A Town’s Nightmare Lingers

This little town on the edge of Colombia’s lush eastern prairies seems a place of secrets and unsettled accounts, a place just

waking up from a dream--or perhaps a nightmare.

For three years, it was the capital of a rebel empire, the epicenter of a huge chunk of land ceded to leftist guerrillas by the government for peace talks.

During that time, the gun-toting guerrillas reigned supreme here, dispensing justice, even building a prison camp nearby to hold hundreds of Colombian soldiers.

It was a place where the absurd became routine, where daily life turned into an all-too-real “Fear Factor” episode: What must I do today to survive?

Both the kidnap victims and the guerrilla warlords who once held them contributed money to build the handsome yellow church that dominates the town square. It is a house of God built by money from crime.

The local high school lost half its soccer team. The players were recruited along with other students to join the rebels, who were seeking new and improved guerrillas, ones with enough education to read and write.

The guerrillas acted as judge, jury and executioner in a town that lacked any other official authority. More than 140 locals once were rounded up and held in squalid pens. Their alleged crimes? They had stolen a rebel leader’s prized hog, among other things. Killers openly boasted of their intent to murder those deemed guilty.

Now, four months after peace talks collapsed and the rebels fled, fear still fills the dirt streets and cinder-block saloons, and strange stories of the rebels’ dystopia abound.

This is perhaps one of the best places in Colombia to see the warping influence that the grinding, 38-year-old guerrilla war has had on a people, and a place. It’s the Wild West meets Alice in Wonderland, where the violent and the bizarre came together to produce a surreal world.

Here, the rebels were heroes who built roads, then later became tyrants who murdered townspeople. The government consisted of distant bureaucrats who abandoned the town, but later rescued it.

“We just got used to it,” said a doctor in town, who, like most locals interviewed, did not want his name used. “Seeing a guerrilla was like seeing a police officer.”

Surrounded by Rebels

La Macarena was one of five towns in a demilitarized zone about four times the size of Los Angeles County that was created in 1998 to spark peace talks with the rebels. The Colombian government pulled out all symbols of state authority--the army, police and prosecutors, leaving only civil officials such as mayors and town treasurers.

As it turns out, this dusty frontier town at first did well under the guerrillas. The town had always been a favorite of Jorge Briceno, the No. 2 commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

Briceno, better known by the nom de guerre Mono Jojoy, built a permanent base just outside town after the zone was established. It had wooden barracks to hold 5,000 fighters, as well as computers and space for warehouses--even a statue of one of the group’s founders.

It also would eventually be the place where hundreds of Colombian soldiers and police officers were held captive in miserable conditions until a prisoner exchange last year. They lived behind barbed wire, some in wooden huts, some chained to trees. Many suffered from malnutrition or malaria. The townspeople knew, but could do nothing--there was no government to call, no police to alert. Some of the soldiers are still in the hands of the FARC, now approaching five years in captivity.

Almost as soon as he arrived, Briceno set out to provide the one thing the town had always lacked: transportation routes. The FARC paid a contractor to build two dirt roads, one of them 60 miles long, to connect La Macarena to larger towns nearby.

Suddenly, a voyage that had taken as long as two weeks by river became a trip of a few days.

Town leaders acknowledged that the roads also benefited the FARC, improving their military mobility. But they credited the rebels with achieving what the government had long failed to do.

“During the detente, we benefited,” said Father Ricardo Cantalapiedra, the town priest. “The government had left this town totally incommunicado.”

“If it’s good, it’s good, no matter who’s doing it,” he said of the roads.

Cantalapiedra’s church benefited as well from the presence of the guerrillas. The priest would often intervene on behalf of people seized by the FARC, which kidnaps hundreds of wealthy and middle-class Colombians each year. At least two of those families expressed their gratitude by making sizable donations.

It didn’t stop there. Over the years, Cantalapiedra won the respect of several of the FARC’s top leaders. Jojoy himself gave nearly $10,000 to help build the church, which by the standards of a Colombian frontier town is a veritable cathedral.

Permanent pews, soaring glass windows and a tiled floor grace the church. The altar is adorned with a 15-foot-high triptych, the work of a local muralist. One panel shows the Virgin Mary and Jesus as peasants. Another--appropriately enough-- is a copy of “Crucifixion,” by Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali.

The final panel features a reinterpretation of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper.” The disciples are Colombian peasants from different provinces. Originally, the muralist had painted in Colombian President Andres Pastrana and FARC leader Manuel Marulanda, leaning toward each other to discuss peace.

