"What did it say?" I ask Don Pedro.
He looks at me, then breaks eye-contact a moment too quickly.
"I can't remember," he says.
I look to Paul, one of Pedro's human shields. He says, "Those first two words look like they said 'Special Forces'."
With that, Don Pedro strides out of the house and into his front yard. We follow him, walking past remains of his extended family - two women chatting in the kitchen, a teenage girl idling on a hammock and a young boy sitting on his legs, lost in the gabbling otherworld cast out by a portable television. Outside, in the cooling South American afternoon, we join the chickens, the mosquitoes, the hook-nosed priest and the other two attendant human shields, dressed in their white 'Peace Brigades International' t-shirts.
"I've been here thirty-nine years," he says, standing in front of us with his chin in the air. "My family grew up here. We ate well. But things changed when the violence came."
Despite his age he remains handsome - trim and proud-looking in a pale blue shirt and black trousers, his caramel skin still tight against his skull. He wears two days worth of pure-white stubble and his eyes are coursing, narrow and deep-set after six and a half decades of squinting in fields against the fierce Colombian sun.
In the sky, spasms of light from an electrical storm flicker noiselessly all around him. Daubed in red on the wall outside his second floor bedroom, you can see some more, unremoved, paramilitary graffiti. DEATH TO THE FARC AND ALL ITS FOLLOWERS.
Petro tells us about his 150 hectare farm, on which he grew rice, maize, sugar, bananas and plantain until the coming of the violence at 06.15am, February 24th 1997 - a period when Uraba, on the north east coast of Colombia, was governed by a politician called Alvaro Uribe. It was called Operation Genesis and it began with bombs being dropped on the countryside by the men of the army's infamous 17th Brigade, who are feared throughout Uraba for their ferocious bloodlust. Blitzkrieg over, the soldiers arrived at the villages and instructed survivors to leave their homes, saying that the 'cortacabezas' (paramilitaries, literally, 'the ones that cut off heads') were coming. Then they burned villages and shot families and threw machete-hacked corpses into the river.
And then the cortacabezas did come. In one town, it was announced there was to be a football match between them and the 17th Brigade. Attendance was compulsory. The locals gathered in horrible silence as the two teams lined up in the town square. At kick-off, the ball was tipped from a plastic shopping bag. It slid out in a slurry of black blood and thumped on the dirt on the floor. It was the severed head of popular community leader Marino Lopez. They played until it was reduced to a sloppy sack of bone-splinters and brain. The score was two-nil to the paramilitaries.
That event is just one of 200 well-documented crimes against humanity that took place during Operation Genesis, which was carried-out under the charge of the 17th Brigade's General Rito Alejo del Rio, who was later crowned "Pacifier of Uraba" at a lush banquet hosted by Governor Uribe. The goal of Operation Genesis was to empty the countryside, to turn it into a new Eden, cleansed of all the people who worked the land. The official reason? To chase out the guerrilla, the anti-government forces, popularly known as the FARC.
Like all the best lies, this one is conjured around a scintilla of truth. The FARC are a cadre of killers, kidnappers and thieves. But the government had much more to gain from Genesis than their expulsion. As Don Petro was to discover when, unwilling to flee his farm despite the violence, he was approached by representatives from a company who wanted him to sell his land for a pittance so they could grow a cash crop called African Palm.
"I refused," Petro tells us. "They sent two paramilitary chiefs to kill me. They couldn't find me so they wrote the graffiti and stole my cattle. I went to see the heads of the paramilitaries. I said, 'Why have you done this to me?' They said I was speaking to the guerrillas. I said, 'No! If you think I'm speaking to the guerrillas, why don't you come and catch me in the act?' Then, the palm company stole my land. They cut down everything and they grew palm. There was nothing I could do."
