UNITED NATIONS - / MaximsNews Network / 19 May 2008 -- Award-winning journalist Silvana Paternostro provides a detailed account of war and magic realism in Colombia, the country of her birth, at The Actors' Gang during the Zócalo Public Square Lecture Series in Los Angeles on 11 March 2008: 

I would like to thank Gregory, Kara and Susanna for inviting me to come to Los Angeles and talk to you about Colombia, the country of my birth, a country that has been at war for at least the last 40 years, the country that I left when I was 15, and the country where my family still lives. We all know of Colombia as the birthplace of Garcia Marquez and magical realism.  Well, I was born right there in the land of what literature critics like to call magical realism. But on the north coast of Colombia where I was born, sometimes things happen that can be as absurd as the events that unfold in his novels in which bullets turn corners and women levitate. I grew up believing that if I swam in the ocean on Good Friday I would turn into a fish. My nanny, a young woman from the countryside, said it with such belief—that who was I to test the waters?

Magical realism is perfectly suited to a country like Colombia, where the truth is often so terrible and unspeakable that it needs to be told as if it were a fantasy. In fact, much of what you read in Garcia Marquez’ books is something that has happened or he has heard has happened. Marquez said that to write magical realism one has to become a journalist in Colombia. Garcia Marquez, a journalist before he was a novelist, transcribes Colombia's daily life.

Yet although these stories are the basis for beautiful literature, life in Colombia is not quite as beautiful. In the first sentence of Chronicle of A Death Foretold, Santiago Nassar is told his killers are looking for him—they had told everyone that they were going to kill him. In fact something quite similar happened to a distant member of my family.

He lived in a town not very different from where the novel took place, towns far away from laws and infrastructure, towns that have been living with a rigid structure of landowners and day laborers now for two hundred years. This distant relative, a man in his sixties was a landowner and like all the men who have farms in Colombia, he was a target of the left-wing rebels that are now known more for their kidnapping practices than for their revolutionary beliefs. The rebels announced that they were coming for him. Instead of going out like the protagonist of the Garcia Marquez’s novella, who donned his suit and went out in spite of his mother’s protests, Don Mario hired four bodyguards and locked himself in his house. Every day when the clock marked six, he shut the windows and turned the lights out.  Don Mario missed his land so much that to remember the smell of soil, he lay down on the patio of his house, and put his nose to the ground. He did this every night for four years: he smelled earth to be able to continue living.

As someone who has not lived there since the age of 15, that story sounded  surreal, ridiculous even if beautiful.  But it was told to me as the most natural thing in the world. It was reported in the local newspapers. Don Mario locked himself in his house for four years, with his nose to the ground and that was just the way it was. Just like when Kafka’s narrator registers quite matter-of-factly that he has turned into an insect overnight or when Garcia Marquez writes that one of the bullets that killed Nassar turned a corner and went up the stairs.

In 1999 after a 20 year absence from Colombia I went back to make sense of what was happening there.  The idyllic place of my childhood was disintegrating and I wanted to know what was happening. Colombia had in the years that I had been away become the largest exporter of cocaine, it held the highest number of kidnappings and murders, and it had millions of displaced people, almost as many as Darfur would later have.  Shortly after I left my very grounded life in Barranquilla, any other place in the world interested me more was than Colombia. That was in the eighties when to be a curious traveler from Colombia was a great inconvenience. I needed a VISA to travel anywhere. More than that. Being from Colombia came with all sets of stereotypes. I was strip-searched many times. The difficulty of traveling also came with a wave of violence. Colombia had to make driving motorcycles with a helmet illegal because there were so many drive-by shootings that this way it was easier to identify the murderers. Most of the time, they turned out to be paid teenagers. Commercial airplanes exploded in midair. All that happened in Colombia while I was not there then had a name: Pablo Escobar and the drug cartels. But Pablo Escobar has been dead 7 years. What was happening?

So, I got an assignment letter. I would go and report on Colombia like I had done so many times before throughout Latin America. 

I grew up surrounded by a loving family that made up better stories than Disney and better games than Mattel. My grandfather, a landowner, would call up to a creature known as Pretty Bird when we came over to visit him. Tell Pretty Bird what you want. I’d ask for Kraft caramels. My sister would want sugar-coated almonds. By the time we reached the patio, candy rained over our little heads.  Years later we found out that Pajarito Lindo was Alfredo, the guard that he had brought from the farm and who slept in the back room of the house armed with a machete next to the cook and the two other maids that helped around. 

