Terror Tourism

Christopher Britt Arredondo

A spider web is the sum of many umbrellas.

--Rodrigo Tamayo

             “We are simple peasants. We can’t do this on our own.” I could sense the anxiety in his voice; see the fear in his demeanor. “Please, we need you to help us get organized.” Me? He expected me, a tourist, to help his community free itself from the narco-trafficking guerrillas and paramilitaries who have been warring over that region of Colombia for decades? If I had ever been subject to a case of mistaken identity, clearly this was it. The man who was speaking to me, an elder within the community, had not realized that I was not there as a professional helper; not one of the anthropologists or archeologists or sociologists or ecologists of the Fundación Pro-Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta who had come to meet him at his brother’s house, high up in the mountains, overlooking Santa Marta. I was there as a guest of the expedition, an appreciative guest –I should add, who only three days earlier, on the eve of my arrival to that port city on the northern Caribbean coast of Colombia, had been invited by the expedition’s leader, Guillermo Rodriguez-Navarro, to come along on an archeological exploration of the La Aguja river basin. Nothing that Guillermo had said to me that night about the many terraces that we would find scattered throughout the basin could have prepared me for this man’s plea. I suspect that Guillermo knew as much and that this is why he decided to let me find out on my own about my people whose houses are now built on the remains of the terraces. Blissfully at ease with the ignorance as a tourist, I had come expecting to find centuries-old archeological ruins, not the present-day ruins of a community of peasant farmers whose lives have been and continue to be governed by terror.

Frightened by what it might mean to actually commit myself to helping this man and his community, I considered correcting his idea of who I was. Bound by my sense of propriety, however, I said nothing to him about my true status as a tourist and guest of the expedition. Instead, I allowed him to go on attributing to me I don’t know what powers he believed I might possess as an outsider. And I listened. In an attempt to match his plea with a show of concern, I asked him where he lived and if his house could be seen from where we were. HHHe led me away from where the other members of the expedition were gathered, over a few boulders and under a large tree, from where he pointed across two steep mountain ridges to his house. As he explained it to me, his was the house that his father had built some 50 years ago when the family had first moved up from the coast into the mountains. We were alone now, taking in the views, smiling at each other. Again he entreated me to help, which left me feeling overwhelmed –after all, I have no experience in Human Rights work; I’m neither in government nor with an NGO; I’m not a community organizer; I’m not even a particularly active member of my own community’s civil institutions. Being the champion of solidairty that I am, I did what I typically do when others entreat me to join in their officializing fun. I looked him honestly in the eyes, revealing the limits of my character and the neurotic inevitability of my aloofness. I could sense, nevertheless, that this time-honored strategy of mine was not going to cut it this time. My silence was getting dangerously close to becoming an insult. As simple as this peasant purported to be, he was no simpleton. So in the end, I was moved to speak up in defense of our shared intelligence, offering a suggestion or two. “Whatever you do,” I advised him, “you should not allow this land, these forests, to fall into the wrong hands. There is amazing wealth here, and not just agricultural wealth, but cultural wealth. Your houses are built on the remains of terraces that were built over 700 years ago. The project for the recuperation of these terraces that the Fundación is proposing to you can help your community maintain control over the land and how it is used. And the eco-tourists who will come to see all these natural and archeological marvels and who will stay with you in your houses will also help you achieve a more stable, more secure, and potentially more lucrative future for yourselves, your sons, daughters, and their children. But if you let the wrong people in, they will try to tell you how to do things, how to govern yourselves, and how to use the land. Whatever you do,” I said in conclusion to him, “you must remain autonomous and self-governing.” None of this was, of course, tremendously helpful to him. But I did, at least, demonstrate to him that I understood his predicament. He looked me square in the eye, and again encouraged me to help. Evidently, he did not think I was one of those wrong people about whom I’d been talking. And he was not going to let me get away so easily. He offered me his hand. I offered him my own in return. Shaking hands, we sealed the deal and my fate as a dutiful terror tourist.

Feeling mutually fortified by our exchange, we walked back toward where the others were gathered, ready to begin the long trek back down the mountains, through the clouds first, then through jungle, and across rivers, to emerge, eventually, in the bizarre mix of tropical and desert climates that typify the coastal region around Santa Marta. Before I left, my elder friend came to me once more and asked me: “When are you coming back?” His nephew Luis, who had been our guide up the mountains the previous day and who would also serve as our guide down the mountains that day, overheard the question and playfully repeated it, laughing: “When are you coming back?” I told them, hoping now that I was lying to nobody, neither them nor myself: “Next year. I will bring my son to meet you; and some friends of mine who speak very little Spanish, and their children too.” After thanking everyone for their hospitality and receiving from them as going-away gifts one bunch of cilantro wrapped in banana leaves and one sack of avocados, I started down the mountain, toward the carretera negra, or paved highway, that was to be that day’s final destination.