But there was one thing Don Petro could do. He snuck back onto his land, hacked down five hectares of African Palm that lay near his old house and, with a few other local farming families who'd also had their land robbed, declared the space to be a 'Humanitarian Zone'. And for now, thanks to the presence of western 'international observers' like PBI, a volunteer organisation who offer unarmed protection to people threatened with violence, they're mostly still alive, living in tents, shitting in holes and eating their meals under a corrugated-metal roof erected on rough wooden stilts. But they're watched. As I sit here now, I'm jumpily aware that these plantations are studded throughout with calamitously desensitised thugs who would love nothing more than to take a chainsaw to Petro, the priest, the shields and me.
On the long journey here, we had to negotiate several 17th Brigade checkpoints and were eyeballed by teenagers with assault rifles who've been taught that we're FARC abetters, meddling gringo devils. We've been stared-out by paramilitaries who believe the same. One of these people - a bulging thunderhead of a man in a scarlet wife-beater who stood there glaring, arms folded, eyes glittering with fury - was recognised by the priest. He said the man was a local chief who used to run with the guerrilla. When he switched sides he had to prove his loyalty, so he ordered the death of a swathe of blameless locals, one of whom's crime was simply that he passed the man a glass of water when he was in the FARC. This, runs the brutalised logic that twists through Colombia, constitutes collusion.
By now, the air has turned deep blue as the night begins to bear down on us. I ask Don Petro if he's scared. Only yesterday, members of his Humanitarian Zone were threatened by paramilitaries on mopeds. Every time they enter the nearest village - a small frontier outpost a few hours journey from here - it happens. "The gringos won't be here forever," they say, "and when they've gone, we will come." Just last week, a fist of loafing cortacabezas promised "thirty years of violence".
"I have no fear," Petro says. "I've walked right through these people and nothing's happened to me. But I'm worried about my neighbours. They're suffering watching their land disappear. On the television they explain it as a war between the army and the guerrillas. But the army are collaborating with the paramilitaries to kill us. The multinational companies use them to clear the land for their own use. We're going to be left like slaves and the rich will live a good life."
"Have you lost any family in the violence?" I ask.
"I have lost two sons and a brother," he says. "My sons I never forget. Nor my brother. Not for a moment."
Suddenly Petro falters. He takes a white handkerchief and lifts it to his eyes. Then, he buckles completely. The 66-year-old takes to the bench and he sits and sobs. "My wife is finished..." he manages to say between heaves of grief.
We leave the farmer and walk through the rapidly thickening darkness back to the Humanitarian Zone. By now the lightening has taken over the entire sweep of the sky. It's as if the heavens are breaking up above us. Veins of white flicker silently for eight, ten seconds at a time before dying. It lights our way as we trudge towards the main shelter, where the displaced families are chattering and cooking rice, fish, and a pan of 'tinto' - buzzingly sweet, fresh-tasting black coffee. We pick over the stubs of cut palm and head towards the weak flame of a hurricane lamp. A man in a black cowboy hat appears in the glow and offers us a tinto. We settle on rickety wooden benches and the priest crouches on his ankles in front of us.
As the residents gather, the priest says we're going to tell our stories before having a 'ceremony' involving a candle. As he speaks, the thunder breaks. It's biblically loud, as if some mad God has started dynamiting the planets and letting the resulting rubble smash down onto the sky above us. It contributes to the feeling of minute helplessness that's becoming overwhelming. I'm amongst a tiny community of peacefully rebelling Colombians and their western protectors. We're hours from the nearest village, a crumb of humanity dropped into the middle of this nightmarishly gigantic plantation. All around us there's nothing but rows and rows, acres and acres, miles and miles of African Palm, sewn in dead straight lines that march blindly into the horizon in all directions. Out there in the darkness it's inhuman, a vast, regimented landscape that's good for nothing but getting lost in. The plants themselves look like gargantuan pineapple tops, their fronds dropping and flapping, unable to bear their own weight. Their nuts, from which the valuable oil is extracted, hang in little testicular packets off their stems. This epic agricultural endeavour is guarded by hundreds of 17th Brigade soldiers and paramilitaries, all of whom see us as the enemy, as terrorists, as a threat that must, at some point, be extinguished.
Beneath the massive thunder, a man begins a tale of stolen land, of massacred friends, of slurs and fear and familial upheaval. As he talks, I start to think of my own journey, which started a week ago, hundreds of miles away in the cold mountain city of Bogota.
