For decades, Colombia was the 'narcostate'. Now travel to Colombia and South America is on the rise, and it's seen as one of the rising stars of the global economy. Where does the truth lie?

Writer and journalist Tom Feiling, author of the acclaimed study of cocaine The Candy Machine, has journeyed throughout Colombia, down roads that were until recently too dangerous to travel, to paint a fresh picture of one of the world's most notorious and least-understood countries. He talks to former guerrilla fighters and their ex-captives; women whose sons were 'disappeared' by paramilitaries; the nomadic tribe who once thought they were the only people on earth and now charge $10 for a photo; the Japanese 'emerald cowboy' who made a fortune from mining; and revels in the stories that countless ordinary Colombians tell.

How did a land likened to paradise by the first conquistadores become a byword for hell on earth? Why is one of the world's most unequal nations also one of its happiest? How is it rebuilding itself after decades of violence, and how successful has the process been so far? Vital, shocking, often funny and never simplistic, Short Walks from Bogota unpicks the tangled fabric of Colombia, to create a stunning work of reportage, history and travel writing.

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Introduction

‘Do they have skyscrapers?’

It was my last night in London before leaving for Colombia, and I was having a drink with a friend in the West End. He knew that I’d been coming and going between London and Bogotá for several years and that I’d lived there for a year in 2001 . He knew that I’d made a documentary about hip-hop in Colombia and that I’d worked for a human rights NGO called Justice for Colombia. He had given me a wink and tapped the side of his nose on hearing that I was going back – a reaction that I was well used to – but until now, he’d never expressed much interest in the place.

With his question, it dawned on me that my friend knew next to nothing about Colombia. He knew that it was where cocaine came from. He also knew that the Medellín cartel had had Andrés Escobar killed when he scored an own goal for the national team in a World Cup match with the United States in 1994 , though his ignorance was no worse than Alan Hansen’s. Watching the highlights of the game the next day, the football commentator had said (innocently) that ‘the Argentine defender warrants shooting for a mistake like that’.

I daresay most of the millions of casual cocaine users in the UK don’t know much about Colombia either. They turn a blind eye to the trade that carries their Friday night entertainment from some remote Andean hillside to the toilet in the pub at the end of the road. The British press, which routinely ignores what is going on in Colombia, bears much of the blame for this benightedness. In the 1980 s and ’ 90 s our newspapers couldn’t get enough of the sensational, bloody war that Colombia’s cocaine cartels were waging. That war exercised a grim fascination and set a precedent for news reporting from Latin America, which has veered between the comic and the grotesque ever since.

Such is our love of the macabre details of ‘real-life crime’ that, according to the Swedish criminologist Nils Christie, depictions of organized crime in films, books and video games are currently worth more than organized crime itself.* Pablo Escobar has become a modern-day legend, but since he was gunned down on a Medellín rooftop in 1993 , the business that he pioneered has become more discreet and less entertaining. Colombia’s cocaine traffickers have become yesterday’s news.

The same might be said of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia ( FARC ), who were long ago relegated to the status of ‘insurgents’, then ‘narco-guerrillas’, and are now just plain old ‘terrorists’. Despite having rumbled on for the last fi fty years, the FARC ’s struggle with the Colombian government is a low-intensity war. It threatens no strategic western interests and the numbers are never really spectacular – at least, not until you look at the cumulative totals.

So the foreign correspondents were transferred from Bogotá to more newsworthy capitals. News editors turned their gaze towards Mexico, where the never-ending ‘war on drugs’ has decamped for its latest, gruesomely compelling chapter. Colombia is left with a war that most outsiders show no interest in and a reputation for crime and violence that is second to none. It is both demonized and ignored. Most people can’t even spell its name properly.

I quit my job at Justice for Colombia in 2005, and in time I too stopped following the news from Latin America. I thought that, notwithstanding the enormous changes taking place in Venezuela and Brazil, perhaps the French writer Dominique Moisi had been right when he wrote that ‘Latin America is not where the future of the world is being decided, nor will it become so in the immediate future.’ My Spanish got rusty, my memories faded and I moved on to other things. It still irked me when outsiders judged Colombia to be a basket case; that its cocaine traffickers, guerrillas and death squads seemed to capture, in a neat précis, all that outsiders wanted to know about the place. But the thrill I had once felt in immersing myself in that most obsessive and introspective of countries seemed gone.

Clearly, things had changed in the years since I lived in Bogotá. Back in 2001 , all eyes were on the peace talks that then-president Andrés Pastrana was holding with the FARC . Ultimately, the protracted negotiations and the well wishing of the hundreds of diplomats, politicians and journalists who made their way into the remote plains of Caquetá to see the guerrillas in the flesh, came to nothing. After months of standing by and watching the government talk, the Army lost patience. The government called off the negotiations, and within hours the Air Force was bombing the FARC ’s encampment.

President Pastrana had come bearing an olive branch, but Manuel Marulanda, the FARC ’s commander-in-chief, never intended to lay down his weapons. He had callously exploited the goodwill of millions of Colombians, stalling the government in peace talks while his high command drew up plans for a military takeover of Bogotá. Or at least, that was how the papers explained things.

After the talks collapsed, peace became a dirty word in Colombia. In 2002 , not long after I flew back to London, an openly belligerent candidate won the presidential election for the first time in twenty years. Álvaro Uribe had no intention of talking to the guerrillas. The way he saw it, the FARC were no more than terrorists. They were also responsible for the bulk of the cocaine production and trafficking that had so destabilized the country. If only they could be defeated, he reasoned, Colombia would soon be on the road to peace and prosperity. Uribe struck a chord with many Colombians, who were by now so desperate to live in peace, free from the threat of kidnap, robbery and extortion, that they happily voted for a man who promised yet more war.

When Álvaro Uribe came into office, most of the Colombian countryside was a no-go zone. Even the biggest roads were liable to be commandeered by FARC guerrillas on the look-out for passing millionaires they could kidnap for ransom, a venture they called la pesca milagrosa – fi shing for a miracle. By the time Uribe stood down in 2010 , weeks before I flew back to Bogotá, Colombians had seen ten years of Plan Colombia, a multibillion dollar programme of military aid from the United States.

The Colombian Army had doubled in size and the FARC had been pushed back, up the remotest mountain slopes and into the densest jungle expanses. When I lived in Bogotá in 2001 , 400 of the country’s thousand or so mayors had found themselves forced to share power with either left-wing guerrillas or the right-wing paramilitary armies that had sprung up to counter them. Now all the country’s mayors were could work unhindered by ‘the men of violence’.

Wealthy Colombians no longer lived with the constant threat of kidnap and the country’s once-notorious murder rate fell to its lowest level for twenty-five years. Even the wealthy now felt safe to drive into the mountains that divided Bogotá from Medellín and Cali. Encouraged by the peace that followed in the wake of Uribe’s war, they began spending at home what they had long invested in Miami. Before long, the skylines of all three cities were dominated by cranes, as Colombia enjoyed a boom in construction.

