Remembering

I am back in Dallas after my month-long journey through Mexico and Colombia. The sand-flea scars have disappeared, and with two consecutive ten-hour nights of sleep (plus a couple of naps), I am almost fully recovered from the day-to-day grind of living out of a suitcase and traipsing all over the place to see one can't-be-missed site after another.


I still have to develop a curriculum project and prepare to share my experiences with public groups, but all in all, I am on the downhill side of the Fulbright-Hays Seminar experience. It was a wonderful opportunity and journey for which I will forever be grateful.


There is one encounter about which I have yet to write. I wanted to wait until I was back in the United States to write about it rather than try to hurriedly post something from Colombia. As you may have noticed from the typos and mistakes in my previous posts, I wasn't always the most careful blogger as time and Internet were scarce.


The story is from the city of Cartagena, where we visited a university to meet some students and hear from a professor who is working with groups of citizens displaced by the violence that marred the country in recent decades.


First we entered a classroom to hear a student give us a brief overview of the university's goals. Students lined the walls, all looking like typical college kids -- stylish, irreverent, smiling, showing off their English. But there was one guy that didn't seem to fit in. His hair was cut close. He wore a mundane outfit of blue jeans rolled up once at the ankle, a brown shirt and cheap brown shoes. He was quiet, not smiling or talking like the others. As we left the conference room to begin a tour of the campus, I asked him in Spanish where I could find a restroom.


Later, in a classroom, the professor began to tell as about an organization that helps people reenter society after years of working for or running from guerrilla groups and paramilitary groups in Colombia. He spoke of a young man who had been attending his meetings. He described the man as quiet and strange, perhaps even mentally retarded. The man had expressed an interest in writing a book but admitted that he was illiterates, only able to write his name. The professor agreed to transcribe his story, one that began in a small town on the Colombian border with Venezuela:

Life at home was cool. In the morning, we would drink coffee with whole black sugar or fresh milk with whole sugar. We would also walk over to the farm next to ours to get milk and sugar and play with other kids. I once got a huge bump on my head trying to run away from a calved cow that almost nabbed me. Times were good, until the abuse began. I was barely two or three when my dad started beating me up with gourd canes, belts and even with ropes. He beat me so hard that he would leave marks on my back and on my legs and I'd bleed real badly sometimes. But my siblings did not get beaten, which was quite strange because I was the low-key and laid back one. My dad probably beat me up simply because he didn't like me. He always loved my siblings more than me and that caused for me to become more quiet and aloof. I had always been rather shy and restrained but, feeling the way I did back then, I grew more and more standoffish. I never scuffled with my siblings; what's more, I let other kids punch me without retaliating. With my dad though, it was a different story; when he beat me, I repeatedly said to myself that as soon as I grew up, things would change because I'd be able to fight back.  

The young man telling this story, the professor finally told us, was the quiet kid in the brown shirt and cheap shoes (far left) who had shown me to the restroom.

His story continued with him fleeing his father's abuse by moving in with family members. There life wasn't much better. His aunt treated him not as a member of the family but as free farm labor. He worked hard, resting only when he had the chance to walk to town for some free time. In town he befriended an older, gray-haired man who was a member of a paramilitary group. The man asked the kid to join the group, but the kid refused until one day a gun was stuck to his head and he was demanded to leave the farm and join the fighters. He was 11 years old when he began his training as a fighter.

Over the three months of training at the school, we didn’t get permission to go to town or to go walk out of the school at all. They never gave us weapons but authorized us to bludgeon anyone while on guard. We got our weapons about two months later, but just so we could learn how to assemble and disassemble them. They handed us AK-47's, Galil 5.6 rifles or M-16's with grenade launchers. After three months, the four of us who first got started grew to one hundred of us and we were even joined by guys over 40. As we were the elders of the group, that month we were given our camouflage outfit and a rifle; we were taken out of the school and sent us into the woods. Training was over!!      

