BOTH SIDES AT WAR CONSIDER IT A JOB

[Exerpt from The Heart of the War in Colombia, by Constanza Ardila Galvis, Latin America Bureau (Research & Action) Ltd., 1998. Also published by CedaVida in Colombia as Guerreros Ciegos: El conflicto armado en Colombia, 1998.]

I never asked myself if coca production was right or wrong. The work was hard and in between, I enjoyed the jungle and the laughter of the Indians when I taught them to read, to write, to put on make-up or do their hair. The crop entailed hard labour but I'd been brought up to work and bring up my family. Everything was marvellous, including feeling protected by the guerrilla. I adored being a leader and in fact the peasants, the harvest workers, the activists and the Indians loved me. I went to all the meetings to teach them what I knew and I quickly earned their trust. They gave me a motorbike to get around on the paths and when the bike could not go down the steep terrain, they saddled up an animal and I looked after them. I cured spots, cleaned wounds, prepared purgatives, treated the asthmatics and set up a dispensary. Rolando was delighted to be important again without having to leave his old business of fixing stolen cars. Feeling master of the land seemed to him to be a more stable proposition. He lived happily and without worries.

We were constantly travelling from the city to the farm bringing tools, medicine, clothes, food and cars, which in that far-off place didn't need legal papers. In the end, Rolando chose not to buy the agricultural supplies to process the coca in the countryside and instead, decided to start a business bringing them in for ourselves and the other farmers. This was dangerous, but as I didn't want to be separated from him, I made the risky trips too. The happier I was, the more I depended on him and the greater my part was in his crooked deals.

My leadership became more committed, they nicknamed me "the monkey" and they allowed me to be a catechist. I kept deceiving myself that I was doing Christ's work, when what I did was serve the guerrilla's interests without realising it. Rolando got to know more people and he started to hear rumours: "They're going to ask 'the monkey' to join up as a member of the armed organisation. If she does they'll never let her out again." This frightened him and he decided to pull me out of paradise. I suffered when I went back to the city because I loved that life and I would never have wanted to leave it,' she said sighing.

'When I pleaded, he would sometimes let me go down to the plains. I learnt to bring in propaganda, arms and agricultural tools to extract the paste from the coca leaves, as well as notebooks and books so that the people of the area could combat ignorance. I remember one trip where we carried enough money to buy off all of the agents on the way. We were carrying "salt", as the sulphuric acid and permanganate were commonly called. We'd gone through the known control posts and we had some money left so we decided to buy mattocks, spades, picks and a fumigator so we wouldn't have to make another trip, as things were getting fraught. We left and twenty-five minutes before Puerto Gaitan, some DAS agents took us by surprise.

"Good afternoon, where are these supplies going?" the agent with a trim moustache asked.

"To Cumaribo," answered Rolando, calmly.

"What are you carrying in the sacks?"

"Cement," said Rolando smiling. To check they stabbed the sacks and there was no way to deny what we were carrying.

"And this?" the man said to my husband. He smiled and answered, "It's salt," and we were kept there until two in the morning. I cried and Rolando avoided me, because he always said before we left, "remember, if they stop us, you have nothing to do with me. You go back or you go on, you're clean. We are only travelling together because we are both going to Cumaribo," and this was the moment to obey him.

I knew it was to protect me, but I couldn't stop looking at him, guardedly. At dawn, Rolando, desperate from hearing me cry, said to the group commander, "let us go, you're not allowed to keep us for so long." That annoyed the commander and he ordered for us to be taken immediately to the port.

We were held because, after the purchases, we didn't have a peso left to bribe them with. I had the baby in a makeshift crib and I had my own gun under her along with Patriotic Union flyers. The DAS men kept cooing over the girl, because she was gorgeous, fat and white, with red cheeks. She was calm and they never suspected what was underneath her. However, they stripped the car completely. Every time they came near me I trembled and thought I was going to faint, but no one noticed. God, whose mercy is great, never forgot us. The commander in the port turned out to be a friend of Rolando's. They had worked together in the DAS in Cali. After they embraced, he began to ask questions to find out why we were detained:

"Rolando, old man, you were always a crook," and he started to laugh.

"Compadre Bolanos, please let us go, we don't have any cash," but friendship was not enough and Bolanos answered:

"I can't, my friend, the agents know what you're carrying and you have to pay, it's the same law for everyone."

In the end, they struck a deal. We left some sacks of salt as a guarantee and we came back with the money for the bribe. To lose them so late in the game, after fourteen hours on the road and when we had nearly got there was too costly. It was better to pay than lose the goods. When I remember that I was carrying a weapon and I'm sure I'd have used it to save my family, I cross myself and think about what might have happened if things had got complicated,' she crossed herself indicating with the emphatic gesture the dangers and atrocities from which God had saved her.

'The plains are a divided territory. The police, the DAS, the army and the paramilitaries control one part and the guerrilla another. Each side knows where the other is and respects their territory, but outside of those boundaries, on the road, on the paths and in the towns every type of revenge and outrage is committed. Us women have to let them search us as they like. They touch our breasts and our bodies as many times as they feel like it. They're also such brutes they cut the palms of the Indian's hands slowly, each nerve, each tendon, each muscle, each finger until they say where the guerrilla is. They were so cruel that once a sergeant arrived and hung the Indians by the hands over a well with piranhas in it and lowered them slowly so that the fish ate them bit by bit until they talked. He was such a brute of a man that he didn't know they only spoke their own language and he wanted them to give him information about the guerrilla in Spanish. Fortunately, the army ordered his capture and it seems that they committed him to a few years in prison.

