Hitchhiking the Zona Roja of Colombia: Guerrilla Fighters in the Heart of the Andes
“Go back to Ecuador. Colombia is not safe at this time,” the mayor of Ipiales, a dusty Andean border town between Ecuador and Colombia, told me and a group of other stranded travelers gathered at the city’s bus depot. After trekking overland for the better part of a year—from the coast of Brazil, up the Amazon River and its tributaries in Peru and Ecuador, and finally, through the Andes—I had arrived in Colombia earlier that morning. Sinewy, tan, dirty, and inured to just about any discomfort, I found out at the Colombian border that the region’s campesinos, agrarian peasants, were teaming up with the FARC, feared Marxist guerrillas who had been a war with the government for 50 years, to shut down the country. The reason for this inflamed national outrage? The Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, had succumbed to U.S. demands to sign a free trade agreement that would allow foreign genetically-modified potatoes to be sold in Colombia, a move effectively strangling the rural poor’s already desperate livelihood. The turmoil of 2013, later dubbed El Paro Agrario (The Agrarian Strikes), would go down as some of the most upheaving times in Colombia since the days of Pablo Escobar and the Cartel Wars of the 1980s and ’90s.
Against the urgings of the mayor, I decided to wait it out in Ipiales to see if the bus traveling north would resume. There were rumors that the protests would lose steam after a few days, as others had in the past; I might get lucky and catch a bus to Cali, a city where the turmoil was relatively minimal. It was risky to stay put, but I had already made it out of a few tight scrapes in South America. As a 23-year-old backpacker—broke but scrappy—I had witnessed my fair share of brawls, had rubbed elbows with drug-runners in the Amazon, and had been explicitly threatened with violence twice, both times for talking to the wrong girl. I reassured myself that I knew how to fly under the radar in dicey situations.
Advised not to leave my hotel, I passed a handful of days in Ipiales reading, writing, and drinking beer with a group of Colombians from Cali who were also stranded at the border. Cali was a colonial city in central Colombia renowned for exceptionally beautiful women and a storied musical tradition; for both reasons, I was planning to stop there for a while on my unscripted journey northwards.
To my frustration, the prospects of continuing deeper into Colombia seemed to become less likely with each passing day. Listening to the television and the murmurs of the Caleños, it was clear that the protests were only intensifying. What’s more, they were turning violent. There was a tiny airport in Ipiales and I could have flown to Cali, but flights were exorbitantly expensive given the number of people scrambling to leave the region. Truth be told, I had another, vainer reason I was reluctant to take a plane: I was on a mission to complete my return home—located in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.—from South America without air travel. So, I bit my lip, found another book somewhere, and resolved to keep waiting.
**
After a long week in Ipiales, law and order—tenuous even in peaceful times—collapsed. The entire police force had been summoned to monitor the protests and roadblocks in the countryside, and without cops, criminals ruled the streets. Muggings in broad daylight proliferated. One of the few times I ventured outside, a protester screamed at me in the street. Food became scarce, and markets and bakeries boarded up their doors and windows out of fear of looters. Making it particularly dangerous for me, the protests were explicitly directed against the U.S., decrying the free-trade agreement that had been jammed down Colombia’s throat. Anti-U.S. messages were graffitied across the city.
I recognized that my wager that the strike would fizzle out was dead wrong. It was time to cut my losses; I would go back to Ecuador. In the week in Ipiales, I had already burned too much cash staying in an overpriced hotel, just sitting around killing boredom. It was a 45-minute taxi ride to the Ecuadorian border, and even traversing this distance was becoming more dangerous by the day. With a heavy heart, I packed my backpack and summoned a taxi.
Before departing, I went to bid farewell to the Caleños. Knocking on my friend Katty’s door, she opened up and frantically pulled me inside the room. Katty, a woman in her 30’s who had gotten stranded returning to Cali from Chile, was in a mad rush to pack her bags. She told me to cancel my taxi immediately.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“The military opened the highway in Pasto, the next city north. If we get there by nightfall, we can catch a bus to Cali—we can be there by tomorrow morning! We are going to get a taxi to the roadblock and pass through on foot. Afterward, we can hitch another ride to Pasto. If we stay here in Ipiales, we could be stranded for weeks. Are you coming with us?”