I went back to Colombia as a journalist, but not to talk to the actors of the conflict and write it as foreign news. I went as the kind of journalist that Garcia Marquez suggests. I went to move between the magic and the real except I like to call my stories non-fiction magical realism. 

So tonight in order to help you understand the feeling of living in Colombia I am going to tell the stories that will I hope also clarify the situation that has been unraveling in front of our TV screens in the past few weeks - about the Colombian rebel killed in Ecuador by the Colombian army with the help of US intelligence, sanctioned by the OAS  as a violation of international law, an attack that led Hugo Chavez to send troops to the border with Colombia.

Thanks to that story you have all been hearing about the FARC, the dead rebel was the No. 2 leader of the organization,  an organization that started out in 1964 to overthrow the government and to bring social justice to Colombia but that lately has been in the business of kidnapping. Right now they have around 700 hostages, some of whom have been kidnapped for as long as ten years.  These include soldiers, a presidential candidate with a French passport, three Americans and many many others.  You might have even heard the story of the child born in captivity who was recently reunited with his mother after being released.

You might have also heard about the right wing paramilitary army—the AUC—that has vowed to kill every FARC or FARC sympathizer alive.  To do that anything is allowed, from stoning to hacking. To clean entire towns from guerrillas, the paras as they are known, massacre entire villages. 

Both sides are heavily involved in drug trafficking. And then to complicate matters there’s the military aid packages from Washington.

What does the story of Pretty Bird and the man who smells soil for four years have to do with the war you might ask? Aren’t talks about wars more about taking sides? Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? Is Uribe and his US supported hard line military actions good or bad? Is the FARC a revolutionary group fighting in the name of the oppressed or is it a terrorist organization? Are the paramilitary a legitimate self-defense army or a terrorist organization?  This is not that kind of talk.  This is about my Colombian War.  It is about non fiction magical realism. 

To start to talk about Colombia I have to tell you something. Colombia is spelled C-O-L-O-M-B-I-A. I would have to commend Zocalo because in all of the back and forth of our correspondence, they did not once misspell Colombia. I’m serious about this.  The United States is so unaware of the complexities of Colombia that most everyone thinks its spelled C-O-L-U-M-B-I-A like the university.  In fact, it was the misspelling of Colombia that made me realize that the US government was hugely interested in Colombia.

This was again back in 1999 at a liberal arts college in upstate New York. A friend who taught there had organized a one day conference to discuss the newly formed military aid package. All day long academics debated if Plan Colombia—remember this is before 9-11, and the ensuing events in Afghanistan and Iraq -- would turn Colombia into the next Vietnam, the next El Salvador, the next Balkan War.

As someone who had been closely following US foreign policy in Latin America for many years, this was quite a turn of events. I have always been surprised and confused as to why there is such little interest in news from Colombia. What happens in Colombia has always been of little interest in the United States. What happens in Colombia stays in Colombia! I know the Colombians like it this way. They are very sensitive about creating a mala imagen, a bad image abroad so Colombians would prefer it if you don’t know that they have the FARC that kidnaps and the AUC that massacres and that it has four million displaced people. They prefer to emphasize the good stuff: emeralds as heavy as apples, the richest coffee in the world, so many types of orchids and birds. Still Americans like to know where their tax dollars are going and I wonder if Colombia’s situation here gets such little attention because there is not a large Colombian community in this country swaying the vote like the Cuban Americans do in Florida or the Mexican Americans here in California.

Anyway, back to that college conference where Colombia was discussed for one day. I don’t remember much of the academic discussions. What I remember the most about that day is a poster held by a young student that was like the posters that I had seen in my college campus in the late seventies. In my college days they read:  US Hands Out of El Salvador. This one read: U.S. HANDS OUT OF COLUMBIA. But Colombia was spelled with a U.  Great I thought, the country is getting 1.3 billion dollars of military aid, the college students are marching with posters, but they had gotten the spelling wrong. There seemed to be something appropriate about this misspelling. It is a war as complicated as it is to get people to spell its name right.