             I’m back on Capitol Hill now, in Washington, DC, surrounded by a grid of paved streets, alleys, and highways. That day, coming down the mountain with Luís as our guide, it took us nearly ten hours to reach the carretera negra, arriving only minutes before dark. We did not want to be caught in those mountains at night. Too insecure. Far too dangerous. Here on Capitol Hill, thanks to the Department of Homeland Security’s latest code orange terror alert, I do not feel any more secure. Everyone around here seems slightly anxious and I cannot help but wonder if our community’s sense of security is truly worth not being able to leave without submitting first to having our cars searched by the innumerable police officers and Secret Service details that swarm around the Capitol building, the Supreme Court, and the Congressional Office buildings. Unlike Colombia, where terror in the mountains, on the beaches, and in the cities is made manifest by the absence of the state, terror in DC is made tangible by the presence of the state. Sirens are constantly sounding off here: fire-rescue trucks honking, hollering, howling; police cars screaching, squealing; ambulances in tears. Helicopters fly overhead regularly, rattling the windows of the one-hundred year old Victorian in which I live with my wife and son. In the background, at times a low, deep, powerful hum can be heard: it’s the fighter jets circling overhead, keeping watch over our liberty.

             Exchanging the anxieties of post 9/11 life in DC for the anxieties of Colombia’s ongoing civil war may not seem to most tourists as the best way to vacation and, as it were, “get away from it all.” Still, there is something undeniably exhilarating about touring where terror threatens to upset your desire for a carefree, secure, and moderately thrilling adventure. That sense of exhilaration comes from the knowledge that by going up into the mountains and away from the coastal cities, you may very well be committing, not a meager act of impertinence, but the biggest and stupidest mistake you have ever made. The truth is that you could wind up kidnapped and a hostage to either the guerrillas or the paramilitaries. The truth is you could be held indefinitely for ransom or perhaps put to work by your captors as a so-called human shield. The truth be told, you could wind up dead. This brush with the shadow of death is precisely what gives value to the freedom one experiences as a terror tourist. However flippant, reckless, absurdly heroic this attitude toward death may seem, it is what makes touring a vital and invigorating experience. The risks involved are not needless, least of all when you live in a city like Washington, DC where freedom is increasingly being restricted by the perceived need to secure the homeland, not just from terrorists, but from something as seemingly random and unpredictable as terrorism itself. While certainly I can appreciate the need for security, I also understand that freedom is a hazardous undertaking; it requires courage. And in Colombia, where it seems that just about anything could happen at any given moment and where most everyone around you seems to be doing pretty much what they want to do, when and how they want to do it, there are plenty of opportunities for courage.

             “Wake up! They’re here to pick you up!” This was Marina, my wife of ten years, mother of our son, and native to Santa Marta, letting me know that, although still very early in the morning, the expedition on which I was to go had just begun. As I splashed water on my face and looked about the room for the clothes I had laid out the previous night, I could overhear Marina calling down to the waiting jeep outside with a pleasant buenos días to one and all. I forgot about the diarrhea that had kept me in the bathroom most of the night (one of the distinct joys of travel in the tropics), grabbed my mochila, or sack, and raced down the two flights of stairs and out onto the street where Guillermo sleepily greeted me with a tired homily of “hello, good-morning, get in.” I squeezed into the front seat, waved good-bye to Marina, hoping I would make it back to see her again, and set my sights on the road.

There were already another six people plus their bags packed into the jeep and we would still pick up another three before finally heading away from the coast and up into the mountains. The dirt road to the mountains can be accessed only at a point where it intersects with the highway that runs just beyond Ciénaga’s city limits. So we drove south from Santa Marta to Ciénaga, a town along the banks of the Gran Ciénaga, or Great Marsh, that has grown into a small coastal city: small enough to not figure as a real destination for either businessmen or tourists but large enough to sustain a so-called cinturón de miseria or “belt of misery” around its outskirts. Here there live thousands of impoverished people, mostly women and children, who have been displaced by the war. For these people who once lived in floating boat-towns on the vast waters of the Gran Ciénaga, but who now live floating in a sea of muddy sewage along the highway, such displacement was the direct result of a command to flee. That command, as I already knew from late-night conversations with several humanitarian aide workers who had spent the better part of the last two years trying to feed these people and help them back to their original homes, was delivered in the form of a massacre. About two years ago, the paramilitaries, who had recently moved into the region and taken it over from the guerrillas, appeared in motor boats and proceeded to shoot approximately 80 people dead.