But Cantalapiedra thought a portrait of the guerrilla leader would be a bit much in his church.

“I told him to change it,” he said of the muralist. The Marulanda figure was transformed into a Roman Catholic priest.

The guerrillas also helped the town’s economy. They bought local cattle and other foodstuffs to feed their troops. Bars were packed on the weekends. This town of about a 1,000 people had two orthodontists in a region where dentists are often scarce.

The rebels filled the vacuum left by the departure of judicial and police officials, sending a “judge” to town every 15 days or so to deal with petty disputes between neighbors. The sentences were usually fines or community service.

They recruited children and teenagers to join their ranks. At one point, the rebels focused their efforts on the high school, worried that there were too few guerrillas who could read. The recruits--five of them teenagers from the soccer team--joined a unit that came to be known as “The High School Graduates Front.”

“All through the 3 1/2 years [of the zone], we had no problems. We had good relations with them,” Cantalapiedra said of the rebels.

But, toward the end of the disastrous on-and-off-again peace talks, things turned bad for the town.

During one low point when the talks seemed about to rupture, Cantalapiedra and community leader Cecilia Gallego arranged a deal with the FARC. If the army stormed in and the guerrillas fled, the townspeople would be allowed to strip the FARC camp of valuables left behind.

And so, when talks seemed to break down in January this year and the guerrillas evacuated, the townspeople swarmed the camp. They carted off computers, mattresses, about four tons of stored food. They took Briceno’s hog.

At the last minute, the peace talks were saved. The rebels returned and they were angry.

Not only had the camp been looted, but during the mad dash, someone had broken the statue of one of the group’s founders, Jacobo Arenas.

In the weeks that followed, the rebels arrested more than 140 townspeople and held them at their POW camp outside town.

Just before trials began, Cantalapiedra struck a second deal. The townspeople would return all the goods they had taken--replacing chicken for chicken, computer for computer, pig for pig.

The FARC agreed, and the townspeople dutifully fulfilled their end of the bargain, delivering all of the goods to the rebels.

Four days later, the peace talks collapsed again, this time for good--and the rebels, apparently unmoved by the return of their merchandise, came to settle scores against some of those who had raided their camp.

Guerrillas’ Killing Spree

They shot four people Feb. 24. They shot three more the next day, including Gallego, who was dragged from her house as her children watched and shot by guerrillas in her backyard.

The guerrilla leader who carried out the killings moved openly about town the day the slaughter began, even agreeing to meet for lunch with a reporter in town to cover the collapse of the talks.

He didn’t show up for the interview, though. He was too busy killing. His men shot one man through the head, then shouted out to passersby that they had just killed a paramilitary.

A few days later, army troops finally showed up. The dead man’s wife saw them as she came back from the funeral.

“You’ve come too late,” she screamed in fury. Today, she says, she trusts neither the guerrillas nor the government.

But today, order at least has returned to La Macarena. Heavily armed police stand on every other street corner.

“With the guerrillas, there was a lot of fear,” said one young store clerk. “I feel safer now, because at least there’s someone to protect me.”

The people of La Macarena still haven’t benefited from the rebel booty. Although the town lacks computers, chairs and desks for the community center, the attorney general has said all seized items are state property that cannot be turned over without due process.

That hasn’t stopped the military, which has told the town that it has “borrowed” some of the rebel goods for its soldiers. Talk about town has it that the local army commander now sleeps on the comfortable box springs and mattress that Briceno once used.

The local police commander said people are slowly beginning to trust the government again. But there is still a lot of work to be done. Many fear that the army will leave and the town will be again abandoned.

“Things are very tense,” the doctor said. “Now, we are a target for the guerrillas.”

One of the roads the rebels were building remains unfinished, only a few miles short of its destination. People are hoping the government will complete it.

There are still no local judges, no human rights officers, no prosecutors.

“There is nothing,” said army Capt. Ronald Pava, who has acted as judge and jury for minor complaints the last few months. “This town needs authority.”

The Colombian army has built a temporary base on the edge of town near a gravel airstrip that it uses for operations against rebels.

One day recently, army officials gathered at the town airport to display the bodies of five rebels wrapped in green plastic whom they had killed in a nearby town. One man had been shot in the head. A second had a golf-ball-sized hole in his throat. A third, a 14-year-old girl, was killed when a bullet entered above her thigh and exited her neck.

The army, said Col. Carlos Villareal, was slowly clearing the area of guerrillas.

“It’s a slow job, not an easy one,” Villareal said.

At the corner of the airfield, the townspeople gathered. They strained to see the bodies.

They looked for their children.