Colombia's History of Violence, Reflected in One Woman's Life

• by Gloria Helena Rey (bogota)
• Friday, July 22, 2011
• Inter Press Service

She was five years old in 1950 when her family was caught up in the brutal conflict between the Liberal and Conservative camps — a period known simply as 'La Violencia' which began in 1948. Her family, who lived in Líbano, a town in the west-central province of Tolima, was forced to flee to a neighbouring province.

Líbano was in Liberal territory, but the Conservatives armed themselves and threatened to kill Liberals like Echeverry's family, who were living in three contiguous houses when a bomb was placed in her grandfather's house.

'For a little girl like I was, all that fear and escaping like we did planted in my soul a permanent sensation of fear, mistrust, uncertainty and a huge emptiness. An enormous anguish that I still feel,' she recalls six decades later.

The catalyst for La Violencia was the Apr. 9, 1948 assassination of the Liberal Party's presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Bogotá.

The violence between the Liberal and Conservative Parties was fanned by the conservative governments of the time. It gradually began to abate after the creation of the National Front in 1957, a power-sharing arrangement under which the two parties alternated in the presidency for two decades — which triggered new outbreaks of conflict, however.

In the 1950s, 'the prisons were thrown open, prisoners were armed, and they were released in exchange for bringing in the heads or ears of Liberal or Communist opponents. All of this, under the supposed political neutrality of the Catholic Church, because killing Liberals back then was not a sin,' Echeverry recalls.

Scholars estimate that between 200,000 and 300,000 people were killed from 1948 to 1958.

Armed bands were created, made up of off-duty members of the public security forces as well as civilians who acted as paid killers for the Conservative Party, while the entire State apparatus was under Conservative control.

The Conservatives killed, and the Liberals 'killed back', according to historians, organising armed groups in several provinces to fight the 'Conservative takeover,' among other actions.

In that ferment of hatred and betrayals lived the Echeverry family who, like hundreds of thousands of others then and since, ended up displaced from their homes and dispossessed of their land by violence that from then until now has varied in the names of the armed groups but continues to claim thousands of lives.

Since the mid-1960s, Colombia has been caught up in an armed conflict between government forces and leftwing guerrillas, which far-right paramilitary militias became embroiled in 20 years later.

Since the mid-1980s, between 3.6 and five million people have been displaced by the war (the smaller number is the official estimate and the larger is the figure given by human rights organisations).

'I just can't believe that everything is still the same, or worse. The violence is still happening, causing displacement, increasing it, embedding it,' says Echeverry, an active and vital 65-year-old.

Echeverry, a retired businesswoman, and her late husband, a Bogotá notary public who died in 1991, represent middle-class families comfortably well off, but not wealthy, who opposed and resisted the outbreaks of violence that have shaken this South American country for so many decades.

Volcanic mudslide, a fresh blow

On Nov. 13, 1985 the Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupted in northern Colombia, causing a deadly mudslide or lahar. The worst natural disaster in the history of this country and the second deadliest volcanic explosion in the 20th century after the 1902 eruption on the Caribbean island of Martinique left a gaping hole in Echeverry's life.

One of the victims was Carolina, the oldest of her four children, who was buried by the mudslide along with her husband at the family's country estate in the farming town of Armero, Tolima province.

'We never saw them again. That is an open wound that is still bleeding,' above all because they could have been saved if the estate manager had heeded her warnings, she says.

That day, Echeverry phoned and begged him to warn her daughter, and told him they should all flee, but he didn't listen. 'He said nothing would happen, that it was just some ash falling and the smell of sulphur in the air, and that I should calm down. By the fourth phone call, the line was busy. No one answered again. Armero was a sea of mud,' she says.

The mudslide killed more than 20,000 of the 29,000 people of Armero, which was completely buried. In a nearby town, it claimed another 3,000 lives.

The kidnapping

On the morning of Apr. 7, 2004, a group of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas kidnapped Echeverry and her cousin Julio Arango as they rode with 10 other people on a motorboat along the Inírida river to visit the Cerros de Mavicure mountains along Colombia's east-central border with Brazil and Venezuela.

'They separated us from the group 'to talk about a few things,' as they put it — but the 'conversation' ended up lasting 20 months,' she says, without providing details of how the kidnapping for ransom ended. But she did say it could have been motivated by the fact that her cousin is 'very wealthy,' and owns computer companies in Panama.

A rebel commander, Hugo, told them that night that they had been kidnapped, and gave them a notebook to make a list of all their assets. 'I started crying when he doubted that my list was complete,' she says.

They were months of difficulties as well as learning. 'They never mistreated us physically, but the psychological mistreatment is terrible when you are deprived of your freedom,' she says, after recalling that she was blindfolded for two hours before they reached the first of five camps where they were held captive over the 20-month period. 'I thought they were going to kill us,' she adds.

The fear is still vivid from when the insurgents would move them in canoes, forcing them to lie down on the bottom, covered with black plastic tarps, which 'nearly suffocated us, in the 40 degree heat.' She would also tremble 'when we heard a helicopter in the distance,' because their captors had told the kidnap victims that the order was to kill them if anyone came near or tried to rescue them.

She says she fell into depression and cried often until she understood that 'our captors were much more captive than we were.

'Their lives were miserable. They were more 'kidnapped' than we were. Most of them joined the guerrillas out of need, because of hunger or a lack of opportunities.'

She wrote down her experiences in four school notebooks that she still has, along with the improvised knitting needles with which she made green socks that she used to protect her hands, and other small items.

Now she is writing a book about 'the other victims' of kidnappings: the families whose lives are torn apart. 'My kidnapping, for example, destroyed the stability of my home and affected the marriages of two of my kids, who both got divorced,' she says.

Colombia is the world leader in the kidnapping industry. Between 1996 and 2008, human rights groups documented 23,854 cases, 15,304 of which were kidnappings for ransom carried out by common criminals, drug trafficking gangs or guerrillas.

The rebel groups use kidnapping to finance themselves or to take hostages with a view to forcing the government to negotiate humanitarian swaps of imprisoned insurgents for political or military hostages.

What did Echeverry learn? 'To live. To enjoy every moment, the here and now,' because she knows life can end in a second, and that there are people who suffer worse things than she has. She says she has come to understand that 'I am incredibly lucky to be alive and to want to continue living.'

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service