The Dispossessed. Aviva Chomsky
“These chronicles shake you to the core,” wrote Luis Barros Pavajeau in the online cultural review La Esquina Regional. “However, they are part of the other country, one that feels far from the large cities. A country that covers itself with a cloak of silence, to dodge the shame of a reality that still fills every corner.”4 Antonio Caballero, a columnist for the weekly Semana, cited the story of Toñito, related in “The Turkish Boat,” in a broadside against the government’s failure to protect the country’s children from violence.5
When Desterrados appeared in Colombia, its author was marking his second year in exile from the country. As he describes in his personal memoir, “From Exile,” Molano fled Colombia for Spain on Chistmas Day, 1998. He had become a target of the country’s paramilitaries after serving as an adviser to the president’s appointed commission charged with investigating the possibility of entering into peace negotiations with the guerrilla oppositions, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN). Through this work, Molano became increasingly outspoken about the obvious (but unacknowledged) collaboration between the Colombian armed forces and the right-wing paramilitaries, who carried out horrific massacres of peasants in the name of fighting the guerrillas. Spokes men for the “paras” (as the paramilitaries are known) openly threatened Molano with death. Molano discovered that two suspicious men loitering outside his house were soldiers dressed in civilian clothes, and an armed forces commander assigned to protect him admitted that the army couldn’t protect him from would-be assassins. The last straw came when paramilitaries, citing “irrefutable proof” that Molano was a “paraguerrilla,” delivered a threat to the editorial offices of El Espectador, the liberal Bogotá newspaper where Molano writes his weekly column. After nearly five years in exile in Spain and the United States, Molano returned to Colombia in early 2004.
Molano makes no secret of his identification with the political Left, but the charge that he is a “paraguerrilla” is absurd. As he told an American interviewer in 2000, he faced death threats because
I am a man of the Left and of the university, more or less. I continue being very critical in Colombian society of the political system, including of the army and naturally the paramilitaries. This doesn’t mean I’m totally in agreement with the guerrilla, although I agree with them on many things. I agree with agrarian reform. I agree with the reforms they’ve proposed for the army. I agree with the reforms of the media and the justice system. But naturally I don’t agree with everything. First, because the guerrilla has Stalinist roots. They are military forces and this gives a lot of force to authoritarian tendencies. I place myself at a distance from that. But my critiques of the system, of the great landowners, of the ranchers, of the army, of the paramilitaries, these are what caused the threats. And the threats grew until I saw that not only was I in danger but my family and those close to me.6
Molano is one of Colombia’s leading public intellectuals, the winner of major awards for his scholarly and journalistic work. A trained sociologist with an advanced degree from the École Pratiques des Hautes Études in Paris, he served in executive positions in several nongovernmental organizations addressing issues of environmental and rural development before taking a position with the government’s peace commission. Although well recognized for his academic publications, Molano turned to a new arena—newspaper and television journalism—in the late 1980s. Since 1991, he has written a weekly column in El Espectador. In 1993, he won the Simón Bolívar Journalism Prize for an episode of the television documentary “Travesías” about Colombia’s indigenous in the town of Chenche. Journalism gave him a wider audience than those who had read his technical reports. It carried a cost, as well:
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 and stories and in my 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. (p. 43)
Molano found increased interest in his work because many of his readers could empathize with the human stories he told. As Aviva Chomsky’s foreword points out, Molano’s trademark style is firmly rooted in the Latin American tradition of testimonial literature. This method imbues Molano’s work with an authenticity and a radicalism—not in the sense of a political tract, but that of “going to the root of the problem.” Molano’s work holds a mirror up to Colombian society, trying to present it as it is. He captures the point of view of ordinary people—from peasant activists to drug couriers. His method brings to mind Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin’s admonition that “one must always try to be as radical as reality itself.”7
The view of Colombia that emerges from Molano’s crónica is that of a country where deadly violence accompanies everyday life like the rain or sun. In “Ángela,” the young narrator dwells mostly on memories of her childhood. Violence only intervenes, initially, as a disruption of her play: “We used to go down to the river a lot to cool off, especially in the afternoon, until my father forbid it because of the bodies that began to float by. He didn’t want us to see them” (p. 69). In “The Garden,” another narrator remembers, thirty-seven years after the event and rather matter-of-factly, the day assassins broke into her first communion celebration. Their victim’s blood splattered across her white dress. The violence erupts and engulfs the individuals, who often admit they have no idea how they could have become ensnared. Ángela’s father realizes he has to flee after paramilitaries accuse him of ferrying guerrillas across a river. “But my father didn’t know who they were,” says Ángela (p. 70). The four protagonists of “Silences” seem more interested in living out their retirement years in Boca del Cajambre than in the conflicts around them. Yet paramilitaries murder old Ánibal after he makes the mistake of sharing Christmas Eve dinner, drinks, and a shower with members of a guerrilla unit.
For the most part, the people who tell Molano their stories are apolitical, in the sense that most of them are not political activists or guerrillas. But this should not blind us to the fact that the violence and the displacement have very clear political and economic roots.8 Documenting these political, social, and economic roots of the desterrados is the contribution of Mabel González Bustelo’s essay “Desterrados: Forced Displacement in Colombia.” González Bustelo, a Spanish journalist and researcher with the Centro de la Investigación para la Paz (Peace Research Center) in Madrid, helps us to grasp both the magnitude and the causes of the problem of forced displacement in Colombia, clearly linked to a neoliberal economic model that focuses on Colombia’s export industries:
Forced displacement is a phenomenon linked to the history of Colombia and to the country’s unfinished historical processes. The economic and political elite have used displacement to “homogenize” the population in a given area and to maintain and expand large estates. Currently, the pressure exerted by the neo liberal model to increase capital circuits has made the process more difficult by introducing factors that change the value of the land. As such, people are not displaced “by violence”; rather, violence is the tool used to expel the population. The true causes for displacement are hidden behind the violence. The reasons for displacement include strategic control of military and political areas, restructuring of local and regional powers, control or disruption of social movements, control of production and extraction activities (of natural resources and minerals), mega-projects, expansion of stockbreeding estates and agricultural industry, control of illicit crops, etc.9
The current war between the Colombian state, the paramilitaries, and the guerrillas must be viewed in this context. González Bustelo has written that Von Clausewitz’s famous aphorism can be adapted to Colombia today as “war is the continuation of economics through other means.” This phrase not only describes the historic employment of private landlord armies to seize prime farmland, but also today’s neoliberal policies that slash state education and health services to such a point that huge areas of the country seem untouched by any state presence except the military. In this “Wild West” atmosphere, paramilitaries and guerrillas can fill the void so that entire regions of the country become immune to Bogotá’s influence. Neoliberal policies forcing competition between small Colombian farmers and international agribusiness drove more than five million farmers