LOS CRUZADOS

These guys came into my cubicle, which was a tent set up on a barren patch of ground, crawling with mismises, a kind of miniature tick. I spent the whole time slathered in Vicks Vaporubâ, in that god-awful heat and unbearable humidity, next to the river that runs through Tibú. The paramilitaries came through, still carrying their weapons, their plastic bottles filled with the ground meat they preserved in oil, and with monkeys and other animals perched on their shoulders. It was a very wild scene. I actually witnessed the entire deployment as they arrived. Trucks and buses filled with paramilitaries, helicopters, in a kind of advance party, like something out of Rambo. At one point Mancuso arrived, in a super-sophisticated SUV, naturally, with his bodyguards, with incredible weapons, and impeccably dressed in camouflage.

Here’s a little anecdote... it turns out that among Mancuso’s many requests, as one of the “stars” of the war, or like any artist, was a “dressing room”, that was a container, which hadn’t arrived, and he was upset about it. When the container arrived, it had no air conditioning, which delayed things further. Then, the washing machine hadn’t arrived and that caused things to be delayed even more. This first stage that I was part of was supposed to last a week, but it went on for fourteen days. I got sick and it was a very strange process, because it was my first time and [my illness] had to do with seeing these guys armed. Of all the staff there, I was the only artist. There were a couple of photographers, but everyone else was a lawyer, a sociologist or political scientist, or a psychologist, and their positions on all this were a bit more closed-minded or more conservative. One advantage I had was that I saw the conflict from a more human perspective, instead of being biased or judging them. I heard some incredible stories straight from their mouths.

I learned a lot during that first trip. I found it very interesting to try to create a place of trust, to allow them to bend a little, so they could be honest and just relax. This sounds all well and good, but at the time it was very difficult. When I got back to Bogotá after those fourteen days I was totally messed up, sick, my brain was on fire from seeing all these messed up people, and observing all the different hierarchies. I listened to them talk about giving up war, but to a certain extent giving up war wasn’t that cool for them; war, for better or for worse –and more for worse than better– is a business that made a lot of things possible for them. I remember my return to Bogotá; it was horrible, I cried for days, I didn’t understand.

Then came more trips; long working hours, from 5 in the morning to 9, 10, 12 o’clock at night. Like I said before, it was a very precarious process and almost completely analog. Everything took much longer and the ID cards were a mandatory part of the process; they had to be issued so that at the end of the demobilization ceremony they could be given their card, some clothes, a little money, and “see you later”.

From there I traveled to another demobilization in Tuluá, with the paramilitary block from the Valle del Cauca, Cauca, and Norte del Valle regions. The work was intense, the region was very complicated, but I met alias HH, who seemed to me a brilliant person, a very learned lawyer. I also met some very strange people; in one case in particular, one of the demobilized paramilitaries, who was some kind of commander, had no national ID card or number. He carried a muleteer’s carriel purse and his only document was a blue American Express card. I began to really understand the absurdities of war. In Tibú, not having much time to take photographs, I used a small notebook, which unfortunately I lost, to draw what I saw or write down the little things that went through my mind.

After Cali, I traveled to Santa Fe de Ralito, where I met the entire upper echelon. Another incredible story was our arrival there in the car: there were signs on the utility posts that said, “Mind your children, the Tiger is loose!” It was impossible to know if the “tiger” was someone called “El Tigre”, some child molester or human abomination, or if a real tiger was on the loose and came around at night to eat children. As we got out of the car, we did in fact see cages holding several jaguars, a male-female pair, and the female had recently given birth. In the evenings, the paramilitaries had surveillance duty, and one of these paracos (paramilitaries) would walk through Santa Fe de Ralito with a jaguar on a leash. Another thing that impressed me was the largest supermarket in the area –in Ralito, which was miles away. To get there you had to pass through a series of checkpoints, because this “base” had been where the agreement had been (more or less) signed. This store had every brand of whiskey you could imagine, at very cheap prices, crazy cheap.

I continued to hear the most absurd things and witness very strange situations, terrifying stories of death, different punishments... I heard all these things because many of the paramilitaries really needed to vent. I learned about things that were going to happen, things that really happened, problems with the DAS, and things like that. I guess I shouldn’t be talking about all this, but it’s okay; I need to vent too.

Throughout those trips, seeing all this war paraphernalia, one thing caught my attention. I didn’t have much time to take photos so I brought along an analog camera on one of the last trips, which was to Montes de María. When I got there I took pictures of several of the paramilitary’s rubber boots. I liked the idea of not knowing who was who. What interested me was having no idea to whom the boots belonged; they could be mine or anyone’s. Up in the mountains, in the bush, you see a person and if he doesn’t have an ID bracelet, or if you can’t be sure that the bracelet is real... well, this made me start to wonder about what was real, what was a lie, what was fiction, and what was non-fiction.