             The theme of Colombia’s civilian massacres emerged again as the jeep wound its way along the mountain-climbing dirt roads, or what the peasants in the area refer to as highways. Our destination, by jeep, was a small house off to the side of one of these dirt roads where another massacre had occurred some three or four years ago. No one could seem to pin point the date. Collective memory has an uncanny ability to fail when the terror that caused so much death in the past is still a tangible force in the present. Several families that had been living near this house had apparently maintained ties with the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN). When the paramilitaries of the United Self-Defenders of Colombia (AUC) took over, they “cleansed” the land and the houses in that vicinity of all the guerilla’s real and suspected sympathizers. There was very little of the main house actually left standing. Three of the four main walls had crumbled, and the one remaining wall, painted white, stood as a sort of grave stone to what I imagined was a massive killing field. Only, you wouldn’t know that much of anything particularly terrifying had ever happened here. I did not ask how many people had been killed. We were only just beginning our trip. I couldn’t tell where the political sympathies of the other members of the expedition lay and I didn’t want to upset any of them with questions that might seem brazen. Consequently, I also did not ask where the bodies were buried, nor, for that matter, if they in fact had been buried, which they very well may not have been, since to bury the body of an enemy –conceived as a combatant or otherwise--, could easily mark one as a sympathizer and thus, too, as one who might deserve the same terrible fate.

Waiting for us at this ruined house was Luís. With him, he had three mules. One for Guillermo, whose bad knee would not stand up to the rigorous hike ahead, and the other two for our packs of food, water, hammocks, and clothing. From where we were, we would need to walk down into the river basin of La Aguja and then climb back up along a different ridge, and then still further up along another ridge beyond the clouds, as they told me, to where Luis’s father kept his house. They pointed to the clouds. These clouds were far enough away for me to hope that Luís and the others were joking. Indeed, we were headed way up there, up to that house beyond the clouds, because that is where several of the rivers that flow down the mountains have their source. And the point of the expedition, as it was first spelled out for me, was to determine how high up the basin and how far down the basin the terraces that the indigenous tribes of the area had built back around 1,300AD could be found. When I learned that the terraces dated from that long ago, I mentioned that they were more or less contemporary with the time of El Cid and the initial impetus toward Spanish Catholic imperialism. I reproduce this comparison here and now because it occurred to me there and then; and when I did share it with the others on the expedition, it generated some pleasant giggling. “This guy, with his off-handed remarks concerning Spanish Catholic imperialism, might not be such a drag to have along on the trip after all.” This, at any rate, was what I hoped the chuckling and sniggering meant.

             Today, Betoma, which is the name given to the area surrounding the Basin of La Aguja, is home to approximately 20 families, numbering a total of about 250 people. The land is unlike any in the world. True, this is said of many places; but in this instance I can back it up with some fairly precise descriptions: The Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta, a biospheric reserve, is the highest coastal mountain range anywhere in the world. At only 42 kilometers or 26 miles from the Caribbean Sea, its highest peaks reach 5,775 meters, or 18,947 feet. Because the Sierra Nevada is so near the equator, the climate changes not so much with the shifting of the seasons but with variations in altitude. Quite literally, a trek up the mountains from the coast to the peaks takes you from desert, to tropical jungle, to savannah, to beyond the tree line where there are permanently snow-packed peaks and icy lakes. Everything under the sun is here, in an area that covers roughly 17,000 square kilometers or 10,564 square miles. The biodiversity of the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta is matched as well by the diversity of cultures that inhabit this ecological gem: the costeños or coastal peoples, of whom the Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez is perhaps the most famous representative, peasant farmers like Luís, his father and grandfather, the Wayuú tribes of La Guajira, and the four ancestral tribes, the Kogis, Wiwas, Arhuacos and Kankuamos, who protect and care for the Sierra Nevada, as it was bequeathed to them by the “Mother of the Universe.”

             Fundación Pro-Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is a nonprofit NGO that was created in 1986 and whose primary objective is to promote the conservation of the natural and cultural patrimony of the Sierra Nevada. By means of its various programs, Pro-Sierra seeks to realize the ideal of a Sierra Nevada where the inhabitants live in peace with one another, where the natural resources have either already been conserved or are continually being protected and recuperated, and where communities use their natural and cultural resources to lead a sustainable form of life. The expedition of which I formed a part had been in the planning for many months and, as I was to learn eventually, sought not only to determine the extent of the terraces in the Basin of La Aguja, but also to identify peasants and farmers who might be willing to restore and protect some of the terraces on their land, open their land up to ecological-cum-archeological-cum-anthropological tourism, and thus provide the community with alternative sources of income and stability that might help them to continue avoiding the temptation to harvest illicit crops, such as the poppy fields, coca fields, and marihuana fields that have been the target of fumigations elsewhere in the Sierra Nevada.

The families with whom we met have been living in the Betoma area since the 1940s. As Guillermo reconstructed it, their history is as follows: They arrived from many parts of Colombia, areas that were then under siege by the emerging parties to Colombia’s on-going civil war. These displaced peoples “colonized” the Betoma area (and I render it “colonized” because this is the precise term that is used in Colombia to refer to these events), thus displacing the indigenous groups who still lived there and replacing much of the native forest with coffee trees, for money, and many other agricultural harvests –yucca, some plantain, tomatoes, beans, rice—for subsistence. Then in the 1970s, as local folklore would have it, a couple of hippie gringos came to Santa Marta with wads of cash to buy marihuana and invest in its harvests. It was the beginning of the bonanza marimbera or marihuana bonanza, as it is known in Colombia. The money was good, and kept getting better. Eventually, motivated by a dangerous mix of greed and business acumen, local marihuana growers began to distribute their harvests themselves, cutting out the gringo middlemen. Thus were born, according to Guillermo’s brief historical survey of the region, the first drug cartels of Santa Marta and the violent and extravagant mafia culture attendant on them.