 We were thrown into the woods and were unlucky enough to run into a fight with guerrillas about five days later. All we could hear and see was the shots being fired and the explosions of gas pipe bombs thrown by the guerrillas. The truth is I don’t know if I've ever killed anyone in such showdowns, but I indeed shot in their direction. There were about four hundred of us, but the fight was tough and the guerrillas were decimating us. In the end, I had to stop shooting and start picking up and helping the wounded. The fight had begun at around nine in the morning; it was eight at night and we were still fighting them off. After that, well into the night, the shooting let up and we had to sleep right in the battlefield, right in the line of fire. We wound up almost with no hearing, with a severe earache from the noise of the shots and with a headache from the smell of gunpowder that refused to go away from the air. When we ran out of food and water, many of our peers had to drink their own urine in order to quench their thirst.       

 The young man, whose name I hesitate to share because I didn't ask him specifically if I could, continued with the fighting group until he was eventually transferred to be the bodyguard of commander called Cuchillo, Knife in English. He was called this because he would butcher his enemies then order the cooks to use his bloody knife to chop the vegetables. He moved up the ranks quickly and by the age of 13 was commander of a unit.

Basically, La Fina was a special security group in charge of managing the coca business. We had our own uniform; it was all black, with a coca leaf printed on the back and the word "fina" under it. We had to keep an eye both on the coca crops and on the money produced by the sales. I would send the guys out in pairs to check on the crops and the labs in the area to make sure everything was OK. Although older guys, up to thirty years old, were in the group, no one challenged my authority despite the fact that I was only thirteen, because they knew I was the boss and they had to obey me. Truth be told, the boys always worked well. I never had any trouble with them.        I was at La Fina for eight months. At times, I'd hit town for a bit of fun with the boys for a while as the guys we did business with gave us big money. Those mobsters on occasion would give us up to two and three million pesos apiece, just for the sake of it. I always carried ten million pesos with me; that money was to be spent on the food of all us of at La Fina, and that sum probably sufficed for about two months. We never cooked; we always ordered food. The rest of the money was generously given to us by the mobsters from the sale of cocaine. We always had money. I could easily spend one million pesos per day as I knew that the next day most likely we'd sell more coke and get more money. Those guys were tough. They came from Santa Marta, Cali and Medellin on airplanes and didn’t only pay in money; sometimes the boss asked for payment to be made in weapons and those guys would bring just about anything, machine guns, a hundred rifles, satellite radios…they could get us anything!  

From 2002 to 2004, the young man was involved in fighting another paramilitary group called the  Buitragos. He was injured in this battle and remained in a coma for more than a month. Fifteen days after waking up, he was back in the woods fighting again.

People around town didn’t like the Buitragos because they were deranged murderers; they committed a whole lot of massacres and went beyond guerrilla standards and people didn’t appreciate that. The war didn’t begin with the Buitragos trying to take over our turf; truth be told, we were the ones who invaded theirs to try to drive them out of that area.


The war was no longer against the guerrillas; it was simply a war over the control of the coca business and of the clandestine runways to fly the drugs out of there. That was the main goal, not fighting the guerrillas off. Very rarely did we capture guerrillas, and when we did, the order was to butcher them. The truth is I didn’t feel anger or hate against those guys, but some of our partners did feel hatred or abhorrence for them, so much so that when we captured a guerrilla fighter, they kicked him in the face once and again, they spat or even piss on him. I, on the other hand, didn’t take pleasure in doing that. If I shot or butchered them, I was simply following my orders. I didn’t do it out of wrath as others did.

Over the next several years, he bounced from one battle to another, from one fighting post to the next, always with plenty of money and drugs and girls. He and his buddies would escape the gruesome war to party in the towns outside of the jungle. They would drink bottle after bottle of alcohol staying awake for days on end with the help of heaping plates of cocaine. Once he suffered a heart attack but was back at the bar within a few days. It's not hard to understand the need for alcohol and drugs, even for a kid so young:

Those were horrible days. Everything stank of death, even our own clothes ended up reeking of it. I was unable to eat any food because of the smell; I limited myself to drinking water and, to be able to withstand that routine, I was on Red Bull and Gatorade by the bulk. The stench was the only thing that ticked me off; to try to keep it away, I wore a cloth over my face. Loading the dead and digging up their graves was not a problem, it didn’t bother me at all. However, some of my partners couldn’t get themselves to do it as they were sickened by the whole task of carrying all those corpses. The commanders forced them to comply, though. For me, that war was one of Colombia's most vicious, if not the most of all. The funny thing is that, of all the dead, none were guerrilla fighters; they were all paramilitaries. At times, in addition to the stench and the heaps of dead bodies, what shocked me most was the thought of the families of those boys. I would think that, most surely, none of those mothers actually knew where their children were; I thought about how sad their parents must feel just wondering as to the whereabouts of all these poor victims of war and I considered that many of their families would never learn of the destiny of their children or how their lives came to an end.    

