Dispatches from the Front

Colombia, Day 8

 

The cold overnight rain has now cleared away and the day dawns bright and warm. Montaña Magica is now perched like an island in a lake of clouds. 500 miles across the lake the Andes poke up and the mountains are like two eagle brothers, winking at each other. A big grey Mirla Montañera (Turdus grayi) picks fruit in a treetop while a Gavilan (Buteo magnirostris) circles high above. Dragonflies sweep the reserva de aquas lluvias (rainwater tank), pausing on hyacinths, while Colibri buzz the blue agapuntos along the path, putting otherwise still forest gardens into quiet motion.

 

The headache I awoke with yesterday is gone today which suggests Alejandra was right - it was the deep fried panchas at supper, not the altitude. She has taken to mixing chlorophyl with hand-squeezed mandarins and giving it to me for my blood pressure. It seems to work, it was back to 127/89 just now. I was dismayed to learn I am allergic to Doña Blanca´s sweet Guahiba flower wine, which triggers a rispiratory distress after only a few sips. There are many ways to die in this country, but some are more pleasant than others. Later today we will learn how to gather these flowers and make this wine.

 

Breakfast is a fire-roasted peanut and current granola, topped with fresh papaya, bananas and apples, all grown by Gabriel and Blanca, and the usual strawberry-flavored goat yogurt. There are arepas and herbal goat cheeses, if you want, but most of us are more than filled by the cereal. Were it not for the war, Don Gabriel's hotel could undoubtedly be a very popular destination, and I could see booking some of my international board meetings here in the future.

 

Alejandra leaves for Medellin to make arrangements for my four hour seminar on Permaculture which is next Friday at the University auditorium. Today we will teach pattern language and observation, which Don Orlando will lead, and in the afternoon I will direct a design charette on engineering cultivated ecosystems.

 

As I walk around with Gabriel after breakfast, he shows me where he has subdivided and sold a small ranchero - 6400 sq meters - to Don Carlos, a Medellin architect. The war-ravaged economy has depressed the hospitality business and forced him to either sell land or look for a job in Medellin. He sold the quarter - with large house, sheds, shadehouses, gardens and well, for 70 million pesos, about $30,000 US, a year ago.

 

As we walk around the forest, I see that hail has hit the bouganvilla-like flowering trees, so that now the broad green leaves have a Braille texture, in some places more like swiss cheese, where the hail must have been quite fierce. Don Gabriel shows how they have cropped their corn to give more light to the climbing beans. Nearby some course participants have volunteered to work the garden, and they have been transplanting black Centurians (Centaurea cyanus) from the shadehouse to the open forest. We turn a corner and surprise a large Gallinazo (Sarcoramphus papa) who lifts off a concrete fencepost. This black turkey buzzard is the first Farm bird I have seen since I arrived in Colombia. They have 20 or more varieties of hummingbird here, and none I´ve seen are at all familiar to me.

 

The newspaper today carries front page pictures of a 36-meter submarino narcotrafico, siezed by the DEA. It was being constructed in Fontibon on the coast with Russian mafia technology and money. Maybe some of that money came from the World Bank loans that are in default. It was designed to carry 200 tons of cocaine under the radar of the U.S. Coast Guard. If one was caught, there are probably ten more in operation. Don Orlando suggests the narcotraficantes should have a space program, delivering payloads to the North through low Earth orbit.

 

Kidnappings, not submarines, are the worst danger for civilians who are traveling overland through Colombia. At roadblocks set up by the Violence, which can last for hours, or even days, civilians will be allowed through only if a quick search through a computer database shows that their bank accounts are too small to qualify them as "kidnappable." Combined with the large number of targeted abductions, these "fishing expeditions," as they are known, have made Colombia the kidnap capital of the world: last year 2,945 abductions were reported to the police - eight a day. The business was good for the guerrillas. According to the paper kidnappings are now running 72 per day.

 

The rival guerrilla group to the FARC, the ELN, whose initials stand for Ejército de Liberación Nacional, derives its income almost exclusively from kidnappings and extortion. It is still holding fourteen passengers who were on a commercial plane that was carrying forty-six people when the guerrillas hijacked it a year ago. Founded in 1965, and led by the Spanish priest Manuel Pérez until his death two years ago, the ELN is considered the most intransigent of the various armed left-wing associations that have prospered in Colombia during the last forty years.

 

Roadblocks and kidnappings that affect even the salaried middle class are only one aspect of the new fear in the cities. The ELN conducts campaigns - against the proposed privatization of the energy sector, against the export of the nation's oil wealth, against human rights violations - by blowing up oil pipelines and electric pylons. They have knocked down 270 pylons in less than a year: brownouts and power cuts have become routine in heavily populated and industrial areas like Medellín and its environs, and darkness threatens constantly in the capital. War refugees living in miserable conditions on the outskirts of the city probably number in the tens of thousands. For its part, the FARC is building up its clandestine structure in the capital; the milicias Bolivarianas - poor and angry youths in the shantytowns who have been recruited into the guerrillas' support network - are known to be growing.