The so-called bonanza had brought with it much money, relatively easy money; but it had generated a great deal of uneasy violence as well: a lot of fighting over whose money it was to be and how it was to be capitalized. As circumstances would have it, one of the members of the expedition, who was from a small mountain village to the other side of the Sierra Nevada, had ridden, as a young boy, with some of the mule trains that were then used to transport and deliver the harvest of Santa Marta Golden® to the innumerable beaches on the coast. We spent a good portion of our first night listening to our companion’s boyhood stories of 300-plus mule trains, of how dangerous it was to fall asleep on the mules, of mules falling off cliffs, of fights breaking out among the men and boys, of men being killed, and of how he and his cousin, as boys, nearly died one trip due to lack of potable water. In the 1980s, the marihuana bonanza came to a close. The guerrillas arrived and imposed their own version of order on the region and its illicit industries. Taking over the drug trafficking from the cartels, they expanded the business to include coca and poppy, and settled in to lord over the land and its people with the glee of plundering terror(art)ists. Then in 2002, these guerillas’ charismatic counterparts, the paramilitaries, arrived. They announced their glorious arrival with signature massacres of their own: one in Betoma and the other farther down in the Ciénega Grande. These were, in fact, the same massacres about which the members of the expedition and I had been talking as we began our tour of the terrorized lands and communities of Betoma.

To all intents and purposes, what has happened and is happening in the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta qualifies as a microcosm of what has happened and continues to occur throughout the entire country of Colombia. Human Rights abuses, politically motivated, mass killings of civilians, greed inspired drug trafficking, negligent local politics and its resulting forms of chaos and social evil, civil war, and a humanitarian disaster that is second, in terms of displaced peoples, only to Congo and Sudan. Welcome to Colombia.

About seventeen years ago, the Fundación Pro-Sierra de Santa Marta stepped into this highly complex and volatile situation in the Betoma region. With the help of local peasants, Pro-Sierra established a camp and restored an indigenous ranch. This involved taking some of the area peasants to the Ciudad Perdida or Lost City, a Kogi ruin located elsewhere in the Sierra Nevada that had been restored in the 1970s and become a major tourist attraction. These guided visits to the Ciudad Perdida were meant to help the peasants of Betoma envision what the terraces on their own lands might look like once they were restored. But with the arrival of the guerrillas to the region and ongoing threats of violence, those plans for archeological restoration had to be temporarily abandoned. What did grow out of that experience, however, proved the saving grace of an entire mountainside neighborhood, called Simón Bolívar, in far-away Bogotá. This neighborhood, which is located on a severely steep Andean mountainside that overlooks the rest of the city, consists of thousands of houses and shacks that have been randomly built up over the years by the many thousands of indigent people who, year in and year out, come to Bogotá in search of what they hope will be a better life. These ramshackle constructions had begun to crumble and, with the rains, to tumble and slide down the mountainside. By rebuilding the neighborhood after the example of the Kogi terraces of the Ciudad Perdida, the neighborhood of Simón Bolívar and its many inhabitants were saved from the horror of being carried down the mountainside by an ocean of mud, only to become permanently buried in it.

The terraces of Betoma, and the peasant families who make their homes on them, would however need to wait another eleven years to receive more attention. About six or seven years ago, Pro-Sierra returned to the Betoma region to once again begin the restoration of the area’s terraces. As a result of these interventions, the jungle that had grown over one large terrace near the banks of one of the rivers that meet at La Aguja, was cleared away, revealing walls that are about a meter or two in height and a stone stairway that connects this bottom-most terrace to others that are further up the mountain. Indeed, the peasant farmers who cleared the terrace and the stairway live in a house that they built on one of these other terraces. But the work that they had begun six years ago had to be interrupted soon after it was started. This time, the stoppage was due not just to the guerrillas but to the bloody confrontations between them and the paramilitaries. Under these extreme conditions, conditions that were in no way propitious to a boom in tourism, no one in ther right mind, least of all the peasant families held hostage to the terrors of massacer, would take the trouble to clear the jungle and restore the terraces.

