National Post (National Edition)
a river runs through it
A new book about the enormous snaking river isn't a travel book but `more a biography of the country.' Brian Fitzpatrick
A Vancouver professor's travels on and near the Magdalena, troubled soul of Colombia.
Wa de Davis wants you to know that his new book is about his travels through Colombia, but it's not a travel book.
“If anything, it's more of a biography of the country,” he says. “There's nothing more boring than travel books focused on the self. It's similar to false heroics in the realm of exploration. As a writer you're just a conduit for the voices of the people.”
To tell the tale of an enormous river described as the soul of Colombia, the country's mirror of America's Mississippi, Davis had one obvious path to take. But he says he was never tempted to hop in a kayak and splash through the artery's softer passages, describing in hackneyed terms what he saw from the pilot's seat.
Instead, for Magdalena: River of Dreams, the author, ethnographer and University of British Columbia professor of anthropology preferred a process he calls “sociology inspired by serendipity.”
This, he tells the National Post from his home in Vancouver, is the magic captured when a writer is introduced to one local person, then another, then another, before linking these experiences like a chain, getting a much more nuanced picture of a nation.
Crediting the Colombian journalist Juan Gonzalo Betancur with the phrase, Davis said his plan was simple as he set out to describe the waterway, all 1,500 kilometres of it, that allowed Colombia's hugely challenging topography to be conquered centuries ago, spitting out a nation.
“He would just get to the town,” Davis says of Betancur, "and wait until he found someone who had something to say that he thought the world needed to hear. Which, as Ernest Hemingway wrote, is the essence of good storytelling.”
Calling your book “a biography of the country” is bold, but Davis, an honorary Colombian citizen for his Amazon work on Indigenous peoples and plant species, is one of few “outsiders” who can get away with it. Long a friend to the Arhuaco mamos, the spiritual priests of Colombia's Sierra Nevada mountain range, his 20 books already include one Amazon-themed title treasured by many.
As Colombia grappled with striking peace with leftist rebels after 50 years of war, Davis followed the Magdalena over five trips, from its origins in the high páramos of the southern Putumayo province to its silt-choked outflow at the port city of Barranquilla. He wanted to hear, he says, from those who for decades had been forced, by terror, to go around with “heads down, gaze averted, hoping only not to be noticed.”
To see what lessons the Magdalena's troubled past could offer for the country's post-peace future, Davis journeyed by skiff, sure, but also detoured across riverbanks, volcanic mountains and bottomless valleys, with one eye on the water, another on the next encounter. In one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, he found a rich mix of voices.
“I wanted to tell the story of the people I met,” he says. And anyway, “Who cares about Wade Davis being on a kayak on the f---ing Magdalena?' ”
In 1968, a school trip delivered Davis to Colombia at the urging of his mother, who had it in mind that her 14-year-old son should learn Spanish. But while the other lads on the trip were stuck in the boiling western city of Cali, Davis was set up with a family in the nearby hills.
“For eight weeks,” he writes in Magdalena's early pages, “I encountered the warmth and decency of a people charged with a strange intensity.… Several of the older Canadian students longed for home. I felt as if I had finally found it.”
In 1974, drawn back as if by force, he ambled through Colombian regions where left-wing rebels roamed, arming himself only with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and a book on vascular plants. At the urging of his biologist mentor Richard Evans Schultes, under whom he worked at Harvard, Davis would spend years exploring the wider Amazon and Andes, living among Indigenous groups in eight countries and examining the positive uses of native plants like the coca leaf, from which cocaine comes. In 1997, he penned a biography of Schultes, naming it One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest.
By the time the book's Spanish translation, El Rio, took off in 2002 after a small Bogotá publisher ran off 500 copies, Davis says he couldn't even remember if he still owned its rights. But when he returned to Colombia in 2008, he found El Rio was frequently jumping out at him from coffee tables. Marta Ochoa, the sister of Medellín Cartel boss Fabio Ochoa, even called, asking Davis if he would kindly go and talk to her brother at a U.S. prison.
But even if Fabio was a fan, these so-called narcos, as lionized by the Netflix series of the same name, are everything that saddens Davis about Colombia. As he set out to write Magdalena, he would use the river's history to explode some hoary notions about the country's place in the world.
“The book by no means shies away from the reality of the violence and the scale of it, the agony of it,” he says. “But it explains it in historical terms and with empathy. And, above all, it shows that this is not the totality of Colombia as the clichés maintain.”
As Davis points out, very few of Colombia's 50 million people have even seen cocaine, let alone used it, yet a conflict fuelled for decades by the drug has made innocent Colombians its primary victims. Since 1964, more than 220,000 have died, 100,000 remain missing, and seven million have been internally displaced. The cocaine trade, facilitated by everyone who has ever bought from their local dealer, has bankrolled the left-wing guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and other mafias. As for the failed $1 trillion war on drugs, Davis says, it "has resulted, 50 years on, in more people in more places using worse drugs than ever before.”
