A Final Pilgrimage : Simon's Sword Recovered?

Here we are on our last day in the country, huffing and puffing our way uphill towards the mansion -- this our final Bolivarian pilgrimage. The house sits at the base of the Bogota's soaring peak, Monserrate, amongst beautiful gardens full of palms, ferns and rhododendrons. After seven weeks of travelling through Colombia, we finally visit the Quinta Bolivar where El Liberatador lived on and off from 1810 to 1830.

Earlier in this blog I mentioned Simon Bolivar's sword and the tale of its theft from the Quinta Bolivar in 1974 by the then outlawed "terrorist" group, M-19 (now an established Leftist party in the Colombian parliament).

The original sword is now safely locked up somewhere in the bowels of the Banca de Republica, the government oddly superstitious and fearful about it disappearing again if placed on public display.

A replica of the sabre and its scabbard, has ironically been donated to the Colombian people by Hugo Chavez, President of the so-called, "Bolivarian Republic" of Venezuela and sits at the foot of El Liberatador's bed on display. I say "ironically", because it is well known that Chavez has secretly provided military and economic support -- and continues to fund -- Colombia's main guerilla group, the FARC, to the tune of millions.

The M-19, split from the FARC in 1974 precisely because the latter refused to support its audacious plan which at the time FARC considered irrelevant to its objectives and damaging to its image.

There is in fact quite a fascinating story behind the raid. One detail that caught my attention was the absurd lead-up to the theft. Once the decision was taken by the M-19 to steal the sword, an advertising campaign ensued with the guerrilla group placing curious messages in the major newspapers.

These ads placed in the papers on the 15, 16, and 17th of February, 1974, read:

“Parasites? Worms? Memory loss? M-19 is coming soon”.

People in the streets tried to guess what the M-19 was. Almost everyone though it was some kind of medicine for an itchy bottom.

Rumours of the "M-19" made the rounds of Bogota as the members of the revolutionary movement set every detail for the definitive strike on the Quinta de Bolívar. Late on the 17th of February, they easily broke into the mansion, stole the sword and left leaving some pamphlets behind about the group and why they had done what they did.

The day after the theft, headlines spoke of big operations to recover it. They did not succeed, in part because the M-19 always knew how to keep the sword safe. It was kept in a notorious brothel for a time, at the home of a famous Colombian poet, Leon de Grieff, then passed along to various M-19 supporters, activists, intellectuals and artists across the country. In the late 1980s it was even flown to Cuba for safe keeping!

The M-19 went about placing graffitti on walls around Bogota the next day:

“Bolívar, your sword is back in the struggle”.

As well as quoting Bolivar himself:

“I will keep my sword unsheathed as long as the liberty of my homeland is not completely assured”.

The international "revolutionary" support for the theft was astonishing. A group called, The Order of the Keepers of the Sword was formed in 1986, and it included people who sympathized with the causes of the M-19 such as Fidel Castro, Ómar Torrijos (the Left wing leader of Panama at the time), and absurdly, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina.

From being an ignored, almost totally forgotten artifact in a small, badly guarded museum, the stolen sword become mythical in the minds of the Colombian general public.

In the 1990s the M-19 joined the new Constituent Assembly formed by the elected liberal President of the Nation, César Gaviria Trujillo. The group laid down its arms and returned the sword as a gesture of goodwill and to demonstrate that a revolutionary group was able to participate in the Democratic process, if genuine opportunity is provided.

"We were no longer at war, so giving it back was a honorable farewell from our times in secrecy,” said one of its foremost leaders who went to Cuba to retrieve the sword.

On January 31 1991, the sword was returned to The Quinta de Bolívar in a lavish ceremony ... but then was rushed off to the high security bank vault.

So the sword has been returned -- after a fashion. Still, (and like Colombian Democracy itself) no one has actually seen the authentic item in decades.

Most amazingly, there are plans to exhibit the sword ... but only in cyberspace. I wonder what message about Colombia the virtually exhibited sword of Simon Bolivar might send?

A representation of freedom without actuality?

A Classy Cup of Coffee

I could not reconcile the fact that most coffee served in Colombia -- its "tinto" -- tastes like dishwater while the country itself produces the world's finest beans. I wanted to know why.