Today, the communities of Betoma, as is the case with communities living throughout the Santa Marta region, enjoy a relative calm. Our expedition of July, 2004 was the first to return to the area since that one large terrace and its adjoining stairwell had been cleared. What we found when we arrived was not only the cleared terrace and stairwell, but an intricate system of layered terraces that began at the river’s edge and ran up the entire mountainside. This system of terraces was enormous, much larger than anything found at the Ciudad Perdida. It encapsulated not this one mountainside, which in and of itself would have been remarkable, but the other sloping mountainsides of the river basin as well. Conceived in this way, the entire basin began to take on the distinct characteristics of an urban land sculpture; and a beautiful sculpture at that: so unobtrusive, so unlike any urban landscape I have ever seen before. Some of these terraces, or so it was explained to me, had originally served an exclusively agricultural function, much like the rice terraces used in Indonesia to this day. Others, it would seem, served as foundations for houses. Others still, served sacred functions. It was on these terraces that we found large, deep, circular holes that had been dug into the ground maybe twenty, thirty, or even forty years ago: the sure markings of looted burial sites from whence guaqueros, or looters, had stolen countless pre-Colombian artifacts and a wealth of cultural information: all for the sake of a couple of lousy bucks. Conquest in the twentieth century doesn’t seem to have been very differerent from conquest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As I was to learn in conversation with some of the younger peasants who now live on these terraces, the looting had been done either by older members of their community, or by other, professional guaqueros, who they had not been able to stop from trespassing onto their land. We were shown, after some playful coaxing by Guillermo, several of the pieces that the peasants had held onto and not sold: beads for necklaces, grinding stones for mortars, pieces of clay pots.

Despite the evident lack of respect that these modern-day, colonizing peasants and their guaquero elders had for the burial grounds of the Sierra’s indigenous ancestors, they did demonstrate to us also their growing appreciation for the architectural sophistication and cultural value of what were, in point of fact, now their terraces. We would find the clearest evidence of this growing appreciation for the terraces up at the very top of the mountain, where Luis’ father kept his house hidden beyond the clouds. But the trip up to that house would prove long and arduous and before beginning our ascent we sat down to a hot meal of vegetable soup, corn on-the-cob, coffee and, for desert, a sweet, thick, cornmeal beverage which made me hope and pray my diarrhea would subside. After refilling our water bottles and saying our good-byes, thank-yous, and see-you-agains we were on our way up to the clouds and the house that they hid from view. This final leg of that day’s journey would take us along river beds, past waterfalls and swimming holes, and up, terrace by carefully constructed terrace, to the top of what must have once been a thriving, mountain city of terraces. In this regard, the trip up along the mountain ridges was rather like a trip back in time, a trip that took us away, ever further away, from the present turmoil and violence that define the limits of day-to-day life for far too many Colombians.

Here, at last, was a chance to satisfy my day-tripper desire to get away from it all. With this yearning as my main motivation, I stepped eagerly onto the mountain trail and started to climb. When I was only a few minutes into the afternoon walk, I stopped at a river crossing to observe two gigantic butterflies fluttering inches over the shining water that danced among the river’s rocks. And then I heard them: airplanes: two of them: flying in unison: recognizance flights: made possible by those in Washington, DC who have provided millions of U.S. dollars for Plan Colombia and its erradiction campaigns: made necessary by the billions of U.S. dollars that Americans spend each year to keep their noses full of cocaine and their veins flowing with heroin: made necessary, also, by the unflinching dedication to quick and relatively easy money of those in Colombia who are in the narco-trafficking business. Would these luscious jungle scenes through which I was hiking be reduced, by means of U.S.-sponsored fumigation flights, to a heap of drying, burnt, vegetation? This had happened already in other areas of the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta. I tried to imagine the damage. And sadly found it easy to do. The planes, after circling overhead for several minutes, disappeared, their engines muffled by the rebirth of bird songs that celebrated their departure.

As we worked our way up the mountain, we came upon many more terraces. From time to time, we would stop, take notes --latitude and longitude of the ruins, description of the walls and stairways, and then be off again toward the next major find. As we climbed, I felt my ears pop and clear. I could see, even with my untrained eye, that the vegetation was beginning to change as well: less jungle-like, fewer enormous, water-hungry flowers and a greater abundance of small, wild flowers and grasses. The trees were changing too, as were the sorts of butterflies I could see and birds I could hear. At one point along the way, we found ourselves, our guides and their mules, all walking on a perfectly maintained walkway made of giant flat stones. The ancestral, indigenous people of the Sierra Nevada had laid this path over 700 years ago and here we were, in 2004, following in their footsteps up the mountains and, to me it seemed, back through time. With my imagination at full tilt, I envisioned them, dressed much as the Kogis and Arahuacos do today, in white tunics and with sandals made of straw; men, women, children walking along their own unobtrusive highway, respectful of the mountain and at one with its waters, its fruits, trees, and rocks. The most interesting aspect of walking through these mountains, however, is that these kinds of romanticized images of pre-Colombian life can not be sustained for long. Just when you, as tourist, sense that you are finally away from it all and in an ideal location for imaginatively reconstructing life in the Americas prior to the invasion of the Spanish, you look around the next bend and find, not just another ruin, but a modern house built on top of the ruin.