***
Everything is behind bars. Even our hotel, tucked away in a quiet suburb, is surrounded by twenty-foot spiked railings. Before the invasion of Iraq, this was the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist. Anyone filing stories that link the army to the paramilitaries expects, at the very least, a wreath of funeral flowers delivered to his wife. It's not uncommon for reporters to be killed outright.
Because it's easy to get away with murder in Colombia. It's easy to get away with abduction, torture and massacre as well. There's a word that you hear a lot in this place: impunity. You hear it from angry, poor people. You hear it from courageous lawyers. And your hear it in the house where the volunteers from Peace Brigades International live.
I've come to experience what life is like as a member of this Christian Aid-funded charity. They act as human shields, protecting both human-rights defenders such as Don Petro, and the lawyers that seek justice on their behalf. Except, it should be pointed out, PBI frown upon the phrase 'human shield'. Presumably, this is, in part, because shields get shot. It's also because they don't want to be aligned with the sort of freelance crazies that drive to Baghdad in hand-painted double-decker busses.
PBI are all about reducing risk, not hurling themselves into it. Before going out into the field, they always carry out a 'preventative security measure'. This consists of a flurry of faxes sent to relevant people, gently pointing out that they have concerns about one situation or another, and are going to be in the area on a certain date. The state's preoccupation with its international reputation, and it's desperation to spread the fiction that what's going on within its boundaries is simply a civil war between the FARC and the paramilitaries mean that things tend not to happen when western eyes are present. The language of these faxes, which end up in the offices of the Colombian military, the vice president, the EU, the UN and the British and American embassy amongst others, is always painstakingly diplomatic. Because PBI don't have an opinion. They can't. Because the moment that they do, they'll be accused of being terrorist sympathisers. And then... well, they're fucked.
In modern Colombia can be found the logical conclusion of the 'you're either with us or against us' philosophy of war. Neutrality is not tolerated by the FARC or the government or their paramilitary allies. This means that the truly non-partisan are the enemy of everyone. And if, as some organisations have found, you speak out against the government, you'll be denounced as working for 'the other side'. One government minister has compared world-respected charity Human Rights Watch to the FARC. Alvaro Uribe, that dark politician on whose watch Operation Genesis took place, complained in 2004 that by "not having the courage to denounce Amnesty International, we have allowed it to legitimise terrorism". An accusation like this is a death sentence. And if PBI were to be slandered like this, it could make their presence here suicidal.
***
And then, we get lost.
We're looking for Mongui Gomez, the leader of the 'Popular Women's Organisation'. June, a young Geordie with a vegan look about her, tries to contact her on her Avantel - a cross between a mobile and a walkie-talkie. But she gets no response. We turn corner after corner, passing street-stalls piled with raw meat and grocery shops with bars in front of their goods and serving-counter, so that when you step inside you are, effectively, in a cage. Everybody stares. Some look amused, some look hostile, but all of them look. Bolivar City stretches up and around us, a brick chaos of flat roofs and illogical alleyways, an impossible, higgledy-piggledy labyrinth of dwelling built upon dwelling, the whole place a disorientating optical illusion that's so high above sea level that you're constantly breathless, your lungs taking shallow, panicked puffs of half-empty air.
"I'm sure it's around here somewhere," says June.
"Hmmm," says Hugo.
This place is controlled by the paramilitaries that are backed, in secret, by the government. An incalculable matrix of Stasi-like informers make freedom impossible here. There are eyes on every corner. There's roughly one murder a day (the most recent was a couple of hours ago). Currently, there's a curfew, which was announced with leaflets shoved through doors that read, "Good boys go to bed at eight o'clock. The bad ones, we put to bed". There's also a ban on males wearing earrings or long hair or hanging about on the streets. I've been told that you sometimes see young people handcuffed and hung by their wrists from flagpoles, left to fry alive in the midday sun.
