Colombia’s other war

Naomi Cohen

Until only recently, the town of Ituango was accessible by a single dizzying, two-lane highway that snakes through the lush Colombian cordillera. The nearest city, nearly a full day away, is Medellin, known to the world as Pablo Escobar’s lair, and to the locals as the place where they could exchange their crops for quick cash. During much of the 52-year-old civil war, insurgents with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) would lay in wait, forcing bus companies to retreat, making the most of daylight to avoid ambushes. Since the Colombian government and the FARC insurgents signed a ceasefire in June, however, bus carcasses have become more a memory than a roadblock.

Ituango’s rugged landscape wasn’t just a flashpoint for Colombia’s internecine war; the town itself was a hostage of the conflict. After a series of incursions in the 1970s, the FARC saw the moneymaking potential of its tucked-away fields and its strategic gateways to both the Pacific Rim and the Caribbean, and decided to plant its flag and, more importantly, coca. Similarly, the army saw a combat advantage in the town’s mountainous vistas — then frequented by lovers and children — and installed military bases, while paramilitaries converted its abandoned hotels into torture chambers. Like jungle predators, each sowed landmines to mark their territory.

Though voters unexpectedly rejected an initial peace agreement, Colombian lawmakers on 30 November overwhelmingly ratified an amended treaty, designed to bypass the electorate. The ceasefire has held and Ituango — considered one of the towns where the FARC would surrender their weapons and transition to civilian life — has not reported a kidnapping in 23 months. But while the paramilitaries have receded as the army has scaled back its patrols and most of FARC rebels have holstered their guns, the state has now staked its claim to the one resource in Ituango left untouched by war — the majestic river Cauca.

The brown artery is a living memory of bloodshed. Pre-Colombian miners hid treasures along its banks until they were sacked and massacred by the first Spanish explorers. During a mid-century period of political conflict known in Colombia as ‘the Violence’, bridge patrols demanded that passengers, often illiterate, carry permits provided by the town’s conservative mayor, written in red or blue ink. Blue was a green light. Red meant liberal — decapitate and throw into the river. At the height of the conflict, a change in the colour of the water signalled a massacre in villages downstream.

Luis Palacio

The peace accord does not address the dam construction underway in Ituango, leaving intact the government’s plans to disfigure the Cauca River with what will be Colombia’s biggest hydroelectric dam. When completed, this will swallow up 3,800 hectares of the Cauca canyon, and with it, dozens of homes and the buried corn and beans that farmers, displaced by war and landmines, had hoped they would one day return to.

The road to Ituango once ensured it was one of the last-standing FARC-controlled ‘red zones’ in Colombia. It is now paved and twice as short, but leads directly to the project, which will violate Ituango’s biological and social ecosystem in a way that neither war nor conquistadors ever managed.

‘Our only problem is natural resources,’ says Luis Palacio, a pony-tailed history teacher who lost his brother to the FARC and is committed to shielding his students year after year from the same fate. ‘You take out the guerrillas but nothing changes.’ He adds that like the conquistadors, the hydroelectric company empowers itself by whatever means necessary.

Paramilitaries once singled out Palacio for teaching socialism in his classroom. They ordered the principal to read a note rebuking his pedagogy. But Palacio, an Ituangan by birth, says he never once taught socialism. As he sees it, the central issue that divides the world is not any political ideology, but who controls the natural resources.

Despite an aggressive, budget-busting public outreach campaign, the public-private dam development company, Medellin Public Enterprises (EPM), has produced a deluge of bad news for Ituango. An influx of guest workers has increased the demand for prostitutes, sparking an increase in the number of Ituangans infected with HIV. And housing costs have risen sharply in tandem with the arrival of newcomers. Scientists estimate that flooding will threaten the existence of eight animal and 12 plant species unique to the area, while locals are dismissive of the company’s environmental study, which they say underestimates, exponentially, the dam’s ecological impact.

Whose peace?

Four years in the making, the peace pact negotiated by Colombia’s president Juan Manuel Santos and the Marxist-inspired FARC elicited once-unthinkable concessions from both sides and codified the FARC’s transition from armed revolutionaries to partisan politics. So confidant was Santos that the agreement would pass, he put it to a binding national vote. Yet despite a vigorous marketing campaign by the ‘yes’ faction, it didn’t pass.

