My cell phone rang. At the other end, from some unknown place, the voice of a man with authority gave accurate directions and clear instructions. Commandant Rodrigo Doble Cero, the founder of the bloodthirsty paramilitary group Bloque Metro, had agreed to my request for an interview. I scribbled down the directions. “Sunday. 8:30 am. San Roque. Drive towards Puerto Berrio. Pass Barbosa. Make a right after Cisneros. We’ll meet in the main square in front of the church.” It was the call I had been hoping for.
My stay in Colombia during the summer of 2003 was in its closing stages. During the past three months, I had shuttled between Medellín and the town of Granada, in the sub-region of Eastern Antioquia, recording the memories of internally displaced persons and absorbing their tales of horror. Paramilitary and guerrilla groups had been forcing millions of their fellow citizens—mostly women and children—to flee their villages, giving Colombia the worst humanitarian crisis in the Western hemisphere.
These internally displaced people were the first to provide me with revealing insights about the Colombian conflict and its knotty dynamics. They disclosed in great detail how armed men had dispossessed them of their belongings, stripped them of their humble daily occupations, and uprooted them from their lands. Some had even witnessed the slaughter of their loved ones.
Thus, before my meeting with Commandant Rodrigo Doble Cero, I had already encountered the paramilitary and their deadly deeds in the narratives of the victims. I sensed their presence in the silence of those I was trying to interview, in their whispers, and in their temporary displacement – physical and emotional - from their own neighborhoods to different sites where they would feel more secure to share their stories. It was in the negation of their presence through silence and displacement that the panoptic presence of the paramilitary was revealed to me.
Commandant Rodrigo Doble Cero was going to be the first paramilitary I would meet face to face. At dawn, while Medellín was still in the darkness, in the company of a friend, I left for San Roque. In Niquía, just outside of Medellín, we passed an army checkpoint undisturbed and ventured into Antioquia towards Puerto Berrio, crossing Matassano, Barbosa, and Cisneros. From there, a steep and unpaved road penetrated a narrow and green valley, bringing me to the height of a plateau. I was leaving the world as I had known it up until that moment far behind me . I felt I was penetrating a thick forest, fraught with uncertainties and perils. Like Marlow, the seaman in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness who journeys on a steamer into the heart of a still largely unexplored Africa in search of Kurtz, the chief of a colonial station, I was penetrating a world that to me was still unknown.
The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once—somewhere—far away—in another existence perhaps…The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way of our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.
Zigzagging by car at a very slow pace for about nine miles, and not without difficulty, after almost two hours we reached a plateau and on the horizon we could spot the village of San Roque. One could sense the extent to which hostile geography has being shaping the life of certain regions of Colombia and the imagination of its people, making it difficult for them to experience their country as one nation.
During the trip, I tried to imagine my encounter with Commandant Rodrigo, and wondered about its outcome. At the time, I did not know much about him. At the end of the 1990s, he had founded the bloodthirsty Bloque Metro, which sowed terror in Medellín and in Eastern Antioquia, killing professors of the Antioquia University, human rights activists, community leaders, and unionists; he also carried out the massacre and the selective executions in Granada.
What I also knew was that commandant Rodrigo’s group was engaged in a ruthless fight for the domination of Medellín with the rival paramilitary group Cacique Nutibara, which at the end of 2001 ousted the Bloque and subjugated the city. A couple of weeks before our meeting, Commandant Rodrigo had published a large report on the official webpage of his group revealing the connections between the paramilitary and the drug ‘kingpins’ such as the boss of the Cacique Nutibara bloc, the infamous Diego Fernando Murillo, alias “don Berna.” In his war against don Berna, a former protégé of legenday drug lord Pablo Escobar, Commandant Rodrigo was losing men and land, and had to withdraw into the mountains surrounding San Roque. About two weeks after our long encounter, in an intense fight around San Roque, the Bloque Metro was annihilated but Rodrigo managed to escape to a city in Colombia’s northern region, near Santa Marta, where he was assassinated by a hit man several months later.
Approaching San Roque we noticed a military checkpoint at the gate of the village. I became worried, since I did not know how to justify my notebooks, the digital camera, and ultimately our presence as foreigners from two different distant countries in a place not tailored for tourists. What should I say? What should I reveal about myself and how much? Or should I rather invent a story? Maybe I should tell them that I am a journalist? And writing about what? One thing was obvious to me: I could not reveal that I am there to meet with Commandant Rodrigo— although his presence there, I was sure, was certainly not a secret, especially to the military. In searching frantically for a way to disguise that public secret, I was experiencing the power that comes with every secret, the silence, and the lie that was revealing not only the presence of Commandant Rodrigo in the surroundings, but also my secret and invisible bind to him. Now through him, the soldiers and I were bound as well.
The military patrol, composed of four or five soldiers, stopped our car—the only one approaching the village, I had just realized. “Good morning. Step out of the car. Your documents, please.” The soldier looked at my Italian passport, had me lean against the car with my arms stretched, while a soldier was searching my pockets and frisking my waist and legs, and another inspected the car with great attention looking under the seats, into every compartment, and the trunk. The soldiers saw and touched my notebook, my pen, and my camera. However, they did not dare ask any question about my presence in that village on that early Sunday morning. In fact, there was no need to offer any word to clarify what we all shared, that is, the public secret of Commandant Rodrigo and his men’s presence in San Roque, or of my imminent encounter with him. In our reciprocal silence—because the military and I did not share any word except for the initial and final greetings—we revealed our common bond to Commandant Rodrigo and paid respect to his power and his rule.
