Читать книгу The Dispossessed - Aviva Chomsky - Страница 14
ОглавлениеI decided to write this book about three years ago when I opened the door to my apartment in Barcelona on a sad and dark afternoon in February. The silence struck me in the face and the emptiness, I confess, made my convictions waver. The statements I’d made to my readers, my children, and my friends, in order to respond to the death threats I received from the paramilitaries, were all behind me. They were neither the only nor the most dangerous threats. Paramilitarism is a time-worn strategy of a powerful sector of the Colombian establishment that has been used to frustrate attempts to achieve a civil solution to the country’s armed conflict. Almost every campesino in Colombia can say that his father or his uncle or his grandfather was killed by the army or police, by the paramilitaries, or by the guerrillas. It is the diabolical inertia of the violence that, since before the assassination of Gaitán in 1948, has claimed more than a million lives.
My exile really began, however, when I put aside my books, stopped writing technical reports, and gave up the pretense of being able to understand our reality from behind a desk. The break came in the early 1980s, when I met an old woman who told me about her life and how she had spent all of it fleeing. Her grandparents had been taken away by Liberal troops during the “long wars of the nineteen hundreds and no one ever knew who won those battles because they never came back.” Her story was so passionate that sociological treatises and Colombian history books lost much of their meaning for me after I heard it. I realized the way to understand wasn’t to study people but to listen to them. And I decided, almost obsessively and using any pretext I could, to travel the length and breadth of the country in order to shatter the academic and official view of its history.
People told me thousands of stories and there was, and is, a common element to all of them: the forced displacement of people for political reasons and economic gain. The wealthy accused campesinos of being Liberals or Conservatives or communists in order to force them to flee and take their land. The spoils of war in Colombia have always been paid in land, and our history is the history of an incessant, almost uninterrupted, displacement.
I wrote about what I saw and what people told me. I used a tape recorder or a notebook and I even tried filming. Though written in the language of nineteenth-century travelers, the stories reached few people. Very few. A book printing in Colombia rarely exceeds three thousand copies and I was unsatisfied. The world the campesinos had shown me was being seen by the same circle of people. That was how by first putting in a finger, then a hand, and then finally, my whole arm, I arrived at newspapers.
I think people began reading me with a mixture of surprise and disbelief. Gradually, though, they began to feel something and like or dislike the people I described in my chronicles, stories, and weekly column. But that created a problem because as more readers became interested and began to defend my notions of the country, more enemies appeared. And my travels became more difficult. The stories, simple as they were, were denunciations of a landowner, a political strongman, a “competent” authority, an army captain, or a guerrilla commander, and the circle began to constrict as the weeks passed.
My travels also got more dangerous because the areas I visited—the frontier regions of colonization where coca and amapola are grown—were becoming more and more violent. The confrontation there between a formal and impeccably legal order and the “real” country, which believes only in itself, is played out every day in a multitude of violences. It wasn’t only the colonos who had found a way of life by replacing traditional crops with illegal ones. The guerrillas had a treasure chest from extorting money from drug middlemen and traffickers, and the police and army enriched themselves by repressing the whole business. Everyone was taking a piece of the pie, and, in truth, no one had a right to throw the first stone. But some people began to do just that and blame those of us who saw the problem and denounced it and who understood how hypocritical it was to accuse only the guerrillas of drug trafficking when the reality was—and is—that they financed part of their activities with the money they extorted from the drug kingpins.
During this time, I was appointed external adviser to the peace counselor by the Samper government, a position that enabled me to continue voicing my opinions without them being associated with government policy. There was a possibility the guerrillas would begin talks with the government; the only precondition was the demilitarization of the town of La Uribe, a symbolic region for the FARC. After carrying out some political consultations, the government expressed its intention to go ahead with this but was faced with two obstacles: first, the crisis stemming from the existence of drug money in the 1994 electoral campaign, which placed President Samper on the defensive, and, second, the government’s decision to license civilians so they could arm themselves and collaborate with the armed forces. In practice, this measure served to reinforce paramilitarism by helping set up armed groups, called Convivir (to live together), paid for by large landowners, many of whom were drug traffickers. These two circumstances began to weaken the government’s position with the guerrillas and to make the demilitarization they asked for more difficult.