Some of these houses seem abandoned when you first approach them. But then you see the sure signs of modern-day inhabitants: plastic bags strewn on the ground near the house, some clothes hung to dry on the line, a distinct scent of coffee brewing and then the most pleasant, warm-hearted, and genuine greeting you can imagine. It is impossible to pass by such houses without accepting first a drink of fresh, clean water, or of water that has been sweetened with unprocessed cane sugar, or a delicious cup of black coffee. This is Colombia, after all: a place whose name used to be as synonymous with coffee as it is today with cocaine. With the drinks that you are offered come smiles, shy speech, and a slow, unrehearsed invitation to encounter people whom you do not know and who do not know you. I accepted every smile offered me and returned it with a smile of my own. But I was especially avid of the liquids offered me, and I took them in with delight and real thirst. Not only was I sweating profusely due to the climb, I had started the day already partially dehydrated from the previous night’s bout with diarrhea. By the time I reached the top of the mountain, I was happy to note that between the sweating I had done and the clean mountain water I had drunk, I had managed to cure myself of whatever it was that had had me ailing down on the coast.

This cleansing of the stomach went hand in hand with another more psychological sort of cleansing. I suppose that where I speak of psychological cleansing some would rather specify spiritual cleansing; but I am a modern secular humanist, I’ve read Nietzsche, Emerson, Freud, Marx; and I am a recovering Catholic too –Catholic of the most severe type: my mother grew up under Franco in Spain, making me a Spanish Catholic; accordingly, most any talk that I hear of spirits or souls and their eternal link to eternal gods is talk I tend to put off to collective insanity. The kind of insanity that builds empires. The kind of insanity that compells one people to shock and awe another people into subservience. The kind of insanity that believes terror civilizes and that the terrorized are the truly emancipated. Even if it is only an illusion and a hallucination, I do prefer the prospect of going mad in the insanity of my own privacy to doing so in the insanity of crowds, clans, congregations, parties, nations, cultures. So psychological, as opposed to spiritual, cleansing is what you get when you read my account of what it is like to retreat to the summits of the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta in search of a moving experience. And be moved you will: you will move up and down steep mountain slopes; you will move in and out of rivers; you will move up, up, and away until you reach the house beyond the clouds. But of course by a moving, cleansing experience I mean also that heightened awareness of simplicity that comes about only once you have peeled away the encrusted layers of memory that keep you chained to your anxieties, guilt, and shame. This kind of forgetting is psychological, as I understand it, in that what we speak of in heroic terms as character is truly little more than the accumulation of neurotic responses to how our deepest fears (which usually involve death) and highest hopes (which usually entail eternal bliss) measure up against Reality: the one true god of all self-respecting secular humanists who value experience, not as a measure of truth but as the Truth. Walking for hours up steep mountain slopes, breathing in and breathing out, becoming one with your sweaty t-shirt, blistering toes, and pounding heart, reality gets real simple real quick and your experience of it, consequently, goes the route of simplicity as well. How many ants did I step on and kill? I don’t know. I did not stop to notice. I did not even think to ask permission of the gods to destroy part of their creation with the passage of my self-assured, self-righteous, arrogant, and conquering step. Focused, as I was, on reaching the summit, I did not notice when we passed through the clouds.

We came first to Luis’s house, where his wife and children received us with customary smiles. Here again we were offered water to drink. We chatted about our long trek, what we had seen, and how much we appreciated the chance to visit their home. I was tired and keeping it simple, and stupid. As I looked over the house, I convinced myself that this, in fact, was the house beyond the clouds about which everyone had been talking all day. I was imagining my hammock hanging first from one set of poles, then another, and slowly I was swept away by the liquid quality of my inner longing for rest. But reality, that step-mother of all virtue, was fast to correct my error in judgment. While I had been imagining my resting ground, the other members of the expedition had begun to trek still further up the mountain. We were not yet beyond the clouds, only in them. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it. But it was true. I was on the move again. The air was growing thinner. My heart was pounding in my ears. My head was in a haze. And the mountain was getting steeper. Guillermo had to get off his mule and walk up part of the way. The trail we were walking on was narrow, no wider than my foot. And up we went. Step after miraculous step. Up. Still a bit more. Up. Over some boulders, then to the left, and there it was at last: the house beyond the clouds.