The punditocracy interrogating voters’ narrow rejection of the peace plan have focused on the efforts of Colombia’s ultra-right former president, Alvaro Uribe, who warned of an impending Castro-Chavista state and spread other alarmist lies about the peace deal, which stuck with voters just enough to doom the yes campaign.

However, as was the case in the recent US presidential election, a fuller explanation of the plebiscite’s surprising outcome can be found in the two in three Colombian voters who didn’t even bother to cast a ballot, most of them — jarringly — in communities like Ituango that were most affected by the war.

Ituango’s dam project is exhibit A. Electoral turnout was half that of Medellin, capital of the no vote — not because Ituangans are apolitical, uninformed or boycotting, but because they were ambivalent about a detente that does not fundamentally alter their systematic dispossession, which is nearly as old as the river itself.

‘The people eat shit because they like it.’ Palacio quotes the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano on the elites’ view from above. Yes, many Ituangans are still illiterate; yes, the village school enrolled its first indigenous girl only this year; yes, ‘what will I eat today?’ is a far more common question than ‘which college will my son attend?’ But this is their reality because the state kept it that way.

Luis Palacio

He’s mixing what looks like a bottle of lime mortar as he speaks. Once he realises that it’s long past ready, he puts it aside. The white paste, he later says, is for painting faces at the school’s first carnival parade in a long while. He leaves the classroom to take in the lush view, which still awes him. He points out a large cement slab that he says used to be for kids to play on, until the paramilitaries installed torture chambers next door. Playgrounds became a thing of the past. Instead, children began to compete to ‘find the bullet’ and trade their findings for gum.

The school principal says the students are ‘drowning in the midst of so much abandon.’ She describes as ‘bullshit’ a company presentation to the school entitled ‘Ituango for a future’. Executives at EPM have centred their public relations effort on the schools, handing out backpacks embossed with the corporate logo, a centrepiece of the brochures distributed across the neighbouring municipalities. But for all of EPM’s bluster, the project has been just the latest iteration of the state’s chronic neglect of its ‘primitive’ country-folk, she says. The school in a nearby town still sees more rain inside its walls than outside, says one of its teachers, and four in five graduates of Ituango’s main high school, acutely aware of their job prospects, were joining the FARC every year.

Farmers, who always took the brunt of the war’s violence, identify trade policy as their most vexing dilemma. Coca and poppy cultivation began to spread following Colombia’s NAFTA-like trade policy with the US, which reduced the prices farmers could demand for their beans on the international market by more than half, forcing Ituango to import food for the first time in its history. The government also disrupted the food market across the municipality after FARC rebels came under suspicion of commandeering supplies and cut off cement imports used for town infrastructure (it’s a key ingredient in cocaine production).

Not even Colombians who lost relatives to wartime violence are assured of their share of the spoils from the peace process. To collect even the paltry sum offered by a compensation fund, victims have to fit a narrow profile, provide documentation that few possess, and travel what may be, for some, the farthest they’ve ever travelled. Many return to Ituango empty-handed.

‘To be a victim in Colombia is to endure hunger,’ said Claudia Perez (not her real name), whose elderly father was killed when he refused to continue paying ‘taxes’ to the FARC following the death of his wife. Perez’s cousin, a venerated human rights lawyer, was also assassinated. Real reparations, she says, would mean asking each victim: how many eggs do you eat a day? Do you like vegetables? What about milk?

The war within the war

‘Do away with the conflict, do away with arms and expand extraction.’ This was the Colombian government’s lead peace negotiator, Humberto de la Calle, exhorting a thin crowd of local reporters, politicians and young activists gathered inside a Medellin conference hall to vote yes, a few days before the plebiscite. His talk seemed a last-minute sideshow, tucked behind a hoard of pinstriped investors fresh off the plane to hear how Colombian palm oil should figure in their business calculus.

‘Oil will pay for the post-conflict,’ said de la Calle, referring to Colombia’s oil juggernaut neighbours, Venezuela and Ecuador. But by oil, he also meant the country’s promising alternative fuel industry, from palm oil biodiesel to hydropower. Peace will both open the floodgates of foreign investment and liberate blood-soaked land for extraction, he said, as though concluding a classroom lecture.

What’s striking about Colombia’s post-peace land grab is that no one’s hands are clean. During his presidency, Uribe — who has long been accused of having links to paramilitary death squads — granted environmental licenses at record speed, making Colombia second in the world, behind only India, in the number of unresolved environmental disputes. Those clashes, according to the advocacy group Environmental Justice Atlas, are concentrated along the Cauca River.