The bus zooms around hair pin turns along the mountain road from Medellin to Manizales. I am feeling increasingly queasy, the deep greens of the countryside reflecting the way I feel. (The last thing I feel like is a caffeine hit).

It's a landscape of deep ravines with thick stands of giant, fluffy bamboo, towering palm trees running along ridge tops, a dappled tapestry of coffee plantations and citrus orchards wrapped in low lying clouds.

The trip usually takes five or six hours. It has taken us just four. Our heads are spinning. We thank the deities that we have arrived in one piece. The bus deposits us near a roadside restaurant where we make a call.

Soon afterwards a jeep from Hacienda Venecia, located a long way below us on the valley floor, arrives. The charming manager of this eighty year old plantation, J.P, gets out and greets us in perfect English, no doubt the product of an excellent education gained abroad. He has taken time out from the busy affairs of the coffee farm to drive up the bumpy, unpaved road to pick up two curious Australians. We will be staying for the next couple of days at the Hacienda which has recently started offering travellers acommodation.

That evening we get down to discussing the dishwater mystery.

"I refuse to drink coffee from a cardboard or polystyrene cup -- and as for those big, cheap mugs of slosh they serve in the U.S ..." I hear myself telling him in a tone of mock disgust.


(I quickly regret the impression this latte loving, pseudo-European, coffee-snob might be making.)

...Want to read the remainder of this story? It is available in my book, 'The House on Lopez Cotilla - A Journey through Latin America' (Kindle Direct Publising, 2012)

***

Old Providence

Thousands of black, claw snapping, slightly aggressive, red eyed crabs have left their holes deep in the island's clammy interior and are moving through the undergrowth down towards the sea. On arrival they will spawn and a few months later make a similarly dramatic exodus uphill and back to their jungle lairs prior to the September heat. The crabs are everywhere. Some have not made it across the badly paved road which runs the circumference of the island's shoreline. It is an amazing sight, a huge, living blanket of life, a single intelligence fulfilling a singular, biological purpose.

Old Providence is located 900 kilometres off the Colombian mainland and is actually closer to the Miskito coast of Nicaragua. It is part of a remote archipelago of islands which includes its larger sister island, St. Andres, which by stark contrast, has been devastated socially and environmentally by decades of unchecked migration from the Colombian mainland and laissez faire development.

Providence is sleepy, extraordinarily blessed with natural beauty and has a population of about 5000 locals. For some strange reason it was considered unsuitable for development by the Pinillo Government of the 1950s and luckily escaped the disasterous economic push which saw St Andreas become the most densely populated region in Colombia, in fact, in the whole of the Caribbean.

Allocated a tax "free port" in the 1950s St Andres attracted swarms of mainlanders and foreigners who bought up land cheaply displacing much of the black, English speaking population (known as Raizals), disrupting traditional forms of economic activity and destroying much of the fragile environment of the island. The total lack of urban planning and population explosion created problems in areas such as public health, housing and law and order. It also created a conflict between Raizals and Panas (the Spanish speaking newcomers from the Colombian mainland) and by the 1980s San Andres also had narcos using it as a base for drug trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

It receives the vast majority of tourists from the mainland and strangely enough, few venture the quick half hour plane ride on to Providence.

The most recent census showed that only about 30% of the population on St Andreas speaks English as its first or preferred language, whereas on Providence, more than 90% of residents speak English (or the island's particular brand of Creole English) as their mother tongue.

Islanders also speak Spanish fluently and it is amusing to hear Castillian words freely thrown into the pot of a grammatically and syntactically challenging variety of English.

"We's could naught ee'n duerm (sleep) in dee past for da wretch-id noise o' dat blast'id scamp'rin' " I am told by one of the locals about the crabs. (trans. "We could not even sleep in the past for the wretched noise of that blastered scampering")

She claims the islanders had to set the four legs of their beds in pans of water to stop the determined creatures from climbing up and :

" Us woz bitin' ar narices off dey!" (Narices Sp. = noses) (trans. "They were biting our noses off, they were!")


Over the next ten days I come to hear lots of local legend about this island of barely twenty square miles.

The crabs too have been woven into local myth and legend.

Conquering Spaniards, who were never very welcome on this far flung, Caribbean island, were said to have been scared off during their explorations by the crustaceans. During the rainy season the horny barked Cockspur trees are full of crabs which unwittingly dislodge savage ants. These fall and inflict painful bites on any unsuspecting passer-by ... as I unfortunately come to experience for myself on a long, hard trek to the summit of The Peak at the island's centre.