The multinationals weren’t far behind. Between 2002 and 2010, foreign direct investment in Colombia jumped fivefold, from $2 billion to $10 billion per year. The value of Bogotá’s stock market shot up, as news spread of the abundance of natural resources Colombia had to off er the world. Tourists also cottoned on to the country’s natural bounty. In the first half of 2011 alone, the number of Britons holidaying in Colombia rose by 40 per cent.

By the time I got home, milk and Newsweek in hand, I had all but booked a flight back to Bogotá. Not only were the roads safe to travel for the first time in thirty years, I knew that most visitors to Colombia would search in vain for a book that explored its fascinating and little-known history. This was my chance to write that book: to venture into Colombia’s hamlets and villages, and get to grips with the stories their people had to tell. I was already itching to get back.

A few weeks later, I was sitting outside a coffee shop near the Hotel Tequendama in Bogotá, talking to a man who had once been a member of the FARC – my London friend would probably have assumed that he was a drug trafficker. Funnily enough, we were surrounded by skyscrapers. I had been telling him about the time I spent in Colombia in 2001 and we had ended up talking about the general lack of interest most foreigners had in a country that remains a byword for general nastiness.

‘We are at war in Colombia,’ he told me sternly. ‘But the way you Europeans see it, no war fought in the Americas can ever be as dramatic or as testing of a nation’s moral fibre as World War Two was to European nations.’

He had a point: if Colombia was an unknown to my friend in London, perhaps it is because we judge the issues at stake in its various conflicts to be trifling, at least when compared to the titanic struggle between democrats, fascists and communists that dominated Europe for most of the twentieth century. But now the tables have been turned. I can imagine few causes that might inspire Londoners to take up arms – thankfully, Europe has had no reason to go to war with itself for more than sixty years. But London has become home for thousands of people fleeing foreign wars, many fought by soldiers convinced that war offered the only solution to the challenges their people faced.

As a young man, the former guerrilla had certainly thought so. He had fought to achieve ‘true independence’ for his country. Now middle-aged, he was all too aware of the FARC ’s role in making his country the epitome of festering, futile conflict. But his optimism for what was still for him ‘the New World’ was undimmed.

‘By the European reckoning, the nobility of a war is measured by how much blood is spilt. Colombia was conquered by Spaniards with great bloodletting. But it was liberated by Americans with comparatively little blood spilt.’ The wars of independence, at least, were something that Colombians could feel proud of, he told me.

He quoted a favourite author: ‘For the last two centuries this country has been known by a name that, if the history of the world weren’t a sequence of absurd coincidences, would have been given to all America: Colombia.’* He smiled and let out a sigh. Somewhere between the euphoria of the New World and the tragedy of the real one, Colombia’s story was waiting to be told. It was good to be back.

1. The View from Bogotá

I had a few preparations to make before I could hit the country roads, as well as some old friends I was keen to catch up with, so I paid £ 220 for the month and moved into a little fl at in La Candelaria, Bogotá’s old colonial quarter. It was on the fourth floor of Casa Los Alpes, a new apartment block, just around the corner from Casa Los Andes, the warren of Andean cottages where I’d lived back in 2001 .

The Andean version had offered Eduardo the limping handyman a template, but the flats he had built at Casa Los Alpes had none of its rustic charm. The ceiling and the roof were made of great concrete slabs that he had pebble-dashed and whitewashed. The windows had metal frames, into which he had gummed squares of glass with silicon. Since the frames ran flush with the outside wall, they took the brunt of the winter rains, which seeped between the glass and the metal. I liked Eduardo and didn’t have the heart to complain about his craftsmanship. The puddles that accumulated at the foot of the window evaporated soon enough and I soon got used to drawing the green nylon curtains whenever it rained – which as I soon discovered, was all day every day. The curtains, the rings they hung from and the poles on which the rings were strung were all home-made too. Eduardo had also made the kitchen counter, the shower cubicle and the single sheet of corrugated steel that was my flat’s front door.

The building was owned by an old Italian with bristling eyebrows, who would eye me suspiciously whenever I passed him in the street. If there was a ranking among the expat community, the old man was at the top, whereas I was just a rung above the dreadlocked backpackers who lived in the hostel at the top of my street. The old man shared a tiny office with his son Guillermo, who was the more amenable, public face of the enterprise. Tacked to its walls were various pithy bons mots , all of which hinged on the folly and menace of the global communist conspiracy.

Over the course of October, I found a tutor who helped me to get my Spanish back up to scratch and scoured the newspapers to re-accustom myself to the intricacies of the political scene. After eight years in power, Álvaro Uribe had left office in August as far and away the most popular president in the history of the republic. To his defenders, he was the greatest Colombian of modern times, the cattle farmer who restored the good name of a proud country. He was credited with building a dedicated, professional Army that had taken the war to the terrorists. His belligerent treatment of the guerrillas seemed to have secured the peace and prosperity that years of negotiations had not.

Once out of office, however, his star was quickly losing its lustre. An American court had called him to testify at the trial of alleged paramilitaries who had been extradited to the United States to face cocaine trafficking charges. Protesters had disrupted the lectures that he had been invited to give at Georgetown University in Washington, DC . And in Spain lawyers were preparing to prosecute him for human rights abuses. Back in Bogotá, the intelligence agency officials who had served under him were being called to account for the chuzadas or wiretapping scandal. In the last year of his second presidential term, Uribe had tried to change the constitution so that he might run for a third time. Colombia’s intelligence agents (and by implication, their boss) stood accused of bugging the journalists, judges and opposition politicians who had spoken out against the constitutional amendment.

In terrorizing the terrorists, Uribe had strayed a long way from the constitution he had sworn to uphold. But inadvertently, he had also made it possible for journalists to visit the villages that had been on the front line of the conflict. On my map, whose dark greens, beiges and deep browns hinted at the dramatic peaks and troughs of the unseen country, I began to plot a route.

My abiding memory of Bogotá was of a city rendered pin-sharp by blazing Andean sunshine. In my fondness I’d forgotten how cold and damp the capital could get. On most days it rained so heavily and for so long that the narrow streets of La Candelaria became rivers that left those without rubber boots and umbrellas stranded on whichever city block they happened to be standing on. Come evening the rain would finally let up, allowing the storm drains to swallow the last of the floodwater. Mist descended from the surrounding mountains like a cloak, enveloping my neighbourhood in fog.

