It was such an exciting story when picked up by news outlets the world over: after a forty-day search, four children found alive in the Colombian Amazon after a plane crash killed the adults. At ages 13, 9, 4, and a mere 11 months, their survival was a complicated affair.
International news reports highlighted the children’s Indigenous heritage, as members of the Huitoto. They knew how to travel along the trees rather than the forest floor, what fruits were safe to eat, and how to use banana leaves along with a tarp and mosquito net recovered from the plane to rest in relative safety at night.
But they were also avoiding the soldiers looking for them, which made sense considering paramilitary violence in the region. It also made sense considering the story the father was telling, about how he had fled to avoid a guerrilla group himself.
Their grandmother recorded a message in the Huitoto language for her granddaughter, Lesly Mucutuy, to ask her and the three in her charge to stay put. A Belgian Shepherd rescue dog named Wilson eventually found them, making him a hero to the nation. All in all, it was an extraordinary tale, filled with wonderful outcomes, even though the mother and two other adults had died on the plane.
The backdrop of Colombian violence also made it thrilling for folks abroad. After the story started showing up in European and North American news, I fielded many reports of what they’d heard from their local outlets. Some were quite eager to tell me about the ongoing guerrilla violence they had just learned about through this story: confidently relating details that had reached them as exceptional, when to folks actually living here they weren’t even close to unusual or the full picture.
I tried to express caution at the time, too, because it was indeed a very exciting story, which many were eager to relay to others with great confidence about the details, implications, and backstory—the same way that the world overnight became “experts” on Clan del Golfo after reading a similarly fast-spreading tale of how the drug cartel’s boss, Dario Antonio Úsaga, alias Otoniel, was captured in October 2021. (The financial boss, Camilo Alejandro Calderón Sánchez, was also just captured days ago, but you’re not going to see anywhere near the same sensational reporting on this.)
In the nearly two years since the serpent’s head was supposedly cut off—at least, if you believed global reports about how the government brought a crime ring to its knees—Clan del Golfo has been involved in quite a few complex stand-offs. Last summer, the Clan held whole pueblos hostage, calling this action a “strike”, as if they were simply engaged in regular political protest. This year, the group further co-opted strike proceedings among mining collectives, and has been trying to leverage President Petro’s “Total Peace” initiative by leaning into the Clan’s political roots.
No, really: this narcotrafficking “mob” is also a paramilitary with expressly political elements to its activities. We don’t think about that kind of set-up in the West, when engaging with the concept of mafias, but here in Colombia, as in many other parts of the world, paramilitary actions can be both criminal and ideological. Another name for the Clan is “Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia”—defenders of a school of political thought with roots in Jorge Eliécer Gaitán’s mid-20th-century calls for direct democratic representation and a central role for the pueblo in state governance.
Is the Clan del Golfo, which engages in massacres and smaller-scale murders, kidnappings and terrorist attacks, and above all else an international drug trade, serious about such political aims?
Well, yes and no. Let’s just say that, the same way whole governments claim to be “for” the people and are also often built upon and in service to the interests of private enterprise, so too does this organization, with rural operations in every part of Colombia, both terrorize for profit and claim to be championing (some) civil rights.
(More on that in my upcoming podcast series on petro-nationalism, and related pieces on the role of paramilitaries in certain African nations.)
But the more important factor is this:
Initial reports often serve to reinforce existing myths of how the world works.
And we rarely get as much widespread coverage of the follow-up, even when that follow-up really, really matters.
Which is why, when I saw a recent follow-up on the extraordinary story of the four children rescued from the jungle, my heart sank.
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