The FARC once had a firm anti-extractivism position, but with time it has deflated. Colombia’s most infamous dam project, Quimbo, was under constant attack until the company paid the FARC to guard its infrastructure, according to a source close to the insurgents. Until two years ago, the FARC reportedly bombed the Ituango dam site, but more to defend the territory it lost to paramilitaries and then EPM than to make an ideological point. The text of the current negotiated peace deal contains no environmental safeguards beyond the words ‘sustainable’ and ‘environmentally-friendly’.

Naomi Cohen

The frontline in the fight against the dam is an activist collective named Rios Vivos, or Living Rivers, which counts displaced families, environmentalists, youth groups and concerned locals in its ranks. They’re not against alternative energy, just against developmentalist projects that are forced on them. With construction underway, the group pivoted to fight for an energy project ‘for and by the people’. They testify in court, march in the streets, write blog posts, songs and poems and connect with other interethnic groups to collectively defend their territories.

But the war against the dam mirrors Colombia’s wider war, with fighting erupting on multiple battlegrounds at once.

The peasants’ association of Ituango has had to fight even to be called ‘campesino’ rather than ‘agricultural worker’, which flattens their political agency. Despite several cycles of land reform and a new land agency created in the peace process, tools to prevent further encroaching by dam developers are still lacking: proper land titles and a reserve zone to protect wildlife. One of the peasant leaders said it’s a scandal he can’t access the river anymore. Another said he’d be all for an artisanal dam, it’s the multinational aspect that bothers him. Peace or no peace, dam or no dam, they all say they’ll continue to raise their voices since their problems won’t end anytime soon.

Outside the association, indigenous peasant women, many of them widows and first-time landowners and heads of household, recently began organising, extending their battle against their primary adversaries, machismo and racism, from the house and the fields to public life.

Energised after losing a campaign to evict a military base from the region’s only vocational school campus, students paraded their banners in Medellin to rally their peers against the dam. Residents talked openly of boycotting the bases and would perhaps repeat by refusing to sell EPM and its employees supplies as construction picks up.

The river remembers

‘It’s the first time I see you impotent, you must be a river condemned to death for the only crime of your potential.’ Claudia Perez recites from her essay Conversations with the River, which reads like a love poem. Her domino and peace sign earrings swing and her dyed red hair flashes with the occasional sunbeam. Her house looks down over Ituango, a hilltop sanctuary for her and for all the abandoned dogs and cats she’s collected over the years.

Perez teaches philosophy, but she has dedicated most of her reading to history. The first settlement in this part of the Cauca, she explains, was named after Gaspar de Rodas, the conquistador who claimed most of Antioquia after the Cauca enchanted him. That hamlet, founded long before Medellin, was burned to the ground twice by the local Tuango people. The persistent de Rodas hiked up from the river’s banks and settled here in Ituango, naming it after the indigenous rebels. But the attacks didn’t stop.

Unlike in other Latin American countries, few indigenous people survived the conquista in Colombia. The communities that did, however, continue to resist. Down the Cauca River, at the other end of the country, sugar multinational InCauca planted sugarcane to produce ethanol for fuel. Every night, the Nasa people — self-dubbed ‘liberators of Mother Earth’ — creep into the fields, cut down the cane and burn it.

Perez laments that she feels so disconnected from her indigenous ancestors, and vows not to let the dam do the same to posterity. Ituango’s freshest victims, she writes, ‘will travel by legal displacement toward a culture of nobody, and their imaginaries and their river worship will, perhaps, float in the mud of oblivion together with the first dead fish.’ The Cauca River has imbibed the blood of her ancestors; it’s the only living record of a people erased by epochal tragedy.

‘We say that we can’t talk about peace because we don’t know peace, because peace is a fallacy,’ says Perez, her eyes opening. She doesn’t entirely believe that. Peace is in the smiles on the kids’ faces, the lasting friendships, the night’s last game of billiards that never ends.

If Ituango — whose intimacy with displacement and destruction knows no start or end — cannot talk about peace, it’s not clear who else can. As Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote in 100 Years of Solitude of the Colonel Aureliano Buendia when he decided definitively to put down one of the 32 civil wars he had initiated, ‘he couldn’t imagine that it was easier to start a war than to end one.’