Tonight I am here as the journalist who went to Colombia to move between the magical and the real—and sometime actually the awful. I went back and  lived again with parents and grandparents and siblings and friends and relatives who live there with the emeralds and the coffee and the best carnivals after Rio and with the kidnaps and the killings, a war that everyone dates as forty years old but really started 200 years ago. Colombia’s war started with the creation of Colombia. To when it went from being the Viceroyalty of the Nueva Granada to the Republica de Colombia named after Cristobal Colon---that would be Christopher Columbus and because Colon is spelled with two Os -- so is Colombia.

A little history is important.

Colombia was the seat of power of the Viceroyalty of the Nueva Granada, a colony of the Spanish Crown. Simon Bolivar, an educated and well travelled criollo didn’t like the rules of the Spanish crown and he led an army against them and won independence for the colony in 1820. The Viceroyalty became the Republic of Nueva Granada, and shortly thereafter it became the Republic of Colombia. If most criollos, the name given to the men of Spanish parents who were born in the colonies, were in agreement to fight against the Spanish Crown, they disagreed on how to build a republic. There were two major schools of thoughts.

The Conservatives wanted to follow the rules of the Spanish crown and have a government ruled by the Church and by some men with land.  The Liberals, influenced by the French Enlightenment, believed in secularism and in laissez-faire commerce. Between the start of the Republic in 1832 and the turn of the century, Colombia managed to have 32 wars between the Liberals and the Conservatives.  Bloody wars.  Remember the wars that Coronel Aureliano Buendia, the fictional character of One Hundred Years, fought on the liberal side? They weren’t made up. It’s historia patria as Colombians call their history. In fact, my great great great grandfather fought on the side of the Conservatives. He was the son of a French colonizer. He was a descendant of el frances que llego, the Frenchman who arrived as everyone in my family refers to their European roots. What gave my family an upperhand in a world that believes in class structure was a 25 year old who arrived to Colombia in 1848 from Bordeaux, bought some land, married a woman with some more land and settled. When it was time to fight the war the Frenchman's son, as the son of a landowner was naturally on the side of the Conservatives government.

The War is known as La Guerra de Los Mil Dias, which sounds much more poetic than a war that lasted for three years.  The Liberals and Conservatives paraded the streets in their respective colors. The Liberals used red towels on their waists. The Conservatives, who were prissier, wore blue handkerchiefs. Under their party colors they both carried knives and machetes.  The Conservatives won in 1902. But neither side disarmed.

The battles between the Liberals and the Conservatives of the Garcia Marquez novel are part of my family lore. And the town where the Conservative General lived is as storied as the town of Macondo. The General in the family was such a proud conservative that his house was painted blue, the color of the Conservative party. He lived across the street from the Church with three spires, he had the monsignor to lunch once a week, and he organized the processions of the Virgin from his house. But the Conservative and Catholic General, I also learned, had a great many children out of wedlock. When I asked how many, the family historian told me many more than there are letters in the alphabet. His eulogy read that he contributed greatly to the progress of the town even if his propensity for violence was misunderstood. Nobody I ask can tell me what exactly that means.

My grandfather was born in The Frenchman's House and he married my grandmother, another descendant of the Frenchman in the church across the street. Conservatives married Conservatives and good Conservative families married good Conservative families.  

Same happened with Liberals.

I remember reading about a town that had both Liberals and Conservatives but only one Church, so the priest decided to build two different entrances. One door painted red for the liberals, the other painted blue for the conservatives.  If this was how Colombia came into the twentieth century this is how it would enter into the 21^st. If the fight in 1898 was between Liberals and Conservatives, the one in 2001, they tell us, is between the rebels and the paramilitary.

The only difference perhaps is that if the war of the one thousand days was fought in both the countryside and the capitals, its modern incarnation spares the centers of population and commerce.  The month I arrived, the papers reported one kidnapping every three hours in the countryside, but in my hometown of Barranquilla where I grew up going to the American high school, everyone was getting ready for Carnival.  Nor was there violence in sophisticated Bogota, with its new facelift of modern city, public spaces and gourmet restaurants and all its weekly magazines.

The month I arrived to report on the situation, I decided to visit the family farm and the storied places that the Frenchman had colonized in the 19^th century.  I was told, of course, No Way! The roads were off limits specifically for people who owned farms or had certain last names such as mine. If I went, my family explained, I ran the risk of being stopped at a rebel checkpoint and taken, the word everyone uses for being kidnapped.  It seemed improbable to me that in the midst of this crisis everyone would be preparing almost constantly for Carnival. When I ask my friends how they can live there, they laugh at me and quote a recent study that named Colombians the happiest people in the world.

