Hard to believe, but I’m finally home in Saint Louis. But before I get going in the new year, I’m putting the travel log, and Colombia, to a close. For now.
My last two weeks in Colombia were like another round of the Amazing Race. First, a trip to the upper Caribbean coast, not too far from our adventure to La Guajira. Two co-workers, Melissa and Candice, and I began with a few days in La Jagua, a small town overrun in recent years by large coal mining projects. Picture the movie October Sky, except Jake Gyllenhaal and all his friends are black/hispanic and live in the tropics. Days were filled with meetings about the mines’ contaminating the environment and monopolizing the job market, discussions on the richness of Afro-Colombian culture, listening to A LOT of Vallenato, and eating every meal possible at our favorite roast chicken restaurant/fruit juice stand/bakery (Jugo de nispero = wow).
We moved then from La Jagua to Santa Marta, this time feeling more like tourists. Of course, the dead body (read: shooting victim) on the sidewalk in broad daylight a block from our hotel didn’t make the best first impression, but since we aren’t drug addicts or thieves, we were told, we needn’t worry about such things. By the afternoon, everyone was pretending the guy hadn’t even existed. Eerie. But we knew they were right about us. On the coast, tourists aren’t the ones getting shot.
We took advantage of our open schedule to catch some sun on the beach. Relaxed under a palm tree, took a dip in the warm Caribbean waters, and one by one got conned into buying ice cream and potato chips for this little six-year-old who was clearly an expert in the art of acting cute for money. She also turned my legs into her own personal sandcastle masterpiece and “taught” me to count in Spanish. Her grandma and brother were soda vendors somewhere nearby, she said. What a life. Anyway she got her ice cream feast, and later we got our own feast in the form of some amazing seafood. For once, a pretty legit vacation.
We pampered ourselves in Santa Marta because we knew the roughest part was yet to come. After a few days, we left for Urabá, essentially the opposite of a tourist attraction. Although probably the most beautiful of anywhere we’d been, the region is extremely rural (primarily banana growers), extremely difficult to travel in (muddy, uneven dirt/gravel roads, traversable only by motorcycle or Jeep Wrangler-esque Russian WAS), and above all, still a hotspot of heavy internal conflict. Not a place to wander haphazardly around taking photos and speaking broken Spanish. But we came not as tourists, but to visit the communities that we accompany there.
The history here, very basically, is that the people we work with in Urabá (most of them Afro-Colombian and indigenous) previously lived on this land for generations and generations, as simple farmers. Until, in more or less the 80’s and 90’s, they were forcibly displaced by the conflict (paramilitary and guerrilla violence). They left for several years, wandering the country and finding work where they could. While they were gone, large companies, most with close ties to paramilitary groups, took over the land and replaced the former collective farmland and vibrant forests with agricultural megaprojects (lots of cattle ranches and palm and banana plantations). In recent years, however, the land’s original inhabitants and rightful owners under Colombian law, a.k.a. our partners, have returned to live on their land again, as they had done for centuries before the conflict. But confronting the big businesses that moved in in their absence, as well as collaborating paramilitaries, puts them at high risk of violent backlash. To protect themselves and their land, they have established what are called humanitarian zones – civilian-only communities recognized under international law – and biodiversity zones – established to preserve and cultivate the area’s traditional plant and animal life. So, we came to accompany these zones, to learn of the people’s situation, and to raise their profile, to show that they continue to receive international attention.
We first visited two zones in the more jungle-y Jiguamiandó region of Urabá, both accessible only by skinny wooden canoe. We spent our days traipsing around in big rubber boots, checking in on families and community leaders, and fending off a constant barrage of relentless biting insects. Most eventful experience was a run-in with a few Colombian military, who appeared out of the woods one day (NOT a normal occurrence) and called out to our boat from the riverbank. I did not appreciate the proximity of the guy’s assault rifle to my face, and no one appreciated the unprecedentedly strange questions he was asking, or the soldiers’ oddly shabby uniforms, but eventually they sent us on our way. Have a nice day…
The most important part of the trip, for me, came last, when we finally made it to the Llano Rico humanitarian zone, in the Curvaradó region. This was the community we helped establish during my trip to Colombia in March, but I couldn’t believe how much it’d changed. Their yucca fields, mere dirt before, had grown up taller than me, what was once a ditch was now a small man-made pond, they’d begun raising chickens and pigs, and they had even wired in electricity. Not to mention how much all the kids had grown, too. We sat and talked with Guillermo, who founded the zone, about the death threats recently made against him and the rising numbers of armed groups in the area. His wife welled up in tears describing her fear for his life, meanwhile her 2- and 4-year-old are in the background, running barefoot through the banana trees, laughing these adorable, carefree little laughs. It was the most bittersweet picture you could imagine, a perfect manifestation of the crazy reality they live every day. I will never forget it.
In a way, what I saw in Urabá was just what I saw in Santa Marta, in the Candelaria and all over the country. It’s simultaneously beauty and horror, devastation in paradise. It’s fascinating, sometimes depressing, and above all, quickly changing. I can only pray that in years to come, Colombia will change for the better.
