<\/p>\n
T<\/b>he first one was Marcel. Right after, they killed Maicol. Then it was Jair\u2019s turn. Here, in this ceaseless war, where bullets come from all directions, from variegated weapons adorned with all sorts of flags, the Marcels, Maicols, and Jairs can be counted in the thousands.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n I called Jose Jair Cort\u00e9s el Tuerto (the One-eyed) because of that prank call that became popular in social media. In a call, a voice that tries to be funny repeatedly calls a girl saying that it\u2019s el Tuerto. She doesn\u2019t know him, and when asks time and time again who is she talking to, the man shouts: el Tuerto, el Tuerto. As we walked the coca-filled roads of the lower part of the Alta Mira y Frontera Community Council, Jair, with his strident laugh, would force us to listen to that prank over and over again. And he would keep at it until we reached the Mataje River, near Ecuador\u2019s border.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n In a significant part of the territory, which after many fights was collectively titled to the afro communities in the higher part of the Mira River, live many white settlers and farmers. They came from several regions from all around the country looking for a new life, and they ended up sowing coca in the black lands. In the agreements between the government and FARC-EP, one of the fundamental points revolves around coca. It must be torn out, they have decreed. The more than 23,000 hectares sowed in Tumaco to produce cocaine must be torn out. It was decided that to accomplish this, two parallel roads would be pursued. On the one hand, civil servants would try to sign voluntary agreements with people so that they could replace coca with productive legal crops. On the other hand, the Army, weapons at hand, would forcefully tear out the plants. All this meant that, even if the afro communities, the owners of the lands, signed the voluntary agreements, there could be a war so long as the settlers refused to sign. Jair realized this.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n <\/p>\n I remember Jair not only in the way he appears on my camera recordings. I remember him in his house\u2019s kitchen, walking by behind his wife. I remember him by the creek, surrounded by his children. I remember him carrying on his back the plantains that no one would buy, the plantains that can\u2019t be transported outside of the farm towards some place where someone might want to buy them. I remember him opening a coconut and talking to his nephew.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n I remember his voice on the phone:<\/p>\n \u2013Hello.<\/p>\n \u2013Do you know who you are talking to?<\/p>\n -…<\/p>\n -With el Tuertoooo!<\/p>\n \u2013Tuerto, are you going to leave? I was told that the community\u2019s governing council is being safeguarded in Tumaco due to the threats.<\/p>\n -No, Tuerta, I am not going leave.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n <\/p>\n On October 5, 2017, a large group of coca planters were protesting in Tandil, a county of the Alto Mira y Frontera. They were trying to stop soldiers from tearing out the plants \u2013their business, their livelihood. In the end, there were not only plants laying on the ground, but also six dead people. The survivors say that the guns were spitted out by the policemen\u2019s weapons.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n The governing board of the afro community is on the side of voluntary replacement of the coca crops. They are on the side of returning to traditional crops and a traditional way of life, because the cocaine business inevitably involves guns, power, and violence. Jair, along with the rest of the governing board, was on that side. But twelve days after the coca growers fell in Tandil, el Tuerto also fell.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n Jair\u2019s body was left in one of the southern roads, down by the banks of the Mira river, the same roads that were cleared with hands and machetes by the community. They say that it happened at 4:15 p.m., near the county of Restrepo. They say he didn\u2019t warn the National Protection Unit that he was planning on visiting his family there, as if what happened was somehow his fault. Surely, the bulletproof vest, the cellphone, and the transportation subsidy that the government entity provided, all as part of the \u201cminor risk\u201d he was in, wouldn\u2019t have helped him much against his murderers\u2019 fire.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n I say, \u201cJair,\u201d but I could just as well say Francisco Hurtado, Yolanda Cer\u00f3n, Armedio Cort\u00e9s, Patrocinio Sevillano, Genaro Garc\u00eda. I say, \u201cthe murdered of Alto Mira y Frontera, in 2017,\u201d but the murdered started falling at least twenty years ago.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n Some of them were killed on the tough path towards the collective titling of the territories. Others, because they denounced the links between the paramilitaries and the Armed Forces. They were shot and condemned: they speak like guerrillas, they write like guerrillas. Some others fell in the roads to the guerrillas\u2019 bullets while FARC leaders negotiated agreements far away, in Havana.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n I say, \u201cThey killed el Tuerto, my friend,\u201d but I could just as well say that they killed them all, the men and women who are leaders, the men and women who stand up for their communities. n.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n According to official registries, his name was Gratiniano. For me though, he was called Maicol, Maicol Stiven Guevara, his nom de guerre, who finished off his signature with a five-pointed star.<\/p>\n I met Maicol in September 2016, in the legendary lands of Yar\u00ed, a nest of colonization stories, a vast plain that smells like the jungle. He was a 24-year-old guerrilla fighter, fully armed at the time, like the rest, though even then most of the rifles were beginning to hang on the entrances of shacks. It was FARC-EP\u2019s last conference as an armed group.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n I remember Maicol the way he appeared on my camera: reading a newspaper, smoking a cigarette with that strange calmness that those armed men and women lived back when they suddenly became attractive to journalists and onlookers. A few days before he was murdered \u2013one year after we met face to face\u2014Maicol saw those images now stored in my camera and my memory. He sent me a message saying he had trouble recognizing himself in those images, that surely his brother, if he saw them, wouldn\u2019t believe that it was him. -But well, -he wrote in the chat -, that was who I was in that life, now I am someone else.