Don Da, still dubious, stood up and sneaked a peek through the edge of the window. He saw a man down there. Tratra, he then heard as the gun was loaded.

Don Da was still sitting in the bed when Conchita came up again. It was just like the last time, except that now a gun man followed her, shining a flashlight over every corner of the room. Don Da drew a cross over his head, chest and shoulders. In the name of the Father, of the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Dear God, dear God, may it be whatever you will.

Someone must have paid attention to his inward prayer as the ta tataof the approaching boots resonated on the stairs. Someone, somewhere, must have heard his thoughts, for suddenly a huge shadow pointed a darkened finger at him, and he, following an order he didn’t understand, stood up and placed himself a few centimeters behind the door. The man with the gun and the flashlight climbed the last set of stairs and also stopped by the door. Don Da’s nose was almost touching the man’s back, but the man didn’t notice the breathing. It was as if Don Da wasn’t exhaling the hot air that he could see coming out of his mouth. The flash of light shone on the bed, the wall in front, the night stand, the wall behind the man, the floor, the space under the bed, and there was nothing, no one. Don Da had become invisible for a few minutes. The men kept searching the other rooms. They threw the furniture on the floor and exposed the faces of all those who slept in the house without exposing the man they were looking for. They shouted invectives, asked about the money, about the merchandise:Where is the merca? Where is the merca?They took Don Da’s motorcycle and the three kilos of coca paste that he had made that morning and went away with the guns on their belts.

Back then, when the palms occupied a significant portion of the territory, you could hear in the neighboring department the drone of small airplanes flying low. A blue wake was drawn in the sky as the aircraft sped away, and, from the ground, you could see the unleased venom falling like a downpour over the coca bushes, over the subsistence crops, over the water and the farmers’ heads. ^*.

Flocks of settlers came to the Colombian southwest, to Nariño, searching for a better life. Then came the coca, the laboratories, the scrappers or raspachines, and the cooking sites. Most arrived in Tumaco, which, due to its seaside location, offered logistical advantages for transporting the processed drugs to Central America. The “newcomers”, as Tumaco locals call those who arrived, came from Meta, Caquetá and Putumayo.

Then, there, in the mountains, just like in the coffee plantations further north, the process after the harvest took place: the ones processed the green coca leaves, while the others processed the coffee cherries. The coffee planters pulp the cherries, and ferment them. The grain, stripped of the meat, is then washed and washed until the mucilage is removed. After that, it is laid out in the sun and dried until the covering layer resembles a scroll. In an improvised shack in the mountains, the coca planters chop the leaves with a brush cutter or with machetes if they don’t have one. Gasoline, soda, and the dancing starts over the leaves, stomping firmly and keeping time to add, at just the right moment, the rest of the ingredients. The coffe planters thresh out the dry coffee bean, select the best, and send it to factories in Switzerland, to cups and palates in Europe and the United States. The coca planters strain the paste, filtering out all the waste. They cut, weigh, and sell. The base coca paste^* that results from the process is sold and carried towards cooking sites, those much more sophisticated laboratories that crystalize it and transform it, finally, into cocaine, which will first arrive in the Pacific Ocean and travel from there to Central America, where it will leap towards the noses of the people of Europe and the United States.

With FARC in the mountains and the paramilitaries in urban settings, war came. Coca leaf and coca paste buyers arrived and then came taxes, some of which were meant for the guerrilla and others for the paramilitaries.

Cylinder bombs and other explosives traversed the sky, flying low, shuddering the foundations of houses. During the stuttering produced by bullets in the night, Conchita and Don Da, laying down under their beds, their foreheads against the floor, whispered: They killed us today, yes they did, they killed us all, they killed us, whom did they kill.

If they come from the village of Candelillas they must be killed because they are guerrillas. If they come from the village of Imbilí, they must be killed because they are paramilitaries.

Assault, explosion, attack of the oil pipeline, combat, mines like seeds planted in the ground, shots in the air, the dead floating down the river with warning signs saying what would happen to those who fished them and buried them. The life and the days in the heart of the war.

Even though no one has been able to prove the connection between glyphosate and the disease that killed the palms, and even though the people who know best blame the rotting of the hearts on a fungus called phyophtorapalmívora, what’s certain is that the palms died. They rotted in the plantations of the big companies and in the ones of small producers like Conchita and Don Da, who asked for a loan to join the legal business of the area and sell the plants for processing. With the dead palms, there was nothing left.

That same year, in many parts of the country, but above all in the southwest, dreams of economic bonanzas vanished in a whiff when the State intervened companies that paid as much as 150% interest rates to small investors. Pyramid schemes, illegal collection of money, money laundering, and the whitewashing of illegal assets obtained through illegal activities such as drug trafficking. In Tumaco, perhaps 80% of the population invested their money, someone else’s money, money obtained from loans, money earned from the quick sell off of a house or a farm, all the money, all in the pyramids. In the fields and the urban centers, there were some who complained that there was no one working because, many said, they all earned their money from companies with narcissistic names like DMG (for David Murcia Guzmán, its owner) or alluring names like DRFE (Quick, Easy, Money, Cash, for its Spanish initials). When the pyramids crumbled, the people went broke. They stood in infinite lines trying to find out if they would recover something. They would throw rocks at the dismantled offices of DRFE and DMG. They were so many, and they were alone and they had nothing. Then, almost right away, the river rose furiously.

That’s what a man from the February 16th neighborhood says, the neighborhood they call Casa Verde because, in the beginning, all the sham houses were green tarps extended over the floor. It was on the eve of February 16th, 2009, while the animals and the people slept. Candelillas, Imbilí, La Playa, La Playita, el Bajito, El Panal, Peña Colorada –there were so many that the Mira River, so deceitful, so strong, swept away. It demolished houses, crops, it took the anguishing bellow of the animals towards the ocean. That day, the waters of the Mira River swept away everything.