Hylton, p. 74

6 Hylton, p. 77


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8 Amnesty International, Amnesty International Annual Report 1988 – Colombia, p. 103

9 Hylton, p. 73

10 Genocide Against the UP June 10, 2005

11 Amnesty International, Amnesty International Report 1988 – Colombia, p. 104

12 James J. Britain, “Human Rights and the Colombian Government” New Politics, Winter 2006

http://newpol.org/content/human-rights-and-colombian-government-analysis-state-based-atrocities-toward-non-combatants

13 FARC-EP 2001

14 Human Rights Watch Colombia: Letting Paramilitaries Off The Hook, January 2004 http://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/americas/colombia0105/

15 Britain, “Human Rights and the Colombian Government”

16 Hylton, p. 76

17 Hylton, p. 77

18 I/A Court H.R., Case of the Rochela Massacre v. Colombia, May 11, 2007 http://www.corteidh.or.cr/index.php/mapa-interactivo

19 Hylton, p. 77

20 Antonio Navarro Wolff, the same M19 leader who had lost a leg to a grenade thrown by a soldier in a Cali café during the truce in 1985, replaced the dead Pizarro as the presidential candidate for M19.

21 Hylton, p. 86

22 Hylton, p. 88

23 Dawn Paley, Drug War Capitalism (AK Press 2014) p. 66

24 I/A Court H.R., Case of the Mapiripán Massacre v. Colombia,

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9 Hylton, p. 73





13 FARC-EP 2001



16 Hylton, p. 76

17 Hylton, p. 77


19 Hylton, p. 77


21 Hylton, p. 86

22 Hylton, p. 88



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9 Hylton, p. 73





13 FARC-EP 2001



16 Hylton, p. 76

17 Hylton, p. 77


19 Hylton, p. 77


21 Hylton, p. 86

22 Hylton, p. 88



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9 Hylton, p. 73





13 FARC-EP 2001



16 Hylton, p. 76

17 Hylton, p. 77


19 Hylton, p. 77


21 Hylton, p. 86

22 Hylton, p. 88



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September 15, 2005 http://www.corteidh.or.cr/index.php/mapa-interactivo See also Hylton, p. 92

25 I/A Court H. R., Case of the Ituango Massacres v. Colombia, July 1, 2006 http://www.corteidh.or.cr/index.php/mapa-interactivo

26 http://www.corteidh.or.cr/docs/casos/pueblobe/demanda.pdf

27 Case of the Rochela Massacre

28 Case of the Ituango Massacres

29 Hylton, p. 99

30 Hylton, p. 99

31 Forrest Hylton, p. 99

32 Amnesty International, U.S. Policy in Colombia, http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/countries/americas/colombia/us-policy-in-colombia

33 Dan Gardner, “Losing the Drug War” Ottawa Citizen, September 6, 2000

34 Judith Walcott “Spraying Crops, Eradicating People” Cultural Survival Quarterly, Winter 2002 issue.

http://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/spraying-crops-eradicating-people

35 Megan Thompson, “WHO: Long-cleared Roundup ingredient “probably” causes Cancer, PBS Newshour, March 29, 2015 http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/roundup-ingredient-probably-carcinogenic-humans/

36 Daniel Graham, “Environmental Consequences of Plan Colombia” Arizona Journal of Environmental Law and Policy, April 25, 2012 http://www.ajelp.com/comments/the-environmental-consequences-of-plan-columbia/ see also Walcott, “Spraying Crops, Eradicating People”

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29 Hylton, p. 99

30 Hylton, p. 99








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29 Hylton, p. 99

30 Hylton, p. 99








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29 Hylton, p. 99

30 Hylton, p. 99








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37 Mathew Stein, “Criticism of Fumigation Grows as Cocaine Trade is Undiminshed,” World Politics Review, July 16, 2007 http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/929/criticism-of-fumigation-grows-in-colombia-as-cocaine-trade-is-undiminished

38 Walcott, “Spraying Crops, Eradicating People”

39 Julian Borger and Martin Hodgson, “A Plane is Shot Down and the U.S. Proxy War on Drug Barons Unravels” The Guardian, June 1, 2001. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jun/02/julianborger.martinhodgson See also Walcott, “Spraying Crops, Eradicating People”

40 Borger and Hodgson, “A Plane is Shot Down and the U.S. Proxy War on Drug Barons Unravels”

41 Daniel Mejia, “The War on Drugs in Plan Colombia” Rethinking the ‘War on Drugs’ through the US-Mexico Prism Yale Center for the Study of Globalization

http://www.ycsg.yale.edu/center/forms/plan-colombia19-32.pdf

42 Dana Priest “Covert Action in Colombia” The Washington Post, December 21, 2013

43 Priest, “Covert Action in Colombia”



45 Jon Carter “Colombia Shale Oil Bonanza” Energy and Capital, March 5, 2013 http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/colombia-shale-oil-bonanza/3142

46 Carter, “Colombia Shale Oil Bonanza”

47 Tom Feiling, “President Uribe’s Hidden Past” Colombia Journal May 24, 2004 http://colombiajournal.org/president-uribes-hidden-past.htm

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48 Uribe’s father was assassinated in 1983, allegedly by FARC

49 Hylton, p. 104

50 Jeremy McDermott, “State of Emergency as Colombia Steps up War on Terrorism” The Telegraph, August 13, 2002 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/colombia/1404315/State-of-emergency-as-Colombia-steps-up-war-on-terrorism.html See also Hylton, p. 105

