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Colombia: On the Rio Tapaje

8 July - Pueblo Nuevo

An hour upstream from El Charco lies Pueblo Nuevo, a small village where residents have fled the fighting that occurs on this part of the river. Colombian military units from the Brigades Fluviales advance up the river using boston whalers with .50 caliber machine guns mounted on their decks. These boats, called Pirañas, are part of Plan Colombia, the multi-billion dollar US program to eradicate coca production and cocaine smuggling into the United States. As the Colombian military moves around on the river, FARC guerillas have attacked from the treeline, essentially invisible because jungle comes right to the water. Both armed groups have river checkpoints. At El Charco, the Colombian military has a large base for the Pirañas. When I asked what was farther upriver, beyond San Jose, a soldier told me, FARC and coca. No one we asked would take us beyond this point.

8 July - Heading Upriver from El Charco

After crossing the vast mangrove swamps to El Charco, we headed deeper into the river system closer to the FARC-controlled areas. The displaced campesinos of Pueblo Nuevo told us that they were afraid to return to their homes because the army was there in force. After several false starts when men with boats refused to take us farther up the river, we found a man willing to make the journey. People associated with the rebels conveyed the message that there were no cameras allowed in their sector. They did not want to communicate with journalists.

The Tapeje is part of a river system which is labyrinthine and spread out over a great distance. Without someone who knows the routes, the points where the sandy bottom is inches from the surface, we would have been lost and aground in minutes. As we spent more time on the river, I began to notice something odd - the near total absence of birds. When the engine fell silent there was hardly any sound at all. In all the great river deltas I have seen, birds and small animals abound, but not the Tapaje.

Map of Journey in Nariño

Our route through the southern Colombian Andes to the Rio Tapaje.

Click for more detail.

El Charco, 7 July

El Charco sits on a bend in the Tapaje river, a good sized town that is home to a growing population of displaced people from upriver. It is a violent and unpredictable place, filled with informers for the FARC and a heavy military presence. El Charco is poor and people have little or no civic services. The mayor told us that the city has gone without a supply of fresh water for more than two months.

We arrived and found about 100 campesinos living in an gymnasium in town. Many of them were from Pueblo Nuevo, a town an hour upriver that was caught in fierce fighting between FARC and the Army a few months ago. They also told us that the guerillas had helped them grow coca and they were afraid to return to their homes. Their situation has definitely gone from bad to worse. They could expect very little help from the Colombian government, which assisted them with mattresses and food for three months before turning the case over to the Red Cross. We made a trip the next day to Pueblo Nuevo to see if there was anyone left.

Carlos took photographs while I taped interviews with the displaced families. Many of them seemed desperate when foreigners showed up asking questions. People who have fled fighting often are important contacts in a war zone and often have much better information than the authorities. When I asked about the ecological effects of the spraying, they insisted it was a disaster for the river, that the chemical killed off jungle animals, fish and birds.

El Charco, 7 July

To get to El Charco, we headed for the coastal city of Tumaco and then caught a motorboat that would take three hours moving north along the Pacific coast into a vast delta and then finally into the Rio Tapaje. The first hour on the launch was on the open ocean, a rough ride, and a campesino next to me struggled to hang on to his pet ducks as the boat tossed around on the waves. A passenger commented, ‘Well, if the ducks go overboard at least they are prepared for it.”

The road to Tumaco, 6 July

We drove down out of the Andes on a switchback road through small towns that had experienced recent attacks by the FARC. As the mountains gave way to jungle and low hills, it was easy to see how the rebels could kill police officers and government soldiers without being caught. In the foothills of the Andes, thick forests run right up to the road, and fighters can move around the villages without detection. Every few miles, soldiers stopped all cars and questioned the drivers.

Pasto, Nariño 4 July

At a café on Pasto’s main square we meet Winston Viracachá, a local cable tv journalist. Winston has been kidnapped and held by the ELN, tried in a revolutionary court and acquitted, as well as involuntary stay with the FARC. We drink and talk about the possibility of traveling to the Pacific coast and exploring the delta near El Charco, a town where many of the displaced campesinos have ended up. In the café we meet a mayor of the one of the small towns near Pasto, a man with absolute faith in his town as an ecological tourism destination. He never mentions the civil war going on all around the capital of the state. After an hour with him, I was almost convinced he was right.

When Winston Viracachá is in Pasto, he wears full suits and when he’s on assignment, a vest marked with the cable company’s logo. The town seems too small to hold him. He's hoarse from talking on the phone all the time.

The only low point of the day comes when we end up in the mayor’s office and an official there tells us in very polite tones that journalists who talk to illegal groups are subject to arrest. I shook his hand and walked out. We were careful not to discuss our itinerary with this man, since it would almost certainly end up in the local office of the internal security bureau, DAS. The previous director of the agency, Jorge Noguera, has been charged with complicity in the murder of Colombians by passing lists to the AUC, or right wing death squads. Jorge Noguera was very close to the current president, Alvaro Uribe Velez. This is part of what Colombians call the parapolitics scandal that has spread to include a large part of the national legislature.

One of DAS’s tentacles will call us into the office, locating us at our hotel Pasto just as we are about to return to Bogota, but this is after we have already taken our trip through the rivers and jungles.

Pasto, Nariño 3 July

Tuesday July 3

A tour through Colombia's restless south

Two guerilla groups are active in the southern province of Nariño, the Cuban-inspired ELN and the FARC. Colombian Army units have been involved in killings and disappearances of the native Awa people, a community that finds itself caught between the rebels who cross their territory and the U.S.-backed Colombian army. Nariño, the poor but fertile state wedged between Ecuador and the Pacific, has more than its fair share of human rights violations and coca production. Much of Nariño's territory is only accessible by boat. There are only the few roads that connect back to the Pan-American highway.

In another burden to the citizens of Nariño, US spray planes flying out of Tumaco cross the jungle to dump tons of glyphosate defoliant as part of the coca eradication program. It has not slowed the arrival of cocaine in the United States at all, only pushed it from one place to another. Much of the coca production we will find is the work of campesinos who are only a step up from subsistence farmers.

A vast tracery of rivers descends from the Andes mountains to course through thick jungle until it finally empties into warm Pacific to the west. It is perfect terrain for revolutionaries and coca growers because the government cannot control the lengths of the Tapaje and Patia rivers. As Colombian units in their .50 caliber equipped Boston Whalers make their way upriver, a flood of refugees has been arriving downstream in small, poor towns like El Charco, caught between FARC and the Army.

According to the UN High Commission for Refugees, Colombia has the worst internal displacement problem in the Americas and follows somewhere behind Iraq and Sudan. This is why we are headed to Nariño, to see it firsthand. In the language of aid agencies, people who are forced from their homes but do not cross international borders are not refugees, they are IDP’s, internally displaced people.

When we land at Pasto's airport at five pm when the light looks as if it is radiating directly from the peaks. The buckled landscape of the cordillera is mountainous like Northern California with tropical forest covered peaks, it is a more mythical version of places I lived when I was kid. Forty-five minutes later, we arrive in Pasto in the shadow of the volcano Galeras.