Early next morning saw the three of us back at the, rather inaptly named, El Dorado Airport. This time though it was in the ‘national’ section. Through the large glass windows we could see the massive international jets and, dwarfed by the latter, the tiny, twin-engined planes we were to travel in. As we booked three seats to San Vicente we were immediately confronted by one of the many ironies of the Colombian situation. Satena, the airline that would fly us to the guerilla-held town, was run by the Colombian military. So much for our low profile!
The next shock came as we were about to board our little twin-engined, 28-seater Fokker. We passed on the German jokes as we saw our luggage, and that of all the other twenty travelers, stacked on the runway around the plane. Each person had to identify his luggage (there were no female travelers) and carry it with him onto the plane. Danny told me that this was to ensure that no one managed to sneak a bomb on board. As I settled into my seat I noticed that every one of the other passengers turned to look at us three foreigners.
The take-off seemed to take ages. We didn’t seem to be going fast enough. I remember thinking that I hoped we wouldn’t run out of runway. Just as I was becoming seriously concerned, we bumped into the air and skimmed over the top of the green sward of a forest. The experience of cruising smoothly at 30,000 feet hadn’t prepared me for the roller-coaster ride of flight in a small plane. As we dropped down from the heights of Bogota, the warm updrafts from the jungle below buffeted us unrelentingly. Sometimes we dropped by as much as fifty feet, leaving our stomachs behind to catch up with the rest of us. At the same time, the pitch of the engine would change from a piercing screech to a halting, throbbing sound. Never once were you able to escape the knowledge that you were on a plane.
Below us , the Amazonian rain-forest stretched out in every direction, with no other distinguishing features whatsoever. There were no roads, no buildings, no electric pylons, no sign of any human presence at all. Occasionally there would be a dark scar where a river intersected the jungle. I reflected that, should we come down, it would take hours, if not days, for help to reach us.
We made one stop, at a little jungle town who’s name was as hard to pronounce as it was to find on the map, then it was on to San Vicente. This was the point of no return, there was no going back now.
San Vicente Airport was little more than a concrete strip in a jungle clearing. As we taxied after landing we saw a group of about eight guerillas in military fatigues just beyond the perimeter fence. We had been warned that they would be expecting us as they monitored the flight lists closely.
As we left the plane the heat hit me. It was like being enveloped in an invisible hot mist. Within seconds I was sweating from every pore on my body. My underwear was quickly saturated and I felt rivulets of cooler sweat running down my arms and legs. My love affair with the jungle was off to a very shaky start. I realised that this would be a very uncomfortable place to live, especially for someone used to mild, European climates.
The terminal buildings were a collection of half-finished sheds. We stood in a group with several other travelers who we suddenly discovered were Colombian journalists. I had been so busy trying to keep my own identity a secret that it hadn’t occurred to me to find out who else was traveling to San Vicente. “There’s no one here to talk to you, you know”, said the man from El Tiempo. “All the leaders are in Spain at a big peace meeting.”
It was not a particularly auspicious start. With fledgling feelings of impending doom I climbed into a taxi and set out for nearby San Vicente. I consoled myself that it wasn’t a particularly political piece I would be doing. So whether or not I managed to talk to any guerilla leaders wasn’t crucial. Just so long as I got some good background stuff on the guerillas in general I’d be okay.
San Vicente was something more than a one-horse town. There were at least six of them standing in the high street. One urinated enthusiastically as we alighted from our taxi outside the hotel. It would have been nice to think that the Hotel Malibu had seen better days, but I feared it had always been a slum. At eight dollars a day it was the best hotel in town. Unfortunately, that was no consolation whatsoever. The small, dilapidated room with adjoining shower/toilet was rudimentary in the extreme. There were two ways of looking at it. It was either the worst hotel room I had ever been in, or the best cell. I decided to adopt the latter approach and set out to make the best of it.
With absolutely no incentive at all to sit in our rooms and sweat, the three of us soon congregated on a small veranda that overlooked the street. Unfortunately it also overlooked the urinating horse, which suddenly decided to complete its ablutions by having a crap. As the stench of horse-shit drifted up to the veranda, we decided that this was the cue for us to explore the town.