...Want to read the remainder of this story? It is available in my book, 'The House on Lopez Cotilla - A Journey through Latin America' (Kindle Direct Publising, 2012)


Two publications were consulted to help write this article:
The first was The History of the Settling Process of the Archipelago of San Andres and St.Catherine by Loraine Vollmer, Ediciones Archipelago, San Andres Isla, 1997 (out of print but kindly loaned to me by Sabina at Frenchy Paletas Arts Gallery, Freshwater).

The second was, A Legacy of Pirates by Jim Gordon Bull, trans. Anni Chapman, L. Vieco e Hijas Ltd, Medellin, 2008.

***

No Lenin's Tomb

We have learnt to pace ourselves, to conserve our energy in this heat, to move slowly like the giant iguanas that pad along the lawns at La Quinta San Pedro Alejandrino, a vast, lush tropical property where Simon Bolivar died in 1830.

It is a hot afternoon in Santa Marta on the Northern Caribbean coast of Colombia; the weather better suited to a good, long siesta than homage to South America's greatest son.

Tamarinds and ceiba trees create huge islands of protective shade. We catch sight of hummingbirds amongst vivid orchids. A line of school children emerge out of nowhere and make their away across the avenue of honour lined on either side with the sun bleached flags of the continent's nations.

Considering the reverential esteem in which Simon Bolivar is held throughout South America nowadays, it is amazing to think El Liberatador ended his rule largely reviled by the population.

Bolivar had decided to leave for Europe, disillusioned by the anarchic direction the liberated countries were moving in and stunned by the public's open hostility to his Bolivarian Constitution - which admittedly (and worringly?) enshrined his Presidency for life. His exile was interrupted by illness and sudden death. Bolivar is is quoted as saying on his death-bed:

"Let's go! Let's go! People in this land do not want me. Come boys! Take my luggage on board the frigate."

We pass one or two other visitors walking through this vast property of palms and tropical flowers bursting through lush greenery. Along the labyrinth of pathways you come across the occasional bust or plaque paying tribute to notable figures from Bolivar's life and battles -- his comrades: Sucre, Girardot, O'Leary, Narino, Miranda, Santander. But these busts and portraits are not altars to saints. Bolivar had complicated, tempestuous relationships with most of them, fell out quite dramatically with his successor, Santander, and made the tragic mistake of allowing Miranda (the victim of a political set up) to be executed. Bolivar was tormented by the decision for the rest of his life.

Simon Bolivar was no God -- and this is no Lenin's tomb. El Liberatador had feet of clay.

The heart of La Quinta is the actual hacienda in which Bolivar died. At first I am surprised by the hacienda's Le Corbussier-like appearance : simple, smooth and clean lined. I think it must be some sort of relatively modern exhibition space, library or administration block.

Joaquin de Mier, a very wealthy Spaniard had invited Bolivar to stay at this handsome country house before the latter set out for Europe. When Bolivar arrived in Santa Marta, he was diagnosed by a US navy surgeon and his own personal doctor as having a serious lung condition (most probably tuberculosis).

Bolivar's journey down the steamy, malarial Magdelena River during his self impose exile is described with great humour by Garcia Marquez whom I have discovered titled his fictional account on Bolivar's own words.

When learning he was so sick and asked whether he wished to receive the last rites, a delerious Bolivar is quoted as asking:

"Am I so ill? How will I get out of this labyrinth?"

The descent into sickness and sudden slide toward death seemed to have greatly shocked Bolivar. It is this very typical human reaction which I find touching. It is Simon Bolivar, the man, and not Simon Bolivar, El Liberatador, who fascinates me (as he obviously did Marguez).

...Want to read the remainder of this story? It is available in my book, 'The House on Lopez Cotilla - A Journey through Latin America' (Kindle Direct Publising, 2012)


*** Simon Bolivar: A Life, John Lynch, Yale University Press, 2007

The direct quotes are taken from Professor Lynch's biography of Bolivar which is highly recommended. The book has been a very enjoyble read and useful resource throughout this journey.

The Song of the Absent Rower: Candelario Obeso

I came across the word "zambo" for the first time here in Colombia. It is a commonly used ethno-specific term for someone from a mixed African and Indigenous background and seems not to have any particular negative connotation. I delved deeper, however, to discover that in standard Castillian, "zambo" is the word for "baboon".

