Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies (19 page)

The “quilombolization” of Brazil is seeing once hidden communities step into the light. Even settlements that make no claim to being founded by escaped slaves are seeking and now gaining recognition as quilombos on the basis that they have a largely black population. Interviewed by a fellow anthropologist, Alfredo Wagner Berno de Almeida, who works with quilombos across the country, warns against casting them as a frozen heritage. “The quilombo is not the sphinx, it is not a pyramid,” he says. “They are not monuments, they aren’t part of the artistic patrimony. They are part of the productive life of the country.” Others, like Onyx Lorenzoni, a federal deputy, complain that the march of the quilombos “is dividing Brazil into nations of color.” Is Brotas Quilombo turning from an outpost of Afro-Brazilian culture to a subsidized black time machine? It doesn’t seem so. Locals of all different shades and backgrounds are coming to Brotas Quilombo and getting involved. Its rediscovery is adding something unique and important to the wider town.

Quilombos are not remnants of something gone but places that look to the past to define their present. It’s something that all living places do. It can sometimes mean that they appear to be more interested in preserving traditions than inventing new ones. But that is a risk worth taking—indeed, it is a risk that has to be taken if places are to be communities, something more than just spaces of temporary individual habitation. Without the binding presence of the past, places are emptied of a meaningful future.

In an increasingly surveilled and homogenized world, some may consider insurgent places an anachronism. If so, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, hasn’t heard the news. In the early 2000s they controlled around 40 percent of the country. Over the past decade their zone of influence has diminished to a little less than 30 percent, but that still amounts to a great deal of jungle.

FARC-controlled Colombia is unique territory, not only in terms of its scale and longevity as an insurgent place but also because FARC’s capacity and desire to hold on to this place seems to run counter to global trends. It’s not that heavily armed militants have gone out of fashion but rather that we have grown used to a different breed. Islamist groups move around like ghosts, quietly slipping between rented rooms and anarchic nations. Their only hope of territorial control arises from the connivance of states that find them useful, or failed states that can’t get in their way. Somalia, Afghanistan, Sudan, South Yemen, Mali, and Pakistan have all fallen into one or both of these categories. Al Qaeda, Arabic for “the base,” found such a base in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Away from such protected safe spots, militants have had to morph into unplaceable networks. The results have changed all our lives, so it’s not surprising that our ideas about the geography of armed insurrection have been shaped by religious fighters’ spectral maneuvers.

As a result, a very different kind of rebellion, with a different relationship to place, has been overlooked or cast as yesterday’s news. Yet armed rebels with revolutionary socialist ideologies have not gone away. They include Maoists in Nepal, who in the 2000s controlled about 80 percent of the country, and Naxalite Maoists in India, who currently have operational control over large swaths of remote forest. Another example is the socialist nationalists of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, along with their political offshoots. They are based in the Qandil Mountains of northern Iraq, but their sphere of control extends deep into northern Syria and Iran.

These leftist revolutionaries have often shown scant regard for human life. However, they are bottom-up movements, peasant-based and with many female cadres, which, geographically, makes a great difference. It means they are rooted in place and can and want to hang on to the territory they consider their home turf. The contrast with Islamist terrorism, which is a top-down, entirely male-dominated, geographically restless phenomenon, is stark.

The FARC has a real stake in the place from which it comes. It was founded in April 1966 by communist farming communities that had been fighting a war of “mass self-defense” against government forces for nearly two decades. The FARC developed in rural areas that had a long tradition of fierce autonomy and distrust of the central government in the capital, Bogotá. By the 1980s FARC control had spread well beyond its core areas. Militarily the guerrillas were pushing forward on more than eighteen fronts, proudly adding the term “Army of the People” to their name. They were “operating as a de facto government,” says FARC expert Gary Leech, “for rural communities across vast stretches of countryside where the state had never established a presence.”

