CHAPTER 1
LANDSCAPES AND PEOPLE: MANY COUNTRIES IN ONE
If ever a country's geography reflected and conditioned its society and politics it is Colombia's. The Andean range splits into three near the Ecuadorean frontier to the south, after marching monolithically up the west coast of South America for thousands of miles from the icy wastes of southern Chile. Any cross-country journey in central Colombia, where most of its 34 million people live, involves a succession of climbs and descents that are impressive and exhausting in equal measures.
A bus journey from the capital, Bogota, to the big industrial city of Cali in the hot valley of the Cauca river 280km away to the south-west takes you first across the flat green expanse of the Sabana de Bogota, the lush, mountain-girt basin that surrounds the capital on three sides. This is followed by a climb over the mountains ringing the city, a descent into the hot Magdalena valley at Girardot, an ascent to the Quindio pass (3,350m above sea level) over the Cordillera Central, the middle of three Andean spurs, a winding descent through the coffee-growing mountains around Armenia and finally a long run through the baking sugar-cane fields that gave Cali its original raison d'être.
Geography made Colombia more like a collection of city-states than a unitary country until quite recently. Regionalism has always been a powerful force in Colombian life, and it lingers on in the psychology of the people. This is particularly so in Medellín, the second city, high up (1,480m) in a valley surrounded by the mountains of Antioquia almost 500km to the northwest of the capital. The city's two and a half million people regard themselves almost as a race apart and are resentful of what they regard as the overweening arrogance of the distant capital. Medellín, like São Paulo in Brazil or Guayaquil in Ecuador, likes to regard itself as the real heart of the country, where wealth is generated and talent is nurtured, only to be appropriated by the undeserving bureaucrats and politicians of Bogotá.
Medellín was founded in 1616, but its wild hinterland was not properly settled, cleared and brought into cultivation until the early nineteenth century. Until then it had been a centre of gold production, some mined and some dredged from the rivers.
River and Coast
The rugged geography meant that for centuries communications between the capital and the outside world were largely confined to river transport, which was slow and hazardous. Bogotá, the highland capital, founded by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada in 1538, was linked to the mother country, Spain, via the Magdalena river, which, with its tributary the Cauca, runs from south to north through the heart of the country. This was the route taken by the produce of the hinterland, and it was also the route of the last journey of General Simón Bolivar, the Liberator, so memorably described by Gabriel García Márquez, Colombia's Nobel Prize-winning novelist, in The General in his Labyrinth.
The Magdalena valley towns are among the oldest in Colombia: Mompós, founded in 1537, hardly seems to have changed since then. These places had their heyday when imports from Spain were ferried up the river to Bogotá from Cartagena, and later when great rear-wheeled paddle steamers plied this river of shifting sandbanks and tricky currents. Now the unlovely oil-refining town of Barrancabermeja is the main centre for the economically important and chronically violent region known as the Magdalena Medio.
The Caribbean coast is very different from the highlands: hot, with very little variation in temperature. The people, too, are more 'tropical' than the gloomy highlanders, the cachacos. The main port, Cartagena, founded in 1533, was where the Spanish colonial power erected the most impressive fortifications of the entire Spanish Main, to protect its magnificent harbour.
They stand to this day. This was the port from which gold, the main product of colonial New Granada, was exported to Spain. Cartagena's wealth made it an inviting target for foreign marauders, such as Sir Francis Drake, who sacked the city in 1586.
Cartagena is now being developed as a tourist resort, with a row of modern hotels stretched out along Bocagrande beach outside the town. Barranquilla, further along the coast by the mouth of the Magdalena, is now much bigger, dirtier and more industrialised. For a while both were overshadowed by Santa Marta, during the marimba (marijuana) boom of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the traffickers developed their own beach resort at Rodadero. Santa Marta is Colombia's oldest Spanish city, founded in 1526, as the conquerors sought to establish footholds on the Caribbean coast. Its strategic location at the foot of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the isolated clump of towering mountains where much of the weed was grown, briefly gave it the edge and excitement of a gold-rush town.
The Islands
Far out to sea are the Colombian islands of San Andrés and Providencia, more than 1, 700km from Bogotá and a lot closer to the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua than to the Colombian mainland, 700km away. These islands were finally confirmed as Colombian territories under the Bárcenas-Esguerra Treaty of 1928, along with a collection of smaller islands, cays and reefs, and there are still occasional diplomatic incidents between the two countries.
