Spent all of July in Colombia, and at least some of the time before, during, and since that trip immersed in another stack of Colombia books. An inadequate summary here, because I’m too far behind to do any of these full justice.
The Vortex by Jose Eustasio Rivera felt like a must-read as I prepared for my first extended trip to Colombia. It’s a novel about the Amazonian rubber boom in the early 20th century, published in 1924 to great acclaim. It starts as a sort of adventure story – young rich boy from Bogota runs off with a girl he is not supposed to marry. And turns slowly into a sort of muckraking tale of the Rubber Barons and the workers they hold as slaves. This from the intro:
During the 1800s, natural rubber found many uses, such as waterproofing raincoats or boots. After the 1880s, rapid urbanization led to the paving of city streets, and all street vehicles began to need rubber tires. The advent of the automobile threw street paving and rubber consumption into high gear, and in Amazonia a rubber boom began. Amazonian rubber trees had never been successfully cultivated. Collecting rubber meant finding the trees that grew naturally scattered in the rainforest and tapping them there. Large-scale exporters from outside the region controlled the rubber trade. They had the capital, the connections, the warehouses, and the large riverboats needed to bring provisions in and take rubber out. They held their rubber tappers as virtual slaves, through debt peonage, a practice sadly common in Latin American history. Through this practice, workers became indebted when labor recruiters (enganchadores, from a word meaning “to hook”) signed them up with a cash advance. Afterward, unable to grow their own food or acquire it anywhere else, the workers consumed overpriced company rations that consistently cost more than the workers earned. The workers were then bound to their employer by continuing debt, unable to leave until it was paid off, which meant more or less never.
The descriptions of the Amazon itself are riveting:
Eventually, the total horror of the jungle was unveiled before my eyes. I witnessed in sharp detail its lurid, slow-moving panorama of life-entwined-with-death—the great trees shrouded and deformed and imprisoned by voracious webs of climbing vines that leap from surrounding palms and then clamber inexorably upward, like fishing nets carelessly hung to dry. Like a crawling octopus, the matapalo, or “tree-killer” vine, attaches its tentacles to the great vertical trunks, twisting and penetrating the bark, grafting itself into the living flesh of its host, injecting its dominance and purpose in a painful transmigration of spirits. The spreading drapery of vines accumulates a detritus of years—a compost of rotting leaves, sticks, and fruit—that occasionally showers to the ground in the form of dirt and fungus, mixed with salamanders, blind reptiles, and spiders. Trillions of devastating bachaquero ants ascend the forest canopy to trim it and then march back to their underground colonies along miniature highways kept clear down to the dirt, carrying their trimmings of leaf and flower like tiny banners of destruction. Termites sicken and kill the trees like some kind of galloping syphilis that conceals its deadly progress.
Pinning this bit as well, because it’s among the books most famous passages:
I AM A RUBBER TAPPER. I live in the fetid river mud, in the solitude of the forest, with my malarial crew, slicing trees that bleed white blood, like the blood of gods. Thousands of miles from my birthplace, I dread all memories of it, because all are sad. My parents? They grew old in poverty, awaiting the return of their absent son. My younger sisters? They waited with patient optimism and trust until no longer young, hoping for a dowry that never materialized. Sometimes, as I hack at the bleeding bark with my hand ax, I take a notion to vary the arc of its swing just a bit and cut off those worthless fingers that never could hold on to money. What are hands good for, if they don’t produce, don’t steal, and don’t redeem? These hands have wavered when I asked them to end my suffering. And to think that so many denizens of the jungle endure something similar. Who created the gap that yawns between our aspirations and reality? Why were we given wings to live flightless lives? Poverty and aspiration, stepmother and tyrant, drove us forward, but to no avail. By looking to the heights, we’ve neglected the most fundamental necessities. Turning to those necessities, we’ve lost whatever we had gained. As a result, we are heroes only of mediocrity. The man who saw the resources for a happy life almost within reach has not been able to get rich and leave Amazonia. The man who aimed to win a bride has settled for a concubine. The man who has resisted abuses has been crushed by magnates as impassive as the trees that witness his daily battle against fever, leeches, and insects.
***
The Ingrid Betancourt book, Even Silence Has An End may end up being the most moving, disturbing and oddly life-affirming book I’ve read this year. It did not teach me much about Colombia, or much in general, beyond: the FARC were deeply cruel to their captives; the Colombian Amazon is unfathomably large; I would very much not like to be kidnapped. But the writing is exquisite throughout and despite its unrelenting grimness, the book itself is impossible to put down.
Betancourt, a former Colombian Senator and — at the time of her kidnapping — a presidential candidate, spent six years as hostage. Just long enough for her father to die, her children to grow up, and her husband to move on in her absence. She endured horrific abuse, including being chained by her neck to a fence, being dragged or forced to march for hours and hours and hours through wretched heat over wretched mountains, while malnourished and in some cases very sick, and the pure psychological terror of unending captivity. Books were rare and precious commodities. Food was perpetually scarce; so was contact of any kind with the outside world. Dehumanization was near total, and friendships very few and far between. Amid such prolonged deprivation, even fellow-prisoners turned easily on one another.
It’s not that I can’t fathom it, it’s that I really, really do not want to. I wept openly (at work!) when Betancourt and her fellow-prisoners were freed at the book’s conclusion. I admit that watching the Colombian peace process from afar, I have been frustrated by those who resist reconciliation on the grounds that the guerrilla get off too easy – isn’t it better to just move tf on at this point? This book helped me grasp the roots of that reluctance much better (in retrospect I probably shouldn’t have needed a book to do that).