My encounter with the military at the checkpoint not only confirmed what I had heard repeatedly about the paramilitary in Colombia and elsewhere: that they were a smoke screen linking paramilitary killers with the regular armed forces. But, st the checkpoint I also sensed that this public secret was part of the paramilitary's power. The exchange of silence between the soldiers and me, affirming through denial the presence of Commandant Rodrigo in a form of active not-knowing, was a testimony to that public secret, and to its strength?.
Secrecy, Elio Cannetti argued in Crowds and Power, is the core of power, and Foucault added that power is tolerable only on condition that it masks a substantial part of itself. The secret thus pertains to the dark bowels of a society and it is like a second world among the manifest world, a second body encased within the first. Wherever there is power, there is secrecy, except that it is not only secrecy that lies at the core of power, but, Michael Taussig affirms, public secrecy:
Yet what if the truth is not so much a secret as a public secret, as is the case with most important social knowledge, knowing what not to know? … For are not shared secrets the bases of our social institutions, the workplace, the market, the family, and the state? Is not such public secret the most interesting, the most powerful, the most mischievous and ubiquitous form of socially active knowledge there is? What we call doctrine, ideology, consciousness, beliefs, values, and even discourse, pale into sociological insignificance and philosophical banality by comparison: for it is the task and life force of the public secret to maintain that verge where the secret is not destroyed through exposure, but subject to a quite different sort of revelation that does justice to it.
In other words, for Taussig the public secret is the grease that allows the wheels of society to turn. Without the public secret, an actively-hidden shared knowledge, there would be no society, since it is the public secret that holds together conflicting social forces. There is a link binding the public secret, silence, secrecy and the truth about the presence—in the case of Colombia—of the paramilitary. Silence and secrecy, wrote Foucault, are a shelter for power. In his depiction of the seventeenth century as an age of repression, Foucault argued that sex was excluded from discourse by banning the words that rendered it too visibly present. For power to work, it had to be turned into a public secret. Under this negation, the opposite phenomenon occurred, that is, a multiplication of discourses concerning sex:
What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.
The public secret is thus silence that speaks truth. The tradition of the oppressed? reveals that society is fraught with an ambiguity stemming from the silence and the negation generated by the public secret. In fact, in societies like Colombia, the public secret of the paramilitary coupling with the military and the police is revelatory of the truth of their domination.
In addition, the circulation of the public secret reveals and further conceals the secret since it cements society at the manner of gift exchange in the form of gift exhange for example (?), entangling each one with the others in relationships marked by an ambiguity no less ambiguous than Mauss’ gift:
Almost always such services have taken the form of the gift, the present generously given even when, in the gesture accompanying the transaction, there is only a polite fiction, formalism, and social deceit, and when really there is obligation and economic self-interest.
If the public secret is the cement of society, that is, the core of power, then it needs to be said that silence is the link binding power with the public secret—with a knowing that cannot be easily articulated. In other words, in silence, and in silencing, the power of control is revealed and strengthened at the same time. This is why Elias Cannetti wrote that (public) secrecy is the core of power.
Once we greeted the soldiers, my Paraguayan friend and I parked the car before the church as previously instructed and waited. A few minutes passed and three men surrounded the car. After having checked my identity—and after some nerve-racking confusion about my last name—one of the paramilitaries in his mid twenties got into the car, and we left San Roque riding again on a bumpy and narrow road. We stopped before a humble house where a woman was mopping the porch. Though we parked on her property without asking permission, she showed neither impatience nor disappointment. Apparently indifferent to our presence, she continued her task as if we were not there. Normal abnormality. People riding horses passed by, throwing furtive and curious looks at us. The public secret bounded us more and more.
About half an hour passed, and Commandant Rodrigo arrived in a four-wheel drive SUV escorted by two men and a dog. The commander and his men were in military uniforms and Commandant Rodrigo wore dark sunglasses, which made it impossible to measure his gaze. They were all heavily armed, each carrying a rifle with a telescope as well as a gun in his belt. They invited my friend and me to step into their van. I sat in the front, next to Commandant Rodrigo, who was driving. He put his rifle between my legs. The cold metal pressed my left thigh. “How many times have you been to Colombia?” Commandant Rodrigo asked me. “This is the fourth time. I almost feel Colombian at this point,” I responded. With that, the commander burst into spontaneous and open laughter.
After about twenty minutes, we reached an abandoned cottage overlooking a wide and green valley. The beauty and the gentleness of the landscape contrasted with their cold instruments? of violence and war. We sat on a porch ready to start our conversation. Commandant Rodrigo finally took off his glasses, revealing a look that was anything but cruel, cold, or malign. His look was different from what I had expected. Before his big and dark eyes, I remained puzzled. I remember thinking that instead of hiding in the mountains and killing guerrillas, I could picture Commandant Rodrigo as a father conducting a decent life with his wife and his daughter, who—he told me later—he was able to meet clandestinely but only rarely.
The Commandant took a sheet of paper in his hands and sketched with a ballpoint pen the shape of Colombia. “Let’s draw some lines here,” he said and started lecturing me about the history of his country. He began recounting the War of the Thousand Days and summarized the political events leading up to La Violencia and subsequently to the formation of the Frente Nacionál in 1957. I turned the recorder on.
(Photo: Laura Rico)
