Business as usual or unusual business: Accomodation and adjustment to drug dealers, guerrilla movements, and paramilitary terrorism in Colombia

Human Organization, Summer 2002 by Whiteford, Michael B

As a nation, Colombia is grappling with social problems that go back several hundred years. Today the country is in its fourth decade of an unrelenting civil war that threatens to break the country into several independent entities. The situation is further compounded by the presence of extremely wealthy and powerful drug dealers who, for the past two decades, have further threatened the country's civil order. Specifically focusing on the city of Popayan, this article looks at how individuals, from several different levels of Colombian social strata, are able to normalize the aberrant. It asks the question: How do you keep things in order when disorder abounds?

Key words: social change, terrorism, drug trafficking, guerrilla movements, Colombia

The throbbing air conditioners of the Cali international airport clearly were loosing their battle to change the humid, sticky air into something more palatable. Drenched with sweat, our clothes one with our skin, we shuffled along with others, our feet nudging our carryon luggage across the terrazzo floor as we waited impatiently to pass through immigration. It had been a decade and a half since we had last been to Colombia and, aside from being anxious to see old friends, another 15 minutes was not going to make much difference.

My familial relationship with Colombia goes back many decades. In the late 1940s my father, Andrew H. Whiteford, an anthropologist working at Beloit College, was invited to Colombia to do some collaborative research. After several summer-long trips, he packed up his family and we blithely headed to South America. Originally he wanted to do fieldwork in the eastern portion of Colombia, the rough and rugged llanos (plains), but while en route someone at the U.S. embassy in Bogota cautioned him that, even then, the level of violence in the area should rule out the possibility of going to the town of Villavicencio. Exercising the dictum that flexibility is obligatory even with the best laid plans of every anthropologist, and pausing no longer than to have another dinner with Colombian anthropologists Roberto and Virginia Pineda, we set out for Popayan, the gorgeous old colonial capital of the Department of Cauca. Dad had spent the better part of three summers working in Popayan, had colleagues at the local university's Institute of Ethnology, and had established an array of friendships that would certainly facilitate the early stages of his fieldwork. In all, we spent a little more than a year in southern Colombia, and the experience produced several palpable by products.

First, research by anthropologists in urban areas certainly was not the norm then. Dad's book, Two Cities in Latin America: A Comparative Description of Social Classes (A. Whiteford 1960), was not typical of much of the research then being done by social anthropologists in Latin America. After all, in the 1950s and 1960s many of our colleagues were pretty well immersed in the study of peasant societies. Second, my parents took their three young children with them to Colombia-a perfectly reasonable decision at the time. All three have gone on to become anthropologists.1 Little did any of us know at the time what sort of impact living in Popayan would have. After that, Dad returned to Popayan from time to time, often with family members in tow. When the time came for me to do my Ph.D. research (M. Whiteford 1976), the decision where to go was simple. On a couple of occasions my periods of fieldwork overlapped with those of my father. We would compare notes and exchange ideas, while he studied social change among the upper class and I investigated the economic survival strategies of low-income migrants to the city. The contacts we made five decades ago continued with a certain amount of ebbing and flowing, but remained strong. Photo albums expanded with pictures of growing families and communications improved with the arrival of predictable Internet communications and eventually with the reciprocal visits of the third generation of Colombians and Whitefords. Unfortunately, as the political situation deteriorated over the years, I found other sites for conducting research. Although I might have been working in half a dozen different areas, we always pined for Colombia. After having the son of one of our Payan6s friend stay with us for a month, we decided it was time to see Colombia again.

A lot of changes had taken place in Colombia since the mid-1980s. During our absence, Colombia had gone from being acknowledged as the country that produced the world's finest coffee, where poets became presidents and cumbia and salsa music originated, to a nation known around the world for its drug traffickers, a country where politically based assassinations and kidnappings occur almost daily and whose citizens automatically are assumed by outsiders to be members of some drug cartel. The irony of all this was not lost on our hosts, and we talked of little else over the next two hours as we traveled from airport to home.