A land of war and peace
WATCHING COLOMBIA WITH SIMON REEVE (Sunday, BBC2) it struck me that the BBC’s go-to guy for dangerous travel telly was always in countries on the brink. The difference in this case was that Colombia might be on the brink of better times.
A peace treaty has ended five decades of fighting between government forces and communist guerrillas. From rebel commanders in the jungle to coca growers in the mountains and slum-dwellers in the cities, there is a tremendous will to keep the peace going.
It’s not just will, in fact, but concerted efforts. Meeting nervously with El Medico, one of the most senior ranking leaders of the FARC communist guerrillas, Simon asked him frankly if he’d committed any atrocities.
El Medico, whose name means The Doctor, said he had no memory of any although he might, in combat, have killed someone.
Whether Simon or the audience at home believed El Medico was less important than the fact he was flying off to more top-secret talks with the government. Peace, he said, as he got in his helicopter, was what he and his troops were fighting for now.
In the city of Medellín meanwhile the mayor had reduced the murder rate by 90 per cent and poverty by 60 per cent. In a stroke of genius from which all mayors could learn a lesson, he’d chucked money at the city’s problems but, crucially, chucked it at the poorest slums.
Beautified with parks, enriched with schools and connected by cable cars, Medellín’s poor now had not handouts but opportunities.
But it seemed that the root causes of the half century-long civil war hadn’t gone away.
Though FARC had become a brutal criminal gang, and one among many, it had at the start been a movement of poor farmers seeking a fairer distribution of the land. They also wanted what even the slum-dwellers of Medellín now had, usable roads to get their produce to market, get themselves to hospitals and schools.
The peace treaty had brokered forgiveness all round but not much in the way of a leg-up for the rural poor. Without their concerns being addressed the brink of peace could easily be the brink of another war.
Simon’s journey begun on the Rosario Islands, idyllic tropical getaways where the old cartel bosses built luxury villas. They shared much in common with Baiae, the town revealed to us on ROME’S SUNKEN SECRETS (Sunday, C4). Baiae (whose name rhymes with the Geordie greeting “why-aye”) was an ancient Roman holiday resort with a bad reputation. One Roman historian described it as the place where old men went to be young and where young men went to be girls. But in his disdain he missed out the luxury villas and the cunningly engineered freshwater fish-pools, supplying the elite with oysters.
He also missed out the heated spa baths, which exploited the volcanic energy of the Bay of Naples and which proved to be the city’s undoing. Naples… Vesuvius… it wasn’t hard to work out what became of Baiae, although it was hard to see why no one had made its story into a slightly sleazy Seventies disaster movie.
An opulent resort full of sin with retribution thundering down the hill in the form of hot lava. It could have outdone The Towering Inferno at the box office but it would have needed a better name than Baiae.