Betancourt’s descriptions of the rainforest —and of the horrors and hardships she endured there — are as harrowing as Rivera’s, if not more so. But what really grabs are the psychological study she makes of her captors, her fellow captives, and herself. One little snippet of that, here (I did this on audible, so don’t have a hard copy to quote from extensively). It’s from right after she’s been caught trying to escape, and knows she is about to be violently assaulted by the guerrillas who have recaptured her:
I heard the man with the chain speak to me: He said my name over and over with a familiarity that was meant to be insulting. I had decided that they would not hurt me. Whatever happened, they would not touch the essence of who I was. I had to cling to this fundamental truth. If I could remain inaccessible, I might avoid the worst.
My father’s voice spoke to me from very far away, and a single word came to mind in capital letters. But I discovered with horror that the word had been completely stripped of its meaning. It referred to no concrete notion, only to the image of my father standing there, his lips set, his gaze uncompromising. I repeated it again and again like a prayer, like a magical incantation that might, perhaps, break the evil spell. DIGNITY. It no longer meant a thing, but to say it repeatedly sufficed to make me adopt my father’s attitude, like a child who copies the expression on an adult’s face, smiling or weeping not because he feels joy or pain but because by miming the expressions he sees, he triggers in himself the emotions they are meant to represent.
And through this game of mirrors, without my thoughts having anything to do with it, I understood that I had gone beyond fear, and I murmured, “There are things that are more important than life.”
***
The Alma Guillermoprieto collection, consists of two books — Looking for History and The Heart That Bleeds — that together contain nearly 30 New Yorker pieces Guillermoprieto wrote between the late 1980s and early 2000s. Each one reads as a sort of dispatch from one of several Latin American countries (she tackles Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Peru and others) – unpacking the current political drama, wrapping it in historical context, speculating on what might happen next, etc. A lot of it was both too old news and too inside baseball to be much use to a general reader at this point, but I found the six pieces devoted to Colombia well-done, occasionally riveting, and really helpful as review / context / additional perspective on all the things I’ve been trying to make study of for the past year or two. (THTB contains three pieces from 89, 91, and 93 on the rise and fall of Pablo. LFH contains three more, all from 2000 on the lead up to Plan Colombia. I didn’t find any surprises in her takes, but it was good to read some pieces that were written in real-time and not retrospectively!).
Guillermoprieto’s reporting is unparalleled and her writing can be lovely at times. It’s mostly conversational in these pieces, but a few narrative bits really stood out. Like this one:
AMONG THE FEW PEOPLE to have benefitted from the current faceoff between the government and the cocaine traffickers are Bogotá’s windowpane fitters. The other morning, at an apartment building that had been left glassless as a result of a nearby explosion, there were three teams of them, trotting from a lineup of flatbed trucks to the damaged building with enormous rectangles of glass in their mittened hands, maneuvering each one into place by means of suction cups, clambering back into an apartment through the nearest gaping window, and barely pausing to puff a little and ease their backs before picking up the next pane. “Every morning, we turn on the radio and wait for the announcement,” one of them told me, “and then when we hear it we go, ‘Bomb explosion! Let’s get to work!’ And we set out for whatever address they give on the newscast. There have been a lot of bombs, but there are a lot of glaziers, too, so it’s not really that much extra work, but I’ve done four or five buildings already myself.” The man said his name was Carlos López, and added, as he and his partner eased another pane of glass out of their truck, that he expected to be extremely busy that day. Eleven bombs had gone off the previous night, most of them in this neighborhood, which is called Teusaquillo and is one of the pleasantest in Bogotá. It dates from the nineteen-thirties, and if the orderly rows of red brick houses with tile roofs don’t quite achieve the English look that was so clearly intended, it is partly the fault of the vegetation—splendid purple-flowered sietecueros trees along the curved streets, and blood-red begonias and blue agapanthus crowded into the narrow front yards. There are a few modern apartment buildings here, several unpretentious brick churches, and—a blessing in a city plagued by noise and congestion—not much traffic, even though Teusaquillo is only a fifteen-minute drive from the downtown area, where Congress, the National Palace, and several government ministries are clustered. The major parties and a good many important politicians have their headquarters in Teusaquillo, so that when the cocaine traffickers decided to launch an attack on what is known here as la clase política it took only eight minutes, and two cars cruising down the neighborhood with several charges of dynamite, to devastate the campaign headquarters of nine politicians. Because the streets here are not very wide, the detonations shattered an inordinate amount of glass, some of it as much as two blocks away from the target sites. Thus Carlos López’s euphoria as he saw himself surrounded by buildings full of business potential. In the way Colombians have of taking all disasters in stride, López’s prospective clients were neither hysterical nor outraged as they stood in clusters outside their windy apartments, comparing notes to see which glazier was offering the best price. One woman, still recovering from the fright of waking up a few hours earlier to the sound of ever-closer detonations, until an enormous one sent a storm of glass shards flying into her bedroom, was still amused to note how the window men had knocked at her door, offering cards and taking measurements, even before the clock struck seven. The aftermaths of the first several dozen bomb attacks launched by the narcotics trade in response to the joint United States-Colombian anti-drug offensive have had in common this slightly festive air. At least, people seemed to be thinking, things weren’t worse.