Yet as he began to think of writing Magdalena in 2014, an almost unimaginable peace deal was in the works between the FARC and the government of then-president Juan Manuel Santos. The idea began as a half-joke he made to some journalist friends in Bogotá, but what resulted is a beautiful, 350-page opus full of Colombians equally in love with the newfound peace as they are with their river.
From the passionate Germán Ferro, overseer of a museum dedicated to the Magdalena in the colonial town of Honda, to Héctor Botero, the cheesemaker who lost everything twice — robbed of house and home by the FARC and later by rightwing death squads — Davis says “the characters had to fight to get into this book.”
Ferro says in moving passages that his life's work is to “reconnect Colombia to the river that gave it birth,” and notes that the Magdalena is highly unusual among tropical rivers, in that it flows south to north. “In Colombia,” he tells Davis, “south is up and north is down.” His words could apply not just to the Magdalena, but to the land as a whole, a place where things often aren't as they seem, no matter how hard one looks.
“There's a whole other Colombia,” Davis says. “I think by holding a mirror to its face and revealing all that's great about the country, it's a book that could, conceivably, in some small way contribute to the peace process.”
The source of the Magdalena in the Andean páramos is a crystalline fountain of life, but as Davis shows, it once helped to guide the path of the Spanish conquistadors, who brought with them a world of death.
By 1536, Sebastián de Belalcázar had waded into Colombia after establishing Quito, Ecuador. Belalcázar had heard of a golden king in Cundinamarca, “the heights where the condors dwell,” and soon set off in search of El Dorado, a mythical lost city of gold. As he did so, he followed the Magdalena north from the peaks of the Macizo Colombiano all the way to what is now Bogotá, laying waste to Indigenous peoples as he went.
At around the same time, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada was trying the same from the opposite direction, battling the river south from Santa Marta on the Caribbean.
As 200 of his men took ships, most of which sank, up the Magdalena, Quesada hacked, with another 900, through the jungle banks. The fierce Chimila people, and deadly wildlife, left most of Quesada's men dead or demented, but on Aug. 6, 1538, he claimed Bogotá just before Belalcázar and the German adventurer Nicolás Féderman, who had led a separate Spanish expedition across Colombia's eastern plains. Quesada's men went on to wipe out peoples such as the gold-worshipping Muisca, whose palaces they likened to those of Troy.
Venezuelan liberator Simón Bolívar wrested the region from Spain in 1819, and in 1821, Bogotá became the capital of what would become Gran Colombia, spanning modern Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela. Bolívar set about commercializing the lower river, knowing that “whoever dominates the Magdalena controls the fate of men.” The great steamships he would import, called vapores, were cousins of the Mississippi steamers, and they began the slow realization of the river's potential. But, as Davis writes, the vapores would also start the river's demise; the lumber needed to fuel them saw riverbanks torn asunder so that the boats could steam from Barranquilla to the rapids at Honda, hundreds of kilometres upriver.
A Liberal-Conservative divide, revolutionaries against landed gentry, as Davis puts it, plagued Colombia after Spanish rule. The 1899-1903 War of a Thousand Days, a bloodbath started over coffee, left the state, which eventually withered from Gran Colombia down to Colombia, in ashes. Later, La Violencia, another Liberal-Conservative war, spanned 10 years, a madness sparked by the 1948 Bogotá killing of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a Liberal politician. The embers of that war would help spark the one launched by the FARC in 1964, which lasted until 2016. This communist uprising over land rights would morph into a threesided conflict; FARC fought the Colombian army, which hit back using the paramilitaries of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC) as its bloodthirsty proxy.
As this carnage exploded around it, the Magdalena suffered devastation via damming for hydropower, oil extraction and industrial poisoning. Its drainage has been scalped of four-fifths of its forest cover. Davis points out that fish stocks are down by half over the past 30 years, and at least 19 fish species face annihilation. The river, into which 32 million Colombians flush their waste, has suffocated.
If this wasn't enough, the
Magdalena's association with dead people has scarred it for decades. First it was Liberals and Conservatives mutilating each other during La Violencia, rolling corpses into the currents; decades later, the narcos, the paramilitaries and the FARC all started to do the same. Revered Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote in Love in the Time of Cholera about a trip up the Magdalena taken by his character Florentino Ariza, who sees “three bloated, green, human corpses float past, with buzzards sitting on them.”
“That's why the fisherman at certain places don't eat the fish that come out of the river, because of the dead,” Davis says. The Magdalena's reputation as “the graveyard of the nation” endures.
At Nueva Venecia, a floating town on the Ciénaga Grande wetlands not far from where the Magdalena meets the sea at Barranquila, Davis talks with Ahmed Gutiérrez, who recalls a night when “even the dogs howled in fear.” In November 2000, 60 paramilitaries came by boat, murdering 39 locals simply because guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN), Colombia's smaller rebel group, had earlier passed through the area.