Yet it seemed that the city had got used to life without central heating. So one morning I walked down to the clothes shops below the Plaza Simón Bolívar, hoping to fi nd a decent jumper. All I could find were hoodies and tracksuit tops – it seemed that bogotanos also lived without wool. So I jumped on a bus heading north. After the huge riots that had gripped Bogotá in 1948 , anyone with any money had deserted the traditional barrios of the city centre to settle the north of the city. The banks, embassies and corporations had followed them. Their employees moved into pleasant tree-lined streets of brick low-rises, where their wives could spend their afternoons in beautifully appointed boutiques and patisseries styled after those of Paris and Miami, and the poor were nowhere to be seen. They left the accumulated architectural heritage of the city centre and its rather gloomy history behind, to be blackened by exhaust fumes and soot.

I jumped off the bus outside the Andean Centre, Bogotá’s best-known upmarket shopping mall. I padded its marble fl oors, cautiously eyeing the expensive imported clothing in the shop windows. Eventually I found a sweater in Benetton and paid the equivalent of £ 50 for a fluff y mixture of every warm thread imaginable, including alpaca, which is what kept most Andeans warm over the centuries before the arrival of cheap Asian polyester.

I’d arranged to meet an ex-girlfriend in the city’s nightlife district, a square mile of bars and clubs around the Andean Centre that is known as the Zona Rosa. I had some time to kill before we were due to meet, so I found a seat overlooking the atrium and ate a burger. A pair of replica monkeys were gliding up and down electric-green jungle creepers, watched by twin infant boys in matching school blazers and caps. I cast an eye around at my fellow diners. Notwithstanding the tropical theme, I could have been in Madrid. Everyone was impeccably dressed, and nonchalantly watching one another as they tucked into their barbecued ribs and stuff ed-crust pizzas. Of course the illusion was dependent on there being no poor people in the Andean Centre, which meant that there were no Andeans to be seen either. There was no trace of the Muisca, the original inhabitants of Bogotá, nor any of the other ethnicities native to the highland capital, much less the black Colombians who make up a fifth of the country’s population.

Apart from a cleaner and a security guard, nobody was watching the television in the corner, so I bought a coffee and pulled up a chair at their table. The newsreader was a statuesque blonde woman with a steely, penetrating gaze. I had the feeling that her beauty was a deliberate ploy to distract viewers like me, who knew that the news was important, but found their coverage of it rather boring.

Over the years, she said, the FARC had been instrumental in kidnapping dozens of soldiers and police officers. The picture cut to a press conference, where an Army general was addressing a bank of cameras and microphones. ‘The FARC should know that we are coming after them. We won’t let our guard down. We still have a long way to go.’

The cleaner harrumphed and shuffled off with her bucket and mop. The security guard stayed where he was and together we watched more stories of neighbourhood criminals and disasters brought on by the winter rains, with a familiar cast of pleading locals and resolute policemen. Then the news segued into Farándula, a daily roundup of celebrity gossip presented by a woman who seemed to be the newsreader’s equally svelte twin sister.

A girl of nineteen or so asked if she could share my table. I nodded and watched as she began eating her soup with a delicacy that I didn’t usually associate with Colombians. Perhaps it was her flawless skin, or the braces on her teeth, or the long thin arm that she rested on the table, but she struck me as being almost Japanese. It seemed ridiculous to sit there wordlessly, especially since the table was so small, so I asked her what the soup was. ‘ Ahuyama,’ she told me. I’d never heard the word before – I later found out that it was squash.

Her name was Katalina and she lived in Los Rosales, an exclusive neighbourhood of modern redbrick apartment complexes on the lower slopes of the northern hills. When I told her that I lived in La Candelaria, she said that she’d be worried to live there, especially after dark. I smiled, groaning inwardly at the fearfulness of the city’s gilded youth, whose sanctuary this was. The poor were like ghosts to people like Katalina – rarely seen, but ever-present and often malevolent.

Of course crimes were committed at night in my neighbourhood. One morning I had found my landlord clambering over the terracotta tiles on the roof, trying to salvage what was left of the telephone lines. The thieves had been after the copper wires, 6 Short Walks from Bogotá he told me; they sold them for scrap. And night-time marauders would steal the neighbourhood’s manhole covers too, to the same end. At the end of my street, some good citizen had used the branch of a tree to warn oncoming drivers of the hole in the road. Guillermo, my landlord’s son, had told me that in the late 1980 s, when the capital was passing through its darkest times, he used to venture out wondering not if but when he would be mugged.

Even my friend Ricardo, who liked to scoff at upper-class paranoia, had been quick to tell me how dangerous the city streets were. His cousin had been walking in La Candelaria in the middle of the afternoon when someone on the fl at roof of the market building had thrown a stone at him, which split his head open. Before the ambulance came to take him away, his attacker had come down onto the street and emptied his pockets.

But those days were gone. Despite the widespread perception of Bogotá as a dangerous city, in the years since I last lived there it had emerged to become one of the safest cities in Latin America. These days, you were more likely to be robbed in Caracas or Quito.* Venturing out at night still had its risks though: many of the street lights in La Candelaria didn’t work and the combination of holes and darkness made any night-time wanderer a hostage to fortune. Only in the last twelve months had the city’s mayor come up with the idea of fitting plastic manhole covers, though I had yet to see one for myself.

I left Katalina in peace and found a quiet coffee shop, where I spent the afternoon on the phone, trying to find a tour guide or local historian who could help me find out more about Bogotá. I didn’t come up with much. The shelves of the bookshops groaned under the weight of the memoirs of Pablo Escobar’s mistress, Ingrid Betancourt’s account of her time as a captive of the FARC and hundreds of analyses of the conflict, but there was nothing that might have told me more about the capital.

The light was fading from the sky by the time I got back to the Andean Centre to meet Maribel. We had some dinner and went to see The Social Network. Every Colombian I had met was a fan of Facebook, so I wasn’t surprised to see that the auditorium was packed. After the film, we walked over the road to a bar in the Zona Rosa. The hardwood panelling on the walls and the stark, skinny plants, dramatically uplit by spotlights buried in troughs of big grey pebbles, were reassuringly nondescript. I had the giddy feeling of being in an airport terminal, a secured bubble of globalized good taste, divorced from any indication of where on the planet I was.

We had a few whiskies, or at least I did. Maribel had a lychee martini before switching to vodka. As the night wore on, the salsa got louder and couples took to the dance floor behind us. I was tempted to join them, but something in the atmosphere that night kept me in my seat. Young guys in designer denim and herringbone shirts clung to their partners possessively, as if they were human shields in a carefully choreographed battle scene. They eyed their fellow dancers steadily from under pristine felt cowboy hats, as they shuffled and kicked their way around the room.

On our way out, at three or so in the morning, a smaller, slighter figure than any I’d seen that evening opened his jacket to show me an iPhone. He whispered a price, I shook my head and he darted away into the crowd. I was reminded of something that a friend had once said to me: ‘If I go to Norway, I can see that their experience isn’t a universal one. No Norwegian lives like poor Colombians do. But go up to the Zona Rosa in Bogotá and you can see that the people there live much as people do in Norway. That’s why what’s happening in Colombia is of more universal importance than what’s happening in Norway – because we have first, second and third worlds living side by side.’