Carrying everything of value with us, we set off. The dusty streets surrounded by broken down, two-storied buildings looked like the Mexican towns in the old cowboy films. Higher up on the surrounding hills could be seen the tumble-down clutter of shanty towns. As we walked, swarthy, sinister, suspicious faces seemed to stare out at us from every doorway. It soon became apparent that we were the only gringos in town, and the first for a long while.
Danny and I had already fallen into an easy familiarity. His irreverent humour complemented mine in many ways. Then there was the rivalry that often springs up between Londoners from different areas of the city. It was especially keen between those from the East, that is the East End and its environs, and the rest. They definitely thought that they were sharper dressers, better money-getters, could pull more women and were cleverer thieves. There was nothing malicious in it. In fact it was all part of the rivalry to be more funny and cleverer with your mouth.
“Reminds me a bit of the East”, I said out of the corner of my mouth, as if I were afraid of being overheard. “Definitely a touch of Brick Lane over there, so you two boys should be feeling quite at home.”
Their reply of, “bollocks”, was long and drawn out. “You West London mob ‘ave got a few slums of your own, mate”, rejoined Dan.
“Yeah, but we aint got all those outside toilets that you lot have still got.” My reply was met with a chorus of “bollocks” from the pair of them.
Suddenly, the narrow, dusty streets opened out into a wide, central square that was a riot of colourful graffiti and banners expressing revolutionary slogans. And there, right in front of us, was a one-storied slum, similarly bedecked with banners and slogans, that was obviously FARC’s local office. A guerilla in jungle fatigues, his weapon close by, lounged in a chair outside.
For melodrama, all that was missing were the strains of the theme from ‘High Noon’ as the three of us advanced on the office. I reflected that this would be a crucial encounter. This would determine how much assistance, if any, we would get. In the event, Danny’s fluent Colombian Spanish and ready wit proved invaluable. Soon he had the guerilla laughing. He stood and shook hands and offered us a cup of coffee. Then he explained that there was no one here at the moment to talk to us and could we come back in the morning.
Right next door to the office was the Yokomo Café. It was clean and the staff were friendly. We decided to make this our centre of operations. Nine am the following morning saw the three of us sitting outside the café eating breakfast. Jungle-fatigued guerillas, with bandoleros of bullets around their chests and carrying automatic weapons, bustled in and out of the office. Strangely, FARC seemed to own few cars, for most came and went on trail bikes or in the yellow town taxis.
We soon saw that nine a.m. was quite late by San Vicente standards. The town, and, of course, the guerillas, had been up for hours and many had already gone off on their assignments for the day. We would have been there at least an hour earlier, but we had been held up by Trent. Jungle or no jungle, he clearly felt that there were certain standards to be upheld. His fastidiousness didn’t come without a price either. Danny and I had sat about for over an hour whilst Trent had washed, shaved, done his hair and generally attended to every detail of his toilet. Dan summed it up nicely. “My old woman gets ready quicker than he does”, he muttered sotto voce.
But now we were ready to get down to business. There were real, live, heavily-armed Marxist guerillas to interview. However, on closer inspection, these guerillas seemed considerably under-whelmed by our interest. It wasn’t so much that they ignored us, just that everything else they had to do had a higher priority.
Then Lucero appeared. The Colombian journalists had told us of the beautiful guerilla who held high political and military rank. She was married to a top FARC negotiator and had a seven-year-old daughter who was looked after by her family. Short, with eyes that seemed to flash and sparkle with amusement, Lucero was a veteran of many battles with the Colombian Army and had achieved almost legendary status. She listened while Danny explained what we wanted, but politely declined, saying she had important things to do. She suggested that we speak with Comandante Nora, who was out the back of the office.
Leaving Trent and myself outside, Danny went in search of Comandante Nora. Within seconds he was back, a pained look on his face. “She’s busy at the moment, we’ll have to wait for a while”, said Dan. But there was something in his attitude that made me curious.
“What’s she doing then?” I asked querulously. The combination of the stifling jungle heat and the lack of cooperation was making me tetchy.
“Her fucking ironing”, replied Danny in similar vein.
There was something in his manner that indicated that he wasn’t joking, but this I had to see. I walked inside and peered through a dusty window. Sure enough, there was Comandante Nora, AK47 propped against a table, ironing her blouse.
