Nowhere to Run

Juan Camilo Hernández was born in Caldono, in south-west Colombia, in 1977. When he was sixteen he took part in a day of collective work (minga) with the Nasa Indigenous people. A commission from the FARC, led by nineteen-year-old Betty Lorena Castro, showed up to help. An elder Nasa woman told Castro that they wanted no guerrillas in the minga, since the Indigenous struggle was independent of la lucha armada.

Yet Juan Camilo was smitten, and soon after Betty Lorena returned to the comandantes en el monte, he followed her. They got married, and about fifteen years later had a son (he’s now sixteen). Juan Camilo studied medicine in Cuba and Argentina, and is now a doctor. Betty Lorena became a nurse.

At the time of the FARC’s demobilisation in 2016, Juan Camilo and Betty Lorena were based in the jungles where Antioquia and Córdoba meet, in the lower Cauca valley. They bought a small farm, or finca, in Santa Fe de Antioquia (founded in 1541 by Jorge Robledo, the region’s most notorious conquistador, who used dogs to kill local Indigenous people). Three years ago, Juan Camilo and Betty Lorena found work at the Hospital de Rionegro, outside Medellín. They moved to live nearby and rented out their farm in Santa Fe.

One of Juan Camilo’s colleagues was the late Dr Z, who died in 2023, soon after his son and wife, as a consequence of his efforts to protect one of his patients, Víctor Peña, a persecuted Indigenous Zenú leader. Juan Camilo cared for Dr Z’s daughter, Dani, in her last illness. When Víctor required hospital treatment after Dani’s death, he also became Juan Camilo’s patient.

Juan Camilo solicited donations from doctors, nurses and other staff to pay Víctor’s medical bills and bury Dani with her family. The administration told him to stop, and eventually fired him when he would not. They saw Víctor not as a patient, but as a debit where a credit should be, and advocating for the rights of a patient, especially an Indigenous patient in a notoriously racist region, is grounds for dismissal. Soon afterwards, Betty Lorena was fired for trying to help striking flower workers at a nearby farm with donations.

With bills and debts to pay, the couple tried to sell the finca in Santa Fe, worth an estimated fifteen million pesos. A buyer offered five. This happened to Dr Z and Víctor whenever either tried to pawn their personal possessions. Juan Camilo tried to sell his motorcycle, but no one would pay more than 150,000 pesos (less than $40).

On the night of 3 February, while the family slept, vandals attacked the house with rocks, breaking several windows. On 5 February, when they went out to the market, robbers broke in and stole everything of value. On 7 February, as she walked into town, Betty Lorena was hit by a truck and left to die at the side of the road.

On 12 February, vandals broke into Juan Camilo’s home and destroyed everything, even ripping up the clothes. That night, they returned to smash the remaining windows. On 13 February, someone offered Juan Camilo 800,000 pesos ($200) for the farm, which is roughly what he owed the funeral director to bury his wife next to her parents in Toribío, Cauca.

Since the formal banking system does not offer emergency loans, debt and credit are in the hands of organised crime. Juan Camilo was offered 65 per cent interest, with threats of higher rates, plus violence, for non-payment. (A nurse at Rionegro Hospital took out a loan to pay for her mother’s funeral after she was fired, and killed herself when she couldn’t pay it back.) Eventually Juan Camilo turned to me – I’ve known Víctor since we volunteered together in Medellín during the pandemic – and I sent him the money.

Why such relentless violence, cruelty and terror? It seems likely that someone wants to acquire Juan Camilo and Betty Lorena’s farm without paying for it. Perhaps they think that ex-FARC guerrillas do not deserve to own property, or to lead dignified lives – or to live at all.

Álvaro Uribe, president of Colombia from 2002 to 2010, is one of the largest landowners in the region; his principal finca and residence is a town away from Rionegro, in Llanogrande. He probably has enough influence to put a stop to such thuggery, if he cared to.

After many years of delay, Uribe is finally on trial for bribery and witness tampering. He made a political career out of threatening to destroy the FARC, and – thanks to generous US assistance and paramilitary support – he partially succeeded, though he destroyed much of what remained of Colombian civil society in the process. In 2003, Uribe turned Medellín over to right-wing paramilitaries, who fought with one another for control of the city. Their victims’ mass graves in La Escombrera are now being investigated. It is Colombia’s largest, and the world’s largest in an urban area. Such records are not set easily, nor by accident.

President Gustavo Petro’s efforts to halt Colombia’s endless wars through ‘total peace’ (negotiations with ELN guerillas, remaining FARC rump groups and paramilitaries), and confront the regional configurations of power and property to which the wars have given rise, have so far come to nought. The humanitarian catastrophe has spread to the Pacific coast and the southwest border region, where Betty Lorena will be buried. For Juan Camilo, his son and Víctor, there is nowhere to run and hide. Yet my suggestion that they seek political asylum in Panama or Brazil fell on deaf ears.

Read Forrest Hylton’s first post about Víctor Peña here.