In fact, during the week that more than 70 people were kidnapped, the main weekly had run a cover story on a study done by a scientist in England. A big daisy painted in the colors of the Colombian flag announced Happy Colombia.  A day did not go by without someone quoting the unknown English sociologist that had just become the most quoted man in Colombia. This is Happy Colombia, the best place to live, everyone told me even if they need armored cars and bodyguards to move around.

To me it all had the quality of magical realism mixed in with a big dose of denial. A country with one of the highest rates of violence prefers to call itself Colombia Feliz.  The country had the highest rate of kidnapping and I was hearing from those who were labeled as targets of kidnapping that Colombia was el mejor vividero del mundo.  

The FARC kidnap in the name of what they call LA NUEVA COLOMBIA, which is the future country that they hope will come into being as a result of their revolutionary efforts.  It’s clear that some kind of revolution needs to occur in Colombia where 96 percent of the arable land is in the hands of 3 percent of the population, where corruption and murder run rampant and 99 percent of all crimes go unpunished, where a paramilitary organization that opposes the FARC has infiltrated 30 percent of the country’s congress.

But despite their aspirations, Colombians in general, and not just the landed Colombians, do not support the FARC.  They are perhaps the most unpopular revolutionary movement in the world. Just last month millions of Colombians went out in protest.

In 2001 when I got there, the kidnappings were called retentions or fiscal evasions. Every citizen, especially the oligarchs and the landowners, needed to pay this “tax” to create this New Colombia.  And they argue that their retentions have had to increase because of Plan Colombia, the aid package of 1.3 billion dollars that Washington was giving the oligarchic government.  To counter this aid package, the FARC passed their own Law 002, which dictates that every Colombian worth one million dollars would be retained until they paid the tax they owed to the rebels.

The FARC were formed in 1964 after the Cuban revolution, but their roots go back before Fidel Castro’s and Che Guevara’s victory. The Colombian rebels surely benefited from the Cuban revolution. Not only were revolutionary movements popular around the world but they received training by the Communist bloc during the Cold War. But the FARC leader, Comandante  Manuel Marulanda, aka Tirofijo which means Sureshot began his fight against the Colombian government long before that. The origin of his rebel group can be traced back to The One Thousand Day War between the Liberals and the Conservatives.

Between the end of the war in 1903 and the beginning of the FARC, there is another war, one that doesn’t have such a poetic name although it also lasted thousands of days. This one is simply called La Violencia. Between the late 1940’s and the early 50s, the Conservatives and the Liberals were at it again. This time the horror increased and this time each side had a paramilitary branch. The Conservatives killing arm was called the Chulavitas, named after a black bird. Groups of men wearing black clothes would arrive into Liberal towns. The next day corpses of Liberals would be found floating down the river. The Liberals had armies too and their leaders were called Black Blood and Vengeance. 

The issues were quite similar:  the Conservatives linked to the landowners wanted to get rid of the freethinking Liberals who were telling the day laborers and the workers about benefits and about land ownership. The Liberal rebel army was accusing the Conservatives of killing the peasants to rid them of their land and expand their holdings. Is every finca in Colombia a product of this practice? If you believe the FARC it is—and that is the reason why every landowning person in Colombia has been labeled a military object by the FARC.

One of the peasants on the liberal side was a man named Pedro Antonio Marin, and he commanded what were called the republicas independientes in the south of Colombia. The war ended with a pact to disarm in the late 50s but Marin did not comply. In 1964, the Conservative government sent the Army in. It is said that napalm was used as a test for the US to later use in Vietnam. Marin’s camp was destroyed. He took the name Manuel Marulanda in honor of a slain union leader, and vowed to fight the Colombian oligarchs Conservative landowners and their army till the end. He called it the Fuerzas Revolucionarias Armadas de Colombia, The FARC, and has been leading it since then. Manuel Marulanda is almost 80 years old He must be the oldest guerrillero in history.  He has been fighting against the Colombian government since 1964, that’s 44 years of living in the jungle with a gun at his bedside. Last week and for the first time ever the Colombian government destroyed one of Marulanda’s main camps. The government went in after the rebels bedtime. They killed more than 20 rebels.