Meanwhile, I continued writing an opinion column in El Espectador, in which I denounced massacres the paramilitaries had committed, criticized the government for its weakness in the peace process, and, above all, pointed to the growing autonomy of the military from the civilian power in the country as the cause of the problems. I also commented on how nefarious the often-used doctrine of the “narco-guerrilla” had become for peace in Colombia. It was a term coined by a former American ambassador in Colombia that had been embraced wholeheartedly by the military, the right wing of both political parties, and, above all, by the media. My critical opinions earned me the open animosity of the country’s right wing and the military, which began suggesting I was an “intellectual defender” of the guerrillas. In reality, I was simply stating publicly what I had seen and heard in those frontier zones where coca and amapola were being grown. I denounced not only the extortion the guerrillas were involved in but also the military’s ties to the drug traffickers and links to the paramilitaries. It was a one-sided fight and one, I admit, I was only able to stay involved in thanks to the freedom the government gave me to say what I thought, even when I disagreed with its own positions. In similar fashion, my editors at El Espectador never removed so much as a comma from any of my columns; on the contrary, they ended up showing me how to use them correctly.
About this time, the guerrillas attacked an army base and took a hundred soldiers prisoner. The government was weakening rapidly. The church, the country’s business and industrial sectors, the media, and, of course, the United States united against Samper and he seemed ready to fall. I continued to suggest the country’s problems would not be solved by weakening the government but, instead, by initiating peace negotiations. And I insisted the biggest obstacle in the way was the military’s refusal to obey civilian power for it was in that breach that the paramilitaries were becoming stronger. My articles became more critical, especially concerning the paramilitaries who continued to massacre campesinos, burn down villages, and selectively murder human rights defenders—all crimes committed with absolute impunity. I then began to receive signed death threats.
I got the first after publishing a column in El Espectador about the nature of paramilitarism and its ties to drug traffickers, large landowners, and members of the Colombian army. It called me a “paraguerrilla” in the following terms: “If guerrillas don’t respect members of right-wing political parties, we won’t respect subversives ensconsed in government jobs.” That note made me realize how serious the situation had become and made it clear I’d struck some very sensitive nerves. My enemies were reading and paying attention to what I was writing, and I felt they’d drawn a line in the sand.
I ignored it, however, and, in spite of the difficulties, resumed my travels around the country. Listening to people and learning of their problems, which, by this time, had become tragedies, in particular the (at that time) one million campesinos who had been displaced by terror. I was hurt deeply by the killings of conservationist friends of mine with whom I’d tried to defend the páramos, the jungles, and the rivers from the greed of cattle ranchers and to denounce the lethal consequences of fumigating illegal crops; of lawyers who had taken on human rights cases; of Indians who’d been murdered for demanding respect for their land and traditions; and of journalists, who investigated enforced disappearances, kidnappings, and massacres. I wrote a column in which, in spite of my fear, I said: “The time has come to tell the country about the ties between the establishment, the State, and the paramilitaries and to do away with everything that stands in the way of the exercise of democracy and a civilian opposition. Everything that is happening scares us. And writing about it scares us even more. But it is a fear we have to live with.”
When the threats against me became public, the commander of the army called me to his office and offered me protection. He told his men to come up with a list of security measures I needed to implement in order to stay alive. After visiting me at home, they concluded I had to start by cutting down all the trees around my house. Then, I had to install reflectors, alarms, and a sentry-post, hire some around-the-clock bodyguards, and begin using a bulletproof car. It goes without saying the government wouldn’t be paying for any of these measures.