Outside, the taxi honked. I rapidly weighed my options. Two relevant conversations whizzed through my mind. The first was with a police officer the day before. I had asked if hitchhiking around the protests was possible, to which he responded that this idea was extremely foolhardy, especially coming from a blonde foreigner with shitty Spanish. The second conversation was with another Caleño from my hotel, Alex. A body-builder who also had also been working in Chile, Alex had proposed to the other Caleños that they trek to the roadblock and attempt walking through it. The agitators were blocking vehicles but might allow foot traffic.
Desperate to get the hell out of Dodge, I asked Alex if I could join their impromptu foot-caravan. He looked at me with a mixture of pity and amusement and shook his head. “No, no, papito. If they see you out there on the road…” He did not need to finish the sentence.
As I stood and ran through the scenarios in my mind, Katty assured me again that we would be in Cali by the next day. But we had to leave now, she insisted. There was no time to waste if we hoped to reach Pasto before dark. With my adrenaline already kicking in, I agreed to go. Katty and I met Alex outside of the hotel, waiting with a young man around my own age and a woman slightly younger, both from Cali, too. Alex, a mountainous figure with tattooed arms like tree trunks, had apparently forgotten his refusal to allow me to go.
After hiking to the outskirts of Ipiales, we met a local kid with a truck who was ferrying people to the roadblock for a small sum of pesos. Waiting to hop in the truck bed, I noticed that the other passengers carried thick wooden sticks, simultaneously symbolizing solidarity with the protest and serving as a crude weapon. Some carried heavy metal pipes instead of wooden staffs.
We drove through chilly Andean roads until we reached the protest zone. I naively had imagined the roadblock to be small and discrete—nothing more than a small band guarding a barricade. Instead, there was an army of Indigenous campesinos, encamped for miles and miles on the highway and placing whatever they could across it to block traffic. As we walked through the protest zone, we were forced to climb over felled trees, severed guardrails, and metal dumpsters hoisted across the road.
We walked for hours and still did not reach the end of the occupying protesters. They had been entrenched here for days, constructing make-shift mess tents and medical stations every few miles. The region’s Andean Indigenous flag flew alongside banners denouncing the Colombian government and US imported crops (“Here, it will always be a papa, never a ‘potato’!”). Like most people from Cali, my companions were Black, and with my fair skin and blonde hair, I was unmistakably a gringo; for the Indigenous campesinos, many who probably had never left the vicinity of their village, our motley brigade was a strange sight. As we entered their masses, murmurs and icy stares followed. Occasionally, somebody threw something at us. Alex, towering over the short, stocky Andeans, seemed to be the only deterrent against more direct aggression.
As we trekked up mountain roads with no end in sight, dusk arrived. Pasto was still very far away—hours by car to put it in perspective—and it was becoming painfully obvious how misguided we had been to think we could reach the city by nightfall. Around sunset, we passed a cluster of huts next to the road, and an elderly couple sitting outside of their house called us over. “Are you going to Pasto?”
“Yes,” Alex said.
“You better stop here. If you walk this road at night, you’ll get assaulted. Find Father Miguel in the church. He is giving mass tonight and will help you.”
We thanked them and walked down from the highway to the central plaza of a tiny—and surprisingly handsome—Andean village. We easily found the town’s church, the only large structure around, and Father Miguel greeted us at the door. He already knew that we were traveling to Pasto and invited us inside. Within minutes, a young nun arrived with steaming hot coffee and soup. I had not eaten since that morning in Ipiales, and the arepas (Colombian corn fritters), chicken soup, and avocado might as well have been a Michelin Star meal after the hours of hiking. Father Miguel agreed to let us sleep on the floor of the church, under the condition that we attended mass that evening.
The next morning found us back on the road to Pasto at the crack of dawn, climbing and descending misty roads hemmed in by trellised slopes of tree tomato, scarlet quinoa flowers, and citrus trees. After hours of walking on an empty stomach, we smelled fresh coffee from a cottage nestled by the road. Alex knocked on the door and asked the elderly lady who answered if we could buy breakfast. The family, Indigenous Andeans living in a home with a dirt floor, served up a glorious spread of coffee, hot bread, fresh fruit, and mountain butter. As their wood-burning stove smoldered in the single-roomed home, I felt something scurry across my feet. I recoiled and knocked my coffee over; the Colombians laughed hysterically. The lady of the house explained that what had brushed my feet was not a rat, just one of the guinea pigs that they were fattening up to slaughter.
The walk continued until the late afternoon. We passed roadblocks every couple hours, and Alex would explain to the guards that we had been stranded in Ipiales and were hitchhiking to Cali. I was instructed to keep my mouth shut under all circumstances during these moments. Some men at the barricades wore bandanas around their faces, with only a slit to reveal their eyes. Instead of wooden sticks, they carried machetes or metal rebar. I wore a baseball cap and sunglasses to cover my face, and Alex carried my large travel backpack to deflect attention.