In September of 2005, the now veteran fighter joined a demobilization process sponsored by the Colombian government. The government promised houses, money, clothes and security as incentives to rejoin a peaceful society. Soon he realized the deal wasn't as good as he had hoped. The money the government gave out was pennies compared to the money he was making in the jungle, and the clothes were nerdy and didn't fit well. He never got a house or any of the other things promised by the government. Ultimately, he fled to rejoin the fighting.


During this time he was promoted to commander over the training school, where young boys came to learn to be fighters. He fell in love with a girl named Marcela, who became pregnant with his child. She was murdered before the child was born.


In 2007, eight years after he left his aunt's house, he searched for and found his mother in Cartagena. After finally convincing her that it was indeed him, that he had not yet been killed in the fighting, he stayed with her for a month at her home. He returned to the fighting, though, because he wasn't able to make any money in Cartagena, and the economic situation was stressful to his mother.  He spent some time as a contract fighter for the Colombian army and also some time working with police. Mostly, though, he continued fighting in battles with paramilitary groups. In 2008, he ran away and eventually joined another demobilization effort.

The truth is I'm not afraid. I came from there standing proud; I never screwed up, I never stole one dime and I always worked well; that’s why they trusted me so much. I was always up to par and achieved good results. I was always faithful. But, at some point, I don’t know what happened; I was fed up and think I grew bored with the war and with being in the woods, with not being able to eat in peace and quiet without having to look around for threats; I was tired of all the nightmares and sleeping with a Prieto Beretta or an R-15 under my pillow. The first few days away from the woods were quite tough; I felt weird. At times, I felt like going back. I felt sad, lonely and bored. I sat at home and reflected upon lots of things. I spent my time like that, sitting, pondering…I thought so hard that one of my neighbors, a girl who usually passed by my house, said to me once, "You're going to think yourself to death". Sometimes, while doing all that reflection, I felt urged to phone my friend and ask him to send me tickets so I could go back. I felt that way because our home was in need and I was penniless.

The young man is still in Cartagena. He attends therapy sessions and receives a regular demobilization subsidy from the government. He works every Monday as a bus driver's assistant. He has been drug-free and alcohol-free since December. That day in the university classroom, someone asked him about his plans for the future.


"I don't have any," he replied simply.  "I'm still working on plans."


He told us that being free from the fighting and bloodshed is not easy. People look at him with disdain, call him "killer" and shun him. He lives in poverty and is learning one day at a time the social skills needed to survive outside of the jungle. He says he has learned that  family and friends are the most important things in life, and it is for them that he stays.

Sometimes, out of necessity, I feel like going back…but, I don’t know. At times, something inside me keeps me from going; I can't explain it. Sometimes I think it must be God holding me back, getting in my way and, maybe, I will actually never go back. When I go to church and really pay attention to God's message, I feel alright; I feel happiness in my heart. My whole body feels at ease. Although it may sound like a lie, it is true: at times, I rise in the morning with my body aching all over and I go through the whole day feeling in pain. But the next morning, when I go to church, my body simmers down. Maybe I feel like that because God is now so close to my heart, urging me not to go back to the woods. Before this, when I made my decisions, I was quite radical; whenever I felt like going back to the conflict, I simply did it, without much pondering. But now I'm different; now, I do feel like going back but when I make up my mind to leave, something inside me holds me back.    

I know this had been a long post, but I felt obligated to share at a least a little bit of this guy's story. There is much, much more to the transcription. He sat across from me that day in the university classroom, his eyes dark and intense. I wanted to give him a hug, but I didn't. I wanted to say something to him, but I didn't know what to say.  I get the feeling that he believes that something good will come of his life even if he isn't sure just what or how. I am glad to know and tell his story. May it be interpreted as one of hope and healing and forgiveness.