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n They killed Maicol, and when I say \u201cMaicol,\u201d it\u2019s as if I was saying thirty other names that were also noms de guerre. Former combatants, the families of former combatants, the dead in Antioquia, in Caquet\u00e1, in Nari\u00f1o, in Cauca, in Putumayo, in Choc\u00f3, in Valle del Cauca, in Norte de Santander, in Arauca.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n <\/p>\n Maicol had left the normalization zone and returned home to the Peasant Reserve Zone El Pato Balsillas. The zone was the first of its kind in the country. It has also been a scenario of war for several decades.<\/p>\n They say that Maicol was killed while walking home at 10 p.m., in El Roble county. His text message reached my phone that same night at 8:38 p.m.:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n -Hello, my little heaven, how are you?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n My reply was delivered to his phone at 3:01 p.m. of the following day. He was gone by then:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2013Hello, hello. How are you?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n They killed Maicol.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n -I am completely out of the NZ, I am a civilian!\u201dhe wrote.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Further down, he added:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2013My plans: to study and work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n I think of the dead in the books, in the stories that date back hundreds of years. I think of those that end up in the television newscasts wrapped in black or white plastic bags, in those quickly buried in the jungle, in those that were falsely accused. I think of all those who are about to die. I think about our endless war, which only changes its garments, though often it doesn\u2019t even do that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n In a customary matchup, I faced off against Marcel. He was beautiful. He had brown skin and very large ears, like the doors of an open Volkswagen, as my dad would later say. He looked as if he had come all the way from India, or an Arab country, somewhere far far away.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Filled with guilt while I was in a cast, Marcel spent some time visiting the small apartment where my sisters and I were struggling to live and interact with each other. One day, Marcel stopped coming around. When I finally took off my cast, I returned to the martial arts school and found out that he had quit. We didn\u2019t know much about Marcel. He disappeared as quickly as he appeared.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n <\/p>\n Time went by and then, another day, our apartment\u2019s phone rang. The voice on the other side said that it was Marcel\u2019s brother. He said Marcel had spoken to him about \u201cthe girl with the red shoes,\u201d my sister. He wanted to talk to her because he had some message. She and I went to the appointment. I don\u2019t remember much about it. I remember him, though: he was similar to Marcel, a bit skinnier, a bit taller, more real, somehow. He told us about the things Marcel remembered about my sister. And he also said something else. They had killed Marcel. He said it happened in a small town in the Atlantic Coast, which was the place they came from. He had gone back to work and start his life anew. Then one afternoon his uncle\u2019s bar with the usual crowd when a group of armed men, paramilitaries, came in and opened fire. His brother told us:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2013Marcel, and others, died.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n For my sister and I, the whole episode seemed like a story out of a detective novel: everything was so distant, so fiction-like, it didn\u2019t fit in our small conception of the world. We believed him, and we cried hugging each other. As we walked home, we decided this was going to be our secret. Perhaps it was decision spurred by fear, by the terror of making that violence a real fact if we allowed the proofs of its existence to touch our lives, however barely. They killed Marcel, and we kept quiet.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n <\/p>\n After hearing Marcel\u2019s brother, I spent a year carrying a black rag on my left wrist. I won\u2019t wear one for Maicol or for Jair. I am afraid that if I did, I\u2019d accumulate so many pieces of cloth that they would end covering all my arm, my two arms, my whole body, and I would end up as mourning mummy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n They killed Marcel, they killed Maicol, they killed Jair. They\u2019ve killed so many, they\u2019re killing them right now. And they are also my dead. They are all our dead.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":822,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cronicasdesarmadas.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cronicasdesarmadas.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cronicasdesarmadas.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cronicasdesarmadas.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cronicasdesarmadas.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=820"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/cronicasdesarmadas.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":849,"href":"https:\/\/cronicasdesarmadas.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820\/revisions\/849"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cronicasdesarmadas.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cronicasdesarmadas.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cronicasdesarmadas.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cronicasdesarmadas.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}JAIR<\/h2>\n<\/article>\n
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<\/div>\n<\/article>\nMAICOL<\/h2>\n<\/article>\n
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<\/div>\n<\/article>\nMARCEL<\/h2>\n<\/article>\n
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\nThis was more than 17 years ago. He and I met each other in a martial arts school where I was fighting to learn to control my breathing, to understand my body, and move it with grace. I failed, but I was proud of being strong and hitting hard. Our teacher forced me to look at my body\u2019s reflection on a mirror while I breathed. In the meantime, I used to think of hitting the sandbag one more time.<\/div>\n
\nRight fist, left kick, a quick sidestep, right kick, and then, suddenly, his hand grabbed ankle and, while containing my blow, he slowly turned me. My body rotated, but my foot, the one that was still on the ground, refused to follow. My ankle broke slow motion, so much so that Marcel was the only one that believed in my pain.<\/div>\n![](\"https:\/\/cronicasdesarmadas.com\/wp-content\/themes\/CRONICAS\/assets\/images\/historias\/single-todos-nuestros-muertos\/9.jpg\")
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