My uncle who lived in the farm during the week tells me that at first the guerrillas were even welcomed by the landowners. They would serve as police force in these provinces that the State had never cared for.  He tells me that they would punish the petty thieves, the little guy who stole chickens and even the cattle rustlers. He tells me that when at first they asked for medicines or food, he would send them both. But that slowly the requests became impositions, and eventually came with threats at the barrel of a gun.  He had to scurry away to the city and manage the farm via cell phone and videotape. He couldn’t afford to run the risk of being in the countryside any more.

There were others who stayed in the fincas and fought back. One in particular, Ramon Isaza, who has been labeled as the father of paramilitarism, killed 20 rebels in 1978.  “A peasant came to tell me that 20 rebels were coming for me,” he told a reporter recently. So he grabbed his eight rifles and gathered 8 of his workers and when the rebels arrived they just ambushed them. “We were born here, and here we will die,” he said.

By the year 2000 the AUC had become a household name just like the FARC. Both had websites. The FARCs was called NuevaColombia.com and the Paras was called Colombialibre.com. Soon the buzz was that there were now parts of Colombia where landowners could return to their fincas. There were zones especially in the part of Colombia called Magdalena Medio where people could even go back and sleep there.

It was thanks to a man who went by the name of Carlos Castano who took up arms after his father was killed by the FARC.  In a few years, his organization would become the AUC, the secret group mostly financed by the landowners and their sympathizers to rid the country of the FARC.  Like Marulanda vowed to fight the Colombian government till death, Castano promised to avenge his father’s death and rid Colombia of every guerrilla or guerrilla sympathizer alive.  From Castano’s perspective, that could mean a store owner who sold food to a rebel. 

Castano first came into the public awareness because in August of 2000 he gave an interview to the Diane Sawyer of Colombia who was helicoptered in for the exclusive:   

“Yes, I am an extortionist.  It’s very similar to what the guerrilla does but I do it more tenderly, with more affection.  Because they are my friends, they can bargain with me.  To some I even give them IOU’s.  With some, our friendly ties help.  But they all have to pay something.  That we use drastic measures is true but Colombians must understand that when you have to exercise authority it is too difficult to limit yourself to moral norms.  If the narcos offer help, I take it.  If the army offers help, I take it—although they haven’t.  If they want to stoop down to the level of the devil with me then we stoop down to that but I swear I will finish these guerrillas.  If the army did what we did, they would all be in jail.  This produces excellent results because we can attack our enemy using their same methods.  It is inevitable that in an irregular war, human rights get violated.”

After the interview Colombia fell in love with Castano. In a court of law his crimes would get him 600 years in prison, but Colombians wanted him to run for President. Women found him sexy. It didn’t matter what he did as long as he was ridding Colombia of the guerrillas.  By 2002 his organization controlled 35 per cent of the Colombian Congress. For better of for worse, the existence of the paramilitary was seen as a necessary evil. I heard all kind of explanations and validations.  Even the Swedish would like them if they had to live with the FARC, someone once told me.

Like the rebels, the paras became the lawmakers and the police force. In some areas they forbid men to wear long hair or pierce their ears. In others, they punished a man who was thought to be abusing his wife. They established their own curfews. They also killed people with chainsaws in order to intimidate a populace that was caught between two violent poles.

While Castano was never elusive about what his group stood for and the need to do whatever it takes to get results, the extent of their atrocities is only now being brought in the open.  Since 2005, more than 300 mass graves have been found.  There was a training school to teach people the physical and emotional skills needed to kill, to dismember, to bury alive. Colombia has a dirty war that is still in the process of becoming uncovered. The leaders are right only now being interrogated.

The people who died were a statistic.  No one seemed to notice the dead. Just like no one seemed to notice that in Bogota the number of street vendors and beggars increased by the minute. I saw a mother selling garbage bags with a sign that said I AM A DISPLACED MOTHER OF THE COUNTRY’S VIOLENCE. I HAVE TO SELL THESE BAGS TO SURVIVE PLEASE COOPERATE.

Seeing that woman reminded me of a man I had run into on my first week in Barranquilla. Going from my grandmother’s to my uncle’s house feeling the breeze that felt like it did when I was a teenager walking those same streets. I saw the yellow flowers of the tree called Golden Rain fall to the ground and three aproned young women walking poodles. War changes everything and war changes nothing I said to myself, not the flowers, not the sidewalks, not even the breed of dogs.

I keep walking the dark street when I feel a body bump into mine.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

A man materializes in front of me carrying an iron pipe.  He speaks directly to my face. “I am looking for work he tells me. Please donita. I will do anything. I’ll cut grass. Paint.”