Luís’ father greeted us with cheer and a twinkle in his eye. His mother, somewhat more sombre or perhaps meek or perhaps servile, politely offered us each a restorative cup of coffee. For his part, Luís excitedly pointed out to us that we were standing on an enormous terrace that was constructed of walls that were as much as three meters tall. Then he pointed to the stone stairwell that led down the mountain from the terrace on which stood the house. The walls and stairwell were in perfect condition. Luís himself had spent months restoring them. He told us, with pride bubbling in his voice, of how difficult a job it had proven to be in the end. He had had to rebuild the walls three times. It was not until the third try, when he actually staggered the walls in three layers, that he got it right. Guillermo asked him if he had noticed how, in the original walls, every eighth or ninth stone was longer than the rest and set deep into the earth so as to act as an anchor for the walls. Yes, he had noticed it, but had failed to duplicate that technology on his first two tries. It was with the third and final reconstruction that he had emulated the ancestral masons. Following this exchange, Luís offered to take us down along the path that led away from the stairwell, where, he promised, we would see many more terraces, stone paths and stairways. Flattered by the offer but honestly too-pooped-to-pop, I convinced him to save that adventure for morning.

Shortly after our arrival, it began to rain. The rain did not let up for about an hour during which time we spoke of the meeting that was to take place in the morning between us and several peasants who live there in the basin, many of them related, either by blood or marriage, to Luís and his family. The community of peasants who live there has already begun, together with ecologists from Fundación Pro-Sierra, to organize forest conservation efforts. The point of the meeting was to gauge the community’s interest in the possibility of expanding that effort to include the restoration of selected archeological sites throughout the basin. We were told the meeting would take place at about 9:00 in the morning. And so, as we waited for the rain to subside and for our dinner to be cooked, we planned an early morning hike part way down the mountain to view other terraces. Once the rain let up, the evening air cleared of all haziness. From where we were, we could see clear down the basin to the carretera negra, where the lights from cars and trucks snaked their way along a bend; and we could see beyond the carretera negra to the great marshy waters of Ciénaga; and beyond that, the ocean; and beyond the ocean, the horizon with its setting sun. We spent that night in the company of our hosts, talking about terraces, the marihuana bonanza, mules, and eco-tourism. The future looked bright that night, even under the darkness of the starlit sky.

The following morning, after a night spent hanging uncomfortably in a hammock that was too short for my frame (my fault, as it was me who had chosen the hammock in the first place), I woke up to a fresh cup of coffee. Clouds had formed again overnight beneath us. The air was warm with the closeness of the sun. After a breakfast of rice, plantains, eggs, chorizo, and avocado, we set out on our morning hike. The extreme slopes we had walked up at the end of our trip the day before now became alive to me as might a treasured text to a bibliophile. With the help of our guides, Luís and his brother-in-law, I was reading the mountain. I learned a bit about the vegetation and the different sorts of bugs that plague different plants and make the mountain farmer’s life more difficult. I learned more about the terraces as well. They were situated in such a way and built with such respect for the natural contours of the mountain, that water did not corrode them. They were built in tune with the water and not against it. Many of the stairwells and terraces that I visited that morning were completely covered with vegetation, most of it so thick that if it had not been for the machete that Luís was carrying, I probably would not even have noticed their existence.

When we arrived back at the house, I admired once more Luís’s handiwork with the terrace walls. They surely were impressive. I decided I would try to replicate them at home, in my back yard. The meeting had not yet begun, but several men had started to gather near the outdoor kitchen table. Soon, others joined them. I did not want to participate officially in the meeting and so seated myself at some distance from the men, to contemplate the landscape. But my absence made me conspicuous. Several men walked over to where I was seated to greet me. When they turned to join the meeting again, I knew that I was meant to follow. And so I did. But I sat, silently, and listened, putting on that face we all like to use when we want others to believe that even when we are only just listening we are engaged in deep, earth-shattering thought. The meeting ended as most meetings do: with an agreement to meet again to further discuss the issues discussed. That follow-up meeting did take place at the end of July, on the same day I caught a flight from Bogotá back to Washington. What I’ve learned since is that that meeting was attended by thirty-seven families as well as several commanders of the areas “peace-keeping” paramilitaries. Of those thirty-seven families, nine signed up for the project. This means that, in addition to Luís’s family, there are now another eight families in the La Aguja basin who will be restoring terraces on their land and laying the foundation for a local tourist economy that could very well improve the lives, not just of these families, but of all members of the peasant community who live in Betoma under the watchful and wrathful eyes of the paramilitary commanders.

As the one guest from the outside who went on the expedition, I was, no doubt, among the first true tourists ever to set foot in the basin, climb its sloping mountainsides, traverse its affluent rivers, and behold its terraces. The Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta is the kind of place that would appeal to the sorts of eco-tourists and bird watchers who travel to Costa Rica. It is a paradise. There is, of course, one very notable difference between Costa Rica, which has no standing army, and Colombia, which has several standing armies, one of them official and the rest, whether of the guerrilla or the paramilitary persuasion, all extra-official. This means that, if you are to follow my example and tour in the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta, you must be willing to allow moments that are pregnant with eco-tourist possibilities devolve into situations that I can think of no other way to describe than to say that they reflect the anxieties of terror tourism.

