Despair over Colombian tragedy

By Nick Caistor in Nueva Venecia

The Cienaga Grande has an unfortunate name - it means the "great swamp" - but to me it's one of the most beautiful places on the planet.

Cienaga is a network of salt-water lagoons on Colombia´s northern coast, just inland from the Caribbean sea. The lagoons are a few feet deep at the most, but they create a world of air and water and silky green mangroves that seems to float magically between the earth and the sky.

In the middle of these lagoons are villages of wooden huts raised on stilts that are home to a tightly-knit community of fishermen and their families. The main village is called Nueva Venecia - New Venice - which, like its European counterpart, rises out of the water like an enchanted mirage.

Countryside idyll

I first saw Nueva Venecia a few years ago when I was making a programme about environmental problems in Latin America.

As with all fishermen, theirs was a world of silence and patience

Early one morning I found myself in a boat skimming across a Cienaga lagoon towards the village. Nueva Venecia loomed up out of the mist, and looked as if it was hanging miraculously somewhere between lake and sky.

I met and spent the day with the fishermen of Nueva Venecia. As so often when meeting people like them, what most impressed me was the harmony they enjoyed with their extraordinary surroundings, and the ease with which they accepted my presence.

As far as they were concerned, I could have dropped from the moon, but they welcomed me into their canoes, and before long we were gliding out through the mangroves, skimming over the surface of the world.

As with all fishermen, theirs was a world of silence and patience. They paddled noiselessly along, in straw hats and smoking hand-rolled cigars, until we reached the spot they thought there should be fish. When we arrived, they got out their nets and tridents, and began fishing, their every action as simple and effective as if it had been bred in the bone.

Environmental problems

Despite their skill, the fishermen ended the day empty-handed. This was the story that had brought me to Nueva Venecia: how the environment of the lagoons had been changed with the building of a new coastal highway, which blocked the free flow of sea water in and out of the Cienaga. This had caused the salt levels in the water to build up to such an extent that both the fish and the mangroves were dying.

Back in the Colombian capital Bogota, the environment minister of the day explained that yes mistakes had been made in the past, but that all this would soon be put right - scientific studies were being carried out, new blueprints were being drawn up, and the path to progress was clear.

I doubted it at the time, and it seems that in the past few years, little progress has been made. The fishermen have had fewer and fewer possibilities to earn their livelihood, and the lagoons have continued their slow agony.

Then last week I read a few lines in a Spanish newspaper. It told the story of how a dozen of the fishermen from Nueva Venecia had been intercepted by a group of armed men. These paramilitaries had forced them to return to the village.

Massacre of innocents

Violence has become a way of life in Colombia

All the men of Nueva Venecia were herded into the small church on stilts, and then taken out and shot one by one in the back of the head. The paramilitaries fired on anyone else coming towards the village, and then went round in their motor launches shooting at other villages in their path.

The newspaper reported that more than 60 people had met their deaths in this way. The armed men's excuse for these killings? They said the fishermen had been helping the left-wing guerrillas who are also strong in that region of Colombia.

The death of 60 fishermen in Colombia´s civil war barely made the news internationally. In Colombia it was noted as the worst massacre of civilians this year, but was little more than another gruesome statistic in a country where those killed in an ongoing civil war is numbered in the tens of thousands.

Perhaps deaths like these have little impact internationally because people in Colombia are not killed for their race or their religion. They're caught up in an absurd war in which any idea of right and wrong has long since become irrelevant.

Cocaine picking provides work for many Colombians

The paramilitaries who killed the fishermen are defending their privileges, their land and the money they earn from the illegal drugs trade. The guerrilla groups opposing them lost any coherent ideology long ago.

The Colombian Government has just put in place a plan which calls for more than a billion and a half dollars to be spent trying to eradicate the menace of drugs and the war surrounding their production and export. Critics say this will just mean more money spent on weapons, to kill more people.

In short, like many thousands of other ordinary Colombians, the fishermen were killed out of greed and stupidity. One of the most beautiful places on the planet has been destroyed, its population almost entirely wiped out. The whole of Colombia is now a cienaga grande - a great swamp - where hope, decency and respect for human life are being swallowed up.