Cuando entres al Darién encomiéndate a María;
En tu mano está la entrada, en la de Dios la salida
(When you enter Darién surrender to Mary;
Entry is up to you, and exit is up to God.)
Inscription found in an abandoned fort in the jungles of Urabá. Cited in Mauricio Alí’s “Estado de Sitio: Los Kuna en Urabá”
Five hundred and seventeen years ago, Antonio de Ojeda ventured out from the island Hispaniola (where the contemporary Dominican Republic and Haiti now stand) towards mainland South America. Hispaniola was the first point of contact the Spaniards had in the Americas, where they fought fiercely against and eventually exterminating the Tanío chiefdoms - Haïti, in fact, is a transliteration of the Tanío term Ayiti or ‘island of high mountains’. Ojeda, who had embarked on the second Columbus trip, sought then to become the governor of Nueva Andalucía by claiming the vast extensions of land that were reported to lie south of the island. After some years of exploration and rifles, Ojeda and his men settled in the Gulf of Urabá, two kilometers north of the actual Necoclí. Named San Sebastián de Urabá, the settlement was erected as a fortress in order to fend off the recurring attacks on behalf of the Urabaes natives, who supposedly had poisoned arrows to their advantage. The Spaniards weren’t able to hold the fort for more than eight months. When Ojeda fled leaving a handful of soldiers in charge, reports stated that the fort was obliterated in a siege shortly thereafter along with its defenders. It was the first settlement in mainland South America by Europeans. The following settlement by the Spaniards, Santa María La Antigua, founded on the other side of the gulf by Panamá’s ‘champion’ Vasco Núñez de Balboa, lasted roughly thirty years until it was razed to the ground by indigenous groups that had – allegedly- sided with Pirates in 1534.
Since then the Darién – Urabá region captivated the imagination of many. It became known not only as the hideout of rebels, pirates, ‘savages’, and outlaws but also a safe haven for freed slaves, natives, and their racially mixed descendants. I will conducting fieldwork for the next 3 months around the Necoclí municipality, and part of my goal is to show, employing the visual ethnography approach, the different types of collective representations that characterize the area. But first, a brief sketch of history of the place.
The dynamics of colonization in the region during the nineteenth century dictated a logic of extraction of natural resources that met an equally bountiful labor offer. In the beginning of the twentieth century, Urabá welcomed liberal guerrillas fleeing an intense bipartisan war that laid waste to rural Colombia, becoming their stronghold. By 1955, with the arrival of the infamous United Fruit Company, responsible for massacring some close to 30 banana plantation laborers in Ciénaga (according to official figures), the region started to be known as the “banana axis” and its enormous geostrategic potential became evident to ruling elites: both oceans, the Pacific and the Atlantic, are located less than a hundred kilometers from each other and the calm waters of the gulf made for a well-suited port for the exportation of natural goods. Paisa landowners and businessmen invested in a road that connected industrialized Medellín with Turbo calling it la ruta al mar (the route to the sea), and took it upon themselves to bring order where “chaos” ruled. It implied that the (white) civilizatory principles of the paisas would override what they saw as the cultural inferiority of native-descendant chilapos from Córdoba and African-descendant morenos from Chocó (although it must be noted that the racial makeup of these groups is much richer).
The atrocious practices of exploitation that were perpetuated with the American company were one of many consequences of the absence of the Colombian State apparatus - which is still felt to this day in many territories. Due to social unrest and the solidification of unions, with a deeply entrenched Liberal ideology humming in the background, the newly formed guerrilla groups of the mid-1960s found in Urabá an amicable welcome committee of angry banana laborers. Banana plantations are truly labor-intensive, demanding that there be some 70 workers every physical packing plant and twice as much in the growing fields, with working conditions that can prove to be terrible. The thousands of hectares of banana plantations in Urabá gave both FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and EPL (Popular Army of Liberation) an equal number in sympathizers. By the late 80s when the paramilitary groups started to the incursion on behalf of the State and the banana transnational conglomerates to restore –yet again- Order, plantations became killing fields with massacres sprouting everywhere an armed group sought to counter the influence of the other. The situation grew worse and escalated when the EPL partially demobilized under the presidency of César Gavíria, and the remaining troops joined the paramilitary, forming the highly specialized and feared Commandos, taking arms against the FARC guerrilla. The bloodiest chapter of this counterinsurgency battle took place in La Chinita neighborhood of San José de Apartadó in January 23rd 1994, when a FARC battalion unleashed its semi-automatic weapons against a block party that they claimed as full of EPL proponents and sympathizers were mingling together. Some 35 dead and much more wounded was the result of the heinous act, with innocent women and children laying among the victims.
The early 2000s were perhaps the bloodiest period perhaps in all of Urabá’s history, and it was all perpetrated by the AUC (United Self-defenders of Colombia) paramilitary forces, which were sponsored by both the State and the banana companies in the region. The threat is still palpable to this day due to the fact they staged a demobilization under the Uribe administration and many of their combatants, left unpunished, constituted at its core the actual BACRIM (criminal bands). One such criminal band is the Clan del Golfo (Clan of the Gulf of Urabá) which is being heavily fought, not without its irony, by police as well as the military. Locals say that their rule was such, less than eight years ago, that no one in town would even dare pluck a fruit from land under their vigil, for everyone was paralyzed with fear of ultimately facing their extreme law-of-talion-type of justice. Their presence can still be felt as they retaliate against public authority figures and conduct extortion on every front. It is because of this scenario that private Colombian companies have dreaded investing in the area. But there is a glimmer of hope as people take it up to them reclaim this territory as a territory of peace, and hope for better opportunities in the future with a less ominous private mode of investment.
More about these new types of opportunity on my next post... served to you fresh every week.