I was given a very free, very open education; I was lucky in that way. But when people see my work, many think that I’m trying to justify or something. Or that I’m being utilitarian or that I am a leftist, like some kind of chic Chávez, chic Timochenko [laughs]... a yuppy guerrilla. But I never saw it that way; the people were always the most important thing to me. I came up with a nice way of talking and approaching them. I would dress up, try to think of some kind of costume that would make them laugh. I wore t-shirts with love symbols, or maps of Colombia that a friend of mine designed. I tried to break the ice, but with a positive attitude. I’d say, “Come on, let’s talk...” I’d ask them how they were, what they dreamed of, what they wanted to do when they got out of there, what they wanted to be when they “grew up”... And because some of them were really quite old, they’d have a good laugh. Sometimes they’d answer honestly, but there were times when I also thought that the whole thing might be one big farce. It was all so well staged; it might be that everyone was just playing the same game. A lie so bold that it’s true; anything they say is true. It’s difficult sometimes because it becomes very abstract: if I believe 35 of them and I’m the one who decides what is true, but those 35 people are lying, then the lie is transformed into truth.

I traveled around for about four years until, on one of my final trips to the plains, I passed through Puerto Boyacá. It was a very long trip, to San Miguel, far beyond Puerto Gaitán, over rough, unpaved roads. These paramilitaries were much younger than the others. Most of them were eighteen years old, some of them even seventeen or sixteen. I assumed they were using false IDs. I was very curious about their long fingernails that had been painted black. Some of them had painted only half of each nail. I found this very surprising; it seemed like some kind of Queer Rambo fashion, a Rambo Drag Queen look, and I couldn’t help imagining what they dressed up as at night. I started asking around and learned that it had to do with a kind of dark ritual, a practice that grew out of the fact that they really had no one to protect them. They might have found protection in religion, or their faith in God or Jesus Christ, or Yemayá, or whatever. But it’s hard to imagine Christ carrying an AK-47, saving their skins in the mountains. I understood that they had to resort to other types of practices, step outside of their faith, in order to feel protected. In this case, there were a number of sorcerers, many of them from Putumayo, Peruvians and Ecuadorians, who performed these kinds of dark rituals. The soldiers had to pay for contras, or protective charms, and depending on how they painted their nails, they received certain powers, or certain magical attributes, to prevent them being hurt or killed in combat.

They told me a number of very wild stories about floating or turning invisible, of being bulletproof, and even coming back from the dead.

I remember a story somebody told me in Urabá –I know a photo of the guy circulated in the press, but I never met him– about this paramilitary, whose neck is wrapped in rosaries, like some virgin’s turtleneck, and the expression on his face is completely diabolical. Apparently, the guy was killed, but he rose out of his grave, then got killed again, and they took him somewhere but he came back again. The legend, so to speak, is that sorcerers had to be consulted in order to stop him. He was like El Patas (mythical Colombian monster), badder than The Predator... not even Bruce Willis or Rambo could stop him... In other words, they would have had to put together a real badass squad. I thought it was the best possible ending; they literally had to resort to witchcraft in order to stop him. This was way beyond human understanding.

I was aware enough to realize that I had to decide what to do with the photos. I thought, shit, if I show them now, what am I playing at? Was I using war as a kind of sensationalist “poverty porn”, or to prove that I had really seen the war, or was it something I should hold on to, to see what would happen?

I opted for the latter and put the photos away for eleven years. They scared the shit out of me. I had also collected different objects, things I’d pick up off the ground, military badges, bullets, letters, a lot of things that I no longer have because they scared me.

Over time I came to understand that the project was more documentary-like and, also, that it had taken on a more mystical quality. Like Art itself, something unintelligible. I thought about it as a humanitarian problem, a problem of war, and from a gender perspective: a soldier sees his son with painted nails and he’s a total fag, but if his son goes to war without painting his nails, well, that makes him a real tough guy.

After those eleven years, I decided to show the photos, but in a way that was in keeping with the darkness surrounding them, displaying them in a very particular way. I created a series of posters and even started painting my nails.  I discovered a strange coincidence: the duality between Jesus and Satan, both their names had five letters. I started painting my nails, I drew the letters in the word “Jesus” on my right hand, the hand of God, and the letters in the word “Satan” on my left hand, and then crossed them, thinking about the Crusades. The word “crusades” comes from the practices of Christians in the Middle Ages, who killed in the name of God. They felt protected by God, which gave them power, or the power to kill other humans. Having held onto the photos and waited for so long triggered all this and led to a kind of iconic reflection on the type of work I’d done. 

