The Colombian Army helicopters break the silence of the nights in El Guaviare, an extensive area of hot land in the southeast of the country of magical realism, to protect a population that dreams of offering humanity its ecotourism paradise and a pantry of extraordinary richness and variety after putting an end to the nightmare suffered by the endless crossfire between the left-wing guerrillas and the illegal armed groups. It is the jungle where they spent six long years of captivity in the hands of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) Ingrid Betancourt and her secretary Clara Rojas. It is also the jungle where four indigenous children were lost for 40 days after surviving a plane crash. They were miraculously rescued on June 9.
In the 1980s, narcoterrorists also settled there, that flooded the streets of the small cities and the hamlets of banknotes while riding in the very thick tropical jungle their clandestine cocaine laboratories. For more than fifty years, El Guaviare welcomed the FARC guerrillas in the midst of total confusion, to the far-right paramilitaries and drug traffickers led by Pablo Escobar and Gonzalo Rodríguez ‘El Gacha’. Now its long-suffering inhabitants have to learn to live with many difficulties in a peace unknown to them.
“Everyone here has been related to the cocaine business,” admits Arnoldo López, a tour guide. which proudly shows visitors the riches of an abandoned world, the one with the greatest biodiversity on the planet, covered with copious flora and an exuberant fauna, where rock paintings with pictograms still without dating are hidden, engraved in the impressive sacred tepuis of the indigenous people, only accessible to shamans. Through this Eden they pass rivers colored by beautiful aquatic plants and a spectacular view of the imposing Serranía del Chiribiquete rises, nestled in the Guiana Shield, one of the oldest rock formations on Earth, which crosses Venezuela, Brazil, Guyana, French Guiana and a part of Colombia. A fascinating landscape.
Land of settlers inhabited by cabucos, mestizos of whites and indigenous people, the fertile Guaviare it went from the marketing of rubber to the business of wild skins to devote itself from the mid-1980s to the production first of marijuana and later of cocaine, a drug that filled the pockets of the most bloodthirsty mafias in Colombia and the coffers of the guerrillas and paramilitaries who are now emerging from the jungle to rejoin civil society after the signing of the controversial peace agreement on November 24, 2016 between the Government of Juan Manuel Santos and the leaders of the FARC. A peace with a strenuous and endless road riddled with potholes.
The inhabitants of El Guaviare have learned to handle silences and face the opportunity to leave drug trafficking and violence behind with undisguised uncertainty. “It’s not easy,” admits César Arredondo, a tour guide who grew up in San José del Guaviare under the FARC dictatorship, where the guerrillas punished with severe beatings minors who were caught smoking a simple cigarette. With thieves and drug dealers they were even less condescending. They simply killed them, even though they did not have the slightest qualms about doing business with the purest quality coca produced by the drug traffickers.
The second country with the most anti-personnel mines in the world
The commandos led by Rodrigo Londoño, ‘Timochenko’, strictly ordered the lives of the peasants. They told them when they could cultivate, cut down trees or hunt in a controlling effort that without meaning to it has ended up protecting this paradise from the destructive hand of man. In Colombia, the country with the second most antipersonnel mines in the world, after Afghanistan, there are more than a million square kilometers of virgin land controlled during the last half century by the guerrillas, left and right, and by the drug traffickers, who in a perverse barter came to pay for the peasant labor of the naive indigenous people with small cartridges of cocaine. “When I was younger, I couldn’t leave the house after eight in the evening,” recalls Arnoldo López, referring to the curfew that fear of militiamen imposed on the 60,000 inhabitants of San José del Guaviare, the capital of the department.
In the memory of the elders they remain etched in blood and fire the images of the 2002 massacre in Boyacá. The FARC, confronted with the paramilitaries for control of the area and access to the Atrato River, murdered more than 100 people who had taken refuge in the temple in a church. Nor can they forget the massacre of 32 countrymen in Maripián in 1997, caused by an attack by Carlos Castaño Gil’s ‘paracos’ against those they considered collaborators with the guerrillas of the South.
Life in El Guaviare has been very hard, everyone admits, now finally determined to enjoy the beauty of its landscapes. But they demand the presence of the State, whom they reproach for having abandoned them to their fate during the more than 50 years of conflict. “Politicians only come around here when it’s election time, and very little,” censures Abraham Ballesteros, who, together with his wife, Sonia López, guards the access to the steep path that leads to the cave paintings of Nueva Tolima, in the Sierra de the pretty one
The same criticism is launched by the inhabitants of the extremely poor communities on the banks of the Guaviare River, a flow of 1,497 kilometers long formed by the confluence of the Guayabero and Ariari rivers. “At the end of the 1980s, at the height of drug trafficking, there was even a disco here,” recalls a 66-year-old woman from Antioquia who has lived in this town for 45 years with nostalgia. tormented by bullets from the Army, the guerrillas and the paramilitaries of Castaño Gil. In 2004, the “paracos” began to leave the areas they controlled to rejoin society. Not all did, because some they created new criminal brigades that still terrify the indigenous people, They traffic drugs and engage in illegal mining without the slightest scruple.
The Serranía del Chiribiquete National Park
The Serranía del Chiribiquete National Park emerges unexpectedly in this vast and lush landscape spread across the department of Caquetá. Better known as El Brócoli, due to the amazing thickness of its vegetation, it has an extension greater than that of the Netherlands. El Chiribiquete, with 575,000 hectares, was chosen by Pablo Escobar to hide his largest cocaine laboratory in Tranquilandia, camouflaged in a dense Amazon jungle flooded with rivers, savages, vestiges of indigenous rituals and hallucinogenic, toxic and medicinal plants.
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Discovered this frontier of the civilized world in 1987, some expedition members from the Botanical Garden of Madrid collaborated in 1991 in the investigation of the huge sacred place of the Karijonas tribe, inhabited by hundreds of species of birds and butterflies.
It is paradise trapped in a conflict that has not yet completely calmed down to bring peace to the peasants of El Guaviare, determined to change the cultivation of coca leaves for cocoa, coffee, sweet potatoes or pineapples while proceeding to clean up the areas infected by pesticides dropped from the sky within the framework of the Colombia plan signed with the United States in 1999 to end the extensive cocaine plantations.