The trip to Pasto had taken twice as long as I had expected, and my beat-up sneakers blistered my feet to raw meat. As we arrived at the outskirts of Pasto, the protesters had again coalesced into an army. Even from afar, Pasto looked ominous, with street fires smoldering and gangs of rowdy protesters occupying the roads. We had to find Pasto’s bus terminal, praying that there would be open routes to the North.
As we entered the city, a gang of kids directly in front of us was trying to smash the windows of a moving car. Alex held out his hand to halt us and, luckily, the kids did not turn around. As we stood motionless, one of the kids, probably about 16 years old, bent down to sharpen a shank on the street curb. When he was satisfied, he jumped up and darted to catch his friends, still pursuing the car. I saw Alex’s hand reach down to a cargo pocket on his jeans; he had stolen a kitchen knife from the church’s kitchen and was now clutching its handle.
We arrived at the bus station and were informed that there were no buses leaving Pasto. Period. The roads ahead were too dangerous, and no bus company would assume the risk of travel. There was a rumor that a solitary bus might leave the following morning, so we waited in the terminal the entire night on this hope. The next morning, we were informed again that no buses would depart. Pasto was visibly more volatile than Ipiales, and the notion of staying there made me nervous.
Around 6 a.m. somebody whispered that a bus pirata (pirate bus) a couple of blocks away from the station was leaving for Popayan, a city en route to Cali, in the next few minutes. Alex and the others ran to grab a seat and told me that I better go with them. Neither the bus, ramshackle and painted with crazy colors, nor the driver was affiliated with any official bus line—it was just some civilian who happened to own a bus and saw a business opportunity. The vehicle was packed to the brim, but every voice hushed as I walked on board. Somebody broke the silence and loudly made a joke that as a gringo, full of dollars, I should pay every passenger’s fare. Acknowledging the shout out, I retorted that as a guest in Colombia, I should have my fare paid for by them, plus supplied with beer for the ride. They ate it up and immediately relaxed their tone towards me.
As the pirate bus tore up country roads, the atmosphere was celebratory. Somebody passed around a bottle of aguardiente, fiery Colombian rum, and the driver blasted Caleño salsa. I had not really slept in days, and I realized how exhausted I was. I thought the chaos was behind me, and I let myself relax and feel relief. The Andean country roads—bracketed by misty mountains tinged with a thousand hues of green, brown, and yellow—was mesmerizing. Smiling inwardly, I thought of how much fun I would have in Cali after all of this shit.
The sweet relief was only for a fleeting moment.
About halfway to Popayan, high in the mountains, we were stopped at a military checkpoint in yet another dusty village. Soldiers, blocking our way on the road, brusquely summoned the driver out the bus. When he returned, he told us that there were guerrilla groups directly ahead. We could drive no farther. Even though he had only completed half of the promised journey, the driver initially refused to refund any of the fares. He changed his mind as the passengers began to form an angry mob.
Fear shot through my body as I registered what I had just heard: I was in the Zona Roja, the guerilla-controlled Red Zone of Colombia, one of the most dangerous areas of the continent. My presence was already causing a stir among bystanders outside the bus. The town was impoverished and ugly; something in the air just smelled of desperation. An old man sitting in front of a store began to eyeball me hard—and not out of benign curiosity. Ahead possibly lay the FARC, a terrorist organization internationally notorious for their kidnappings and murders of foreigners. Whereas the previous roadblocks had been controlled by pissed-off farmers, ahead lay a stronghold of organized, armed, and hardened guerrillas, some perhaps even trained in commando-tactics by sympathetic ex-Soviet soldiers.
The Caleños and I huddled around Alex and discussed how to proceed. Katty, the woman who had initially encouraged me to hitchhike, visibly started to panic and now suggested that I try to find lodging in this town and wait it out. Sure, I thought, I’ll just find a nice hostel in a fucking guerrilla-controlled village. Wow, thanks for advising me to join you…
Alex and other men from the bus strategized, and I caught bits and pieces of the discussion: Perhaps the military would dismantle the guerrilla roadblock and highway travel would resume; it could happen tonight, but it could be days; this town was indeed dangerous. I had been banking on the false hope of the military opening the roads over and over again for the past week. Now, in the Zona Roja, it did not seem any more likely than it did before. I knew one thing for certain: separating myself from the group was not a good idea.