It was strange to be back in a country that seemed at once universal and isolated. Despite its particular history of fratricidal conflict, spending time in Colombia had often felt like being in a microcosmic version of the world at large. Both are run by a white-skinned elite that makes up about 10 per cent of the population. In both, the privileged one in ten lives in the cooler climes and owns about 80 per cent of the mines, farms, industries and banks. He eats and lives well, studies at the best schools and universities, receives medical treatment in the best hospitals and usually dies of old age.

Below him on the social ladder are another four out of ten Colombians, generally a little darker-skinned than the privileged one, who spend their lives working as hard as they can, not so much to join the privileged one, as to stave off the possibility of falling into the poverty endured by the remaining five in ten. This bottom half live in the hottest regions, on the worst land, in the most isolated parts of the countryside or on the neglected margins of the big cities. They are black, Indian, white or mixes of the three. The poorest of them live from day to day, never sure of where their next meal will come from. That’s the way the world is, and Colombia is a small-scale version of it.

I’d met few Colombians who had the will or the means to move between the three worlds to be found in their country. Maribel was one of them, but she was as careful as anyone to get a taxi that the security guards outside the bar could vouch for. Everyone seemed to have a story to tell of a friend who had taken a taxi and agreed to a short cut, only for the driver to turn into a darkened street, where he stopped to let in his two accomplices. They called it el paseo de los millonarios – the millionaires’ stroll: a midnight ride around the cash points of the city, a pistol digging into the victim’s ribs, until the account was empty.

With Maribel safely home-bound, I spent twenty minutes waiting for a taxi driver who might take me south, but none of them wanted to leave the uptown neighbourhoods. So I started walking; all this watchfulness was making me feel claustrophobic. All I had to do was stick to the Avenida Séptima; if I kept up a good pace, I reckoned on being home in a couple of hours.

Over the first ten blocks I passed groups of well-heeled young men and women who were trying in vain to hail taxis home. A pair of young businessmen were propping up a third who was being sick into a bin. ‘Not on your shoes, Raúl!’ said one. After half an hour I came to Chapinero, euphemistically known as ‘the theatre district’, where I passed same-sex couples walking home arm in arm. A face peeped out warily from the doorway of an innocuous-looking house whose windows shook to the sound of techno. For the next few blocks, I could have been in Camden Town circa 1978 , as the street was crowded with leather-clad punks waiting for southbound buses.

Beyond Chapinero there were roadworks under way, so pedestrians had to cross and re-cross the avenue. I ended up walking down the badly lit streets that run parallel to the Avenida Séptima. I walked fast, dodging the potholes in the road, the shoots of rainwater that gushed from the gaps between the paving stones, and the empty spaces once capped by manhole covers. The horror stories I’d heard from Katalina, Ricardo and Maribel ran through my head. I tried to reason my way past them. The story here was not crime, but bogotanos’ exaggerated fear of crime, I told myself. But a nagging voice in my head told me that I was dando papaya . It was an expression I had heard time and again. Its literal meaning was to ‘give somebody a papaya’, but Colombians use it to describe anybody who gives a thief an opportunity: in other words, a mug. It seemed very bogotano to blame not the fox but the rabbit silly enough to venture into his path.

The gloomy backstreet was empty – anyone venturing out at this hour would be in the back seat of a car or taxi. In fact, with Chapinero behind me, the entire city seemed to be empty. Perhaps this was the solution to night-time crime: with most of the city having taken to their beds long ago and the revellers behind closed doors, muggers found that their only would-be victims were homeless old men.

Maybe the silence of the city and the fear it inspired explained the great sentimentality with which my Colombian friends talked about their own patch: their family, friends and the neighbourhood they lived in. In time, I’d come to recognize the wariness with which one region eyed another. If I were going to Cali, bogotanos would tell me to be careful; it was ‘muy peligroso’ – very dangerous.Once in Cali, people would warn me of the same danger being particular to Bogotá, Medellín or Barranquilla. I had thought that people around me would have grown accustomed to the violence, but in fact, they seemed more scared than I did. Whatever lay beyond the end of the street was potentially dangerous.

I soon came to the barrio of Teusaquillo. In the days before the first Europeans reached the Andes, when the Muiscas ruled the city then known as Bacatá and the plain on which it stood their tribal leaders would bathe in the springs here. By the 1950 s Teusaquillo had become a pseudo-English garden suburb of bungalows and faux-Tudor houses with neat front gardens. Though faded, it still had some charm. Behind a barred window and muted by lace curtains, a bare bulb shone. Through the half-light cast by a flickering street lamp, I could make out a solitary local, who was walking his dog. A security guard stood outside his kiosk on the corner of the empty street.

I came to the Avenida Caracas. Running down the middle of the avenue were two new concrete highways that had been built for the Transmilenio , the name bogotanos give to the gleaming fleet of bendy buses, harbingers of a twenty-fi rst century version of the city, that shuttle from the wealthy north to the impoverished south and all points in between. A depot-bound bus was waiting at the traffic lights for a man who was pushing a cart laden with off cuts of wood, metal poles and bags of empty bottles. The weight of the cart, and his skeletal frame, which was bent double by the effort, meant that it took him ages to cross the road. The bus hummed patiently.

On the other side, an indigent man was squatting at the kerb, picking through a bag of scraps that had been left outside a shuttered restaurant. With him was a teenage boy who was inhaling glue from a plastic bag. A boy in rags strode past me on a mission, singing at the top of his voice, alone, free and seemingly oblivious to anyone who might have been listening. No one looked at him, bar the security guards.

These old men and teenagers, dressed in tattered hand-me-downs, their toes poking out from cast-off shoes, a sack of tin cans for the scrap merchant slung over one shoulder, had been here when I was last in the city. Despite the signs that Colombia was emerging from its twenty-year-long crisis, they were still here. They were short and skinny, with matted hair and furrowed, greasy faces tanned by the Andean sun. Solitary walkers through the night, they slouched with downcast eyes, hoping to avoid other members of their tribe. In the early mornings, as the commuters returned to take the city they half-owned, they would shrink away to sleep under cardboard boxes at the back of car parks. They re-emerged in the afternoon, but confined themselves to the backstreets, where I’d occasionally be asked for the price of a bread roll or a cup of coffee.

When the Hotel Tequendama came into view, I knew that I’d soon be home. It was five in the morning and the sky was growing light. There was still no sign of the stark Andean sunshine that illuminated my memories of the city. That morning, the city was hemmed in by cold, grey clouds that swept over the mountains from the east. A lone man eyed me up as he spoke into a lapel mike. Ahead, a security guard with a muzzled Rottweiler slowly paced around in front of the hotel’s grand main entrance. I made it back to the Casa Los Alpes just as the first of the day’s commuters were coming into the city centre.