And all of these barbarities, for what? To avoid having to confront each other. We even saw how the guerrilla camped on one side of the river and the army on the other. Each washed on its banks, but they didn't attack each other. Each side considers the war a job to be done and if they're not forced to fight, they prefer not to risk their lives. One side charge for the crops, the other charge for the tolls, if one side charges the war tax, the others charge custom duties. Both want us, the people, to offer them our services and when we serve on one side, the other side kills us and vice versa. At that time I remembered the bible: you cannot serve two masters.

Socorro always referred to the bible and the gospels. She took a phrase from a sermon or crossed herself with every painful memory.

'Before the army crossed the river, the guerrilla imposed their justice,' Socorro continued, remembering those early times.

"You, companero, come over here, we have to talk," a guerrilla commander would say.

"Yes, commander, at your service," answered the one who had committed the crime.

"We've found out you're paying your workers badly."

"No sir, they're lazy and don't work hard."

"Look companero, the complaints are frequent, which is why we've taken up the case. If you don't pay them fairly you'll have to go. You have been warned," and without listening to the response, he turned around and left. That was the first warning. The second came with a stronger threat:

"Senor Bedoya, see here, we've told you not to steal from the workers and to treat them properly, but you don't seem to take any notice. If you cannot live within the law here, you'll have to leave."

The third time it was a curt order:

"Senor Bedoya, you have three days to leave."

If anyone disobeyed, they were disappeared and no one asked what had happened to them. Everyone accepted the guerrillas' justice. We also knew we had to give them ten per cent of the paste processed from the harvest or the equivalent in cash. No one ignores the guerrillas' rules. Those of us who had farms and sold coca also knew the laws of the other side. If you want to get the paste through you have to pay ten per cent and if you have to get chemicals in, there's another tax, which is why coca is so expensive. They're each doing their job, the struggle is a lie, or at least, it's not the principal reason for the war. Real confrontation takes place when they're pressured or because someone has overstepped the mark.

It's as though there were two countries inside Colombia. If you're in one territory you should follow the laws and they're not that different on either side: obey and serve. One ends up committed to one side or the other. The coca-farm owners were on the guerrilla's side because the army couldn't protect us due to the illegality of the work. I also enjoyed being with them because I could offer the Indians my support, I felt I was serving Christ. For me too, it was a job. I don't want to justify myself because I also backed the violence, I bribed with cash and smiles, I used all sorts of tricks to carry Patriotic Union propaganda and I felt like a true leader.

I put my daughter at risk many times. I knew that if we were caught and identified whoever detained us wrongly, we were signing our death sentence. To make the wrong move could cost lives.

What I'm about to say may sound strange, but in the Vichada, to be a member of the Patriotic Union was forbidden, it was worse than being a guerrilla. Legality is a myth, as is the lie about respecting indigenous people. They respect strength, anyone who holds a weapon. The peace accords amount to nothing - they killed all Patriotic Union activists.'

Rolando and I had tried many crooked ways, but we never managed to consolidate our wealth and the farm with its coca crop seemed a more torturous, but more stable path. We were wrong, things were changing. Pressured by the surplus of coca, Villavicencio became a centre for traffickers. Money was flowing and the order came to dismantle the laboratories. The army was forced to cross the river and all hell was let loose. With the fighting, the bombings and the burning of crops and laboratories, the business became nearly impossible. Every time they announced the army was coming into the area, we had to take the chemicals and dismantle the house. The Indians carried large barrels of gasoline on their backs a long way from the house and buried them. We waited for the crops to be burnt and then we planted again. One harvest would be lost, the next would be planted, I would dig up the buried products and work on the paste, then we'd have to hide again because the army was coming and we'd escape to the mountains and wait for them to go.

Everything became difficult for us. We had invested all the money from the cars and we had to protect our patrimony in any way we could. With all of the army incursions the chemicals became scarce and an unqualified chemist told Rolando that if we planted Peruvian coca, he could bring the price down by making the paste with cement. This coca plant, unlike the bitter or the sweet, took longer to cultivate, but it was no problem to get cement. According to him, he could get us eighteen grams for each arroba [= 25 lbs], which was an excellent percentage and we got involved. We worked hard and processed with cement, but it only gave us an eight per cent return and we couldn't even pay the workers. I remember how we cried in the doorway to the house calculating how much we had lost.

We went to Villavicencio, without saying anything, to sell the paste and pay the pickers and those who had pressed the crop, but we didn't even get enough money to do that. While we were selling the paste, we found out the guerrilla were looking for us to kill us because we hadn't given them their percentage. We didn't understand why until we were told the sham chemist, to make himself look better, had said the harvest had rendered eighteen per cent and it wasn't true, so we couldn't pay. Rolando decided to confront them:

"Socorro "I he said to me, "if I don't come back in three days it's because I'm dead." He gave me a kiss and left.

Five days went by and he wasn't back. I decided to look for him and I went off in a rented car without knowing how to get to where the guerrilla were. I cried the whole way. I came to a town called El Viento, on the border of Meta and Vichada and there I found him drinking beer with the guerrillas, celebrating the deal they'd made: he would give them a car instead of the percentage.