Alex kept looking over at me; there was palpable concern written on his face. Finally, he walked over and explained the predicament. The whispers that the roadblock ahead was controlled by an armed guerrilla group, maybe the FARC, were true. This meant that it was far more dangerous than the previous roadblocks. On the other hand, people were saying that Popayan was easily accessible after the roadblock. It was also confirmed that buses were running from Popayan to Cali. This time it actually seemed plausible that we could be in Cali by the next day. With a pained look, Alex told me that he was going with a group of other passengers from the bus to ask permission from the guerilleros to walk through the roadblock. The other Caleños one by one decided that they would also go to the roadblock. All eyes fell on me.
“Johnny, I don’t know how to say this…This is more dangerous for you than for anyone else. If you want to come, I will do my best to keep you safe, but understand the risk you are taking.” I was not going to stay put in this village. Just no fucking way.
“I’m going with you.”
Alex looked at me straight in the eyes and spoke in clear and slow Spanish. “OK. You are to hide in the middle of the group while we talk to the guerrilleros. Do not under any circumstances let yourself fall behind the group. Do not open your mouth. Keep wearing my cap to cover your face. I will carry your backpack again.”
The worst thing that I could have broadcast was that I was from the U.S., so I decided that I would pretend to be Brazilian. It helped that I spoke a Spanish-Portuguese hybrid, wore a ragged São Paulo soccer jersey, and that plenty of Brazilians were blond-haired. There was a young woman from Medellín from the pirate bus who was now with us. We had become friends, and she agreed to pretend to be my Colombian fiancée. My cover was as follows: I was a Brazilian national who had met a woman from Medellín while on vacation in Colombia, and we were now returning to her hometown to get married. As before, we found a local who was taxiing travelers to the roadblock, and we were off.
Several months prior while in Amazonia, I had purchased a bag of pure guaraná, a stimulant herb used by Indigenous warriors before battle. I was saving it for workouts, but this seemed like the ideal time to take it. I wanted to be as sharp and alert as possible to read the situation at the roadblock and understand what was being said. Mixing copious amounts of the powder in a water bottle, I downed the muddy brown potion. Within minutes, my heart was pounding like a drum, my fingertips were tingling with electricity, and my mind honed itself into combat mode. The great fatigue that had been weighing me down was completely forgotten. Suddenly, I could understand Spanish more easily than I ever had in my life. What before had been an incomprehensible Caleño accent, was now as clear as English. The world around me seemed to move in slow motion.
In a packed truck bed heading for the final roadblock, I prayed on a small rosary a young girl in Brazil, an ESL student of mine, had given me almost a year prior. I had kept it in my pocket all through my travels, and I thought it kept me safe. After what seemed like an eternity, we arrived at the roadblock, an imposing metal barricade erected across the highway and guarded by armed men with covered faces. These were not the campesinos with sticks from before; these were guerrilla rebels with AK-47’s.
As we descended from the truck, a young guerrillero quickly appeared and demanded to know where we were going. Alex explained how we had been stranded on the southern border in Ipiales and had been hitchhiking for days to reach Cali. The young man seemed wary and kept asking politically-charged questions:
“Do you understand why we are in revolt?”
Alex answered in the affirmative.
“Do you sympathize with the strike?”
“Of course. President Santos is an hijueputa!” Calling the president a son-of-a-bitch seemed to win the young man over.
The guerrillero launched into an enumeration of the crimes and injustices that the Colombian government had committed against the campesinos, and explained that the recent free-trade agreement was the last straw for them. They were too poor to feed their children, and, after peaceful petitions had failed, they had no choice but to resort to bold action to force the government to hear them.
Finally, the guerrillero asked if we had seen any military personnel on the road from the town we had just left. I remembered seeing soldiers on the road; there was definitely military personnel headed in this direction. Alex, for some reason unknown to me, responded that we had not seen any military at all. The guerrillero’s next statement made my stomach contract: “We cannot let you pass.”
Silence from Alex.
The young man continued. “The military shot one of our comrades yesterday.” A sound of angry disbelief rose from our group. “In retaliation, we set up an ambush here. You cannot be on the road.” The guerrillas knew the military was coming for them and had laced the highway ahead with improvised explosive devices and hidden snipers. The territory in front of us would become a war zone within hours.
Nobody knew what to say. The young man turned surprisingly sympathetic and suggested that we find the town’s schoolhouse, where we might be able to shelter ourselves from the upcoming firefight. He gave us the name of the schoolmaster and advised us to ask permission to wait in the gated schoolyard.