 

In February of last year, a national march against kidnappings and disappearances was so successful that the organizers thought they would never be able to repeat it, but last October a march for peace brought millions of Colombians out on the streets - five million, according to the most cautious estimates, out of a population of 48 million. The marchers, dressed in white, didn't take to the streets only in the cities: six hundred towns, small and large, also had demonstrations.  The demands of the marchers were addressed equally to the guerrillas, the right-wing paramilitary forces, and the government: uninterrupted peace talks, cease-fire now, and respect for civilians.

 

The first brutal twenty-year-long episode known as La Violencia was a civil war without battles; one in which peasants armed with peasant weapons - machetes, knives - carried out massacres against other peasants. It lasted from 1945 to 1964. In 1957, the liberal and conservative hierarchs who presided over the killings signed an accord which set the stage for much of what has followed: the two sides agreed that there would be presidential elections but that for the next sixteen years the two parties would alternate power.

 

That agreement was threatened in 1970, when the populist caudillo, General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, ran an upstart candidacy against the Conservative Party nominee, Misael Pastrana, father of the current president. Although Pastrana claimed victory, many historians believe that a majority of the vote may well have gone to Rojas Pinilla. No independent body was ever allowed to count the ballots. Unfraudulent presidential elections have been the norm since 1974, but by that year there were as many as a dozen armed organizations roaming the country - including the M-19 guerrilla movement, which took its name from the 19th of April, the date on which Rojas Pinilla was defeated - and the current major players, the FARC and the ELN.

 

In the most recent version of La Violencia, the one that has been going on for the past 20 years, the ideologies are very blurred. Alejandra and I were sitting in a sidewalk bistro in Medellin and looking very touristy and up came three very large and healthy men. The one who spoke was probably 6-foot-10 and 300 pounds, a very muscular black man. "Would you like to visit pre-Colombian sites?" he asked, and before waiting for an answer he says that he and his friends can take us there and keep us safe, that they are all ex-army (and presumedly highly skilled in self-defense). We were emphatically not interested and they left, but these men, who may well have been hostiles already, were pretty typical poster boys for paramilitary recruiters. The revolving door between the army, paramilitaries and guerrillas spins constantly. Good skills get good pay.

 

If Clinton is right that escalating the war is the most expedient way of bringing it to an end, the question that comes to mind is just which of the many sides in warring Colombia the US expects to benefit most from a billion-odd dollars' worth of weapons. President Pastrana, who requested the aid, will be gone from power in just two years. So will Clinton.

 

The gift of howitzers and heat sensors, helicopters and planes, assumes that the military establishment is capable of reforming itself from within, purging itself of the officers and soldiers who collaborate with the paramilitaries or with the drug traffickers, and developing a plan to take on the guerrillas and win. And it assumes that all of this can be accomplished in the coming two-year period when the military forces would be flooded with aid money.

 

In Colombia peace has always been achieved by use of force, leading to exclusions that lead to more violence. A great many Colombians who want an end to the war think that the military assistance package might help bring that end about; but on the basis of their past experience they seem to have no appetite for what the immediate consequences of an escalated war are likely to be. Indeed, as the peace ballot and the peace marches would indicate, what people want is not war at all, but a national reconciliation.

 

 

 

Dispatches from the Front

Colombia, Day 9

 

Last night we paid a visit to Uncle Roy´s Medellin cousin - a very mellow fellow - and then watched a film ZERI had made of Gaviotas, which was first rate. I will try to get a copy to take back to the Training Center. I would like to meet both Gunter Pauli of ZERI and Paolo Lugari, and make visits to Gaviotas and Simon Velez´s bamboo project, but Alejandra says I would have to stay in Colombia another month so she could make the arrangements. I think about coming back here in December with Alison - she would love this place - but I remember what Don Orlando says, ¨Before you come to Colombia you have to make a conscious decision that it is okay for you to die.¨ With two little children it is probably not the time for both of us to travel here together.

 

Yesterday I asked Alberto Ruz what he thought peace would take. He said he had been thinking hard on that for some years and didn´t really have an answer. Right now it is in the best interests of the sources of violence to keep the war going, and that would have to be changed for there to be peace. The guerillas would have to have something to support their cause other than control of coca territory and kidnapping. The coca growers would need a more profitable crop. The army, and the US, would need somewhere else to stay in practice. The paramilitaries, mostly street punks, would need a more pleasurable pasttime than rape, torture, and murder. What is it, Alberto asks, that would do all those things?

 

I imagine the wisest course would be for the next POTUS to bring the leaders of the Colombian peace groups, including Alberto Ruz, together for a summit and strategy session. Throwing money and military hardware at the problem is only making it worse, and the peacemakers need to be heard and then helped.

 

Dispatches from the Front

Colombia, Day 10

 

The whole 30 of us partied hardy last night with a local dance band and some of the neighbors. Everyone is Santa Elena lives behind locked gates with watchdogs but most are friendly. Two clarinets and a drum makes a band and what they lack in instruments they make up for by singing. They brought a traditional Colombian dancer in the white and gold frilled blouse and black and white pleated lace skirt, rouge cheeks and flowers in her hair, who twirled and tapped and undulated like a belly dancer to the trills of the neighbors. Doña Blanca broke out more of her homemade wine and everyone drummed and danced until late into the night.