Two days later I woke to news that Air Force bombs had killed the man known as ‘Mono Jojoy’, the commander of the FARC ’s Eastern Block. After breakfast I logged on to the FARC ’s website. ‘It is with profound remorse, clenched fists and chests heavy with feeling that we inform the people of Colombia and our brothers in Latin America that Commander Jorge Briceño, our brave, proud hero of a thousand battles, commander since the glorious days of the foundation of the FARC , has fallen at his post, at his men’s side, while fulfilling his revolutionary duties, following a cowardly bombardment akin to the Nazi blitzkrieg.’

It was a morning of glorious sunshine. It picked out the pine trees on the steep, wooded hills that rise up from the plain of Bogotá to form a north–south wall for the city. The whitewashed walls of the church of Monserrate gleamed from the summit. I made my way through the Journalists Park, with its statue of Simón Bolívar under a neglected limestone cupola and followed the creek upstream, past the students making their way to the Universidad de los Andes, to the Quinta de Bolívar. This is where Simón Bolívar, the hero of Colombia’s wars of independence, lived when he was in Bogotá. I had come to catch up with the thinking of the academics and NGO s that have been faithfully monitoring, measuring and struggling to come up with solutions to Colombia’s convulsions since the fifties. Unfortunately, I’d got my timing wrong: the conference had ended, not started, at 10 a.m. I’d forgotten what a nation of early risers this was.

On my way back down into the city, I fell in with Lucho, an old friend from the Arco Iris Foundation, one of the most respected of Colombia’s NGO s. He seemed less than surprised by the morning’s news. ‘The death of any soldier is to be expected,’ he said solemnly. ‘Every FARC commander has his understudy waiting to replace him should he fall in combat. Mono Jojoy is sure to have agreed his own treaty with Death.’ Lucho’s easy recourse to metaphysics sounded exotic to my ears, accustomed as they still were to the talk of Londoners, few of whom have agreed to anything as grand as a treaty with Death.

‘And anyway,’ he went on, ‘the guerrillas don’t count for much these days. The real problem facing the country is the mafia. They’ve bought out half of Congress.’ In a country that practically defined itself by its ‘war on terror’, this came as something of a surprise.

We hit the news-stands on Calle 19 , where Lucho asked for a copy of El Tiempo. Colombia’s oldest daily newspaper has long been a cornerstone of its democracy, except for a brief period in 1955 when it was shut down by the military dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. For a while, El Tiempo reappeared as Intermedio , ‘The Times’ becoming ‘The Intermission’, before Rojas Pinilla was booted out of office and normal service was resumed. It was Colombia’s first and last experiment with dictatorship.

But at one kiosk after another we were told that that day’s edition had sold out. A young boy with a bundle of newspapers under his arm was winding his way between the cars waiting at the traffic lights. ‘Extra, extra!’ he shouted. Lucho snapped up the eight-page supplement while I ordered us a couple of tintos at a street-side coffee bar. He propped his elbow on the counter and began hungrily scanning the pages.

Perhaps I was expecting cars to be honking their horns in jubilation at the news, but there was nothing so palpable. The politicians and journalists might have been celebrating the death of Mono Jojoy as another blow to the terrorists, but Lucho seemed less than impressed. ‘The newspapers are always saying that peace is just around the corner. Today, it’s Mono Jojoy. Last year it was Raúl Reyes.* When I was a kid, my dad used to tell me about Capitán Desquite and Tarzán and Efraín González. These days, they call them terrorists, but back then they were just bandits. Colombians have always had short memories.’ I later found out that Capitán Desquite – Captain Revenge – had been a Liberal guerrilla in the 1950 s and that Efraín González was a Conservative guerrilla from the same period. I say guerrilla, but since their main role was to defend their followers and kill their political opponents, bandit may well have been a more accurate description.

Mono Jojoy’s death had come just a few weeks after the inauguration of Colombia’s new president. To untrained eyes the Air Force’s strike might have confirmed that Juan Manuel Santos had adopted the hardline tactics of his predecessor, Álvaro Uribe. But Lucho suggested that it signalled a change in strategy. ‘Hugo Chávez and the FARC high command would have been aware of the strike in advance. Maybe they even gave it their blessing.’

The idea that the Venezuelan president might have colluded with senior FARC commanders sounded far-fetched, but Lucho was adamant. Mono Jojoy had been one of the hardline leaders of the FARC ’s military wing. With Jojoy out of the way, the FARC ’s leader, Alfonso Caño, who had always been more open to negotiations with the government, had a free hand to talk to President Santos. Unlike his predecessor, Santos seemed keen to talk to the enemy, or at least keener than he might admit to his supporters.

‘It may well be that Santos hammers out a deal with Caño some time next year, perhaps with Chávez acting as intermediary.’ Lucho drained the remains of his coffee and stuck his hand out for a cab. ‘Maybe the FARC will demobilize in return for a toughened up Land Law. Who knows? In Colombia, nothing is impossible.’

I was still nodding, struggling to take it all in, when Lucho jumped in the back of a taxi with a wave and sped off into the traffic. I clearly had some catching up to do. I reached for the copy of El Tiempo that Lucho had left on the counter. The frontpage story celebrated the ‘monumental blow’ that the Army had dealt to the guerrillas; the man that President Santos had described as ‘a symbol of terror’ was finally dead.

Mono Jojoy was the latest name to be added to the list of FARC commanders killed by the Army or extradited to stand trial on cocaine trafficking charges in the United States. To the optimists in the new government, the guerrillas’ surrender was only a matter of time. As and when they turned in their weapons, the country would once again become ‘the Athens of South America’, a beacon of democratic moderation in a continent that had always been prone to populist excess. El Tiempo didn’t have to spell out the alternative: that Colombia remain the guerrilla-infested, cocaine-addled basket case depicted by foreigners.

Although the official line on the war with the FARC was straightforward enough, I had a feeling that I wasn’t getting the full picture. The triumphalist pride and unspoken humiliation were worryingly familiar. The media bombast that followed the news of the death of Mono Jojoy only encouraged me to try to fi nd out more about the man and his struggle. I thought about going to his funeral. No date had been announced, since his body was still in the Army morgue in Bogotá, but in time his remains would have to be handed over to his family. Lucho had said that the FARC commander would probably be buried in Cabrera, a small town in the highlands an hour or so southwest of the capital, where he had been born.

But every journalist that I spoke to in the days that followed told me that the trip would be too dangerous. Cabrera was in Sumapaz, the high moors that overlook the capital, where local farmers have spent years arguing the relative merits of Marx and Bakunin. Both the FARC and the state intelligence agents likely to be monitoring the mourners would be highly suspicious of a foreign journalist asking questions.