Over the past twenty years the FARC has come to embrace a more flexible, more nationalistic, “Bolivarian socialism.” It has left many of the strictures of Marxism-Leninism for its sometime comrades, sometime enemies, in a smaller outfit called the National Liberation Army (whose zone of influence is in the mountainous northwest of the country). But to understand how and why the FARC continues to place such store in occupying the jungles and remote villages of Colombia, we must look to some classic revolutionary works.
Guerrilla Warfare
, published in 1961 and written by Ernesto “Che” Guevara, is probably the most important. Establishing and keeping inaccessible territory is the key to Guevara’s lesson plan. A “guerrilla band will here be able to dig in,” he says. “Aircraft cannot see anything and cease to operate; tanks and cannons cannot do much owing to the difficulties of advancing in these zones.” Building up defensive space also allows a revolutionary infrastructure to be put in place, “where small industries may be installed, as well as hospitals, centers for education and training, storage facilities and organs of propaganda.”

But these technical details only scratch the surface of Guevara’s ambitions. His real motivations were political. Rooting an armed group in the countryside allows the revolution to go to and come from “the people.” Building up what another guerrilla leader with an obsession for holding territory, Mao Zedong, called “the base of the people” is the means and the goal. The idea is that “guerrilla warfare basically derives from the masses and is supported by them,” Mao said. “It can neither exist nor flourish if it separates itself from their sympathies and co-operation.” Given the ruthless nature of the FARC, which gains much of its income from kidnapping and taxing drug traffickers, it may sound like an unlikely conceit. But it provides the guerrillas with what they consider to be a tried and tested basis for their own commitment to redraw the map of the nation into zones of insurgency and imperialist power.

So much for the theory. The FARC has not shown itself adept at maintaining the “sympathies and co-operation” of the Colombian people. One 2001 Gallup poll showed that less than 3 percent of Colombians had a favorable opinion of the FARC. Many blame its fighters for a war that has killed around 250,000 people and caused millions to flee their homes. It is a war that looks both endless and pointless. Although the FARC’s determination to control territory has been successful, the group never seems to have known what to do next. Che and Mao would have pushed on, because they saw the mountains and jungles as a springboard. But the FARC guerrillas aren’t just based in the countryside; they are entombed in it.

What keeps them there is partly sentiment but also the brutal fact that these are the only areas where their message continues to have any kind of appeal. Writing for a Colombian political journal, Alfredo Rangel, a onetime defense ministry official turned Bogotá-based private security worker, explains that while “their national banners are invisible or not credible, their local, armed patronage and their ability to take advantage of rural youth unemployment allows them to establish pockets of support in many regions.”

The result is an endless series of halfhearted advances and speedy retreats—over recent years more of the latter than the former. The longer this has gone on, the more FARC’s investment in carving out territory has shaped the mindset of all the other combatants on the field. The Colombian army also defines its mission as seizing, holding, and defending territory. So too do the anticommunist paramilitaries of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, which in the mid-1990s declared that its intention was to “reconquer” land “colonized” by the guerrillas, “because it is there that the subversion has succeeded in creating parallel government.”

The stalemate looked as if it might be coming to an end in 1998, when the government handed over a huge swath of territory to appease the FARC. It was hoped that this gift, an area about the size of Switzerland, would provide the kind of gesture of goodwill that would kick-start meaningful peace talks. Although the détente lasted only a few years—the FARC seemingly unable to get beyond warfare as their raison d’être—there have been growing calls in recent years for the idea to be given another chance. Spain and France have proposed that an international demilitarized zone, without the armed presence of either the guerrillas or the state, might be a better way forward. It is a territorial solution to what is a territorial dispute.

Whatever the success or failure of this latest initiative, it has shown beyond doubt that the FARC, and organizations like it, set enormous store in possessing place. It is the fight for it that defines them. What differentiates them from terrorists and makes them genuine revolutionaries is that they are bound to place. Most modern terrorism, by contrast, is placeless; it thrives in an uprooted world. The problem for the FARC guerrillas is that their geographical ambition has come to outweigh all others. They hang on to place so tightly that they have squeezed the life from it.

5° 20′ 59″ N, 48° 31′ 36″ E

Hobyo has seen better days. An ancient town on the western coast of the Horn of Africa, it prospered for many centuries thanks to the Indian Ocean’s busy shipping lanes. A hundred years ago it was the capital of a small sultanate and a lively commercial center, drawing in traders in precious metals and pearls. Today it is a pirate town that is avoided by the rest of the world. But it’s at night when Hobyo really disappears from the map. For in a town where a single hijacked vessel can make more than $9 million, it’s surprising to learn that no one has invested in an electricity generator. Nighttime satellite images show Hobyo as an inky nothing. It’s a place that sees a lot of money but is dirt poor, since both the economy and the identity of the town have been hollowed out by brigandry.

