Colombia's leaders have discarded the peace process and plunged the country once more into the horrors of a senseless war - millions have left in the past, more will do so. Ana Carrigan reports from a country of uprooted lives and internal exiles.
Yet again, for the 14th time since a Colombian president first ordered the army to bomb a small rebel enclave, in 1964, the government has gone to war with the guerrillas. When the army started dropping laser-guided bombs, 500-lbs "bunker busters," and anti-personnel fragmentation bombs in the former peace zone three weeks ago, I found myself remembering a chance meeting on the plane to Bogotá with a young Colombian who was going home to see his family after an absence of six years. He was nervous and excited, unsure of what he would find. Friends had told him, that in his city the situation was bad. I know the city and his friends were right to warn him.
"My family are campesinos," he said. They lived on the side of a mountain, overlooking the purple ranges of the western Andes. "I need time in my father's house. There's no electricity, no television. At night, the neighbours come and we talk. I miss those long nights of conversation with my father. And I want to wake up in his house in the silence before the dawn; to step outside into the awesomeness of those mountains and listen to the birds and the animals while I wait for the sun to rise across the valley. I need to know that peace again," he said.
In Switzerland, where he now lived, he was a truck driver, and had married a Swiss teacher. She was a Latino-phile who had travelled all over Latin America, but she'd refused to come to Colombia because she was afraid of being kidnapped. Still, she had agreed to meet him in the coastal resort city of Cartagena. But his heart was in the mountains. "I'll smell the smoke rising in the morning from the kitchen fire," he said, "and my mother will cook a Colombian country breakfast, with broth and scrambled eggs and onions and beans and hot sauce, and maize pancakes and yucca breads . . ." Homesickness, it is said, always begins with food.
He wasn't afraid of being kidnapped. "Oh no, I've known the guerrillas since I was a child. They were always coming by, looking for money and food." Of course, now it's different. Now the campesinos are under pressure from the guerrillas and the paramilitaries. "Where my family lives the 'paras' only arrived last year. Now they demand money too. My father has a few coffee bushes and he's been able to manage so far. But when the campesinos can't pay up any longer, they have to leave. They leave everything - the house, the land, the crops, the animals. They go off carrying just a little suitcase with a few clothes."
I never asked why he had left Colombia, I assumed the war was to blame. He had done his military service when he graduated from high school. He was just 16. "Fighting the guerrillas is terrible," he said, "you can't imagine how awful. By the time I got out of the army, I'd lost most of my friends, my classmates were nearly all dead. When I got out, all I felt was violence and aggression. That's all there was left for me." Of the 300 recruits in his unit, only 180 had survived.
Now that Colombia's leaders have discarded the peace process and plunged the country into the horrors of a senseless and unnecessary war, his story has returned to haunt me. First, because his uprooted life is one of the many individual tragedies of a Colombian exodus of some six million people. Most leave for economic necessity. Others have been forced to flee by the death squads. I have friends in this exile community, in Europe, the US, Canada, and I have rarely met a Colombian abroad who was not consumed with homesickness.
Even when it is foolishly dangerous to do so, many return and try to pick up their lives. "I'm tired of running, I'm not going to run any more," a friend I had thought was safely in Spain told me when I met him recently at a Bogotá peace rally. Laughing, he added: "I decided I might as well die of a bullet in Colombia as from a broken heart in exile."
The end of the peace process will mean thousands more uprooted lives, condemned to an empty, futile, existance. Another reason why our conversation keeps turning over in my mind is because I have met some of the peasant soldiers, aged between 16 and 18, who will now be thrown into the frontline by incompetent commanders, whose indifference for the lives of their troops seems unaffected by the recent billions of dollars in US military assistance.
Last January, during the previous crisis in the peace process, journalists had plenty of time to talk to the young soldiers who manned the military roadblocks on the road into the peace zone while awaiting orders to attack if the talks collapsed. I cannot forget the tension in those young faces on the way in, and the contrasting relief I found on the return trip, after the talks had been rescued through the successful mediation of the international community. Only the generals, perhaps the president, too, were upset by being cheated of their war. The soldiers joked and laughed with the press.
Finally, our conversation haunts me because when he spoke about campesino families being forced to join the anonymous mass of Colombia's internal exiles, something in his eyes, something faltering about the gestures of his strong, truckdriver's hands, alerted me. It seemed clear he had seen that terrible moment when a couple steps out of their house for the last time, turns to lock the door behind them, and sets out on foot, their children beside them, carrying "just a little suitcase with a few clothes". He knew that moment of utter desolation and helplessness, and I felt he was mortally afraid that any day now, this could befall his own family.