It was clearly going to be difficult to pierce the united front the government was intent on building. I had every intention of avoiding danger, if only because it would leave me open to fear, which seemed to cripple the faculties of all those it touched. The Colombians that I had met were delighted to see a tourist defy their country’s awful reputation. But they wanted me to see the sights, not go rummaging through their dirty linen.

I would however get occasional clues to the stories that complicated the official line on the country’s ‘war on terror’. Buried in the city news pages of El Tiempo, I found a small piece about nine people who had been shot and killed across Bogotá the previous night. Most of them had been killed by paramilitary death squads. Masked men in a park in Ciudad Bolívar had shot three teenagers, including a thirteen-year-old boy.

On clear days I could see Ciudad Bolívar from my window. It is a huge barrio, built high on the treeless southern slopes of the city. Over the past twenty years it has absorbed many of the millions of Colombians who have been driven, whether by political violence or poverty, to seek new lives in the capital. Nobody wanted to live in Ciudad Bolívar, but those who had no choice in the matter had built, plumbed and wired a neighbourhood that the utilities companies and town planners largely ignored. Infamous for crime and violence, most taxi drivers wouldn’t even go near it.

I knew that Nidia, the housekeeper who had a little room on the ground fl oor of Casa Los Alpes, lived in Ciudad Bolívar. When I got back, I found her sweeping the already spotless stairs. I asked her if she knew anything about what had happened in her neighbourhood the previous night. She’d heard the news, she said in a whisper; the death squads often took it upon themselves to root out anyone they believed to be working for the guerrillas.

I balked; it was hard to believe that after eight years of a nationwide Army offensive that had pushed the FARC into the mountains and along the rivers that run out into the jungle, the guerrillas still had operatives in the capital. Whether through fear or ignorance, Nidia couldn’t tell me what the guerrillas’ urban militias did, bar some mutterings of the type I’d heard from her on previous occasions, about rowdy teenagers swigging beer at the bus stop outside her house. To her mind, revolutionary violence and under-age drinking were of a kind; they were the doings of subversivos.

Nidia always called me ‘su merced’ – ‘your honour’, an archaic term of polite address that was no less surprising for being so widely used. Such deference might have sounded strange outside the highland departments around Bogotá, but it was quite common to hear poor people in the capital address their social superiors as ‘ su merced ’. Whenever I heard the expression, I couldn’t help but ponder the question posed by a Frenchman who visited Bogotá in 1840 : ‘What is one to expect from a republic where every man calls “master” any individual whiter or better dressed than himself?’

One hundred and seventy years later, La Candelaria was full of very short, very old people living in cramped, unheated houses that had been seen little change since the coming of electric light. Their poverty and instinctive deference to anyone with more money or education than themselves went back further still. A visitor to the city in 1900 had found it divided between energetic modernizers and hidebound devotees of the Catholic Church. It was ‘a world in which confusion and clarity walked together, as did superstition and faith, arcane ritual and logical deduction.’* That year, half of all the children born in the city had unmarried parents, despite the fact that Bogotá had more priests per head of population than anywhere else in Colombia. The city’s clergymen railed against the sin of illegitimacy, as they did against the dangers of drink, but were widely ignored on both counts. The municipal government had a monopoly on the production of booze, and depended on the revenue for the bulk of its wages bill. Despite the outward signs of piety, it was said that farm workers around Bogotá got half their intake of calories from corn liquor.

The days in which ‘pigs, chickens, horses and cows lived intermingled with families of all classes and conditions’ were long gone, as was the Church’s monopoly on Colombia’s education system. But the humility, reserve and durability of the elderly were as apparent as ever. What was new, at least to them, was the FARC , the terrible response they had provoked and the all-pervading fear that Colombians of all classes had learned to live with. Their fear was fully justified. The FARC is still the largest guerrilla army in the world. Unlike Al-Qaeda, the IRA and the Basque ETA , Colombia’s insurgents had come close to toppling a government.

Their military power had been doubly frightening for having risen in tandem with their reliance on kidnapping the wealthy for ransom. Many of the students that I had taught at the private Universidad Externado in 2001 had had some personal experience of kidnap, as I found out when I asked them, unkindly I admit, to write an essay about the time they were most frightened. The story that stays with me is that of a girl whose father had received a letter from the FARC , stating that anyone with assets worth in excess of $ 1 million would be considered a legitimate target for ‘detention’. Only by paying a ‘war tax’ would his name be struck off their list. The girl’s father was keen to pay the tax and live in peace, but had no way of locating the tax collectors. So he set off into the countryside, a manila envelope full of cash in his briefcase, to fi nd his would-be abductors. He was lucky, in that he wasn’t robbed en route and somehow found a FARC front on the moors of Sumapaz. The girl’s father handed his money to the commander of the front, who gave him a receipt, and the millionaire was able to return to the city with some peace of mind.

Others weren’t so lucky. I remember too a conversation with David Hutchinson, an English banker and long-term resident of Bogotá, who had been kidnapped by the FARC in May 2002 . He spent his fi rst month in captivity camped on the moors of Sumapaz. From his tent he could even see his own house, a graphic illustration of just how close the guerrillas had come to overrunning Bogotá.

The government was locked into peace talks with the FARC at the time. To the guerrillas, it must have looked like a reprise of Cuba in 1959 , or Vietnam in 1975: a moment when the balance of power between old and new creaked towards the latter. And yet, in the years that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the idea that communist insurgents might overthrow what upper class Colombians liked to call ‘the oldest democracy in Latin America’ wasn’t just an aff ront, but an anachronism; and one that only further isolated their country from the rest of the world.

The peace talks of 2001 – 2 were a fascinating time for me, even if the near overthrow of the Colombian government went largely unremarked upon elsewhere. For the privileged families that have governed Colombia since independence, however, it was a humiliation that they vowed never to revisit. When the peace talks broke down in acrimony and mutual blame, the Air Force was sent in to drop bombs on the FARC ’s encampment. The hundreds of envoys from the United Nations and European governments, who had been hopeful of a negotiated solution to the conflict, scuttled for cover. Since then, they have either professed themselves impotent or simply lost interest in Colombia.

The United States, as potent and interested as ever, seemed to greet the return to war with relief. The political life of Colombia has been subsumed by its internal confl ict ever since. The barrage of propaganda, designed to exhort the population and marginalize dissenters, has come to seem normal. Somewhere, far from the capital, volleys of gunfi re echoed the rhetoric.

The following Sunday morning, I was no sooner out of bed than off down to the Avenida Séptima and onto a bus heading north. I felt a need to run, to fi nd a vista beyond the claustrophobia and paranoia of life in Bogotá, which the death of Mono Jojoy had only heightened. Half an hour later I got off at the Avenida Chile and walked a few blocks up the hill to Quebrada La Vieja – the Old Woman’s Brook – a stream that runs down from the mountains that border the eastern edge of the city.

