On the road to Restrepo that follows the paw of the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes out of Villavicencio passed the Aereopuerto de Vanguardia lies a parcel of land that has for many years been known as Santa Teresita. The house belonging to the finca is situated to the left of the road. The pastures are to the right and extend across the shallow raudal of the Rana for nearly two kilometers.
These were the fatting pastures of Don Tom Kirby, an old Florida Cowboy, and his wife Ricky. Tom had come to Colombia in the early 1960's on behalf of several Florida businessmen who were trying to hold on to some 50,000 hectarias in southeastern Meta, they called Mapiripan. That was long before the colonols built the little town of Mapiripan on the edge of the Rio Guaviari, that eventually became the municipio of some 8 to 10,000 inhabitants.
It took two days to get to Mapiripan from Villavicencio by either of two different routes. One way was south through San Martin where not far out of town one encountered a turnoff to the left in a southeasterly direction out of the piedmont and up onto the southern badlands of the serrania, around the headwaters of the Rio Manicacias to the north, through El Crucero, Morichito and Las Auras to the east. The road had been made years before by some ancient mariner who simply took off across the savannah with a compass in hand looking for the straightest and driest route from one point to the next in search of a destination.
Farther south was another turnoff to the left, that passed through Candilejas, the namesake of the entire southern route traversing what was by then the Departamento rather than the Intendencia of Meta. The llaneros would say, "Por la via de Candilejas," rather than, "Por los Kioscos," which was the other route to Mapiripan through Puerto Lopez and Puerto Gaitan." If you followed la via de Candilejas another half day, you would come to a turnoff to the right of the road heading due south through the serrania, between the headwaters of the Rio Pororio and the Cano Ovejas that approached the vegas of the Rio Guaviari and the pueblo of San Jose Del Guaviari on its southern banks. Continuing passed the turnoff to San Jose, through the highland of the Serrania between the Rio Manicacias to the north and Cano Ovejas to the south, through the landmarks of Amparo and Brasillia, you came to another branch in the road that headed south to the savannahs of Mapiripan.
The road to Mapiripan passed between Cano Ovejas to the west and Cano Jabon to the east on a narrow strip of serrania highland that subsided as it approached the Rio Guaviaria. On either side of the serrania the land dropped off toward the damp bajos and zurales where the comejen and pasto rabo de zorro were, that boarder the Canos Ovejas and Jabon. It was what the llaneros called "un rincon ciego," for which there was no other way out except in this case across the Rio Guaviari. From the mouth of the rincon in the north, to its farthest extention in the south were some 75 kilometers, by an average width of perhaps 25 that were the savannahs of Mapiripan. Just to the river though it was but some 30 kilometers from the headwaters of the Ovejas and Jabon.
There at the river’s edge was where the pueblo of Mapiripan came to be in the mid 1960's. It began as just a few ramadas. Then someone began selling food for the colonols in the surrounding selva and fuel for their outboard motors. Before you long there was a town and the people of the town needed land in a land that had never been subject to any kind of formal tenancy before, except for that of Don Tom’s and the Florida businessmen. It was not that the colonols wanted Tom’s savannah. They needed selva to slash and burn and plant their crops of yuca, arroz and maiz in. The savannah was no good for growning their crops.
It was everyone else that would become the problem. It was the town itself that was in direct conflict with the old tierreteniente’s claim to the land. Before they built the town no one went there and nobody gave a good god damn who used it. But once there was a town, once there was a place to gather, it became a magnet for anyone who had nothing, and everything to gain by being there.
The colombian writer, German Castro Caicedo wrote a novel about the role of the Dakota DC3’s in the llanos at that time that ferried tons of people and supplies out of Vanguardia to remote locations of the frontier. He said that sometime in the late 1970’s the crews of DC3’s began carring increasing amounts of people and cargo to lonely airfields were few had gone before. To such places they took beer, food and chinsaws to the agony of the jungle that died daily by the stroke of the ax.
I flew out to Mapiripan once, during the wet season of maybe 1974, on one of Alvaro Enao's DC3's. I remember we flew low and the terrain below was so green. The storm clouds roiled ominously in the distance and here and there dark sheets of rain fell from the sky. I can not remember which of the HK's it was, but I do remember there was a little plaque on the interior wall of the airplane that said it had been completely overhauled in 1954. So, it was the one that had been rebuilt in 1954, if none of the others had been rebuilt in the same year.
Alvaro Enao owned Aereolinas La Urraca, based out of el Aereopuerto de Vanguardia, near Don Tom's fattening ranch there at Santa Teresita on the road between Villavicencio and Restrepo. It serviced the greater llanos from Arauca to the north, out to Venezuela on the east and on down to Mitu, Miraflores and Leticia in the selva of the Transamozonica to the south. La Urraca means magpie in English and the logo of the airline painted somewhere on each of the aircrafts in the early 1970's was a cartoon of a black magpie. Later the planes were painted differently, but my personal favorite was always the little black cartoon magpie. The magpie was the signal of La Urraca's intent to steal airfreight and passengers from whoever whenever they could and remains legendary in the hearts of those who remember the sight of the DC3's proudly assembled on the earthen tarmac of Vanguardia, noses to the summer wind, heading dos, dos al Norte.
