Stories from Lejanías (or “Stories from Afar”)

11.02.06

I have always been curious to know the origin of the names of the places I have visited and every time that I asked why a certain town has a certain name, I have received interesting responses: at times philosophical, at times scientific and sometimes simply funny. During my first trip to Arauca, I met a community that, for a second, dispelled my curiosity: the settlement of Lejanías, whose name carries no mystery.

We arrive in Lejanías one Friday in December, on a summer day, when the light of the sun completely filled the sky and the Araucan plains appeared even flatter, by the force the sunrays played on the earth.

We leave El Botalón, a little town whose principal road is paved (although for only a few meters), a center of commercial confluence of the rural zone that surrounds it, but where the air that you breathe is that genuine country air, with the voice of the creek from far, the vallenatos, the rancheras and the plains music playing in every house, the nights long and dense. A pick-up truck takes us through some dirt trails that pass through what appears to be one long and infinite plantain crop. The trip is long: many kilometers, almost without us realizing, because we keep seeing the same thing.

We exit to a paved road and keep travelling until we get to another unpaved path, where, a few meters later, we find ourselves in an army checkpoint. The backpacks of the soldiers are in the patio of a house; some soldiers are seated inside in the house, and others, just in front. They are troops from the 47th Battalion of the 5th Mobile Brigade. Some soldiers come towards us: they ask for our documents and ask where we are headed, and what we are doing. They say they won’t stay too long in those civilian houses: they will move after drinking some water.

We continue our trip. The sights are different now: palm trees that seem to touch the sky, plains burned by the summer, the silence and emptiness of the savannah. Finally, the first house appears: it is a store, where some campesinos are playing pool and finishing off the final beers of last night’s party. That’s where Lejanías. Here, without the need to ask, my *** curiosity: a settlement so isolated from the rest of the world, and so abandoned to itself, just as I saw it, that it couldn’t have any other name. It is a community where 15 families live, each one at least 15 minutes walking distance from each other. Here, basic sanitary services don’t come, there is no electricity and there is no guaranteed medical attention for the campesinos. The people look at us, stunned: it is the first time that someone visits them, and they take advantage of the moment to tell us thousands of stories.

We come to another house and, in short time, all the residents of the zone meet there. Without thinking twice, they kill a chicken and the women start to prepare lunch, while the men tell us anecdotes from their lives. They talk to us of the bazaar they had the night before, to raise funds for the community, as needed as the community is forgotten by the municipality and the State. They send the children to look for oranges, to share with us the little they have. Some sit in hammocks, others on empty gasoline canisters, others look for pieces of wood.

Quickly, an environment of confidence is created: we ask how they live there, and they want to know something about our countries. From their words, emerges a story of how difficult it is to live with poverty and abandonment, even more if to all of this is added the threats and attacks of the soldiers of the 5th Mobile Brigade, in charge of security in the zone.

The campesinos tell us that, in the last days of the month of November, 2005, the army stayed in some civilian houses, mistreating some of they physically and verbally. They detained a campesino, accusing him of collaborating with the insurgency and, after nearly 5 hours, during which they couldn’t confirm their accusations, they let him go, saying: “Get out of here, guerrilla!” They took two campesinos in a helicopter, accusing them of the same. The campesinos are so accustomed to suffer this type of mistreatment, that they narrate it as though it were normal, highlighting the comic side of every story of injustice that they have had to live. That day, everyone laughed at the story of the pig who was branded with the name of the Battalion.

I left Lejanías with the echo of the campesinos’ voices in my ears, from so many stories that I was able to hear in such a short time. Stories from afar. We return to El Botalón. In the same place where we found them before, the soldiers remain. The backpacks in the patio and the soldiers inside the same house. Still drinking water?

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