Eventually, thankfully, we find Mongui and go for a long walk. This is 'visibilising', letting it be known that PBI have Mongui under their protective cloak. As we go - past graffiti of a huge pair of black eyes - she tells me about the work she does, promoting women's rights and denouncing paramilitary crimes, and about a friend of hers, a trade union leader, who was 'disappeared' from a local marketplace two weeks ago. In the days leading up to this, there were unfamiliar people hanging around. Watching. Patrolling. Those people are around again. Friends of Mongui have been asked questions about her. The other day, she came home to find a bag of pig guts at her front door. Before opening it, she assumed that it was a severed head. And now, she's scared. "At any moment, I could be disappeared," she tells me. "I make a lot of enemies with this work".
Naturally, Mongui isn't new to this horror. Only last year, the paramilitaries killed her son. "I've seen lots of people killed," she says. "I've seen disembowelled people. I've seen throats slit. People I know have been disappeared and then just their heads have turned up".
We carry on walking steeply upwards, past painted-on Coca Cola signs, stray dogs with swollen teats and shady, open doorways. As we're talking we're met by a young woman with fervent brown eyes, scraped back hair and the kind of gynaecologically tight jeans you see on females everywhere in Colombia. She works for a charity that's allied with Mongui's. Beckoning us into a dark room, empty but for a circle of low wooden chairs, I sit and listen.
"There's a war been declared on young people, here," she tells me.
"Why young people?" I ask.
"The fact that you're young means you have energy, you want to speak out, you're spontaneous. And that's exactly what they want to stamp out. They go into schools and they take people out - kids of 13, 14 - and they lock them up and beat them or drag them along behind motorbikes. People here are quartered. Some parts of their body turn up in one place, other parts in another place. They torture people. They make them walk over fire, they take their eyes out, they take their tongues out."
"They take their tongues out?" I say.
"With chainsaws".
***
"It's not usually reported what the origins of displacement are," says Ivan, a hugely charismatic and expansively bearded man. "The method that's seen the biggest successes are massacres because they're such a sensational act. The paramilitaries arrive at the village with the support of the army, then collect all of the inhabitants up in the central square and accuse villagers of being guerrilla sympathisers, knowing full well it's not true. Then they select predetermined people from the town - mayors, social leaders - and they torture them in front of everybody. Heinous acts of cruelty, usually raping of the women and quartering people alive. Then they'll just go and murder forty people. We're talking hundreds of massacres like this in the last twenty years. Of course, the companies install themselves when the majority of the dirty work has been done."
We accompany Ivan and Doralucy to their waiting car, which has inch-thick darkened windows. Yesterday, Ivan's wife was followed and Doralucy's lawyers group received a message promising revenge for its work. There's been a general increase in death threats, recently, and people being surveilled. But nobody's sure what any of this actually means.
This, I realise, must be what it's like to be in the middle of unfolding history. Confusing. There's no reference book to check, no earnest documentary to watch. There are just odd, seemingly random jigsaw pieces that appear from nowhere. A government pronouncement, a hard-drive stolen from a lawyer's house, a mugging, a newspaper running a thundering editorial, someone being filmed, a disappearance. And it all seems to be linked... It all adds to the sensation that's common amongst PBI volunteers, of heat gathering, of swelling pressure, of something bad about to happen.
It's like viewing a city's tube-train system from the air, so all you can see are the places where stations break through to the surface. The connections remain hidden. In Colombia, all you get to see are the raw facts of what happens - the A and then the Z. Like, farmers being terrorised off their land and then a western banana company or an oil multinational or an African Palm grower moving in. A politician denouncing peace communities, then massacres taking place within them. Nine trade union activists campaigning for their rights under international law at a Coca Cola bottling plant and then being killed by paramilitaries. The links, if indeed there are any, have yet to be dug out of the ground.
***
I'm told that there are a lot of reinserted paramilitaries here who are paid to inform. 'Reinserted' means they've gone through the sham process of 'demobilisation', which they're able to do under the ironically titled 'Justice and Peace' law, masterminded by Uribe. All they have to do is hand in one gun between two of them to receive a regular cash payment and, for the vast majority, a legal pardon. Amnesty International says they're simply being 'recycled' back into the conflict.