A beautifully manicured path wound its way along the course of the brook, past the grand apartment buildings of Los Rosales and then up into the forest. It was a 400 -metre climb to reach the crest of the hills, but there was a well-trodden trail, crowded with soaring eucalyptus trees and thick groves of bamboo. Within a few minutes all I could hear was the breeze in the treetops. As the air grew cooler and damper, the mosses grew thicker. A family of well-shod bogotanos with waxed jackets and Labradors passed me on their way down, but by the time I reached the top, I’d not seen another soul for an hour.

Looking east from the summit I could see only thick woods covering steep-sided valleys. I headed south along a less used path that followed the crest of the hill, passing under pine trees that had carpeted the ground in a thick bed of dry brown needles, and came out onto a bluff that fi nally gave me the view I’d been waiting for. Below me lay Bogotá in the haze; its drone, emitted by big cities everywhere, was reminiscent of the sea. Behind me lay only wilderness.

I had often wondered why the conquistadores chose to build their capital here. Although it sits on a verdant, sheltered plain, 2 , 625 metres above sea level, many of the mountains that surround Bogotá are dry and windswept. The capital is over 450 miles from the north coast, and the River Magdalena, which until well into the twentieth century was the country’s only trade route, was hundreds of metres below me. Cali and Medellín were both prettier cities, with easier climates and better access to the outside world.

Colombia’s topography has dictated the course of much of its history. It has been a blessing for its farmers – the mountains and the tropical lowlands that separate them include all varieties of climate, so all kinds of crops can be grown in them, from kale and broccoli to mango and pineapples. But the crumpled landscape has proved a curse for its traders. Since cities like Cali and Medellín have always been able to feed themselves, they have had little need for commerce with the rest of the country. As the crow fl ies, Bogotá is only 190 miles from Medellín, yet until the 1950 s it cost less to carry a sack of coff ee beans from Medellín to London than it did to take it down to the Magdalena and then up to the capital.

So Colombia developed as a nation of isolated provinces. When it was a colony of Spain, cities like Popayán, Tunja and Mompós were provincial capitals. After independence, power increasingly accrued in Bogotá and they became backwaters. Such was their poverty that foreigners visiting Mompós in the nineteenth century remarked that the town elders’ sense of superiority was all that separated them from their former slaves. They were notable for their piety, haughty disdain for the modern world, and frequent ambushes of the tax collectors sent from distant Bogotá.

For most of its history, Bogotá has been the smallest capital city in Latin America. Even in 1900 it was home to no more than 30 , 000 people. I’d seen postcards of the city as it appeared in the 1950 s, when its streets were unbroken and lined with villas with front gardens, and cars were few and far between. Peering beyond the gleaming new buildings that housed the government ministries, I could make out the slums of Egipto and Las Cruces. Since the fi fties, the city has grown like a boil, fi lled with millions of country folk escaping the poverty and violence of the hinterland. Today Bogotá is a city of 8 million people that sprawls north, south and west from the colonial hub like the dusty spokes of half a bicycle wheel, each spoke a highway that runs out past warehouses, factories and car showrooms. And yet the neighbourhoods of the south still feel like villages that have been uprooted and dumped in the mountains.

A huge amount of work has been done over the past ten years to try and catch up with decades of unplanned, chaotic growth.

A succession of bold and visionary mayors have laid pavements and cycle paths along the highways, and built parks and libraries in the windswept neighbourhoods of the south. But they face huge challenges, not least of which is the indiff erence to others that seems to pervade this city of strangers.

Generations of bogotanos have grown up regarding the city government – indeed, all government – as corrupt and ineff ectual. It has become a self-fulfi lling prophecy, in which few people pay their taxes and those elected to govern the city routinely pilfer the treasury. The public realm has been starved; hence the wasted people the size of children, lying filthy and emaciated in the doorways of shops, and the security guards who look out at them, their pump-action shotguns protecting anything of value that can’t be shuttered for the night.

If only, I thought from my hilltop lookout, the night were reclaimed. If only an army of workers set about fixing all that has gone neglected for so long. If only the pavements were repaired, the houses painted and colour brought back to the grimy walls that line the avenues. If only the streets were lit and bogotanos felt safe to walk their city. As it was, many of them still called a taxi just to go to the supermarket.

I clambered down the rocks from the ridge towards a mountain brook. Close by were the huge, straight trunks of fallen eucalyptus trees that had tumbled over waterfalls and been blackened by the water. The winter rains must have washed away whatever hold they had on the hills. If I were to slip and break a leg, I too might lie here unseen. There was no sign of human life to appeal to: no mountain huts or roads; no dogs; not even a telegraph wire to follow.

In the distance, I could see three huge residential high-rises that were being built on the ring road, each twenty or thirty fl oors high. Being Sunday, they were deserted. They off ered great views over the plain of Bogotá, but I could see that anyone who bought an apartment facing the hills would look down on a slum.

Friends had warned me not to walk in the hills alone. Although they looked empty, they bordered a series of invasion settlements. Unplanned, unauthorized and un-policed, the slums act as a buff er between the city and the empty expanse behind the mountains. The kids who live there, I was told, would rob anyone who strayed onto their patch. I could have turned back and retraced my footsteps, but instead I carried on, trying to look purposeful. The ring road was only a few hundred yards away, I told myself.

When I saw the first people, I instinctively stopped, stood still and waited for them to go. But as I got closer, I saw that to get to the main road I had no choice but to walk through the settlement. Once on level ground, I soon got lost in the warren of muddy paths that meandered between the zinc-roofed shacks. The further I walked, the more stupid I felt. Luckily, the fi rst person I came across was an old man, dressed in a grey woollen poncho, brown trilby and rubber boots. He looked surprised to see me, but gladly pointed me in the right direction.

Half an hour later, I was back in the fug and racket of the buses racing along the Avenida Séptima. I recognized a couple of teenagers I’d passed in the shanty, who were sitting on a wall. ‘What did you make of the neighbourhood?’ one of them asked with a wry smile. We chatted for a while. As I turned to go, they asked me, as if it were always worth a shot, if I could spare some change. I was about to reach for my wallet, but then I thought that they might snatch it. I didn’t want to dar papaya . ‘ Que pena, no tengo ,’ I said, and kept on walking.

Since I’d not been able to find a book that might tell me more about Bogotá, I’d started reading a novel by Héctor Abad Faciolince, one of Colombia’s best-known newspaper columnists.

Angosta is a dystopian vision of a not-too-distant future Medellín. The city is governed by Los Siete Sabios – the Seven Wise Men – a shadowy clique of businessmen, landowners and senior police offi cers who monitor and eliminate all possible sources of dissent. The poor of Angosta are confi ned to the ravines at the bottom of the city by a high wall that is guarded by gun-toting Chinese guards. Transit to the upper slopes is strictly controlled. There, both the temperature and the mood are more congenial: people can walk the leafy streets without having to worry about being robbed. The gully dwellers are kept out of sight, at once ever-present and easily forgotten.