And terror did set in while we were descending the mountain. Our trek down to the carretera negra, back to the future, was punctuated by instances of uncertainty, doubt and fear. It was during these moments that the discontents of modern civilized life visited themselves on us and me especially, with the relentless power of reality and its unpleasant truths. We had been walking, hopping, and sliding our way down the mountains for hours. At about 2:00 in the afternoon, nowhere near our destination, our guides began to wonder if it wouldn’t be best for us to take a shortcut. We came to a house that was unlike any other we had passed by or stopped at the entire time we were on the expedition. The people inside did not smile at us. They did not offer us anything to drink. And they did not wish to speak to us. Who were they? None of us knew. I began to conjecture, inwardly, that they were either guerrilla sympathizers or paramilitary sympathizers. It did not matter which, to me. They were unpleasant. And their unpleasnatness was spooky. A few meters beyond the house, we came to a split in the trail. One of our guides believed we would find the shortcut that they had been talking about if we went left. The other believed we should go right. We all talked it over, spinning verbal umbrellas, spinning webs of anxious desire, until finally one of us decided to go talk to the cheery folks back at the house. Our self-appointed messenger came back with directions to go right at the fork. We started off in that direction, but our guides were uneasy. They hesitated and kept stopping and starting again. After anotehr debate, it was decided we should return to the house and ask again. The message that was sent back to us with our second messenger was to go left at the fork. And so we did.

We had all been made quite nervous by our not knowing which path to take and still more uneasy by the helpful and caring people at that unwelcoming house. Why had they not wanted to speak to us? And why had they sent us down the wrong path? Was it just a mistake? Or was it malice? The evidence, however scant, pointed to the latter of the two alternatives. The shortcut that our guides led us into was a trail that had not been traveled by either animal or man in many, many years. Luís was up ahead cutting open a path with his machete. Guillermo, mounted on his mule, was directly behind him, and I followed closely behind the farting, shitting, tail wagging beast. I could feel the jungle’s proximity, its immensity, and sensed it closing in on me. I was becoming claustrophobic in the great outdoors. The jungle floor was dark and dense beneath the thick cloud of treetops above. This darkness made me recall something dark that the driver of the jeep had said the previous day before we began our hike down through the mountains, onto terraces, and back through time. He had said that none of us were to take our cell phones with us. Why? Who commanded it? It seemed that everyone understood perfectly well the why and the who. Everyone but me, because, being from the outside, the best I could do was make an educated guess without the benefit of being able to test that hunch against past experiences. My gut told me it was the paramilitaries who had stipulated we not bring cell phones. My head told me that in this way, if we were to identify their location, we would not be able to phone it in to anyone. The potential terror inherent in my predicament began to suggest itself to me with clarity, the kind of clarity that comes to you from the simplicity of panic. My mind was racing, tying one set of questions to another, weaving a web of paranoia. “Who are these people with whom I have come on this expedition? This is an expedition to where? Do my companions have ties with the paramilitaries? Are they secretly a troupe of guerrilla fighters or informants? Am I being taken to a camp somewhere in this terrible jungle where I will be turned into a hostage? No. Impossible. Guillermo, who I have known for years and who has stayed with me in my own house in DC, is my friend and host. This mishap is simply part of the trip. Nothing more. Think of it as an adventure: you are walking through the jungle, like you’ve seen Moughli, and Tarzan and Vietnam War soldiers and Rambo do in the movies. But what if Guillermo is in on it? No, no, no, no. You are being paranoid. Pity, pity: poor little gringo so far away from home and in need of some comfort. Keep walking! Trust yourself. Your understanding of reality has hardly ever been so warped that you can’t tell friend from foe. These people are your companions. Walk on. All will be fine.” Before we had even reached the carretera negra, I had already returned to the future-oriented civilization of our modern age and its inner discontents. Home at last. As I do now in Washington, DC, I felt anxious then and uncomfortably aware of how the terror inside me serves to alienate me from others, from myself, from our freedom.

Where exactly was the terror in my tourism? It presented itself in many forms –dense, pressing jungle and uncooperative people; it spoke to me with many split tongues --take the right fork, no the left fork; and it emanated from my own self-limiting narcissism –they are out to get me, this has all been an elaborate charade and a ruse to get me into this jungle and kidnap me for ransom. Truly, the most unpleasant truth that was revealed to me through my experience as a terror tourist in Colombia was that the terror that I so much feared to face was already in me. Prior to any terrifying experience, I was terrified of being terrified. The irony, of course, is that the only terrifying reality that I did face was of my own making. But I needed to get real, to face my fear of death, and to recognize the many ways in which my denial of this fear actually served, not to liberate me from it, but to limit the horizons of my experience. Back now in Washington, DC, where an entire city lives in terrifying obedience to the fear of terrorism, I can honestly say that the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta, Colombia, in spite of its real dangers, is today a comparably safe, un-terrifying, liberating place to tour. The courage of those nine families in Betoma who are restoring pre-Colombian terraces deserves to be matched by your courage. Be a terror tourist. I know of no better recommendation to make to a people who presume to be the freest and bravest on earth.