Like the islands and cays of Nicaragua's Miskito coast, the population of San Andrés and Providencia, which totals about 50,000, is largely black and English-speaking, some the descendants of English Puritan settlers, pirates and African slaves. There has been a big influx of mainlanders in recent years and the racial mix is changing, particularly on San Andrés. But earlier attempts to replace the English language and Protestant (especially Baptist) religions with Spanish and Catholicism have been dropped.
San Andrés was declared a freeport in 1968, in an attempt to compete with islands such as Curaçao and Aruba, and has become a centre of sun-and-shopping tourism for Colombians keen to stock up on duty-free electronic equipment. Many of the recent hotel and resort developments have the ostentatious vulgarity that only drug money can impart, and the US has become increasingly concerned about the role of the islands as platforms for trans-shipment of cocaine to Mexico and the US.
Providencia is different: smaller ( 4,500 people), less developed, and with a local council and civic movement determined to save it from the excesses of neighbouring San Andrés.
Frontiers, Plains and Jungles
Back on the mainland, the country's other great regional urban centres are Bucaramanga and Cucuta, capitals of Santander and Norte de Santander departments respectively. These are the main economic and political centres for eastern Colombia and for exchanges with Venezuela. Cúcuta, on the frontier, is a smugglers' bazaar to compare with Ciudad del Este in Paraguay.
Outside the central region and the Caribbean coast, the country remained largely unsettled until recently, when oil and drugs lured the brave or desperate to try their luck in the southern plains and jungles. Colombia still has more wild frontiers than most countries. Even large parts of the Caribbean coast were for centuries only intennittently in contact with the outside world, whose influences had a way of being absorbed and stifled – as Garcia Márquez suggests in his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, a work that should be read as more realist than magical.
Internal frontiers are still everywhere in Colombia. One of the wilder sorts is the Urabá region, on the Caribbean coast, a world away from the beaches of Cartagena and Santa Marta. It is politically part of Antioquia, but nothing could be further from the permanent spring of Medellín (which is how the tourist brochures describe it) than the sweltering lowlands of the Gulf of Urabá, which are Colombia's main banana-producing region. This is big business: Colombia has the largest Latin American quota for selling bananas to the European Union. The poor, unemployed and landless have poured down to Urabá from the highlands for decades, carving out plots of land for subsistence farming on the unsettled frontier, or finding work on the big plantations.
It is one of the most lawless and dangerous parts of the entire country, with a bewildering array of armed and paramilitary groups of all persuasions struggling for supremacy in the streets and shanty towns of Turbo, Apartadó and the other banana towns. The body count is always high here.
The jungles and mangrove swamps of the Chocó region, up by the Panamanian frontier, are remote and cut off to this day, with few roads and most transport by river and sea. Indeed, the entire Pacific coast is a backward and neglected region. The hot, humid port of Buena ventura (founded 1540) is a notoriously ill-favoured spot, even though it has a busy harbour and there is a paved road over the Western Cordillera to Cali, 145km away.
When cholera swept through parts of South America in 1991, Colombia's only serious outbreaks were in the poverty-stricken towns and villages of the Pacific seaboard, where the rickety wooden houses built on stilts over tidal inlets and the primitive public hygiene provided fertile breeding grounds for the vibrio cholerae bacterium. Public health schemes have been attempted in recent years, but this is also one of the worst regions for the deadly cerebral malaria and for other tropical diseases such as uta and leishmaniasis.
More than half of Colombia's national territory is occupied by low-lying plains and grasslands, known generically as the llanos, which begin not far south and east of Bogotá and stretch for hundreds of miles across the Orinoco basin into Venezuela and south until they merge into the jungles of the Amazon system, the Vaupés and Caquetá and Putumayo, with their sparse populations of tribal Indians. This whole vast area is a happy hunting ground for guerrillas and drug traffickers. Most of the cocaine processing laboratories these days are hidden away in the jungles and forests of Caquetá and Putumayo.
The llanos, interminable rolling grasslands that bake in the dry season and flood during the rains, constitute one of the world's largest remaining frontiers. The skilled horsemen of the llanos provided much of the irregular cavalry for both sides in the wars of independence in both Colombia and Venezuela. The Colombian llanos are still a battleground, but now the struggle is between oil companies and guerrilla columns, and between the security forces and drug-traffickers.
The region known as the piedemonte llanero, the foothills of Casanare and Arauca departments, are Colombia's main oil-producing regions. A pipeline carries crude from the Caño Limón field in Arauca to Coveñas on the Caribbean coast. It is a favourite target of one of the Colombia's two main guerrilla organisations, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army or ELN), which has blown up sections of the pipeline hundreds of times over the past decade, with the loss of more than 1 million barrels of oil.