We were granted permission and took refuge in an enclosed patio next to the schoolhouse. For hours, we listened in silence to what was happening outside. By this point, there were about 20 of us from the bus. What seemed like an eternity passed and, still, nothing happened. Then, everything started all at once: the staccato chunking noise of automatic rifles; the boom of explosions on the road; and finally, the shouts of panicked human voices. There was a Peruvian girl with us, the only other non-Colombian, and we had bonded on the pirate bus. As the firefight started outside, she started hyperventilating and crying.
It was already late afternoon, and there was concern that the fighting would continue through the night and that we would not be safe in the schoolyard for much longer. A man suggested that we make for the hills and try to scramble through the countryside around the fighting. Alex opposed this suggestion, and the two argued intensively for several minutes, with the rest of the group divided over what to do. Suddenly we saw the flashes of guns and explosions in the hills. If the man had convinced us to go, we would have been caught in the crossfire.
We hunkered down in the schoolyard for several more hours, the fighting proceeding in fits and starts. Dehydrated, I decided to risk going outside to find something to drink during one of the lulls. The woman who was pretending to be my wife went with me. Minutes after leaving the schoolyard, the shooting started again. This time it sounded like it was right on top of me; I felt the air around me reverberate with gunfire. My brain stem registered mortal danger, and my mind went completely blank. Without awareness of what I was doing, I sprinted away from the sound of the guns, seeking anything on the side of the road that could serve as a bunker. I grabbed the woman’s arm so hard that she yelled in pain. I had nearly ripped it out of the socket as I took off sprinting.
Behind the cover of a large tree, I waited for another moment of calm. Finally, I made it back to my friends. To my relief, the woman who had left with me was also back in the schoolyard, uninjured. After sunset, the battle was over. The Colombians agreed that it was safe to go out and search for somewhere to sleep. We found a local family who offered us room and board in their home, and seven of us slept in a tiny, cinderblock room under a tin roof. I had an Amazonian hammock in my backpack, and after slinging it up between a pole on the ceiling and a latch on the wall, I offered it to the woman from Medellín. I laid my head on some crumpled clothing on the floor.
Guerrilla fighters, who had thwarted the military advancement, walked right outside our room. I could see their faces through the window; they were grinning. I was told not to go outside the room for any reason, even to piss or get water. Adrenaline was still coursing through my body, and sleep was impossible. As we lay on the floor, the conversation between Alex and me evolved from recounting the events of the past few days to a more lighthearted discourse on soccer and Colombian women. Before long, we were laughing about the incredible ordeal we had just survived. “This is Colombia, my friend,” Alex said. “Outside hell is breaking loose, but here we are having fun, bullshitting, and talking about girls.”
There was calm the next day, and the road was clear enough to hitchhike to Popayan. Walking on the highway where the fighting had been, I saw bombshells and bullet casings scattered on the asphalt. Immediately outside of the town, the carcass of an 18-wheeler truck lay torched in the middle of the highway, gutted and burnt to a black crisp. The truck had likely been transporting the hated GMO crops, and the rebels had seized it and set it aflame. The Andean valleys below were dotted with cottages and trellising—something like a South American version of Tolkien’s Shire. If it had not been for the sights and smells of warfare, it would have been a surreally beautiful hike.
After a series of rides, we arrived in Popayan, the ‘White City’ of Colonial Gran Colombia. The strike had not affected this region significantly, and there were buses running to Cali, also relatively immune from the chaos of the strike. I was planning to use the Couchsurfing website to find lodging in Cali, but Katty told me I was welcome to stay in her family’s home as long as I wanted.
As I sat in the bus station in Popayan with a ticket to Cali in my hand, the most intense relief I have ever felt in my life overcame me. I had not felt safe in such a long time, and registering what was behind me induced euphoria. Pure gratefulness and relief were all I felt. I wanted to call my family, but I had no idea how to tell them what had happened.
After a long bus ride through sugar cane fields and sun-drenched valleys, we reached Cali, which might as well have been El Dorado. I did not know what to say to the people who had protected me over the last few days. The stress we had endured together had bonded us profoundly, yet less than two weeks ago, we were strangers. We said our goodbyes and hugged, and an emotion arose that made me want to either cry or laugh. I thanked Alex last, hoping that he understood how grateful I was to him for the kindness he had extended to me, a foreigner, and the risk he had taken on my behalf.