In the 2000s there were plenty of pirate towns up and down this coast, but Hobyo was one of the most secure. When they were beaten back by Islamists in the south or the marine police in the north, the pirates came to Hobyo, sometimes bringing their booty with them. As a result, Hobyo is as good an example as any of a “feral city.” It’s a term that is used in military circles to describe regions that have no effective government but sustain an internationally networked criminal economy. Feral cities are the ragged end of spaces of exception: they are not the product of governments or ideologies but show what happens when such structures fall away. According to Richard Norton, writing in the
Naval War College Review
, feral cities have “lost the ability to maintain the rule of law,” yet they remain “a functioning actor in the greater international system.” Norton throws his net wide, arguing that Mexico City, São Paulo, and Johannesburg have entrenched feral characteristics and may be well on their way to becoming feral cities.

These cities may be partly feral, but Hobyo is almost entirely so. Somalia has had no effective central government since its 1991 civil war, and although it lies within the Somali province of Galmudug and has its own mayor, Hobyo has been in the hands of pirates for over a decade. Its remote coastal location makes it one of their prize possessions. Planted a mile off Hobyo’s coast lies the pirates’ hoard. “This one is bigger than Hobyo,” gloated one young pirate to a visiting French journalist, Jean-Marc Mojon, pointing offshore to a hijacked Korean supertanker that was soon to net his comrades millions of dollars. Meanwhile, pirating has spawned a secondary industry, with small fishing boats taking supplies from Hobyo to the stolen vessels. Satellite images show that the town is dotted with heavily walled pirate compounds, their courtyards lined with vehicles. The town’s most prominent feature is a telecommunications tower, which is used by the pirates to communicate with hijacked ships anchored off the coast.

In recent years the total paid over to Somali pirates has been between $150 million and $200 million per annum. The size of this figure comes more clearly into relief when put alongside Somalia’s GDP per capita, which is $300. All of which makes you wonder where all that ransom cash goes. Not to Hobyo, that much is certain. It ends up abroad or someplace far inland. Pirates aside, Hobyo is a dusty, low-rise, crumbling town fighting a losing battle against the encroaching desert. Other interviews by Jean-Marc Mojon with the residents paint a bleak picture of a place emptied of hope or purpose. A local elder complains that “we have no schools, no farming, no fishing—it’s ground zero here.” The idea that piracy should be reaping benefits for Hobyo doesn’t appear to have occurred to him. Instead, he worries about the desert: “our most pressing concern is the sand, the city is disappearing, we are being buried alive and can’t resist.”

Hobyo’s pirate bosses offer what has become a standard justification for their trade: foreign vessels came into our waters and stole all our fish, forcing us into piracy. But most serious analysts don’t buy the idea that the pirates would much rather be fishing. While it is clear that illegal foreign fishing in the early 1990s did first provoke local fishermen to arm themselves and defend their waters, thus forming the nucleus of the pirate fleets, evidence collected by the Norwegian expert Stig Jarle Hansen suggests that fish stocks remain viable. The scale of the switch from fishing to piracy is better understood as an economic and social choice. In a poverty-stricken country the quick and vast financial rewards of piracy were too tempting to resist. The story of the most famous Somali pirate, Mohamed Abdi Hassan, known as Afweyne (“Big Mouth”), who is based in Hobyo, is a story of entrepreneurial zeal. Afweyne was a former civil servant who took to piracy because it was a good business opportunity. In the absence of other ways of making serious money or a state willing or able to stop him, he began recruiting sponsors. One potential candidate, interviewed by Stig Jarle Hansen, ruefully remarked that “Afweyne started up in 2003. He asked me to invest $2,000, as he was gathering money for his new business venture . . . I did not invest and I regret it so much today.” Afweyne traveled to more established pirate towns up the coast in Puntland on recruiting trips, headhunting men with the best reputations, and he quickly became the driving personality and business brain that turned what had been an amateurish, small-scale phenomenon into a well-financed, well-equipped operation run by professionals. Afweyne also played an important role in the opening of a pirate stock exchange. Based in the nearby town of Harardhere, it allows investors to buy shares in various pirate outfits and in particular attacks on high-value targets.