Despite these security problems, Casanare promises to become an oil-boom region over the next few years. The adjacent Cusiana and Cupiagua fields have proven reserves of 2-3 billion barrels and should be producing more than 500,000 barrels per day before the end of the century. For the moment it is still wild country, with no large towns, just a string of fortified drilling camps garrisoned by units of the Colombian army's counterinsurgency forces.
Colombia has extensive jungle territory in Caquetá and Putumayo departments, along its southern frontiers with Ecuador and Peru, but the country's only outlet to the Amazon proper is a small polygon of territory centring on the busy river port of Leticia, which faces both Brazil and Peru on the other side of the great river. All these frontiers are highly porous, particularly for drugs. It is possible to walk into Brazil unhindered from Leticia into the garrison town of Tabatinga.
Bogotá
That just leaves Bogotá, the capital. It is huge (about six million people), ugly, overcrowded and chaotic. It has been acting as a magnet for migrants from the countryside for decades and has grown uncontrollably in both population and extension. Environmentally, the consequences have been dire.
Bogotá is situated on the very edge of the Sabana, 2,650m up at the foot of a range of steep, green mountains. The oldest parts of the city, Santa Fe and La Candelaria, founded in 1538, are here. Some cobbled streets of attractive, whitewashed houses have been carefully preserved, but the commercial focus of the city has shifter northwards, to Chapinero and beyond.
Further up the slopes, in the outcrops and ravines, the shanty towns of the capital have sprawled haphazardly, destroying the tree cover, fouling the watercourses and helping to turn the Bogotá river, which meanders across the Sabana until it drops down towards the Magdalena at the Tequendama falls, into one of the most polluted stretches of water in the world. The shanty towns also stretch endlessly across the Sabana to the south and the urban-industrial sprawl threatens to engulf the international airport of El Dorado to the west.
Antanas Mockus
When In October 1994 Antanas Mockus was elected mayor of Santa Fe de Bogotá - reputed to be the second most Important elected post In the country - his triumph was hailed as a victory for 'anti-politics'. He was certainly not a typical Colombian politician; Indeed, not a politician at all.
Mockus, the 42-year-old son of Lithuanian Immigrants, Is a mathematician turned philosopher who was the youngest ever rector of the National University In Bogotá. In that role he was credited with being an effective If eccentric administrator, who liked to attend meetings brandishing colourful toy swords and climbing In and out of dustbins to make some point or other that often eluded his baffled colleagues and students. His notoriety took on national proportions when at a mass meeting In the university auditorium he became so exasperated with hecklers that he turned his back on his audience and dropped his trousers. Unfortunately - or perhaps fortunately, as things have turned out - somebody In the audience had a video camera to hand and the tape of Mockus's rectoral mooning exercise found its way on to the national TV news programmes that evening.
Mockus had to resign, but his outlandish action had turned him Into a national figure, and his name began to be mentioned as a possible future education minister. He showed absolutely no Interest In becoming a politician, and when he was prevailed upon to stand for the mayorship of the capital, It was expressly as a 'non-political' figure. He caught the public mood and was elected by a landslide (65 per cent of the votes cast).
Many voters had come to feel that the capital was ungovernable: a dirty, overcrowded, noisy, horrendously polluted jumble of old buses, clogged traffic, uncollected rubbish and street vendors, surrounded by lawless shanty towns where about 75 per cent of the population live.
It Is too soon to judge how effective he will prove - he has already launched successful experiments with street theatre to encourage drivers to respect zebra crossings and traffic lights - or to conclude It he really Is part of a wave of public rejection of traditional politics and politicians. But - Mockus is merely the most striking of a number of non-party figures elected In 1994 to run Cali, Cartagena, Barranqullla and other big cities.
Despite its many drawbacks, not least of which is a seemingly perpetually overcast sky, Bogotá remains, as it has been for centuries, the political and cultural centre of the country. Here are all the government departments, the biggest newspapers and magazines, the most prestigious universities, the best theatres and bookshops, the wonderful Gold Museum. The capital is the focus of most intellectual and artistic endeavours.
Bogotá's café society, the tertulias, used to be famous throughout the Spanish-speaking world, enabling it to lay claim to the title 'the Athens of the South', where writers and artists set the world to rights over endless cups of coffee in the salons of Carrera 7, and congressmen were given to reading from their latest collections of poetry during debates in the neoclassical National Capitol building.
It is different now. The transformation of the highland political and administrative centre into a huge, grimy industrial city began the change; the habit of competing drug gangs of settling their differences in the restaurants and night spots of the capital in the 1970s helped it along and the more recent residential and commercial migration to the suburbs have completed it.