Several months later, after the new administration had taken office, I wrote that President Pastrana, in spite of his good intentions, would not be able to advance in his quest for peace until he dealt unequivocably with the paramilitaries. And I warned that, should he do so, he ran the risk of dividing the armed forces because it was inexplicable how the paramilitaries could continue to act with the impunity they did. Before I had even submitted the article, I received a present: The Black Book of Communism, a well-known investigative report written by a team from the Paris-based National Scientific Research Center (CNRS), with a somewhat cryptic, handwritten dedication: “History has a special place reserved for those who write it and another for those who distort it.” Three days later, I got another message telling me the paramilitaries could not be “dismantled” as I had insisted they should be. But what could be done—and they were going to do it, the message said—was dismantle the “paraguerrilla,” which had done more harm to the country’s institutions than the guerrillas themselves. In its editorial, El Espectador responded to this: “The objective of the self-defense groups is to silence the voices that criticize them and achieve political recognition in order to gain access to the negotiating table.” The paramilitaries were quick to answer: “We have irrefutable proof that Mr. Molano is a member of the parasubversion, is not an enemy of the self-defense groups but of the nation, and is an intellectual sniper, prejudiced in his judgements and biased in his analysis.” They ended by saying: “Mr. Director, we would like to publicly reiterate our respect for free speech, criticism, and dissent.”
That same night, December 24, I decided to go into exile. The Spanish embassy in Colombia had offered me protection and the possibility of establishing myself in Spain. Although I’d thought about leaving the country since receiving the first threat, it’s difficult to know exactly what made up my mind for me. I felt the danger, although I’d done what I could to hide it, and knew that leaving would mean distancing myself from my children, my friends, and from all the other things a person accumulates and comes to love: a horse, a book, a pair of running shoes. The look in some of my friends’ eyes, however, told me that they, too, felt threatened when they were with me. And when, on seeing me again, one or another of them would say: “What? You’re still alive?” I knew that was that. I had nothing left inside me to respond to a new and offensive letter which arrived, this time unsigned: “The sooner they bury you the better. If you’re a communist, you’re a bandit and that’s the same as being a terrorist, you son-of-a-bitch. Wherever you are, the autodefensas will come for you.”
The next day, without saying goodbye to my children because I am a weak man, I boarded a plane to Spain. I took only a few shirts and some books with me because I didn’t want to put down roots anywhere far from my country. I never want to feel like a stranger here. In spite of all the pain it entails, exile has taught me to look the loneliness that is always with me straight in the eye and to possess no more than the clothes I am wearing so that, at any time or on any day, I’ll be free to return to Colombia. The bitter tastes of being far from home change and sometimes become almost bittersweet although there is an oppressive weight I drag along with me from street to street and from night to night. During the first days of my exile, I couldn’t help but think I was the same little boy who my parents left in the care of one of their lady friends one day, and who, for lunch, began to gobble down sausages so voraciously that it made me squeeze my legs together.
I arrived in Barcelona and found a dark apartment, depressing in the long, grey winter days. I went out only to buy the food I needed, returning to write, and, above all, to use the telephone. I lived forty-eight-hour days, twenty-four in Colombia and twenty-four in Spain. With the first flowers on the cherry trees, life returned to Barceloneta, my barrio, and one morning at dawn, the silence was broken by a cacophony of trumpets and drums. That night everyone dressed in costumes—as fish, tigers, clowns, vampires—and went to the Plaza San Miguel where there was a vacaloca and fireworks. I wasn’t in the mood for parties, though, and went instead to the ocean, the cold ocean—a contradiction I will never get used to—and let it carry me away as the rivers used to do when I was a boy.
The routes you plan out and follow each day in exile are narrow ones. You have the same fear of the abyss the ancient sailors had, a fear that shuts you in and imposes an unbearable redundancy on your steps. I am sure it’s the same sensation colonos feel alone on the mountainside before they begin to dominate it, little by little, with their machetes as they clear the land to plant and, above all, gain a view of the distance so they can see who is coming. Like the colonos, I began to “find myself” and make peace with the walls of my apartment, with the street corners of my barrio, and the streets of Barcelona, until I realized they had never declared war on me.