You immediately start making connections. "Creollo", "mulatto", "mestizo" -- these other categories (any racial category for that matter) used to describe a person's racial background have me cringing -- but I am surprised at how freely they are employed in Colombia. Perhaps these terms have been "appropriated" over time by those whom they aimed to denigrate -- much in the way being called a "wog" has been back home? It is "Zambo", for some reason, that intrigues me with its traces of old world Spanish racism, (that repulsive equation of a primate and a person), as well as the historical seed it carries within itself : a connection between Spain and Africa in the first instance via "baboon" and then the subsequent application of the term to a class of African slaves and exploitated Native people who united in a New World context.

I suspect "zambo" even insinuates its way North to the USA to become the totally reviled term, "Sambo"?

Candelario Obeso, the Afro Colombian poet, refers to himself as "your beloved zambo" in his beautiful poem, Cancion der Boga Ausente (Song of the Absent Rower) with a certain degree of irony and affection. From a dirt poor background, Obeso comes from Mompox, (which we have just visted) and which was the first town in South America to declare its total independence from Spain in 1810.

Mompox is also most famously associated with Simon Bolivar who was stationed here after two failed attempts to liberate his native Venezuela. Bolivar and the much feted 400 Momposinos marched on Caracas in 1811 giving huge impetus to the liberation of the whole of New Granada (Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru) a year later.

A monument to those events of the early 1810s sits proudly at the centre of Mompox's decaying Plaza Simon Bolivar with a handsome statue of El Liberador and an heroic inscription which reads:

If to Caracas I owe my life,
To Mompox I owe my glory.
For those with a literary bent, Mompox (and not the author's home town of Aracataca, I am assured) was the inspiration for Gabriel Garcia Marquez's mythical town of Mocondo depicted in One Hundred Years of Solitude. I am amused that quite a few Colombians I meet are rather dismissive of their Nobel Prize Winner and find him a bit repetitive as I do.

...Want to read the remainder of this story? It is available in my book, 'The House on Lopez Cotilla - A Journey through Latin America' (Kindle Direct Publising, 2012)

Simon Bolivar's Sword

Reflections on La Candelaria and Crime

May 1 - 3

I remember trying to stay warm in a tiny, box like room just off Kathmandu's Pie Alley in 1985. With wooden slats for a bed and the thinnest mattress imaginable I would, by candle-light, snuggle in my sleeping bag reading a novel picked up from a second hand book store in the area. That was more often than not, my evening's entertainment. The streets were dimly lit, covered in mud, strewn with trash and controlled by bands of mangy, vicious dogs that needed to be beaten off with sticks. The atmosphere was almost medieval and the area was not exactly safe. Close by there was the pie shop along a grimy lane which stank of piss and where illegal money changers and drug pushers did business. Apart from the obvious the Pie Shop served Tibetan momos, bowls of spaghetti and hot lemon drinks. There was music every night and guaranteed company and conversation. It was a place to exchange hair raising stories from the road and seek a little Western respite from the hard slog of travelling through the Indian subcontinent. I remember that Pie Shop as a little oasis where a relatively new breed of traveller, "the backpacker", sought refuge from the dark and cold alongside Hippies, who were beginning to look decidely older and a bit out of place.

Fast forward : Bogota, 2011. Here we are twenty six years later taking refuge from the dark and cold along Calle 13 in the Candelaria district. I'm astounded by the simiarities with Kathmandu's Pie Alley and its grimy, fascinating environs. We are three stories up in a ramshackle "apartment" paying a good deal more than the fist-full of worthless rupees, but still the price of a room is relatively cheap. We are snuggled up in bed, me with my net book cursing the WiFi connection which constantly drops out, my wife reading her Kindle with its fresh download of novels. There has been an evening down pour and outside the cobbles are coated with a slippery patina of mud.An overturned garbage bin lies at the curb of an intersecting lane being picked over by dogs and the occasional beggar. You would think twice about walking the streets of this part of La Candelaria at night. Shady types hang out on street corners, eyes glazed, faces drug ravaged. Music blares from the hole in the wall restaurants and cafes of the neighbourhood.