 

This morning we got the psychological release that quite often appears on the third or fourth day of a permaculture course. The open release of the night before may have helped to open the floodgates. Three people are most deeply affected, two collapsing on the ground, the other falling into uncontrolled weeping after opening circle. If I hadn´t seen this so many times in past courses I might be concerned. I know it to be an energy fuse that blows when possibilities overwhelm complacency and exhilaration for the future conflicts with the guilt of a life mostly wasted. Sometimes this means quitting a job or a marriage, or changing their living situation and starting over. Here in Colombia it can mean the ever-present background level of fear is recognized as voluntary. We hug and hold each other, and then Don Gabriel and I proceed to get back to teaching how to build composting toilets and use GPS mapping systems.

 

After lunch Alejandra takes me on a walking tour of Santa Elena and we stop at a Granero to try some bonuelos - little fried cheesebreads. They also sell arepas in the round form, like jumbo button mushrooms, grilled on an open fire. These places are unregulated so any farmer with roadside access can open one. One thing I see a lot are closely trimmed bamboo hedges, like box elder. It is mostly Guadua, distinguished from the temperate Phyllostachys we grow at The Farm by their ringed stalks, which can get up to 20 cm in diameter. The average farmer in these parts probably does a little better than the $80/mo national average. Here there are more whites in the countryside than most places in L. America, where the norm is for Indians, blacks and Meztizos to live on the fincas and whites in the cities. Colombia is more like Tennessee - or Russia for that matter - where having a part-time farm is a status symbol for the wealthy.

 

As we eat our bonuelos and gape at the awesome views of the mountain valleys, Alejandra says the only quick solution to the war is to legalize cocaine. She says she has floated this trial balloon to people in all walks of life as she travels with the Peace Caravan and nobody argues with her. She is sure that would end the war. Overnight.

 

Back at Magica Montaña two trees in the yard interest me and Gabriel and Blanca take turns introducing them to me. Sikopia Jalumo, planted by Gabriel, is a 40-foot acacia, which has only leaves at its crest, like a palm. The meter-wide six-pointed leaves are silver on the underside. It grows with a hollow center and is favored for drums. Gabriel points to a hole at the top and says the Carpenter bird (Carpintero, Chysoptilus melarcolicus, the red woodpecker) made a nest, but a Toucan came and evicted him. He points to lower down on the trunk, where the Carpintero has made a second hole and turned the Sikopia into a duplex. Don Gabriel says Gavilans are pests here but the Toucan raided a nearby Gavilan nest and knocked out the fledglings, so the Toucan is welcome here.

 

Doña Blanca satisfies my curiousity about the second tree, which resembles an oversized coffee bush, with large clusters of reddening beans. It is Galande Media Noche, the midnight gentleman (Calonyctium aculeatum) whose night-blooming white flowers, 15 cm wide, put out an enchanting perfume. Producing all year, it is actually a member of teh Morning Glory family, Convolvulacea. Blanca says it is rare and endangered so she gathers the seed and plants them around. She also says it tolerates cold, which makes me want to try growing it back home. It is shallow rooted and constantly dropping and renewing its leaves, which give it possible commercial use in the biomass energy business.

 

The computer, which had been broken, came back from town today, so tomorrow I will try to finalize the daily schedule for each of the courses and then we can print those before leaving for the Darien. I also managed to get some laundry done so I can start my second week with clean clothes. Where we are going is likely to be a difficult climate for doing laundry. They get 10 inches per month in Turbo at this time of year, 25 inches in November.

 

Here in the mountains, where it is cool, we eat a large meal at midday, usually rice and beans and ensalada. They like to serve soups with corn on the cob floating in the bowl or a chicken leg floating for the non-vegetarians. We eat a light supper, soup and arepas con queso.

 

Dispatches from the Front

Colombia, Day 11

 

Today we have what I am told is a more typical Colombian breakfast - empanadas (a cornflour potato knish, deep fried) and hot chocolate. The breakfast table conversation is about Bamboo. Ampala, who is the mother of Clemencia and Patricia, all of whom are taking the course and also speak good English, grew up with Simon Velez, the world´s foremost bamboosero. She has all his books, including the German one I saw earlier this year in the ZERI Pavillion in Hannover, Grow Your Own Home. She says the patron of Velez was his grandfather, who was an architect-artist. While Velez rarely teaches anymore, there is a buzz about a course he may be giving soon in Jamaica.

 

In the morning Doña Blanca gives a two-hour intensive in growing sprouts, and then turns the class over to me so that she can make lunch today outdoors on wood cookfires, a stew of fresh vegetables and rice. I show the class, which has now grown to more than 30 participants, slides of natural building techniques, and we spend the rest of the morning making cob with our feet. The cob which is traditional in these parts is called ¨tapia¨ but it is different in one important respect - they mix in blood to give it a special quality which is distinctively Colombian.

 

Okay.