Then, one afternoon, I felt the urge to eat bananas—even if they weren’t from Urabá—and to buy African yucca and some granadillas from Urrao that I’d seen in a store selling exotic products. I’ve never been very patriotic, at least not like Señor Caro, who for having spent all his time translating Virgila never saw the Magdalena River, but now, from afar, I must confess that I began to find even bambucos appealing. I missed my friends and my travels across the cordilleras and the llanos. I even began to miss my enemies. You have to learn to distinguish between the country, as land and as home, and the political system that has it in the state it is. After repeated efforts to strike up a conversation, sometimes with no answer at all, the barber from the corner and the baker began to talk to me. It was difficult for us to understand each other. To many people, Colombians speak an old-fashioned Spanish, which makes it difficult to guess where we learned it. But the Spaniards, the fine Spanish people, are cheerful, they drink clean wine, take siestas, and haven’t forgotten the gunpowder taste of the lentils they were forced to eat during the terrible Spanish civil war.
Come what may, I will not repeat the history of the Spanish republicans or the Chileans and Argentinians who left saying they’d be back in two weeks and returned—those of them who did return—thirty years later. Washing my underwear in the sink and watching the specks of dust that inhabit old cities float through the sunlit air of my apartment, I have composed love poems in my head that I’ll never write down; passionate discourses against paramilitary crimes and their complicity with the army and police—which I will publish someday; and long and tedious essays with French sociologists and their épigones about the significance of civil society. I won’t say I have rethought the country. But I have come to understand its importance, its very minimal importance, to people in these cold latitudes. To Europeans, for example, La Virgen de los Sicarios, that marvelous movie of that marvelous book, is considered as farfetched and unbelievable, although not nearly as amusing, as Charlie’s Angels. And there is only a small chance that anything thoughtful about Colombia, other than the usual drivel about blood and coca, will be published in the newspapers in Spain, especially when so much space is given to the pop singer Rocio Jurado’s stupid love affair with her bullfighter husband who isn’t even a bullfighter anymore.
Writing about our realities from here is difficult. It means not only daring to acknowledge them—a daily and always painful exercise—but also doing it without living and breathing them. When I read and re-read what I write, it seems dry and full of those traps the magic of words makes it so easy to fall into. But writing about the realities of Europe is even more difficult because almost none of them resonate in the hell that our country has become. How important can Spain’s Hydrological Plan be to me when I know fifty campesinos were killed with machetes by paramilitaries in Chengue? I read the debates about the plan and it’s like they’re talking about some micro-organic fossils that were found a hundred years ago on a meteorite that fell from Mars. Of course, there is news that affects us—the mad cows, the reemergence of racism, and even the future of Barca (the Barcelona soccer team)—but the only news that really means anything to me is that which touches on the solution to our war.
I am convinced that a negotiated solution to the country’s armed conflict—even in the midst of all its ills—is a life or death proposition for me because, apart from meting out justice to people who’ve always been excluded, it is my only hope of going back to Colombia and being able to live without all those shields, which are as hostile as they are useless. It’s my only chance of once again being able to walk along remote country paths without having to look constantly over my shoulder, and, most of all, my only chance of being able to see my grandson grow up. I will never get used to being in exile although, today, I know that small death begins not with the threats of your enemies but with the silence of your friends.
When they murdered Jaime Garzón,b however, I knew I could not go home soon. So I picked out a large work table, sharpened my pencil, and began this book. On completing it, I understood—and bowed my head in profound respect—that in spite of its pains, the drama of my exile is but a pale reflection of the terrible tragedy that millions of Colombians live each day, uprooted and exiled in their own country. I believe, as they do, that the seeds of a true democracy can be found only in a negotiated political agreement. The war will have only one outcome, the dictatorship of the victors.
a Annibal Caro was the sixteenth-century Italian translator of Virgil’s Aeneid, the classical Roman epic poem. In translating the Aeneid from Latin into vernacular Italian, Caro intended to promote a sense of patriotism for early modern Rome rooted in the “glories” of the Roman Empire.
b Jaime Garzón, a journalist and human rights advocate, was Colombia’s best-loved political satirist. Assassins gunned him down on a Bogotá street in August, 1999.