These practices were also common in Urabá. And not only by paramilitary groups. One might associate them with the whole hired assassination thing, the “I can kill, then pray to the Virgin Mary, or kneel at Pablo Escobar’s grave, or kneel down at some other guy’s grave, because he’s going to save me or whatever” thing. There is a lot of very dark magic in this country. Thinking about it now, in 2019, with everything that is happening, there are a lot of interests at stake: who is taking care of whom, who is who, who’s a bigger sorcerer, who’s a lesser sorcerer, and who is more vulnerable to whom. What is the problem of faith, in a state where you never learn to take care of yourself, you aren’t taught to take care of yourself, only to survive? I find this very disturbing.

About six or seven years later, in 2011, I was with a friend, a journalist for El Espectador, and I told her my story and she was perplexed and asked me why I hadn’t told her before. For me, it was a real-life experience, something that happened to me, and it was there, but I wasn’t sure it was relevant to the public. She suggested that I do an interview with her and so I told her my story and it was published in El Espectador. It was incredible; I’d never known anything like it. The press has this incredible scope. The story was replicated in newspapers around the world, especially in Latin America. What happened next, the comments, was the best thing of all. People starting leaving posts below the article: “Uribe, paraco!”, “Fucking paramilitaries!”, or “It’s a good thing the war is still going on”, “They should kill so-and-so...”. It was this crazy storm of comments that I’d never seen before. 

After that, Juan Peláez and Adriana, from the Miami collective here in Bogotá, invited me to do something, to come one day and give a talk, which turned out to be very strange, for the following reason: after the whole process was over and the troops had demobilized, many of them were placed in houses in different cities around Colombia, wherever they chose to go. They set up these shelters or halfway houses, which in Bogotá were actual houses in the Teusaquillo or Soledad neighborhoods, or here, downtown, and all over Colombia. I saw these guys doing nothing all day long. They’d just sit around in flip-flops in some garage. I was scared to death because these were the same paramilitaries that I still remembered, whose faces I had seen.

The day of my talk, I displayed the images and bracelets that I had saved, the badges and letters and photos, and we had printed up giant copies of the comments from El Espectador and covered the entire gallery space with them: “Paraco”, “Son of a bitch”, “War is the best” or “War is the worst”, etc. A lot of people had come and I started telling my story, like the one I’m telling you here, and other anecdotes. Suddenly, at about 6 or 7 o’clock, the lights went out. Everyone was spooked and started moving closer together, scared out of their minds. Besides, I was telling some very scary stories and there were at least three halfway houses for paracos nearby. I had never really thought about all this as part of the art world, or part of the critic’s world, but at this point, I no longer felt that I was “using” the photos. I was just presenting a number of problems, simply by showing some pictures of fingernails, which began to take on a power that I couldn’t ignore, but neither did I want to turn it into some kind of self-aggrandizement.

There’s the photo –which is strong in itself and speaks of an experience– of someone’s hands, that are just hands, peasant hands, or the hands of someone whose work tool, suddenly, at age fourteen or sixteen, was a rifle. Maybe thinking about war as a job, a play with many actors, and a job that involves using your hands. I hadn’t realized that, for example, I could create a bias and think about becoming famous, or about using these people, or that I was a documentary journalist... But I had to understand the place from where I was seeing all this, from where I was speaking, and that took some time, and time is very valuable to me. It’s also a question of narration; I can write about the experience and make people feel something, but being there and telling the story in person makes it more human.

These rituals were used by the rank and file, who paid for them with the money from their salaries. The paramilitaries who lived in the bush earned a salary, but they didn’t need anything; besides, they couldn’t leave or go anywhere to spend it. Some of them knew they had money, but you couldn’t spend it in the bush, so they preferred to carry around a backpack full of booze, cigarettes, and even porn magazines. A cigarette in the mountains cost twenty thousand pesos, a one-minute cell phone call could cost up to fifty thousand. There were paramilitaries who made their living that way.

I heard a story about one guy who went two years without leave and when he finally took a break he had saved up fifty or sixty million pesos. He shut himself up in a whorehouse and paid to have it all to himself for a month. He spent a month getting drunk, fucking the whores, getting high, and then he left and went back into the mountains. There are kids who by age thirteen or fourteen know all about these things. We played gangsters and it was cool, all that “bang bang, you’re dead” stuff, but in this case you really are dead and all of a sudden you can’t get up. Apparently, the whole adrenaline rush and this feeling grows until it becomes a taste for the macabre you can’t get rid of. 

Killing is a drug, but the funny thing is, you see it everywhere. I could try to justify it, but what I think is powerful about these photos is that you begin to see an underlying poetic problem, something much more metaphorical, in these hands. I limited myself to just hands, not faces or badges, just these hands with nails painted black, which became something scary.

