The Dispossessed. Aviva Chomsky
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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.