Whilst we were waiting, a portly, heavily-mustachioed guerilla called Comandante Mauricio came up and introduced himself. He had been sent to show us around the town. You didn’t have to understand Colombian to discern that Mauricio was less than pleased with his assignment. But as far as we were concerned it was the most positive step so far. As Mauricio headed off on foot, we followed in his wake.
Over the next couple of hours we got an in-depth look at most of San Vicente’s road-works and municipal improvements. We trudged for miles along a network of hot dusty streets, none of which were paved or tarmacked. A few looked absolutely impossible to navigate in anything less than a tractor. Suddenly we came across a road that was precipitously steep and deeply rutted. It might not have been the worst road in the world, but it was certainly in the top ten. Frustration must have made me blasé. Turning to Dan I said, “Definitely a touch of the Mile End Road there, mate.” The three of us laughed.
Mauricio might not have understood the language but no doubt sarcasm is internationally recognizable. His face like thunder, he advanced on me. With his finger he beckoned for me to follow him. We had passed hundreds of tumble-down hovels in our progress through San Vicente, but had looked into none of them. Suddenly I was standing inside one.
The floor was of bare earth, with a couple of pieces of plastic matting scattered about. The roof was a patchwork of rusty and holed corrugated tin. The walls were made out of an assortment of timber of different sizes, colours and types. The windows were just holes in the walls with torn material in the place of curtains.
There was one large room, with what must have been a bed in the middle. On this sat a tired-looking woman in her early thirties dressed in rags. At her breast a small infant was feeding. Around her feet sat several other small children. This was abject poverty in the extreme.
Mauricio spoke to Danny for him to translate, but his words were clearly for me. “The Government have never, ever done anything at all for these people. These are the ones they have given up on.”
It was meant as a rebuke and it had its desired effect. I was instantly both ashamed and embarrassed for making fun of such a situation. What had I been thinking of? I prided myself on having a social conscience. I wholeheartedly supported revolutionary movements like FARC. I told myself it was the effect of the ‘Loaded’ factor. Their readership wouldn’t be the slightest bit interested in civic reconstruction in rural Colombia. ‘Loaded’ was an irreverent, light-hearted read. Everything had to be a laugh or a put-down.
So how did I justify my writing for them? The answer to that was that whilst the style of writing might appear to be lighthearted, the message was still there. Because the establishment controlled the media, socialist revolutions never got a fair press. This was an opportunity for me to get the message across to several hundred thousand people, who might normally baulk at the idea of reading a serious political piece about Colombia. Anyway, all ideology aside, I resolved to treat everything much more seriously from here onwards.
Then a little incident occurred that further defined what I was already discovering to be a difficult relationship with Trent. Danny and I had been strolling ahead, pointing things out to each other and talking, whilst Trent had been hanging back to photograph whatever took his interest. Suddenly he called me over. I thought it was to point out something. “Look Norman”, he said in a very level tone, “this is your first assignment, so I am really the senior man. When we’re out like this you should walk behind me.”
For a long second I thought he was joking. Neither of us had completely relaxed with the other, so humour would have been difficult anyway. But as I stared into his face it dawned on me that he was serious.
Perhaps the rebuke from Mauricio had curbed my normally ebullient personality. Perhaps I was still striving to be as professional as possible. Maybe I was temporarily lost for words. As I turned and walked over to Danny, Trent struck out ahead.
Danny screwed up his face as I drew near and shook his head, “he can be a bit of an arse-hole at times” he offered. If anything it served to bring Dan and I closer. He was a decent guy who was embarrassed by such behaviour.
That evening, tired, uncomfortable in the suffocating evening heat and frustrated by our lack of real progress, we sat in what passed for the lounge of the Hotel Malibu. Occasionally we glanced at the one TV set, high on the wall. Suddenly it had all our attention. There, all over the national evening news, was San Vicente Airport. And at the forefront of the screen, waiting to meet what looked like some sort of official delegation as they descended from the aircraft, was Lucero.
With Danny translating we learned that this was FARC’s official peace delegation, returning from a peace conference in Spain. Traveling along with FARC’s delegation were top ministers of the Colombian government. We had missed what was probably the biggest news event in the history of San Vicente, out looking at road works with Mauricio. With a growing feeling of impending doom, I retired to my room for the night.