When you think about manicures, obviously there’s the idea of social status, or hierarchies and position, violence also. Like who’s worse, who’s more of a fag, who’s funnier... There are all kinds of genders involved in war and they’re all human, and this is true of any community, because they always exist.

There was everything in those camps: mafia, a Chinatown, and crack cocaine, so it’s very funny to see a threat [published by the paramilitaries] that says, “we’re going to kill all the dealers, etc.” when the paramilitaries, in order to forget or get over their grief, or just to have a good time, would get shit-faced, do tons of crack, cocaine, and I think they even took “brown-brown”, which is this diabolical mixture used in Sierra Leone in the seventies, a mixture of gunpowder and cocaine, which supposedly makes you ultra-violent. I’ve never tried it, but it’s supposed to be fucking crazy.

The photos began to travel and have been shown in many places. I printed up a series of huge posters and that’s what happened. Now they’re going to be in this magazine and I think it’s a beautiful thing; it’s important, when you work like this with people, that you share the work, whether or not it’s in an exhibition space. It might be in a newspaper, a magazine, or as posters in somebody’s house, or they might be used to sweep up garbage, to make paper airplanes, or hats for laborers, or origami [laughs]. That’s sort of what happened, and it left a strange mark in my life. It’s something that I’ve internalized a lot.

Strangely, there was only one girl who had her nails painted. When I asked about it, I was told that [painting your nails] had to do with acquiring special powers, like floating and being bulletproof, like being in a movie. It’s interesting that, in the photos, you can’t be sure of the person’s gender. I’d look at the hands [in the photos] and they looked like the hands of some peasant woman, of a laborer –hardened, large, heavy hands–, and others were super feminine, but they belonged to a man. But the hands in the photos I published belonged to men only. And the unpublished ones, which you may or may not see, are interesting, but they rob the others of a certain nuance.

The idea behind this kind of protection was that they didn’t necessarily need to carry a rifle, because they had something else. And the way their nails were painted depended on the contract they’d agreed to. They paid money for a certain charm that would give them all these powers. To acquire the most power, you had to perform a human sacrifice to make the deal work; you had to kill someone. Part of the deal was that you had to sacrifice someone and that person would take care of you. It depended on what you were looking for, and on the amount of money you had to pay for it. But it wasn’t just a question of money, it was about courage also, and had to do with certain bathing rituals. There was a whole ritual... I heard that, in order to receive all the powers, for the charms to work, you had to make a human sacrifice. You had to kill some guy for it to work. Part of the deal was that you needed to sacrifice someone so they would protect you. I did some research and this has been going on since time immemorial, since the stories about dragons. The king always had some sorcerer or someone who either read the oracle or understood science or medicine, someone who understood what others didn’t. It’s nothing new, these priestesses, oracles… It’s all the same, but used in another way.

When I started telling you this story, I mentioned that Salvatore Mancuso didn’t want to see his men until he had his air conditioning and washing machine. Mancuso came up to the offices just to ask, “Where’s my washing machine and where’s this-and-that?” He changed uniforms three times a day: brown in the morning, purple at lunch, and gray or black camouflage at night. He was so stylish. One day, I had a piece of paper and I asked him for an autograph. Many people might see this as granting him star status, but why shouldn’t I ask Uribe for an autograph, or Mancuso, or Timochenko? They’re all actors in the theater of war.

I remember something else; I think it was in the Tumaco block, where the demobilization took place in a little town called Chachagüi, which is like a resort town for the people of Pasto.  The commanders were staying in a kind of resort hotel and the bastards –and this struck me as so ridiculous– had this kiosk in front of the house and they’d have someone sing to them while they ate their chicken. And they had this dog called Toro, and they’d buy Toro a roast chicken to eat, while all the rank and file had to cook out over a fire or do whatever they could to make a stew from three plantains and a piece of rib. I thought, Jesus, these guys give the dog chicken and their men have to make do with whatever they can find... I understand they’re humans, but I remember wondering what the hell was going on.

Those are the stories, in a nutshell, and they sum up about four years in all. Four years of traveling all over the country. It was an incredible experience, seeing it from this perspective, a real privilege, to really live it, to get a first-hand idea of situations that, unfortunately, the media doesn’t cover. Still, it’s difficult. The hardest thing is that the problem of forgiveness, or morality, or the church, or good manners, good and evil, ethics and resilience, all that, is fine in books, but when you’re out there, up to your neck in it, it’s very hard, very complicated. It was a great experience, but also one that marked me, and that’s what I find most beautiful. Because when you look at art it’s often very difficult to be shocked; there are so many barriers and layers that, although it’s made by humans, it can seem very artificial. But when you’re out there you don’t spend time thinking about it, things just are.