I told him that I wished I could but I did not live here not feeling very comfortable at the sight of the pipe. As I told him a plane flew over us. His eyes grew wider.  “Lucky you donita lucky you. No one should have to live like this. Escape this violence.”

I asked him where he was from.  From his accent I could tell he was not from the coast. He told me he had arrived a few months ago, “Escaping violence” he said. He explained to me that his father and his two sisters were killed in front of him, and to save his wife and his three children he had taken them and just left.  They had walked for days until they reached the outskirts of Barranquilla. A good priest, he told me, had set up tents for the hundreds of families like his.

I was starting to understand the statistic about the millions of internally displaced people that I read in the UN reports. And only in UN reports! It needs a celebrity to get the victims of wars and refugees noticed so since I'm in LA I should ask. Does anyone know George Clooney or Angelina Jolie, to ask them to take up the cause of the internally displaced Colombians.

I know my time is running out but I want to leave you with one more story.

When I was two years old, my grandfather brought an eight year old girl to live with us. My sister had just been born and my grandmother thought it was a good idea to have someone keep me distracted now that my newborn sister was getting all the attention. She played with me in my room like my friends, but unlike my friends she knew to put the toys away when I was done.  She woke me up in the morning and stood by my bedside when I prayed at night. Then she retired to her cot in the servants’ room with the cook and two maids.  She was sent to school except she didn’t go to the American school with me. She attended the school that my grandmother called the school for los ninos pobres. No one told us the rules, but she and I both knew what they were.  She came to my friends’ birthday parties, always wearing the same yellow dress, and she helped us break the piñata, but she was never allowed to gather the candy.  When I was about nine years old she disappeared. I came back from school and she was not there, when I asked the cook she told me se fue ya no esta. Like the women in Macondo she didn’t leave, she just evaporated.

When I decided to go back to Colombia I knew that coming back to find her was an important part of the journey. But I had no way of knowing how to start to look for her. One afternoon I ask my grandmother if she remembered the girl that used to live with….”Imeldita” she said, Of course why?

I asked her how it was that she came to live in our house.

My grandmother explained matter of factly, like Kafka and Garcia Marquez,  that Imelda is the daughter of one of the trabajadores from the farm. “ I remember as if it was yesterday.”  she said with a sigh. Those to her were the good days, when my grandfather was alive and they lived on the farm. “We were outside,” she says, “playing chess on the veranda when a man and wife and about ten children came to the gate. The boys were stark naked, the girls had on rags. The man asked your grandfather for work.  He said he had walked for days from the interior, escaping the violence.”

There is that word again. That series of words. Escaping the violence…

The family stayed in a plot of land and worked for many years. “So when they found out that you were born,” my grandmother says, “he told us we could have one of his daughters.” She came in the jeep with the weekly delivery of fresh meat, milk and fruit. My grandmother sees nothing wrong with this exchange: she would be better fed, better educated with us in the city she explains and you would have someone to play with. 

One morning not long after that conversation, I woke to Imelda’s caress.  She was sitting on the edge of my bed. Her dark, oval eyes sparked as always, and her smile was unchanged, so beautiful that you might think her life had been as perfect as her teeth.

I stayed in bed, under the covers, to hide my anxiety. Imelda, effortlessly resuming the ritual of our past, turned off the air-conditioner, let the shower run and asked if I needed any ironing. She told me that she had worked, on and off, as a maid. She said that she was a grandmother and that she lived in a tiny cement house. Her house, she told me, needed a new roof. With 60,000 pesos she could replace it and finally keep out the rain and the robbers. Twice thieves climbed inside and stole the few valuable things she owned. Her son bought her a new iron, but she hadn’t been able to replace the electric Sanyo fan.

We sat on the edge of my bed in silence, close to each other, as I searched my bag for the pink and brown bills that say “10,000 pesos oro.” I gave her six, the equivalent of $30. “Gracias, Nani,” she said, using an endearment known only to close family members and servants who knew me back then. She hid the money under her shirt, and then she asked, “Will you come back to Colombia so I can live with you again?”

I didn’t tell her that I couldn’t live in Colombia anymore. That I had become a different kind of Colombian, one that shied away from a life of escaping violence.

Labels: United Nations, U.N., Silvana Paternostro, My Colombian War, Colombia, Latin America, War, Magic Realism, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

 

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