Some weeks ago, Guillermo Alfonso Jaramillo, the governor of Tolima state, came to Bogotá for a day. The night before, I had passed a young man sitting on the pavement, holding an infant in his lap. The sign beside him read: "We Are Displaced. We are Hungry". He told me he was from Tolima, and I recognised the name of his village, because Tolima is where my grandfather was born. It is also where the FARC was born, 38 years ago. In the past eight months, almost 12,000 people have been forcibly displaced from Tolima, and the governor went to meet the most recent group who had fled to Bogotá.
The meeting was in a community centre in a poor part of the city. When Jaramillo arrived, there was a crowd of about 100 people waiting for him in the street. There were many young women and small children, and several pregnant mothers.
The women wanted to know what the state would do to protect them and help them return to their homes. The governor said it was too dangerous for them to go home and he suggested they settle instead in another village. "There's no money," he said. "The central government has no budget, and won't help. The state is bankrupt and there is 25 per cent unemployment in Ibague (the regional capital). But if you want to come back, we can offer you schools and kindergartens with help from the teachers and non-governmental organisations. However, if you stay here, in this dehumanised city, there is very little I can do for you. I can make appointments for you with government officials, but it's not going to help you much." The women said: "We are not beggars. We want to work. We want to live with dignity."
They said they knew the people who were complicit in the killings and disappearances in their home town, and they asked what plans the state has to deal with its own "dark forces"? A lawyer from a human-rights defence group intervened to point out that there was 99 per cent impunity in Tolima. He claimed 17 local investigators had been killed. "If you can get an arrest warrant issued," he said, "no-one will serve it." The governor said: "My administration has denounced what is happening. I know the problem. Any of us who want to change things in this country are under threat from the same people who have driven you from your homes. And for the same reasons. This is about protecting the status quo. Still," he added, "I continue to believe non-violence is possible. There are models: Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Ghandi. The peace process has to succeed."
Colombia has its Kings, Mandelas and Ghandis. It always has. They lead dangerous lives, because peace in Colombia has always had violent enemies. Recently, Father Francisco de Roux, a Jesuit, asked the EU governments which are co-financing his development programme in an extremely violent, paramilitary controlled part of the country, to stick by their commitment in the event that any of his team should lose their lives through the violence. Some 10 of Father de Roux's collaborators have been assassinated in the last four years.
"When one goes to war in Colombia," he said, "one expects the war to cost lives. When one goes to construct peace in Colombia, in the midst of violence and terrorism, one also has to expect that peace will cost lives. We, the men and women who work in this programmme, know our work is dangerous. We accept the risks, because this is our contribution as Colombians to the effort to overcome the crisis of our people. No government, and no financial institution, is responsible for our lives, or for the risk that we have freely chosen to assume. We hope, therefore, that Europe understands us, and that we can count on you to stay the course with us to the end."
Christmas in Colombia is an extended affair. Monday, January 7th, was the last official day of the long vacation break, and that evening I went for a hamburger with a friend in one of the many bars around the fashionable 93rd Street Park in Bogotá. The place was buzzing. Expensive four-wheel drive vehicles cruised the streets searching for parking space. It was a warm night, and the restaurant terraces had spilled out on to the sidewalk, where high-energy, high-decibel conversations competed with syncopated salsa rhythms, blasting from passing car radios and adjacent bars.
Around 11 p.m., we crossed the street and strolled into the park. Families from the city's poor, southern barrios were eating their dinner on the grass, and the night air was infused with the aroma of spicy home-cooking. Small children and dogs ran amok, teenagers kicked a football, street vendors sold chips and sodas, and here too, the omnipresent rhythm of salsa pounded the senses. The war seemed very far away, in another country.
Two days later, when President Pastrana closed down the peace process, Colombians were stunned. "[The President's decision] fell on the country like a bucket of cold water," commented El Tiempo. In January, Pastrana kept his word to give the guerrillas 48 hours to abandon their safe haven, and those few hours gave the mediators just enough time and space to avert a war that the president thought was a done deal. Last month, he did not make the same mistake. He ordered the army to attack at midnight, two and a half hours after he had broadcast his declaration of war to the nation.
Now, with the menacing roar of the helicopters, swooping and circling over the city's roofs and parks by day and by night, with tanks and soldiers patrolling city streets, and military roadblocks on the access roads, it must be quite hard for Bogotanos to recall how it was, just a little while ago, when the war was essentially a virtual war, that only disturbed the squeamish on the nightly news.