A fat black vulture - a chulo - lands on a street light that's still on despite the sun that's so strong and clear around here that it's like seeing in four dimensions. The bird reminds me of where we've just come from, a Humanitarian Zone that's a few years more established than Don Petro's. We woke to the sound of pigs snuffling and assault rifles rattling in the hills. Despite PBI's presence, at least 160 have been killed. In March 2005, the paramilitaries and the 17th Brigade butchered eight, including a six year old and an eighteen-month-old who, they insisted, were "guerrilla sons of bitches". Villagers were only able to find the body-parts of their children by observing where the chulos were circling and feeding. It occurs to me that the soldiers only behave like this because they truly believe they're right. If all a human being is, is an amalgam of stories lived and stories heard, what happens when so many of the tales one's told are not true? What happens when a seventeen year-old is conscripted and told by everyone that the countryfolk of Uraba are FARC terrorists? You get what Uraba's civilians have got - an enemy that's misinformed and diabolical.
We climb aboard the first of a series of busses. I grab a seat by the window and watch the countryside pass. You can smell the moist fertility in the air. The landscape groans with vegetation, weird green things shoot out of it at crazy angles, fat cattle chew lazily, the ground underneath their hooves obese with oil and coal and gas. This region is a greenhouse above the surface and treasure-trove beneath. And, of course, it's 17th Brigade country, a land of severed limbs and cerebral malaria, of mass graves and multinationals.
Before long, we're waved to the side of the road by 17th Brigade. They want to search the bus. PBI-man Paul pulls a folded fax from his pocket. The camouflaged kids have twitchy, darting eyes, and Paul tells them calmly that their commander knows we're coming and that we're in a hurry. I watch the negotiation quietly, trying not to betray my sweaty anxiety. Paul actually looks ridiculously comical talking to the heavily armed soldiers. In his shiny green PBI jacket and matching baseball hat, he looks like a Leukaemia-case on a day trip to Chessingtons, not dominant in the slightest. Then, I realise, perhaps that's the point...
***
Then, something hits my neck. Another one hits my lip. I blow it away and ponder some unpleasant facts. The larger forces involved in Colombia: The US, whose embassy here is its biggest anywhere outside Baghdad; the $631.6 million of US aid promised to Colombia this year for 'security assistance'; General Hector Rincon, commander of the 17th Brigade who was taught the methods of torture and terrorism and to make 'no distinction between insurgent and civilian' at the School of the Americas in Georgia; Alvaro Uribe who, since his stint in charge of Uraba, has become the president of the country and a close ally of George W Bush; what Ivan Cepeda told me when I asked about Bush's 'war on drugs' in the region - "It's a war against the farmers, not against drug cartels. Narco-trafficking serves the US's interests very well insofar as getting a foothold in Latin America for security reasons and in hiding their economic interests - which have to do with the natural resources in Colombia."
Then there's 'Early Day Motion 333', which called for suspension of British military aid to Colombia on human rights grounds, and was signed by 207 MPs before being vetoed by the Foreign Office; how Britain is the world's largest importer of Uraban palm oil; internal displacements which, contrary to what Uribe claims, increased from 280,000 in 2004 to 300,000 last year; PBI's budgets, which have been slashed to a bare minimum following a drop in donations after higher-profile problems in Iraq and Darfur; the woman I met who told me of her friend who, on being unable to afford 'tax' demanded of her by the paramilitaries, was ordered to pay in 'soup' and was forced to boil up the meat from her freshly butchered son and eat him.
Something else hits my face. They're flying ants, half an inch big. They swoop in and land on our arms and eyes and cheeks whilst the priest continues his pitiful prayer, the world raging around him. "This light is like a friend of ours," he says beneath the roar of the thunder and rain. "It helps us continue our struggle against the government. It represents our hope..." A growing swarm of insects are pulled in from the darkness and hurl themselves into the flame. They keep coming until the well of molten wax beneath the wick is an horrific, boiling broth of legs and wings and agony, a grotesquely apt 'symbol of hope' for this savage Eden.
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Words & photos copyright 2005-2010 Will Storr