Long before the paramilitaries came, the villagers had already watched much of their fishing habitat destroyed by government highways and river diversions. Still they kept faith in the river.
“The Magdalena for us means life,” Gutiérrez says. “The river was the most beautiful in Colombia.… And then for years we treated it like a sewer. Just like we treated each other. But it's possible to renew the river. We endured a massacre, but now we are living in peace.”
Davis makes similar linkages between the Magdalena's would-be rebirth and spectacled bears, and first mapped by the great German explorer, Alexander von Humboldt, who teased it out using the sketches of Colombian naturalist Francisco José de Caldas.
Davis describes one part of the Magdalena, near where it meets its tributary, the Rio Cauca, as “a land so limitless that Colombians could hide England and the English would never find it.” But the Magdalena's chokepoint, he says, is in the streets of Girardot, a city below Bogotá. The Rio Bogotá is born above the capital in purity, but reaches the Magdalena as “less a river than a slurry of waste.”
From there, the Magdalena continues to the sea a changed waterway.
“If you could do something about the Rio Bogotá, you'd go a long way to cleaning up the Rio Magdalena,” Davis says.
“They used to say of the Hudson that you could tell what kind of car that GM was making in Tarrytown by the colour of the river,” he says, laughing. But other than the fact that its fish won't be found on Manhattan's menus, “the Hudson has come back. You can see humpback whales going to the Hudson. The resilience of nature is amazing, COVID taught us that.”
And, in a twisted sense, Davis says the war might have saved Colombia's landscape. Compared to industrial development decisions made in eastern Ecuador in the 1970s, FARC's presence put enormous chunks of Colombia off-limits for oil and mineral prospectors. Its Amazon, though threatened by deforestation, is still as big as France.
“So Colombia now has this incredible opportunity to rethink its destiny, informed by 50 years of scientific research as to the importance of bio and cultural diversity, that didn't exist when Ecuador made those decisions 50 years ago,” Davis says.
Continuing the theme, he goes back, as he often does, to his friends the Arhuaco of the Sierra Nevada, and recalls a ceremony that involved former president Santos, just before he left office. Davis wasn't meant to be there that day at the settlement of Nabusímake, but when Mamo Camillo of the Arhuaco told him, by chance, that Santos was about to visit, he ended up flying to Nabusímake the only way possible — by presidential plane and helicopter from Bogotá, after wrangling a seat via U.S. connections.
Mamo Camillo had told Davis: “The peace won't matter a damn if it's just an excuse for the three sides to maintain a war against nature. What we need is to make peace with the natural world.” And when the president's aides, during the flight, asked for suggestions on what the Arhuaco thought of Santos' peace pact, Davis passed on Mamo Camillo's words. In a well-received speech, Santos would use
Over a decades-long love affair with Colombia, Wade Davis has befriended the spiritual priests
of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range.
Neither the conquistadors Belalcázar and Quesada, or the German adventurer Féderman, fared well after they left Bogotá. Belalcázar did a long stint in a Spanish jail, Quesada died suffering from leprosy, and Federman drowned at sea.
“As warriors, they had destroyed so much, but as men they created little,” Davis writes, and 500 years later, the same could be said of the FARC. After four years of talks in Havana, Cuba, in 2016 the rebels agreed to lay down their arms, in return for acceptance into politics and conditional amnesty for the terrible crimes they committed.
Like a fork in a river, two former presidents, Santos and his predecessor Álvaro Uribe, went their separate ways on the peace deal.
Uribe, who has denied repeated allegations of ties to Colombia's paramilitaries, had almost wiped out the FARC, helped by U.S. military funding between 2002 and 2010. He wanted the onslaught to continue, and saw the pact as a betrayal by Santos, who had served as his defence minister. Santos steered the deal the long way through Congress, after its concessions to FARC dismayed many Colombians, who rejected it in a plebiscite. For his efforts, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Now Uribe's political protégé, Iván Duque, is president, and the deal's implementation, on everything from land restitution to coca crop substitution, has slowed to a trickle. Many FARC have rearmed, other armed groups have entered the communities where FARC once reigned, and community leaders who sign on for peace are being murdered at alarming rates.
Davis, though, thinks the internationally guaranteed peace deal, independent of whatever Colombian government is in power, can survive as an organic, standalone project. Much like the Magdalena, he feels it is the people who will decide the future of Santos' pact.
“I think the book shows that the people of Colombia won't tolerate a return to war,” he says. “It's amazing how in every little hamlet (there are) efforts for reconciliation. Everybody wants peace.
“It's a little bit like Ireland, or any country that's racked by civil strife and becomes bloody and violent. Peace actually appears to have been negotiated at the table, but it always comes when the people themselves in the streets say `bastante! We're f--ing fed up.'” them almost verbatim.
Call it sociology inspired by serendipity.