Angosta, which is the Spanish word for narrow, is a gripping depiction of the constraints of life in a paranoid city, something like a tropical version of George Orwell’s 1984 . But the author hadn’t had to stray far from the reality of modern Colombia to create what outsiders might regard as a fantasy. The Seven Wise Men were based on the Twelve Apostles, a group of wealthy landowners from Antioquia, the department of which Medellín is capital, who had been prominent cocaine traffi ckers and paramilitaries in the late 1990 s. Santiago Uribe, brother of former president Álvaro Uribe, was alleged to have been among their number, though he has always denied any involvement.

While Angosta’s Seven Wise Men might be inspired by the recent history of Medellín, the walls they raised and policed aren’t specifi c to any one nation. Internal barriers, no less real for being invisible, divide American cities from São Paolo to Los Angeles to Kingston. Across North and South America, the public realm is being gradually suff ocated; those who fi nd themselves unable to pay for private services are left outside the city walls.

Colombia is the single most unequal country in Latin America, which is in turn, the most unequal continent in the world. All signs suggest that Colombia will surpass Haiti, Sierra Leone, Namibia and South Africa to become the most unequal country in the world in the years to come.* It’s not that Colombia is poor: its GDP has doubled over the last twenty years, as has public spending. Plenty of countries are poorer and enjoy less economic growth than Colombia. But in spite of (or because of ) the accumulation of wealth and power in so few hands, the Colombian government has done less than any other in Latin America to reduce the poverty in which 20 million of its citizens – almost half the population – live from day to day.

Winston Smith, the anti-hero of 1984, is rooted out by the state and ends his days contemplating ‘a boot stamping on a human face – for ever’. Winston devises his own subtle forms of resistance, but any organized challenge to the tyranny of Big Brother is impossible. Like George Orwell, Héctor Abad Faciolince didn’t seem to think that revolution was a realistic prospect. The heroes of Angosta only find something like peace when they are driven into exile. What then of those Colombians who have decided that the only way to aff ect meaningful change is by force of arms? Most of their countrymen regard the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia as dinosaurs: antiquated and all the more dangerous for being on their last legs.

Yet as seen from the uninhabited hills overlooking Bogotá, the wrangling of rich and poor, and left and right, seemed overshadowed by a more elemental confl ict, between the known and the unknown. The geography of this country threw up obstacles to all human endeavour, whatever its inspiration or purpose. I thought again of what David Hutchinson had told me about the ten months he had spent as a captive of the FARC . A few weeks after arriving at their camp in Sumapaz, he was taken on a long march towards the southeast, over the easternmost range of the Andes and down onto the llanos , the huge plains that run towards the border with Venezuela. They spent months on foot. Although they travelled by day, they didn’t come across a single soldier or policeman. ‘No satellite saw us. Nobody came and killed us. Nothing at all,’ David told me. ‘Colombia is a very big country with a very small state. It’s a one-way mirror. Behind the one-way mirror is over half the territory of Colombia, where the state can’t see anything.’

In Britain, people often complain about the omnipresence of the state and its incessant surveillance of daily life. If there is a one-way mirror in Britain, it is obvious who is doing the watching and who is being watched. But in Colombia, people complain about the absence of the state. I’d flown over the eastern plains myself, and had marvelled at the unbroken tropical savannah rolling out towards the horizon. There, the state was not so much a nanny as an absent father.

Colombians take their one-way mirror for granted, for it has always been there. Those looking into that mirror see only familiar and reassuring refl ections; but behind it, never to be seen, lies a sparsely inhabited, frequently lawless country. Few seem willing to admit just how deep the division runs; fewer still, to acknowledge the inevitable violence that division in - spires. Despite the surveillance and control the Colombian government aspire to exercise, they are on the wrong side of the mirror.

I asked David how the guerrillas rated their chances of overthrowing the government. ‘I asked one of the commanders when it would all end for him,’ he told me. ‘He said, “When we are marching on the Avenida Séptima in Bogotá.” That’s their dream – that one day they’ll win.’

Understandably, David didn’t like them much. ‘They know nothing about anything at all,’ he told me. ‘They can’t read or write. They’ve never heard of England. They’ve never been to the sea – they don’t even know what the sea is.’ His voice betrayed a residual disbelief at what had happened to him, as well as the fear that the guerrillas had instilled in him. ‘Well, that’s not true. They know a lot about some things. They know a lot about birds and fi sh and the forest. They know natural remedies for when you get ill. So they have a sort of Indian knowledge, which is sometimes quite interesting. It’s very like reading the Odyssey. They live in a world of five thousand years ago.’

Most of the conflicts of the post-Cold War world have drawn on ethnic or religious divisions for fuel. The Colombian confl ict, as well as being older and easier to ignore than most, is also harder to explain. It certainly isn’t religious: nearly all Colombians are Catholic. Nor is it ethnic: the Europeans and Africans who came here fi ve hundred years ago took wives or mistresses wherever they found them, and at street level at least, no one hue dominates the others. Most black and native Colombians live in the margins, but their struggle for racial equality has been subsumed by other, broader agendas, principally grounded in region and class. Perhaps that explains the near-invisibility of Colombia’s war: it is a long-running, unchanging, old- fashioned class war. To say that the shoppers wandering the polished marble floors of the Andean Centre and the guerrillas of the FARC are separated by 5 , 000 years might be an exaggeration, but it gives some indication of the obstacles faced by anyone hoping to build a nation in this corner of the continent.

I pulled out my map and set to wondering about all the forgotten villages dotted along Colombia’s jungle rivers or perched in its distant mountain valleys. For the past twenty-fi ve years, places like Playboy, Putumayo; Balmoral, Casanare; and Berlín, Santander have been too dangerous to visit. But even as the guerrillas have been pushed back, the countryside remains largely unknown, even by most Colombians. In the remotest departments, the only way to get around is by boat. Other regions have roads, but many of them are unpaved, so even those wanting to get to know the countryside better fi nd themselves stymied. The mountains, jungles, swamps and rivers that frustrated the conquistadores when their galleons fi rst made land in the early years of the sixteenth century still resist those who seek to govern them.

One of the few foreign authors to have struggled to make sense of modern Colombia has called it ‘a nation in spite of itself ’. From their mountain capital, its rulers might catch echoes of the war rumbling in the tropical lowlands. The city’s lawyers, Congressmen and political pundits might digest its causes and eff ects and pontifi cate over what should be done, just as they have since declaring their independence from Spain two hundred years ago. But to this day, much of the rest of the country considers the bogotano elite to be overweening meddlers, inscrutable and bloodless, somehow a breed apart. I couldn’t help thinking that they were spectators in their own country, that the confl uence of indigenous, African and European peoples on which the nation rested lay elsewhere, and that Colombia is still, as one journalist called it, ‘an act of faith’.