51 BBC News, “Uribe Defends Security Policies” Thursday November 18, 2004 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4021213.stm,

52 “International Donors Should Not Fund Sham Paramilitary Demobilizations” Human Rights Watch Colombia: Jan 18, 2004

http://www.hrw.org/news/2005/01/17/colombia-demobilization-scheme-ensures-injustice

53 “Letting Paramilitaries Off The Hook” Human Rights Watch Colombia, January 2004 http://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/americas/colombia0105/

54 Tom Feiling “President Uribe’s Hidden Past” Colombia Journal May 24, 2004 http://colombiajournal.org/president-uribes-hidden-past.htm

55 Feiling “President Uribe’s Hidden Past” In the same article Feiling reveals what happened when the Colombian news program, Noticias Uno, ran a story on the connection between Uribe and the Cocaine Cartels: After the reports aired, unidentified men began calling the news station, threatening to kill the show’s producer Ignacio Gómez, director Daniel Coronell, and Coronell’s 3-year-old daughter, who was flown out of the country soon thereafter. Gómez was also forced to flee Colombia and is currently living in exile.

56 This was known as the parapolitics scandal, and was reported through mainstream media like Fox News, the Guardian and the Miami Herald.

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49 Hylton, p. 104









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49 Hylton, p. 104









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49 Hylton, p. 104









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57 Human Rights Watch, “World Report for 2014 – Colombia” http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/colombia

58 “Coronel Alfonso Plazas Vega Fue Condenado a 30 años de Prision” El Colombiano, June 9, 2010 http://www.elcolombiano.com/historico/el_coronel_alfonso_plazas_vega_fue_condenado_a_30_anos_de_prision-LVEC_92678

59 Amnesty International Report 2011 - Colombia http://www.amnestyusa.org/research/reports/annual-report-colombia-2011?page=2

60 Adriaan Alsema, “False Positives” Colombia Reports August 14, 2012 http://colombiareports.co/false-positives/ Includes a link to a Spanish language documentary about the false positive scandal.

61 Benjamin Dangi, “US Bases in Colombia Rattle the Region” The Progressive March 10, 2010 http://www.progressive.org/danglmarch10.html

62 Alsema, “False Positives”

63 U.S. Department of the Airforce, Military Construction Program Fiscal Year 2010 Budget Estimates, Justification Data Military Construction Program Fiscal Year 2010 Budget Estimates May 2009 http://www.saffm.hq.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-090511-049.pdf

64 Hilary Stemple, “Colombia High Court Suspends U.S. Base Agreement,” The Jurist, , Wednesday August 10, 2010 http://jurist.org/paperchase/2010/08/colombia-high-court-suspends-us-base-agreement.php

65 Cameron Sumpter, “Colombian Judges Face Threats and Murder” Colombia Reports April 23, 2010 http://colombiareports.co/colombian-judges-face-threats-and-murder/

66 “What is at Stake in the Colombian Peace Process?” BBC News, January 15, 2015 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-19875363

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67 Riccardo D’Emidio “Divide and Purchase, How Land Ownership is Concentrated in Colombia” Oxfam International, September 27, 2013 https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2013-09-27/divide-and-purchase-how-land-ownership-being-concentrated

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[ Acknowledgments ]

Thanks to Tony Connor, my former writing teacher at Wesleyan, who read a rough draft of this manuscript many years after I wrote it and gave me incentive to continue working. Thank you to Anita Gallers, Lori Desrosiers, Tom Clark, Howie Faerstein, Elizabeth Crowell and Jan Lamberg of Deepdish, and to Sally Bellerose, Ellen Lafleche, Em Jolie, and (again) Lori Desrosiers of the Clams. My dear writing friends, you have all sustained me. Thanks to my husband, Bruce Weinraub, for supporting me financially while I wrote, and to my daughter Tieyin for being generally wonderful. Thanks also to Steve Strimer of Levellers Press, my publisher, and to all the Colombian people who back in 1985, treated me with more warmth, hospitality and courtesy than I probably deserved. If in some instances I have taken advantage of your frankness, I apologize. I believe it was for a good cause. Last but not least, thank you to Sally Greaves, photographer extraordinaire, who has always believed in me.

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[ Acknowledgments ]


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[ Acknowledgments ]


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[ Acknowledgments ]


Durante la Tregua

During the Truce

Doherty embeds a bewitching tale of her experiences as an American college student on a junior term abroad within a searing excursion through Colombia’s history. The two narratives speak to one another, and to the reader, with subtlety and power. The result is at once shocking and delightful.

– Alison Richard, Crosby Professor emerita of Anthropology, Yale University

Doherty’s subtle, kind and evocative memoir of Colombia makes a lively counterpoint to her account of the country’s violent history. During the Truce really brings that history home.


Durante la Tregua is the real deal, part memoir part, travelogue, it takes the reader back to Colombia in the turbulent mid-eighties – a time of both great political repression and hope for a better future. Doherty’s writing is so precise the reader feels they are tagging along just a step behind her as she travels through Bogota from the wealthy shaded streets to the direst barrios and their armies of homeless children.

– Joe Gannon, author, The Night of the Jaguar, and freelance correspondent in Central America

$15 ISBN 978-1-937146-88-7

Levellers PressAmherst, Massachusetts

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Oonagh Doherty was born in Scotland, and grew up in both the United Kingdom and the United States. She has published prose in 34th Parallel, The Connecticut Review, and epiphany and has published poetry in many venues. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice, once for prose, once for poetry.

Oonagh C. Doherty


Documents

Durante la Tregua During the Truce