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.

***