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Exile, Writing, and Cultural Freedom

Peace Found in Exile
By Karen Peterson
of the Albuquerque Journal
Sunday, January 11, 2004

In 2002, 15 Colombian journalists were murdered, and many more were forced into hiding or exile. Among the latter was Fernando Garavito, a well-known and highly respected newspaper columnist in the Colombian capital, Bogotá. Garavito had just published a biography detailing the links between Colombia’s drug cartels, right-wing paramilitary groups and the then-candidate and now President Alvaro Uribe Velez.

Garavito had received a few veiled threats, but shortly before Easter, two men showed up at the Bogotá university where he taught. They claimed to represent an organization that protected journalists, and they asked for Garavito’s class schedule, the name of the newspaper where he worked and his home phone number.

Garavito went into hiding the next day. Before the week was out, he and his young daughter were on a plane to the United States; his wife, Priscilla, a classically trained ballerina with her own ballet academy in Bogotá, and their son soon followed.

The family took refuge in Maine, where they had a distant relative, and spent two brutal winters in an unheated beach cottage. But on Dec. 23, 2003, Garavito and his family moved to Santa Fe under the aegis of the International Network of Cities of Asylum, with help from the Lannan Foundation and PEN New Mexico. He hopes to begin teaching at the University of New Mexico this semester.

Garavito said the move is the first real opportunity that has come his way since he left Colombia, and one that came at a critical juncture.

"Material survival has been difficult, but the hardest thing is intellectual survival," he said. "You have to enrich yourself every day with books and conversation, build ideas—and I’d been out of the country two years."

Garavito said he feels a moral obligation to continue writing about Colombian politics. Although Americans don’t see it the same way, Garavito said his country remains "the first victim" of the international traffic in drugs, principally cocaine.

"Our best people, the cleanest, most honest and honorable men, have been murdered," he said. "Drugs have ended the economy, ended politics. The ethical situation of the country is terrible. We have to reconstruct the conditions of public life—economic life, political life, government—with the trust of the Colombian people."

Finding his voice

Garavito chose the exile in "the second primary victim of drugs"—the United States—deliberately. As a writer and an intellectual with stints in the diplomatic corps in Portugal and Switzerland behind him, he said, "I could have gone anywhere."

"I thought I could have a voice in the U.S., I could make American citizens understand Colombia better and enrich the relationship between the two countries," he said.

After he left Colombia, Garavito continued to publish his Sunday column of political commentary in Bogotá’s El Espectador newspaper. He had been—and continued to be, even in exile—highly critical not only of Uribe but also of both the right-wing paramilitaries and the leftist guerrillas, parties to the country’s 40-year civil war. But not long after he left, El Espectador decided to quit publishing the column.

"They thought if they could shut me up, the problem would go away," Garavito said. "I was censored."

Garavito found his situation "paradoxical."

"I had to flee the country because of my writing, then they wouldn’t publish the column," he said. "I was left with nothing."

He sent out feelers to see if he and his family could return, but he was told it would be dangerous. At that point, he said, "I resolved to write for the Internet. I wanted to organize a community of readers."

Through the grapevine

Garavito found some work teaching in Maine, but by mid-2003, the family was in such desperate economic straits that they no longer had access to a computer or Internet service. Lannan Foundation director Jaune Evans said it was "a miracle" that Garavito and his family came to the attention of the foundation, which, at that point, had been working with Cities of Asylum project for three years.

"Somebody referred his name to PEN as a writer who had been exiled and that led to a phone call, then another, then questions to us and so on," she said. "We wanted them to be here for the holidays, so it all happened pretty fast."

Evans said the fact that Santa Fe’s first participant in the Cities of Asylum program is Latin American and a Spanish speaker is happy coincidence, too. "You’re not allowed to request a specific language or culture," she said. "We’re delighted because it couldn’t be a better fit."

Garavito’s first views of his new home—Christmas Eve, Canyon Road, the farolitos—were encouraging.

"The first impression we had was a city of a single street, with all these lights and full of life—there were opinions, different languages," he said. "It was international." Evans said she has already seen changes.

"One of the things he said was that it had been very difficult for two years to learn English because he didn’t feel he had anything to speak about," she said. "Now, in three weeks, he has sentences, he can even joke."

Garavito praises not only Santa Fe’s blue skies and mountains but also its people, whom he finds very warm and welcoming. His daughter Manuela, 12, is enrolled in elementary school and Priscilla is hopeful that she, too, may be able to pick up her career. "There’s real communication here," he said. "This is really a city of asylum."

Mailing List

Fernando Garavito’s weekly political commentaries will be available online soon. To get on his mailing list, contact him:
jotamosca@hotmail.com.

Copyright 2004 Albuquerque Journal; Reprinted with permission

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