We are a stone's throw from Plaza Chorro de Quevado where it is thought Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada established Santa Fe de Bogota in 1538. La Candalaria stretches about 20 blocks in all directions - in fact it is the oldest part of Bogota. The closer you get to La Candelaria's main square, Plaza Simon Bolivar, the more strikingly beautiful the architecture becomes -- 16th to 18th century colonial, 19th century neo-classical, touches of faux Mudejar and Gothic as well as Art Deco.

...Want to read the remainder of this story? It is available in my book, 'The House on Lopez Cotilla - A Journey through Latin America' (Kindle Direct Publising, 2012)

Why Colombia?

"Why Colombia?" It's not just friends and family members who ask as they try and conceal their horror. I too have found myself at times struggling with the decision. No one needs to list the potential dangers and bad press the Colombians have had to endure for decades. A glance at any government travel advisory is enough to drain the courage of even the most daring traveller.

Twenty years ago I would not have given a second thought to the idea of travelling to a country like Colombia. I was much younger of course -- and obviously more wreckless. I find myself, however, losing my nerve. My wife, (as usual) just rolls her eyes at the horror stories I've pulled off the net. I actually appreciate her sanity in the midst of my own growing doubts. Being older, more fragile and less linguistically equiped she should logically have more to fear -- but doesn't.


"Of course, shit happens," she tells me, "but it can happen anywhere ... You just go looking for horror stories to scare yourself ... We're not going anywhere or doing anything particularly risky. We're having a stopover in LA but I notice you haven't gone to any trouble to find out about assaults, thefts, rapes, drive by shootings and killings that go on there."


She has a point. And as an acquaintance living in Colombia tells me:

"In Bogota and Colombia you could run into the same problems you would in many developing nations with high poverty rates. But the things which used to happen here are mostly history, with the exception of remote regions where guerrillas still roam."


I recall our first journey to Latin America in the 80s. We arrived in Los Angeles, taking the first Greyhound bus South and walking across the border into Mexico with no Mexican visa stamped into our passports. In stark contrast to the security measures on the US side of the fence, the Mexicans seemed indifferent to aliens wandering across into their territory. We disappeared into that massively exciting (and if you were believe the travel advisories, seriously dangerous country) for months, riding the slow train to Guadalajara, inebriated for the most part of the journey on tequila and aguardiente that was shared around the carriage.


My wife claims I got on the train full of these friendly Mexican passengers who shared their food, drink and good cheer and got off two days later speaking Spanish ... a "magical realist" exaggeration for sure, but a myth with some truth in the sense that we immediately felt at ease and were receptive to the people, their culture and language.

We eventually (and quite easily) bribed our way out of the Mexican visa stamp situation. We turned up at an immigration office in Guadalajara six months later, explained we had no tourist card or visa and were willing to pay any charges for our misdemenour. We were very politely offered a range of options, anything from a further 6 months stay to permanent residency - and not too costly at that. Imagine an illegal immigrant trying that on in Australia!


It occurs to me that this trip has some connection to the past. It's not a repeat but an extension of it ... a bit of unfinished business. I've brought along a number of articles from that time which have sat in a drawer at home doing nothing for the last twenty years. I thought it would be a good idea to resurrect them (or parts of them) on this blog while we travel through Colombia.


The last few years of the 80s were spent living, working and travelling through most of Latin America. We never managed to get to Colombia (at that time truly bogged down in anarchy). I've re-read Garcia Marquez's The General in His Labyrinth -- a horribly turgid book, especially on a first reading -- but am somehow now captivated by the portrayal of the main character, Simon Bolivar on his last journey from Bogota on the altiplano (a metaphor I suspect for the heights of his achievements as the region's Liberator from the Spanish) to the decaying, Caribbean city of Santa Marta where at the age of 47 (the same age as me) he meets his death, disillusioned by the disintegration of his vision of a truly liberated South American Super State.


The risk of not doing things or going places you want -- out of fear -- is perhaps the greatest danger of all as you get older. There are enough real problems and dangers to contend with at this age, why indulge or entertain those which do not exist or are at best remote possibilities?

Perhaps I have found my own answer to the question: "Why Colombia?"



***







Post Script:


All images above were taken today (2 May, 2011) at the Statue of Simon Bolivar, or at and around Plaza Simon Bolivar in Bogota. Seems I have survived our first day in the country to tell this tale, with - God willing - more to come in the following month or so :-)