Donate Now Carlos Avila Gonzalez and Phillip Robertson, for the Pulitzer Center
Pasto, Bolivia
At a café on Pasto's main square we meet Winston Viracachá, a local cable tv journalist. Winston has been kidnapped and held by the ELN, tried in a revolutionary court and acquitted, as well as involuntary stay with the FARC. We drink and talk about the possibility of traveling to the Pacific coast and exploring the delta near El Charco, a town where many of the displaced campesinos have ended up. In the café we meet a mayor of the one of the small towns near Pasto, a man with absolute faith in his town as an ecological tourism destination. He never mentions the civil war going on all around the capital of the state. After an hour with him, I was almost convinced he was right.
When Winston Viracachá is in Pasto, he wears full suits and when he's on assignment, a vest marked with the cable company's logo. The town seems too small to hold him. He's hoarse from talking on the phone all the time.
The only low point of the day comes when we end up in the mayor's office and an official there tells us in very polite tones that journalists who talk to illegal groups are subject to arrest. I shook his hand and walked out. We were careful not to discuss our itinerary with this man, since it would almost certainly end up in the local office of the internal security bureau, DAS. The previous director of the agency, Jorge Noguera, has been charged with complicity in the murder of Colombians by passing lists to the AUC, or right wing death squads. Jorge Noguera was very close to the current president, Alvaro Uribe Velez. This is part of what Colombians call the parapolitics scandal that has spread to include a large part of the national legislature.
One of DAS's tentacles will call us into the office, locating us at our hotel Pasto just as we are about to return to Bogota, but this is after we have already taken our trip through the rivers and jungles.